The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (3 page)

With a stack of glowing recommendation letters from former teachers and headmasters, including Mr. Stearns at Phillips, Dudley easily got into the ambulance corps and talked his wastrel older brother, Clifford, into going with him.

On October 24, 1917, Joseph Baldrige, Mabel, Gwen, and Grafton all waved from New York’s South Street pier as the two brothers sailed for Europe. With them on the SS
St. Louis
were six surgeons and thirty-five nurses, all bound for the front lines. The crossing was a boisterous affair of late nights in the ship’s parlor singing patriotic songs at the piano, hard drinking, and close dancing with strangers, as they all enjoyed their last civilian revelry before the horrors of war became a daily routine.

Over the years Dudley Francis Wolfe had grown into an attractive, quiet, dignified young man with a shock of curly dark hair above the high forehead he had inherited from his father. He was friendly but reserved, and while he had an engaging smile, he more often looked out upon the world with a steady sober gaze from behind his round glasses. He was considered stout and would struggle throughout his life with his weight. At five feet ten inches, he weighed anywhere between 180 and 220 pounds, his heaviest being after his expulsion from Phillips at what was probably the nadir of his life. Once free of that failure, he grew up, got back into sports and steadily lost the weight, developing the solid, athletic build of a running back rather than the lithe agility of a sprinter.

When Dudley and Clifford got off the boat in Liverpool they made their way to London, where they decided to do some sightseeing before the ambulance corps training was to start. One night Dudley dined alone at the hotel, and as he bent comfortably over the oak bar waiting for his dinner, a middle-aged man who looked through thick glasses and wore a trim suit approached him and asked whether he was the American Dudley Wolfe registered at the hotel. Dudley stood and reached out his hand, affirming that yes, he was.

The man bowed slightly and introduced himself as Lucien Wolf, explaining that he had a brother Dudley who had emigrated to America many years before, and he wondered if perhaps they were related. Dudley invited Lucien to join him at the bar and, pulling his passport out of his pocket, asked him to write his name on a spare page so he could see how it was spelled. Curious at the missing “e,” the two men compared genealogical notes and dates. Soon they looked at each other with widening eyes and then, somewhat awkwardly, uncle and nephew rose and embraced each other.

Dudley listened as Lucien told him the whole story. He quickly learned that his father, Dudley Wolfe, the self-proclaimed British aristocrat and businessman, had actually been born Dudley Wolf, the second son of a Bohemian Jew, Edward Wolf, who had escaped a violent wave of political uprisings and class warfare throughout Europe in 1848. Edward, a pipe manufacturer and tobacconist, and his Viennese wife, Cécili Redlich, raised their children in Hackney, a Jewish section of London. Their two eldest, Dudley and Lucien Emmanuel,
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were sent to Gloucester House, a Jewish school for boys in Kew, outside of London. At some point after Dudley Wolf emigrated to America in the late 1880s and before he married Mabel Smith in 1893, he had added the “e,” forever leaving his Jewish name and heritage behind.

Lucien also told Dudley, with tears coming to his eyes, that he had only learned of his brother’s death the year before, and not from Mabel but from an attorney in Omaha. Lucien had told the attorney that he wanted his brother’s children to be told how to communicate with him, but obviously, he knew now, that hadn’t been done. They had never been told of their Jewish uncle in England. What an extraordinary coincidence that he should happen upon one of them in a London hotel! Looking at Dudley Wolfe, Lucien felt a swell of love and pride. He could see his brother in the young man’s square jaw, aquiline nose, and high forehead. How Dudley would have liked to see his boy grow up! Lucien had so many questions: Why had his brother never mentioned his family in London? Why hadn’t Mabel, in going through his papers, found Lucien’s letters and contacted him? And mostly, why had Dudley abandoned his name and heritage after he arrived in America? But Lucien would never know. His brother’s reasons had died with him.

