Conquistadors of the Useless (7 page)

After these harassing five- or six-day weeks, we had earned a rest by the time Sunday came round. Far from profiting by the opportunity, no sooner had Rébuffat and I returned the last novice to safety on a Saturday evening than we would be off up to some hut thanks to André Tournier, who took all the responsibility with his customary kindness and more than ordinary generosity. The following morning, caring nothing for the fatigue that weighed down our limbs, we would do a big climb as amateurs.

Despite our brilliant placings on the leaders' course, although we were good climbers, we were not yet really excellent ones. Both of us had some of the qualities necessary to do the ‘grandes courses', but in each of us these were to some extent cancelled out by equivalent weaknesses. Gaston was remarkable for his self-confidence: no doubt he thought, like Nietzsche, that ‘nothing succeeds without presumption'. Thanks to this optimism he faced his chosen mountain with extraordinary calmness and cold-bloodedness. Moreover, without being a genius, he was an extremely good rock climber. By contrast, however, he was deficient in some of the qualities which distinguish the mountaineer from the climber, such as a sense of direction and ease of movement on mixed ground and snow and ice. I was completely his opposite. I was rather nervous and lacking in confidence and, apart from occasional flashes, a very mediocre rock climber. But I had an unusual sense of direction and was completely at my ease on all types of high mountain terrain.

Thus our qualities complemented each other, but for all that we did not make up a really first-class team. The climbs we did together, such as the Mayer-Dibona on the Requin and the Mer de Glace face of the Grépon, were quite good for those days but not really exceptional. The proof of the pudding is that during these climbs all sorts of strange incidents occurred, and even taking into account poor conditions and equipment our times were quite slow. The speed with which a party does a climb is an almost exact gauge of its ability.

Rébuffat showed the greatest enthusiasm for these Sunday climbs, and seemed to enjoy them, but his ambition made him look on them a bit patronisingly: they were no more than something to be doing while preparing oneself for the really big stuff. For me the mountain world remained wonderful and terrible. Each of our climbs put me into a state of delicious anxiety, every enterprise was an adventure, and my mind was not at peace until the summit was finally under our feet. Our successes made me feel at least as happy and proud as I did later on reaching the most inaccessible summits in the world.

The Montenvers camp came to an end about the end of September. My eyes still full of the splendour of the high summits, I returned after three months' absence to the more modest hills of Beaufortain. As before, I was sent to Roseland; and as our two old troops had been merged, Rébuffat went with me. Our life during the latter months of 1941 may not have called for efforts quite as prolonged and spectacular as those we had left behind, but it was still very tough and a great deal less inspiring. There was no more daily adventure, no more unceasing comradeship or joy of victory. J.M. was building two big chalets at Roseland, each designed to hold thirty men. The work was being done throughout by the youth corps itself, under the direction of the usual leaders. There were one or two professional masons to plan the work and put the finishing touches. Despite my rank as a climbing leader I only counted as a volunteer still because my eight months were not yet up, and I was set to work as a labourer. Well-directed and organised the work could have gone ahead in a happy atmosphere of creativeness, but unfortunately the prevailing climate was as morose and degrading as that of a prison.

We were heaped together twelve to an ordinary-sized room, and to say nothing of the discomfort or the difficulty of breathing in an atmosphere like a rabbit-hutch, any privacy was out of the question. The food was almost exclusively composed of bread and overripe boiled vegetables. On twenty-year-olds working eleven hours a day at nearly six thousand feet in temperatures often below zero, the effect of this diet was to induce a state of semicoma suitable neither to good feeling nor good workmanship. Worse still, the huge quantities of vegetable matter we absorbed had a highly irritant effect, so that it was usual to have to get up four, five, and even six times a night.

