Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest

I felt compelled to comment on this book for several reasons, the first of which is rather humorous. I was reading well into Davis' introductions of the men involved in the 1921 efforts and was spellbound by their protean and majestic talents, their characters and achievements. While doing this, I was idly awaiting a local weather report on the TV. Changing channels, I stumbled across a nauseating daytime TV "reality show" run by some shameless instigator named Jerry Springer. Here were arrayed a collection of lower-class hippopotami, all building up to the anticipated denoument of actual physical conflict. Apparently, many of these situations involve DNA testing of some potential---or living---illegitimi. Having never seen the show before, I was half out of my chair in disbelief. In my lap was Davis' paean to these peerless English heroes of the previous century---while on the screen was the end-product (one would hope) of decades of cultural and genetic dumpster-diving. I left the TV room and chose Davis over Springer---who in their right mind would not? My forecast was for light snow---in comparison to the hurricane-born squalls and blizzards facing the pioneers of Everest, I faced few hours of shovelling. We may, if things continue to spiral down towards the lowest cultural denominator, never see the likes of a Mallory, an Irvine, a Bruce, Norton, Finch, Morshead or Somervell again. An anguisihing thought, but an unavoidable one, given the times in which we live.Reflecting on these men, I knew WW I was indeed ghastly, but it was also the forge of heroes---especially in the form these uncommon men. Both my uncle and my father served in WW I, the uncle actually a volunteer in 1915, years before his country entered the war. For that reason I knew of the squalor, despair and unavoidable fates of those entrenched. These men Davis defines for us were indeed Homeric demi-gods. It seems each of them was an accomplished scholar, indefatigable mountaineer, and a poet, musician, doctor, warrior, writer, or artist to boot. Despite the quirks and passions they displayed, each was a model of achievement, certitude and colossal gifts. My aforementioned uncle had been born in 1895 and my own father in 1899---and they were, if not mountaineers, at least exceedingly accomplished and admirable men.I deemed Davis' book a "semester course" because even its annotated bibliography is a book in itself. The amount of his research is simply Everestan, truly stupifying . I recommend it to all who want a grounding and a base-camp for further reading on the "Third Pole" as it is sometimes called.The only portion which stuck in my craw was Davis' seemingly gratuitous trashing of Americans in the party which actually discovered Mallory's body. On page 569, he accurately (and to him at least) fairly demeans the Americans by referring to their "singularly inarticulate" musings, which included the words "awesome", "totally cool" and "bummer". Davis is indeed being accurate by citing these lamentable linguistic lapses. The latter are a sure earmark of the failure of American education to elucidate and inspire, but it just felt a little gratuitous. My solution would be for Wade Davis, on one of his trips to Europe, to spend an hour or so in the American graveyard at Coleville-sur-Mer. Therein lie thousands of Americans who, like Mallory and Irvine, will remain "forever young" as they say, by dint of sacrificing themselves in the major wars of the previous century. We Americans may be lurching toward Jerry Springer Nation status, but some of us know, some of us read, and some of us reach for the heights, if only by reading superb books such as this. Highly, highly recommended!

Wade Davis's INTO THE SILENCE isn't just a great history of Mallory and the various quests to ascend Everest. If read closely, it's also a great example of the possibilities of cultural history. What do I mean by that? Davis sets out to explain a personal aim or intention in light of surrounding culture. As a cultural historian myself, I can say that doing this well is no easy task. Sure, many historians and commentators work in a slapdash fashion, attempting to explain things--movies, novels, what-have-you--by simply declaring that they are reflections of the zeitgeist. But this isn't cultural history done well. Thoughtful historians know that linking individual acts to the culture they are born into requires careful, detailed, granular "reenactment" of the ways of thinking and feeling circulating in a culture. Only then can we begin to understand how culture directly interacts with personal volitions or habits of mind and spirit.Davis does just that. This is the most detailed account--written in the style we've come to expect from Davis, accessible, elegant, and lively--of Mallory and Everest that you'll find. But this isn't for detail for its own sake. Bringing the cultural alive again through detailed reconstruction--through what art historian Michael Baxandall calls reenactment--allows Davis to make claims like this (on page 89):"This was an intimation of something that would haunt the nation for a generation, the impossible chasm between those who has been to war and those who remained home to revel in its imagined glories, spouting idle rhetoric, struggling to retain a sense of normalcy, dreaming old dreams of a world the very memory of which had been obliterated in the trenches."You don't just assert historical connections like this. You have to lay substantial groundwork in support of them. And with supported connections of this kind, Davis climbs an Everest of sorts himself: he produces a monumental study that, perhaps like no other, explains the conquest of Everest as an aspect of wartime and postwar culture. Highly recommended.

