Conquistadors of the Useless (11 page)

Whatever his skill and natural aptitude, the climber who abandons the beaten track for the profounder and more austere joys of the great alpine walls, or the highest summits in the world, will always have to undergo serious risks. The mineral world into which he forces his way was not made for man, and all its forces seem to unite to reject him. Anyone who dares seek the beauty and sublime grandeur of such places must accept the gage. But as far as the man himself is concerned, careful physical and technical training in the complex arts of surmounting rock and ice can eliminate almost all subjective risk.

However odd it may seem, master rock climbers rarely come to any harm, even among the most extreme difficulties, and this accounts for the way in which a few virtuosos can climb solo for years with complete impunity. Dangers stemming from the forces of nature, called objective dangers, are very much harder to avoid. In doing big climbs on high mountains it is impossible never to pass under a tottering sérac, never to go in places where a stone could fall, or never to set out in any but perfect conditions. He who respects all the wise rules found in the climbing manuals virtually condemns himself to inaction.

Running risks is not the object of the game, but it is part of it. Only a lengthy experience, enabling observations to be stored up both in the memory and the subconscious, endows a few climbers with a sort of instinct not only for detecting danger, but for estimating its seriousness.

Weighing nearly a hundred and seventy-five pounds, with abnormally short arms and heavy muscles, I am ill-designed by nature for extreme rock climbing, and in fact I have never been brilliant at this branch of the sport. Despite all this I have quite often led rock faces of great difficulty, led on by my natural impetuosity and perfectionism – but only at the price of taking occasional risks, whence my relatively numerous falls, distributed throughout my career.

By contrast, the majority of nearly fatal incidents from objective causes which I have been lucky enough to survive occurred during my early years of mountaineering, and this although the actual climbing concerned was both easier and less in amount. It is possible that a chain of coincidences was responsible for the accumulation of dramatic moments, but it seems more likely that inexperience was to blame. Nowadays I would not be surprised if I peeled off a rock climb as a result of pure difficulty, but it seems most unlikely that I should again be involved in misadventures like those of the Col du Diable and the north face of the Aiguille du Midi. As I have already remarked, it is possible to climb hard for twenty or thirty years and still die of old age. The hardest part is to survive the first four or five years.

I learnt a great deal from the various adventures of 1942 and 1943, of which I have only related the most remarkable. During the seasons which followed I showed a lot more care, even to the extent of slightly limiting the technical level of my attempts. Rébuffat, on the contrary, still animated by the wonderful self-confidence which he had shown from the very beginning, seemed to have no fear of finding any climb beyond his resources. Training to perfection by his job as a mountaineering instructor and benefiting from abundant spare time, he succeeded in doing a large number of high-class ascents. Simple, quiet and reserved in his daily life, he showed no backwardness at all when it came to mountains. He reckoned that all he had done up to now was no more than training for bigger things, and that the only thing lacking was a companion able to follow him. Judging me worthy of this role, he literally pestered me to go with him to repeat the exploit of the Italians, who, led by Riccardo Cassin, had in 1938 climbed the north face of the Grandes Jorasses by the Walker spur.

This extraordinary face, consisting equally of rock and ice, is without any doubt the queen of the Mont Blanc massif. Visible from far around, it seems by its inaccessible appearance to throw scorn on climbers and to dwarf otherwise proud mountain walls. No mountaineer worthy of the name could fail to want to climb it. Like Rébuffat, ‘the Walker' was my greatest dream. It was to me the most grandiose, the purest and most desirable of faces. But I certainly did not think of it as other than a dream. It seemed too formidable, too far above the rest, and I did not believe myself to possess the necessary class. Only supermen like Cassin and Heckmair were able to do this kind of thing, and I was sure that neither Gaston nor I were of this order. I therefore left him to his grandiose projects and followed my more modest path.

Rébuffat, however, succeeded in interesting one of the best mountaineers of the preceding generation, Édouard Frendo. It would seem that they were not yet ready for such an undertaking, because the time they took to climb the first quarter of the wall, at which point they were turned back by bad weather, showed clearly that they did not dominate the situation in the necessary way. But Rébuffat was in no way downhearted. With his invariable tenacity he determined to try again at the first opportunity. Two years later he and Frendo succeeded in doing the second ascent of the Walker after three days of hard climbing and two bivouacs, thus accomplishing the first really great exploit of post-war French mountaineering.