Dudley looked at the distinguished man next to him, his uncle. This man and his mysterious father had been brothers, the sons of Bohemian Jews, refugees no less. And while Dudley Senior had apparently broken all ties with his past, before he left his home the Wolfs had been a loving, close family which gathered around Cécili’s piano after dinner, each of them playing an instrument while “Papa” sang Dvo
ák
lieder
into the night. Suddenly Dudley realized where he got the “Cecil” in Dudley Francis Cecil Wolfe; he had been named for his grandmother.

Dudley almost laughed, picturing his maternal grandfather’s face if he were to hear this news. B. F. and the mighty Smiths were proud of their Maine lineage straight back to 1610. He wished he dared tell him that those Smiths now had eastern European Jewish blood flowing through their heirs’ veins.

Exchanging addresses with his newfound uncle, Dudley promised to visit him before returning to America after the war and suggested they might even schedule a family reunion of sorts, although his Semitic relatives might not be welcomed with open arms at the gated enclave of Warrenton Park.
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After Lucien left, Dudley sat at the bar trying out his new name and signature beneath where his uncle had written his. Repeatedly he wrote “Dudley F. C. Wolfe” and “Dudley F. C. Wolf,” as if deciding which he would choose.

Once in France, Dudley drove into action behind the wheel of a small medical camion, a specially rigged Model T Ford with a wooden box frame attached to the rear to carry the wounded and the dead. For the next year, from the western front, where he witnessed the bloody battle of Soissons along the Marne, to the Italian front along the Piave River, he drove through one of history’s most devastating wars. While other young men were shooting themselves in the foot or leg to get out of combat, Dudley volunteered for some of the worst duty possible. He quickly learned the difference between mortar fire and shrapnel—you could possibly run from a mortar blast if you heard it coming, but with shrapnel you had to hit the dirt and pray not to get hit. He saw soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, so close he could see the color of their eyes as they pulled the pins from their grenades. After the clouds of mustard gas cleared he would walk through the fields and trenches, pulling masks full of vomit off dead soldiers, their faces purple and their lips black. He saw open trenches filled with rats as fat as otters nibbling on the dead and dying soldiers. He witnessed artillery rounds so solid he couldn’t distinguish the individual explosions but merely felt and heard the constant bomb-like roar through his body. Then there were the husks of bodies, already ruined by disease and starvation, which he loaded into the ambulance. The winter of 1917–18 was brutally cold, and it was followed by an equally painful, sweltering summer. Chewing coffee beans and taking swigs of grappa to stay awake and remain numb at the same time, Dudley drove through the Austrian attack along the Piave River near Venice. Man after man, body after body, some getting hit before his eyes with their shattered legs collapsing beneath them, others blown naked of their clothes by the bomb blast, their torsos and limbs hanging from the trees above: the war became Dudley’s education.

The ambulance work suited him. He found cold, narrow purpose in its physical stress and emotional exhaustion. There was no time to think about his failures at school, the disappointment of his mother, or the demands by his stepfather and grandfather that he make something of his life. Here he was, dodging bullets and bombs, pulling broken men from their trenches and driving them through a rain of munitions to the relative safety of the dressing stations. Often they would be screaming in pain and he wished for a gun to put them out of their misery, as he had the animals he had found in traps with a leg chewed nearly off in an attempt to gain freedom. But he hadn’t shot the men; he had loaded their ruined bodies into the top-heavy Ford and driven them to the hospital, many of them dying on the way. Then he would turn around and go out to do it again. No one had to ask or direct him and no one ever called him slow or suggested he was a dullard. He knew the routine, he knew his mission, and he performed ably and without complaint.

In the midst of this hell, Dudley remained a gentle man. On one trip from the front, he brought a mortally wounded French soldier from the trenches to the hospital where he then watched him die. Before he returned to his camion, Dudley took out his pocketknife and cut a small lock of the man’s hair, wrapped it in a square of hospital gauze, and tucked it into his coat. Perhaps he intended to deliver it to the man’s mother, or his girlfriend back in Paris. But he did neither. He wrote the man’s name and where he died on a slip of paper, tucked it and the small bundle of hair into an envelope, and kept it locked in his desk drawer. Whatever the gesture may have meant, the lock of hair became one of Dudley’s most guarded possessions.