The dining room consisted of an old barn. Through the gaps in its walls the wind blew gaily, and during those autumn months it froze hard inside. The barn was in any case half a mile from where we slept and over a mile from where we worked, so that every day we were forced to walk six miles or more simply in order to eat and get to our work. Given the excellent spirit which prevailed in the J.M. we would no doubt have accepted this brute existence in good part if only the work had been productive and properly organised. But we were short of tools, and the actual materials arrived at irregular intervals and in no order of priority, so that we would often be kept waiting for hours in an icy wind, only to have to work subsequently at a positively Stakhanovite pace.

In such conditions the great goodwill which animated almost all of us quickly disappeared. Everyone tried to get away with the minimum amount of work, and the universal motto was ‘get out quick'. As almost always happens among men when conditions get too close to the survival mark, selfishness became pronounced, and the fine ideal of fraternity gave place to the law of the jungle, in which intrigue and mutual accusation flourished. I suppose that the terrible conditions in which the whole country lived at that time excuse a good part of this muddle, but how in that case can it be accounted for that in other J.M. centres the morale remained high, the food adequate, and the work productive? The responsibility must rest above all with the commandant of works, an arrogant, selfish brute, unfit to command. He took his sadism to the length of getting us up before dawn to do P.T. in the snow, clad only in shorts, while he directed us from his window, warmly clad in a fur-lined anorak. I remember that one day he made us roll around in eight inches of fresh snow. My rage was such that for the only time in my life I felt the urge to kill.

After three more months of this kind of existence I came to the end of my statutory time in the J.M. Nobody will be surprised that I was completely disgusted with the organisation, or that my health left a good deal to be desired. Far from wishing to sign on as an instructor, as I had originally planned, I had no other thought but to get home as fast as I could, and I got back to Chamonix about the beginning of January. While looking around for the means to execute a new project I took up my ski training again. Once again I went in for competitions, but with far less satisfactory results than the previous year. After the ordeal I had been through I needed about two months to get back into good physical condition, and just as I felt my form coming back I badly injured my knee.

With the return of spring the problem of earning a living once again arose, this time in acuter form because I wanted to get married to a girl I had met in the skiing competitions. I therefore pressed on with the daring project I had formed during the foregoing months and, with the aid of a small sum of capital furnished by my mother, rented a farm at Les Houches, a village six miles or so down the valley from Chamonix. I bought a few animals and set up as a farmer. Despite the Utopian element in my choice of this hard but worthwhile life I did not give it up until the Liberation, in September 1944, and then only with regret.

Having always lived in the country I had some idea of things agricultural, but I was far from being a professional peasant, and, as might have been expected, the running-in period was fraught with difficulties. During the first year my inexperience and idealism almost led to complete failure. I only avoided it thanks to the help and advice of my neighbours, M. and Mme. Tairraz, and also I think to sheer hard work on a scale not often contemplated even by the tough peasants of the upper valleys. It is a well-known fact that hill farming is harder and less profitable than farming in the plains. This is the reason why the inhabitants of the high valleys are, in ever-increasing numbers, leaving the land either for the cities, or for commercial activities connected with the tourist industry. In the Chamonix valley, however, the conditions are better than elsewhere. The soil is fairly fertile, and if, on the one hand, the valley-sides are so steep as to render any cultivation out of the question, the floor of the valley compensates by being almost flat, making it possible to work with animals and farm machinery.

Today some of the more skilful farmers with the bigger farms can make a good living, without having to drudge, thanks to modern methods. But in 1941 such conditions, the result of continuous depopulation, did not yet exist. Although the Chamonix area was more suited to cultivation than a good many others, the tiny size of the individual farms made things very difficult. This state of affairs had brought about an immemorial poverty which forced the inhabitants to work by primitive and extremely laborious means.

At that time of food shortages, far from being deserted, the farmlands of the upper Arve were being worked right up to their remotest corners. I had the greatest difficulty in renting enough for four or five cows and a few acres of potatoes and vegetables. The fields I did manage to obtain were very expensive, scattered over a wide area, and in the case of a good third of them, steep and semi-sterile. From the outset, therefore, I was placed at a disadvantage relative to the farmer who inherits his own land, generally grouped around his farmhouse, and the position was made worse still by my technical ignorance. Fortunately my energy and liking for hard work, combined with my training in sports and manual labour, enabled me to pick up fairly rapidly the majority of agricultural techniques in use in the valley. Only the arts of threshing, scything and sharpening the scythe gave me real difficulty.

