Damnable Heresy
David Simpson
- BuyInto the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis
Vintage, 655 pp, £12.99, October 2012, ISBN 978 0 09 956383 9
In February 1924, four months before George Mallory and Sandy Irvine died on Everest, Conrad published a short essay called ‘Geography and Some Explorers’. He distinguished between the provision of scientific facts, which could be of only limited interest, and the ‘drama of human endeavour’ embodied in the pursuit of a ‘militant geography’ larger and grander than the mere search for knowledge. Wade Davis’s book on the British Everest expeditions of 1921, 1922 and 1924 shows how each demonstrated its own form of militant geography, its own blend of poetry and politics, error and achievement. Mallory occupies the centre of this story, but the book reaches far beyond the life and thoughts of a single mountaineer and his place in a history of great British lost causes.
Letters
Vol. 34 No. 21 · 8 November 2012
From Janet Crook
David Simpson left readers with the impression that opposition to the use of oxygen in high-altitude mountaineering was the preserve of a few long-dead members of an upper-class faction in the 1920s Alpine Club (LRB, 25 October). Not so: the argument continues to be made by some leading mountaineers today, the grounds for resisting now being the grotesque sight of ‘comfort stations’, discarded oxygen bottles and dead bodies despoiling what was a once a pristine landscape held sacred by the peoples of the high Himalaya. No corner of the world, highest mountain or deepest ocean, Arctic or Antarctic, rainforest or desert, is now safe from corporate exploitation, either for its natural resources or its cachet as a tourist destination. The spiritual aspect of mountaineering is disappearing, and at the same time the cultures and values of indigenous communities, who often understand much better how to tread lightly in their harsh environments, are being systematically eroded. The suggestion that the use of oxygen should be banned in high-altitude mountaineering is undeniably elitist, but it may be the only way of preventing the Himalaya going the way of the Alps, now largely a giant adventure playground for well-off thrill-seekers.
Janet Crook
Edinburgh
From Bob Hall
David Simpson quotes Wade Davis as mentioning ‘Haig’s attempt (as late as March 1916) to limit the number of machine-guns per battalion, for fear of dampening the men’s martial spirit’. In sixty years of reading military history I’ve met many of the wilder, more prejudiced and unsubstantiated criticisms hurled at Douglas Haig (he was ignorant of the conditions in which he sent his men to fight; he was indifferent to their sufferings; he sheltered in châteaux miles from the front line; he scorned the war-winning invention of the tank; he thought cavalry would win the war by charging barbed wire and machine-guns) and thought that most of them had been successfully demolished by modern historians writing about the Great War. This one is new to me. It is a matter of fact that the British army was not only equipped with the eminently reliable Vickers Medium Machine-Gun, in rapidly increasing numbers as the changing tactics of the war dictated, but from mid-1915 also had the excellent American-designed, British-manufatured Lewis Light Machine-Gun down as far as platoon level. This was the army which, under Haig, transformed itself in a few months in 1916 from an agglomeration of inexperienced New Army battalions into an all-arms professional force which two years later could go on to beat the German army ‘if not quickly and easily, at least eventually and conclusively’.
Bob Hall
Old Windsor
Vol. 34 No. 22 · 22 November 2012
From Donald McWilliams
David Simpson fears that the Mallory film The Epic of Everest has gone the way of very many old films (LRB, 25 October). Not so. I saw it in the Vondelpark, Amsterdam in 1995. Dutch National Archives projected it onto a screen in the park using a 35mm projector mounted in one of the archive’s windows. The film ends with the figures of the climbers disappearing into the distance.
Donald McWilliams
Montreal
Vol. 34 No. 23 · 6 December 2012
From Andrew Thamo
The incorrect attribution of the first Tibetan grammar and dictionary to Charles Bell by either Wade Davis or his reviewer David Simpson – it is not clear which – does injustice to Csoma Sándor, who published the first in English in 1834, under the auspices of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (LRB, 25 October). Sándor’s feat was all the more remarkable given that his mother tongue was Hungarian and he had travelled to the Himalayas by foot from his native Transylvania.
Andrew Thamo
Balingup, Western Australia
From Bernard Richards
What price
Should we demand for turning what was rare
Into a cheap couvade or proxy paradise,
Just one more travelogue to make the groundlings stare?
Thus Louis MacNeice in the script for The Conquest of Everest, lines later included in Autumn Sequel (Letters, 22 November).
Bernard Richards
Brasenose College, Oxford
Vol. 35 No. 1 · 3 January 2013
From Paul Nicol
Bob Hall says that the allegation that Douglas Haig sought to limit the number of machine-guns per battalion is new to him (Letters, 8 November) and refutes the charge by pointing out that the army had machine-guns. Yet the story is one of A.J.P. Taylor’s most memorable in The First World War (1963):
Lloyd George inquired how many machine-guns were needed. Haig replied: ‘The machine-gun was a much overrated weapon and two per battalion were more than sufficient.’ Kitchener thought that four per battalion might be useful, ‘above four may be counted a luxury.’ Lloyd George told his assistants: ‘Take Kitchener’s maximum; square it, multiply that result by two – and when you are in sight of that, double it again for good luck.’ This feat of arithmetic gave 64 machine-guns per battalion. Before the war was over every British battalion had 43 machine-guns and cried out for more.
A similar account can be found in Taylor’s English History 1914-45, where he also asserts that Haig ordered Passchendaele, and that a cavalry attack was part of his strategy in July 1917. I’d be disappointed to hear he’d made it all up.
Paul Nicol
Chelmsford, Essex
