Conquistadors of the Useless (47 page)

‘The fact that Lachenal never in the whole of his life did a single first ascent is quite characteristic of his approach to climbing.
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The ascents he liked best were the really grandiose ones, regardless of the number, of times they had been done, because by contrast with shorter climbs of extreme difficulty they gave him what he really sought in the mountains: grandeur, technical and aesthetic perfection, and self-surpassment.

‘In 1950 he was selected for the French expedition to Annapurna. One of the pair who reached the summit, he came down from the mountain covered in the somewhat fugitive glory of our sport, but physically mutilated. The courage he showed in overcoming his infirmities was beyond all praise. He accepted all his operations and subsequent adaptations in the most stoical way, and it had begun to seem that after five years he had almost made up the leeway. In spite of his shortened feet he might soon have returned to the greatest ascents, but fate decided otherwise. He who had dominated the mountain completely was not destined for any partial mastery.'

As Maurice Herzog has written: ‘Not only his deeds will remain in our memories, but also his great gusts of laughter, his joy in action, and the sheer likeableness he radiated.'

Our veteran, Marcel Ichac, has succeeded brilliantly in his career. The film he made of our adventure, though necessarily not quite complete, attracted thousands of viewers both at lectures and on the commercial circuits. This film and Maurice Herzog's book between them went a long way towards popularising the sport of mountaineering; so much so, in fact, that latterly it has been possible to raise the money for other national expeditions in the Andes and Himalayas. Thus our success made it possible for many other climbers also to realise their dreams.

After a few years in which he was involved in lesser enterprises, Ichac took the major gamble in 1958 of producing, for the first time in the history of the cinema, a full-length feature in which the mountains were more than a back-cloth and mountaineering more than a popular myth. This time mountaineering was the real subject of the film. It was called
Les Etoiles de Midi
. No doubt some of my readers have admired its thrilling story and superb photography. I was lucky enough to be Ichac's main collaborator, not only in so far as I played the lead, but also in choosing the majority of the scenes, directing the team of porters and guides in their complex manoeuvres, and in some small measure advising on the script, so that I am in a position to give an opinion on the various problems we encountered.

Our budget was less than half what is normal for such a long and ambitious feature. The whole undertaking therefore had something of the character of an adventure from start to finish, and right up to the very last day success was not assured. To have overcome such material difficulties at the same time as the technical and artistic ones seems to me to add still more to the stature of Ichac's achievement.
Les Etoiles de Midi
may have its weaknesses, but the praise it received from the toughest critics and the large audiences it attracted proved its overall value. For Ichac it was a tremendous success, only achieved by desperate risks and hard work – a genuine ‘other Annapurna'.

Oudot, our brave doctor, was also to know a destiny out of the ordinary, but an untimely death prevented him reaching the summit of his career. An experienced clinical surgeon, he was pursuing researches in the cardiovascular field, and had already risen to national eminence. Some of his discoveries marked notable steps forward, and he had just brilliantly passed the extremely difficult ‘concours de chirurgien des hôpitaux de Paris' which opened the gateway to the professorship he desired. All this time he continued to visit Chamonix regularly, and it was in the course of one of these visits that he skidded into an oncoming vehicle while travelling at high speed on a wet road, causing an appalling accident in which several people lost their fives and others were seriously injured. Jacques died a few hours later, and French surgery and mountaineering lost one of their leading figures.

In many ways Rébuffat seems to me to have had the most remarkable success of us all. Born into a lower middle class family of reduced circumstances, he was forced to leave school after the primary stage. When I first knew him at the age of twenty he was disciplined yet ungainly, affable yet shy, even a bit dull – in other words a perfect average Frenchman, undistinguished either for good or for bad qualities. Only his apparently crazy mountaineering ambitions, which were apt to slip out in the course of conversation, gave any sign that he might blossom into anything other than the office clerk he had begun as, or the physical education teacher he was studying to become.