1. 1.
   Translator's note.
   The Whymper Couloir is a gully on the Aiguille Verte notorious for stone falls late in the day.
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1. 2. The term ‘Bleausard' is applied to a habitué of the rocks in the forest of Fontainebleau, the closest climbing to Paris. The rock is a compact sandstone lending itself to the most acrobatic climbing, and the more so because the climbs are rarely so high that one cannot jump for it if in difficulty.
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1. 3. Philipp Brooks.
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1. 4.
   Translator's note.
   ‘Artificial' climbing is when the climber progresses by hammering metal spikes, called pitons, into the rock. ‘Free' climbing is when he climbs the rock by his own unaided forces.
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1. 5. Nietzsche.
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1. 6. Rock pitches are graded from one to six in ascending order of difficulty.
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1. 7.
   Translator's note.
   Chimneying, or back-and-footing, is when the climber moves up by pushing with his back and his feet on opposing walls of rock. It can only be done where the chimney is the right width and the walls are reasonably parallel.
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1. 8.
   Translator's note.
   A cornice is an overhang of snow, usually found at the top of gullies and along high ridges.
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1. 9.
   Translator's note.
   An étrier is a short, three-runged rope ladder used for artificial climbing. This and the following paragraph are very controversial.
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1. 10. Guido Lammer.
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1. 11.
   Translator's note.
   The rimaye, or bergschrund, is the master crevasse separating a glacier from its surrounding mountains.
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During these two years the course of my life was completely changed by the liberation of France and the end of the war. From 1942 onwards the region around Chamonix had been an important centre of resistance. The hills harboured bands of Maquis, and many of the local people belonged to various secret societies. For my own part I contributed to the feeding of these bands, among whose leaders I had a number of friends. Thus I lived in permanent contact with the resistance, and knew what was going on, without actually belonging to any organisation.

Nowadays I wonder why I did not take a more active part in the first phase of the liberation. I can think of lots of reasons, none of them really very good. In the first place I had no need to go underground. As a farmer in charge of a productive unit I was excused compulsory labour service in Germany, and with the exception of an occasional check-up I was never placed under any restriction. Then I had never taken much interest in politics, so that I had no axe of that sort to grind that would have led me to join the Maquis. The plain fact remains that the resistance sought to hinder and eliminate the German invader, and as a Frenchman I ought to have played a more active role in it.

During their early stages, the underground movements existed mainly to help political refugees or young men called up for service in Germany to escape their unenviable fate. At this time I felt that I was doing my duty to the full in revictualling the Maquis and in sheltering various ‘wanted men' at my house. By the time the military side of the resistance became more prominent I must confess I was put off by the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere, and also by the petty rivalries between the various personalities and parties. No doubt I would have joined enthusiastically in any open rebellion, as I subsequently showed, but as there was nothing to impel me towards underground activity I never went in for it. I had however assured a number of the leaders that on the day when the fighting came out into the open they could count on me. I must admit, finally, that I was so taken up with the work on my farm and with my climbing, that I completely failed to realise that the resistance could play an important part in the liberation of France. I went blindly on my way without troubling myself too much with national affairs.

After the 6th June 1944 the resistance got tougher and things began to happen more quickly. In Haute-Savoie the Germans remained in control only of the main towns. They were firmly in possession of Chamonix, where most of the big hotels had been turned into hospitals for the wounded, but the other villages in the upper Arve valley were virtually in the hands of the Maquis. It was obvious that open revolt was about to break out, and I asked one of my friends, Captain Brissot-Perrin, a regular officer in command of part of the local resistance, to let me know when I should be needed to take part in the fighting. It was not long before he sent word, and I went at once to his headquarters in the hamlet of Chavand. They were short of weapons for newcomers, so I became a dispatch carrier maintaining lines of communication with another group posted above the village of Servoz. The situation was confused; the heads of the different factions of the resistance seemed unable to agree, and my friend's authority was not recognised in all quarters. Two days after I had joined up I was standing in the sun waiting for orders in front of the old farm which served as headquarters, when a group of armed men suddenly appeared. They asked me excitedly if the captain was there, and when I replied in the affirmative they pushed me aside and rushed in. There followed the sound of a violent discussion and then they came out again. Soon afterwards Brissot-Perrin told me that he had been forced to resign. He advised me to go home, which I did at once. The Maquis now proceeded to surround Chamonix. In the face of this threat the Germans dug themselves in around the Majestic Hotel, and after much parleying surrendered without firing a shot.