He wrote frequent and often funny postcards and letters to his family, making his wartime activities sound more like an extended vacation, describing his ten-day leaves to Rome and Naples and collecting the exploded shells as souvenirs for Gwen. Sitting in a café in Milan, where he was on leave from the French front, Dudley wrote to Gwen, “Heigh ho, sisterlino Gwendolino! Hope you have a fine time Christmas vacation. But don’t eat too much! Give my best to all I know. Much love, Dud.” In one, he described watching an observation balloon get shot down by a “Boche” sniper,
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then of seeing the observer come floating down in his parachute, almost at Dudley’s feet. Most often he wrote in between attacks along the front and would end the letters abruptly when a call came for ambulances—“and that means me.” But he always took the time to close the letters tenderly: “Give my love to all, Your loving brother, Dud.” Over the years, between Clifford’s rebellion and Grafton’s youth, he and Gwen had become the closest siblings and wrote long and detailed letters to each other.

Finally, word came that Dudley’s commission for the French Foreign Legion had come through. As he was signing his release papers from the ambulance corps he learned that he was to be awarded the Italian Croce di Guerra, the Italian Red Cross medal, and the campaign medal for the Italian–Austrian War.

On October 1, 1918, after ten months driving an ambulance, he finally donned the uniform of the French Foreign Legion but fought on the front lines for only a month. On November 11 the armistice was signed; the war was over.
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Even though his active duty was short, he received more medals for his service: the French Volunteer Medal and the French Campaign Medal. After posing for a picture in his decorated uniform, one of his Grandfather Wolf’s handmade pipes proudly held in his right hand, he neatly tucked the ribbons and medals into their boxes and packed them away for his mother and grandfather.

While Phillips Academy at Andover had rejected Dudley academically, after the war they proudly claimed him as one of their own, years later boasting that he had amassed more medals than any other “Andover man” during the Great War.

As he was packing for home, Dudley learned that Clifford, who had been assigned to the western front, had been captured and was being held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Dudley went into high gear, writing to the American Field Office, the Red Cross, and the diplomatic corps to get information on Clifford’s condition, status, and, now that the war was over, his release. For the next two months, he badgered anyone and everyone he could find, until he finally received word on January 1, 1919, that his brother had been put on a train in Strasbourg bound for France. Clifford was free.

With Clifford’s safety now assured, Dudley realized he was still not ready to return home. He lingered in Europe for almost another year, spending most of his time in Paris and then in London with his uncle Lucien, where he met an entire family of Wolf cousins he hadn’t known existed. He saw pictures of his young father on Cécili’s piano, which now sat in Lucien’s parlor, and gave his uncle several pounds to have the photographs copied; he wanted to take a set home to Maine with him.

After months of gentle urging from Mabel and Gwen, Dudley finally returned to America in the fall of 1919 and joined his mother, sister, brother, and stepfather in Omaha, where the Smith family banking and real estate businesses still flourished. For the next four years Dudley struggled to find his way in real estate, while Clifford, who had also returned a decorated veteran, came home a changed man and immediately began learning how to manage B. F.’s vast holdings. Dudley tried to embrace the business, but as he sat in the flat, dusty cow town of Omaha bent over probate documents and land titles, he yearned for the gentle hills and ocean breezes of Rockport. Each summer he eagerly returned to Maine and his first love, sailing. He entered every race he could find, from local regattas to world-class competitions, but he also relished the times he was alone on the ocean, absorbing the quiet solitude. He realized that war and sailing had a lot in common; although one was mired in chaos and the other in calm, he felt utterly detached from the world in each, and it was the solitude he cherished. Every year his summer vacation got longer until finally, in 1924, with the excuse of at last entering college in the fall, Dudley announced he was heading back east for good. Clicking along on the railroad his grandfather had helped build, Dudley watched the parched prairie grasses give way to the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, New York, the Berkshire Mountains, and, finally, the marble and brick office buildings of Boston. The ocean was only another hundred yards away.