By unending work and ability to adapt to new conditions I managed to make up to a large extent for my technical handicaps, and I would no doubt have done quite well in the circumstances had I been less simple-minded, less full of ideals which had nothing to do with common sense. Thus a horse-jobber unloaded a donkey on to me for an exorbitant price, which turned out to be suffering from a disease of the hooves. I also engaged my friend Gaston Rébuffat as my farm labourer. Despite all the goodwill in the world, he turned out not to be gifted in farming matters, to the extent of being unable to shovel manure without being sick. Naturally his output was less than a third of that of an experienced man; and, as was entirely natural, he also had a propensity for disappearing into the mountains for two or three days at a time, which reduced the said output still further.

Getting in the hay was a particularly dramatic performance for us that year. I had to gather enough fodder for four cows and two or three goats. This may not sound much of a job to a mechanised farmer of the plains, but was a terrible business in the prevailing conditions. Almost a third of the hay consisted of short grass growing on abrupt slopes scattered with bushes and boulders, creating a lot of work for the amount of profit involved. The worst of it was that we had to cut, dry and gather the hay with no other tools than scythes and hand-rakes. To stack the hay in the barns, which were sometimes hundreds of yards away, we had to carry it on our heads in heavy trusses, or else to drag it on sleds across the slopes before trussing. The work is extremely hard even for those brought up to it from childhood, and for us, despite our natural vigour, it was absolutely exhausting.

Our lack of technique was a great handicap, and we lost a lot of time. The cutting was particularly laborious, and took us about double the normal time. We had to get up at four and even three o'clock in the morning and work through until nightfall, with no more rest than was needed to eat; and what with the bad weather and Gaston's occasional escapades, it seemed as though we were never going to finish. When I finally lifted the last miss on to my head it was almost as dry as straw, but I was borne up with the pride of succeeding where everyone had told me I would fail.

My reasons for becoming a farmer were complex. My first idea was to find a way of living in the mountains, so that I could continue climbing and skiing. I also had other, more materialistic reasons which were perhaps excusable given the historical moment: to get enough to eat to satisfy my enormous appetite, and to avoid compulsory service in Germany. But to these logical reasons was added another, less palpable one – the love of nature and of the earth which had been with me from childhood. This in itself would have been enough to account for my decision. Even at school, years before, I had never wished to become a doctor, manager or magistrate like the rest of my family. As my chances of getting to university lessened, I dreamed successively of becoming a forestry officer, an agricultural adviser, and a gentleman farmer. As all of these projects went up in smoke, I had thought I could find a life to suit my ideals in becoming a simple peasant, and now that I had become one in fact, I sincerely meant it to be for good. After the fiascos of the first year, having made rapid progress in the arts of growing crops and raising animals, I acquired the necessary technique and practical acumen, and indeed became as hard and crafty as a born peasant.

By the time I was forced to leave my farm in 1944, I was perfectly adapted to the life. My only other means of support were my emoluments as director of the Les Houches ski school in winter. Jealousy was not entirely absent from the sarcasm provoked by some of my agricultural methods, which were less traditional than those of many of my neighbours. My yields were excellent and my animals in exemplary condition. One of my cows became champion milker of the Charamillon alp over a hundred others.

My existence as a mountain peasant suited me perfectly, and there is little doubt that, if it had equally well suited my wife, I would never have quitted it. I had met her at Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, where she was a teacher, some months before adopting this career. We were married in the late summer of 1942. Very blonde, with porcelain-blue eyes, she was young and pretty, and it was in no way surprising that she should have a taste for things elegant and intellectual. She was far from entranced with this hard country life, which she had already known from childhood. With the patient obstinacy that enables women to win all their battles she never tired of edging me towards other ways of earning a living. When the chance finally appeared my resistance was exhausted, and I gave in easily.