France was now practically freed, but the Germans drew back to the Italian frontier which they held in strength, and from which they launched dangerous raids on the higher French valleys. The resistance was over but the war went on. The ex-Maquis were turned into military units, more or less directly linked with the First Army which had disembarked from Africa. In the Chamonix region the period of transition was highly confused, and the rivalry between various personalities and parties gave rise to positively music-hall incidents.

Like most of the Parisian climbers, among them Pierre Allain and René Ferlet, Maurice Herzog had gone to ground in the upper Arve valley and had requested a command appropriate to his rank as a lieutenant in the Reserve. As a newcomer he was not treated with any great respect by the leaders of the
Armée Secrète
.
[1]
He was so annoyed by this that, although he had no affiliations with the Communist Party, he turned, on the rebound, to the
Francs Tireurs et Partisans
. They were short of men, and Herzog was received with open arms and made a captain. Almost all the non-Chamonix climbers joined Herzog's company except Rébuffat, who after a few days in its ranks went back to the A.S., judging it more politic not to compromise himself with any group bearing the least taint of communism. Herzog was one of my climbing friends, and only a few days before the liberation of Chamonix we had been the first to climb the Peuterey ridge of Mont Blanc via the north face of the Col de Peuterey. He therefore asked me to join his troop, but I was not very impressed by all the muddles and internecine quarrels of the new army. I shut myself up in my farm and got on with the potato harvest, encouraged by my wife in no uncertain terms.

Around the beginning of October I had a visit from an old J.M. friend called Beaumont. He was in a Maquis group in Val d'Isere which had become famous for its exploits under the name of ‘Compagnie Stéphane', this being the pseudonym of its commander, the regular Captain Étienne Poiteau. Stéphane had a lot of ex-J.M. mountain instructors in his troop, as well as amateur skiers and climbers from the Dauphine. He now proposed to form a company able to take on the Germans on the high alpine ridges, and perhaps to dislodge them. In order to get more trained mountaineers he had sent Beaumont off to Chamonix with the mission of recruiting local professionals.

Beaumont had a smooth tongue – he has since done brilliantly as a representative. Using every trick of argument he sang the praises of the Compagnie Stéphane, its glorious past, its sound military organisation, its terrific spirit, and the key post I would find waiting for me. His master-stroke was to assure me that all my oldest mountain friends such as Michel Chevallier, Pierre Brun, Robert Albouy and J.-C. Laurenceau were already in the troop and asking for me to join them.

Captain Stéphane's fine reputation and the fact that his unit was a serious military organisation, containing many of my best friends, combined with my old love of adventure to tear me away from my wife's affection and the farm life that so much absorbed me. When I think about it today, I am lost in admiration for Sergeant Beaumont's recruiting talents. Not only did he succeed in getting me into the army at a time when I had a horror of all things military, but he lured back to Grenoble three other Chamoniards, notably my friend the guide Laurent Cretton who was not only married but the father of three children.

It is one of my principles never to regret anything I have done: but if there is one act of madness on which I have never ceased to congratulate myself, it is having joined the Compagnie Stéphane. The eight months I spent in it were among the most wonderful in my whole life. Naturally it wasn't as perfect as Beaumont had painted it. It was a human institution, and as such had many minor faults. But it was a most extraordinary troop, and above all its leader was an exceptional man who could communicate his enthusiasm and his belief in the cause to a degree I have never known in another human being. At the outset the company had been a simple Maquis with headquarters at Prabert, in the heart of the Belledonne range. Instead of letting his men go to pieces in the comparative idleness which was the besetting vice of so many of the Maquis, Stéphane put them through an intensive military training. They became a veritable commando with a special ability to melt away into the landscape and move from place to place under the most difficult conditions.

After the 6th of June, his team being in a state of perfect readiness, Stéphane went over to the offensive, putting into practice his personal theories about guerrilla warfare. Divided into ‘sticks' of six or a dozen, each with a high firepower, his men moved virtually only at night and had no contact with the local populace under any pretext whatever. In this way they were for practical purposes invisible. Thanks to this method and great physical fitness, these sticks were able to carry out quick raids sometimes as far as sixty miles from base. Their objective might be to ambush a German supply column or attack a strongpoint. This done they would disappear, only to deal another blow five or ten miles farther on. The system rendered them almost uncatchable, so that they harassed the enemy to the maximum with minute loss to themselves. By their speed of movement and the number of their attacks they seemed to the enemy to be everywhere and nowhere, giving the impression of a small army.