Under this unremarkable exterior, which tended to be accentuated by an odd listlessness of gesture, Rébuffat concealed the industrious stubbornness of an ant, the decisiveness of a Napoleon, intelligence, and an amazingly accurate power of intuition. Motivated by his unlimited enthusiasm for the mountains these qualities made him, in spite of limited physical endowments, the greatest guide of his generation.

In fact, curious as it may seem, greater mountaineering calls much more for mental than for physical qualities. A careful study of alpine history shows that the greatest climbers have rarely been physically favoured by nature, whereas many athletes who seemed born for the job have never become anything more than brilliant performers on small training crags. This is simply a reflection of the fact that success in any sport, no matter how simple, always requires real intellectual and moral capacity over and above the necessary physical aptitude. In most of them, however, the physical side remains preponderant to the extent that you rarely if ever get a champion who has not shown unusual giftedness from the outset. Perhaps this supreme predominance of the mind over the body is the main distinction of mountaineering over other forms of athletic activity, and gives it an added moral value.

One year after Annapurna, Rébuffat had one of the most remarkable Alpine seasons ever known. Having had the initial luck to be engaged by ‘the' client capable of doing the greatest climbs, he made ascents of the Walker (thus becoming the first man to do it twice and the only guide to have done it in a professional capacity up to the present), and, a few weeks later, the Eigerwand, despite a violent storm on the way up. He and Paul Habran thus became the first men to have done the two greatest Alpine climbs in one season. After such exploits it would have been natural to expect him to attack the last great problems of the Alps or higher and harder summits overseas, but he did nothing of the sort. His successes in 1951 were practically his swan song, and thenceforward his life took quite a different orientation, doubtless for family reasons.

From this time on he guided spasmodically, and only on classic routes, most of his methodical energy being diverted into other channels. By virtue of a staggering capacity for work he succeeded in simultaneously practising several professions with considerable success despite a complete lack of training. At one and the same time he was commercial director of a large business, an alpine writer of style and inspiration whose works ran frequently to several editions, a talented mountain photographer, a popular lecturer, and a promising film producer.
[17]
If family and social success is the right end of the mature man, Rébuffat has without any doubt won the greatest of all his victories in attaining it.

Francis de Noyelle, the young diplomatist who was our interpreter and transport officer, occupied a rather special position in our team. A good companion in fair weather or foul, he was popular with us all, but although he had done a few easy climbs he was not, strictly speaking, a mountaineer. He enjoyed travelling but was in no way hagridden by any desire for adventure. Son of an ambassador, the traditions of his service were not such as to encourage flights of fancy. In the event he has pursued an active and no doubt interesting life in his chosen profession, visiting many parts of the world and advancing steadily towards a position of importance.

Schatz, our athletic draper-physicist, has shown both brilliance and originality in his subsequent career. Less than a year after the expedition he got married and gave up regular climbing, spending the next few years in expanding his family business. To all appearances he had become a settled and prosperous businessman when, at over thirty, he went back to doing research. His wife supervised a large part of his commercial interests while he himself worked like a galley-slave, rapidly becoming so highly qualified that he took part in the perfecting of the first French atomic bomb.

Couzy likewise had a career of distinction, but, contrary to what his intellectual capacities might have led one to expect, as a mountaineer rather than as a mathematician. When he was killed by a falling stone on an unclimbed face of the Roc des Bergers in November 1958, he already had one of the greatest alpine records of all time. There was nothing in his outward appearance to foreshadow such a destiny; indeed he was gentle, thoughtful and meticulous. His unusually wide culture sprang from an enthusiasm for philosophy and the arts quite as great as for scientific research, though as a graduate of the Polytechnique and the Ecole Supérieure d'Aéronautique he held an important post in military aviation.
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Happily married to a charming wife and father of four children whom he adored, he seemed bound for every form of social and intellectual success once the adventurous instincts of youth had been appeased.