At the time I joined the Compagnie Stéphane it was fresh from several months of intense activity and little diluted by the new elements which had come to it after the liberation. It was trained to perfection and animated by a tremendous
esprit de corps
. The prevailing atmosphere was one of enthusiasm, comradeship and human warmth, recalling the best days of the J.M. I need hardly add that I found these psychological conditions ideal, and from the outset I took to them like a duck to water.

For all that, my first few days were a bit disappointing. The Compagnie was in the process of being incorporated into the 15th Battalion of Chasseurs Alpins, then being formed, and as a result it had to be enlarged and reorganised along more conventional military lines. A certain amount of confusion ensued; discipline was relaxed, and apart from a few hours of military instruction per day, I spent the best part of my time listening to the heroes of the Maquis relating their adventures. Luckily this did not go on for long. We were posted to quarters a few miles above a small spa called Uriage for intensive training before going into the front line. The ‘taming' of the company turned out to have been no more than superficial. In the event this rather special unit remained very largely independent, and the traditions of the Maquis were maintained.

Stéphane was fair-haired and very tall, with a school-girl complexion. Candid grey eyes lit up his slightly plump face. Under the exterior of a shy, clumsy young man, he hid the energy and courage of a
condottiere
, together with an abundance of intelligence, psychological insight, and humanity. He now sought to preserve in his company the virtues which had made it famous: iron morale, toughness, and mobility. To this end he led us a hard life. We slept in bivouac tents whatever the weather, and quite often on manoeuvres we would simply lie down fully dressed under a tree. We had no transport and no cookhouse. Each section of a dozen men was an independent unit which did its own cooking over an open fire.

Apart from firing practice, map reading and Morse code, the training mainly consisted of incessant manoeuvres among the mountains and forests of the Belledonne massif. Exercises of varying size and complexity succeeded each other uninterruptedly. One time it might be a section attack on a given map reference, another time it might be on company or even battalion scale against a supposed enemy unit of comparable magnitude. The main principle behind it all seemed to be to get us used to living in a state of perpetual readiness for action, whether by day or night.

The manoeuvres were often carried out with live ammunition and hand grenades. Naturally we were told to aim well over the heads of our ‘enemies', and not to throw grenades actually among them. Nevertheless some of our old guerrillas took a malicious pleasure in sending bullets whistling about our ears, or, worse still, letting off grenades only a few yards away; all of which was quite impressive to a raw recruit like myself. I particularly remember how, one day while crossing a glade, I was caught in the fire of a light machine gun hidden somewhere above. A first burst tore up the turf a few paces in front of me. I sprinted to the left, but the whizzing of bullets forestalled me at once; and when I fled back to the right I was quickly brought up short by other bursts in that direction. Finally, in despair, I threw myself to the ground and lay still until my tormentors should see fit to leave me in peace. All this playing around with real bullets may seem rather stupid, but in fact there were no serious accidents, and there is no doubt that it quickly hardened us to war. If we had had to go straight from our training into heavy fighting, many lives would have been spared simply because we were relatively used to being under fire.

During the whole of that month of October 1944 the weather throughout the Alps was truly frightful. It rained non-stop and snowed down to five and a half thousand feet, a height we sometimes passed in the course of manoeuvres. We were continuously soaked and it was almost impossible ever to get our clothes dry. In such conditions our existence, which was already hard enough, what with forced marches, heavy loads, night watches and insufficient rations, became trying in the extreme. This was particularly so for the new recruits, who had never known anything like it. But in spite of everything our hardened veterans gave such an example of infectious enthusiasm that the troop's morale remained high, and we played soldiers with unabated zest. Everyone took these operations as seriously as if they had been real warfare. Personally, although I found it quite hard going, this fraternal life of intensive action in contact with nature suited me perfectly, and I gave myself up to it unreservedly.

About the middle of November, the 6th, 11th and 15th Battalions of Chasseurs Alpins went forward to take the place of the somewhat diverse units which had been holding the line for more than two months in the Maurienne sector, from Mont Tabor to the Col du Mont Cenis. The mountains were white with snow, the thickness of which made any military activity difficult, so that not much was going on. The greater part of our battalion was detailed off to guard villages and works of art, while the specialised skiing sections held the advanced outposts. Captain Stéphane instituted a series of raids of varying size, acting on the theory that attack is the best method of defence. His idea was to give the Germans a healthy respect for our fighting abilities. Together with several of my friends I was given the responsibility, in my capacity as a mountain specialist, of helping the officers to plan and carry out these attacks.