But Jean was not made for the rat-race of this world. He was a sort of saint, an idealist tormented by visions of the absolute. Whatever the nobility of his aims and objects, no man can become what society calls a success without a certain element of practical cunning. Couzy was the complete opposite of a Lorenzaccio: he could only march straight forward.
[19]
Perhaps he might have become a great research worker (had he not been accepted for the Ecole Normale Supérieure?), but laboratory life repelled him. Like the knights of olden times, he was possessed not only by an ideal but also by an intense need for physical action. Climbing, as his friend Schatz has penetratingly written, ‘gave his inner riches a means of expression'.

He was lucky in that his work left him more leisure than most, and above all the possibility of arranging it to suit his own convenience. Naturally this was a major factor in his alpine development. But how far was it really accidental? Despite his very genuine interest in aviation, it was possible to suspect that Jean had chosen his career partly for the freedom it gave him, and the more so because he had turned down lucrative offers from private industry. For fifteen years he made the most of this freedom, and his huge volume of achievements illustrates with the clarity of a graph how an inflexible will is an even more important element of success than luck.

Muscular and with tremendous stamina under his almost frail appearance, he was an accomplished athlete. Unshakeable health and the digestive system of an ostrich were further assets on big climbs. A certain lack of manual dexterity handicapped him, by contrast, in his earlier days; and on mixed ground, where no technique or intelligence can make up for instinctive neatness of gesture, he always remained slow and ill at ease. But he never let this lack of natural agility stop him from attempting and overcoming the greatest difficulties, and by means of thought and application he eventually made up for it. On rock, in particular, he became a past master.

Jean accepted every sacrifice necessary to acquire and maintain his class. He took regular daily exercise, shunned all excess, and never let a weekend go by without training on the rocks of Fontainebleau or the Saussois whatever the weather. In his view the best training for climbing was climbing, but though he loved these gymnastic outcrops he never considered them as an end in themselves. Proud though he was to be one of the best ‘rocknasts' of ‘Bleau' and ‘Sauss', he would always head for the Alps or the Pyrenees as soon as the weather report was hopeful, often borrowing an aeroplane from his club in order to get there quicker. These three-day trips from Paris account for his accumulating in under fifteen years what has been called ‘the most varied and complete list of climbs ever assembled'. Thanks to his unflagging enthusiasm he was thus able ‘to scale the steepest Dolomite faces, from the Marmolada to the Cima Ovest di Lavaredo; the toughest rock routes in the range of Mont Blanc, from the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey to the Grandes Jorasses; the most difficult ice climbs from the Triolet to the Dent d Hérens'.

If Couzy already deserved to be known as a great climber by the number of hard routes he had repeated, his own first ascents put him among the ranks of the really outstanding. Together with his partner René Desmaison he became one of the last great conquerors of the Alps. He disdained the fiddling new climbs on which some people try to found cheap reputations, and sought for lines which by their scale and elegance would equal or surpass those of the past. Among his dozen or so important innovations I would quote particularly the direct route on the north-west face of the Olan and the first winter ascent of the west face of the Dru, the latter of which marked the beginnings of a new era in its own extreme kind of mountaineering.

With the evolution of tactics and equipment the Alps had become too restricted a field of action for one who combined creative vision with his strength, skill and determination. Only the world's highest summits could now enable him to give of his full measure. At the time of Annapurna he had still been too young to play a decisive part, but on the Makalu reconnaissance in 1954 (which also climbed Chomolonzo) he was the most dynamic and efficient member of the whole team, and the same applied to the successful Makalu expedition of the following year.
[20]

I was lucky enough to be his almost constant companion in the course of these two adventures. We led a hard life at close quarters, and it was during this time that I came truly to know and like him. On those far-off mountains, where man will never be master, one is not drawn on by the prospect of confronting exceptional technical difficulties; it is more a question of braving loneliness, lack of oxygen, wind and cold over a period of months. This austere contest strips off every pretence and lays bare the deepest weaknesses of a man's character. It was in precisely such circumstances that I was able to measure Jean's true worth. He was a hero who had found his proper place.