Everest was the last great challenge after the race to the poles had ended. This is the story of the young British men who having survived the horrors of the First World War sought solace and accomplishment in the attempt to reach the "top of the world". What makes this book different from standard climbing accounts is that it aims to put those efforts in a broader context of what it was like to survive the Great War and how it affected those who came through it. The author also goes to some pains to show the cultural differences between the English climbers and that of the Tibetans who lived around Everest who could barely comprehend why anyone would risk their lives simply to climb a mountain.For some the detailed descriptions of the horrific battles of the war will be a bit much. Davis clearly feels that the waste of that war drove these climbers and includes graphic descriptions to help the reader understand that horror. If you want a book about the glory of battle, this is not for you.The details of the expeditions are voluminous and at times perhaps more detailed than interesting. The level of scholarship here is amazing, but there are times you just want to get to the climbing. That said, the climbing is fascinating and the author's conclusions about the psyches of the climbers seem well supported. The impending sense of doom as men throw themselves into the death zone with what we would see as primitive equipment is palpable and while we know historically that the efforts will fail, at the end there is still a feeling of amazement at what was accomplished and horror at the cost. This book is not perfect but it is interesting and involving and a detailed description of a world that no longer exists.

About one of the greatest climbers of all time. Considering it was 1924 and the equipment therein a tremendous achievement to get so high...

Into the Silence, by Wade Davis, is quite simply the best non-fiction book I have read in a long while.The subject is compelling - the quest of George Mallory and other climbers of the 1920s to reach the summit of Mount Everest. But the way the author approaches the subject is even more compelling. He engages the reader; he introduces characters and has them move through scenes; he makes what seem to be tangents, revealing the context of people's lives, their prior experiences. These tangents then prove to be fundamental to the story. He takes the time - he allows himself to take the time - to present each character with cultural context.The writing is beautiful. The human voices everywhere in the book, coming first of all out of his own grandfather's experience in the First World War, are stirring.Davis shows that several British, Irish and Canadian men, badly scarred by the horrors of the First World War, sought in the after-war years to develop a secular ritual of climbing to the frozen summit of the world, in the Himalayas - a land of perpetual snows and glaciers and natural wonders where human destructiveness and folly had yet to make a mark. As if these men were turning the clock back on their own lives, recovering their own lost innocence.Wade Davis shows, in counterpoint, how the Buddhists of Tibet followed spiritual rituals, in an altogether different dimension, where every feature of the landscape was rich with other meanings.Actually, the climbers were visitors in the Himalayas, pursuing an ideal, putting themselves and the Tibetans and Nepalese who accompanied them at considerable risk. I have read several other books on Mallory recently, and found they stick to hero-worship with reservations, but offer little insight. Into the Silence is essentially a tale of two worlds, providing real insights about the interactions between Western mountain climbers and Himalayan peoples.

- Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to summit Mt. Everest, said “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” Several quotes from this remarkable book, that I also loved, include the sad quote from a woman reflecting on the horror of the war in stating that “all the men I ever danced with are dead”.- This is a remarkable masterpiece of writing about the theme that “the price of life is death” for all those who had lived through the first world war or the Great War. Wade Davis tells the story of the early exploration into Tibet by Francis Younghusband, which began the first conquest of Tibet by a European and during that duration of looking at the possibility of climbing Everest, accounts of the most horrific war run in the most idiotic way of the great war that many of these climbers survived, and of the first three attempts to conquer climb Mount Everest in 1921, 1922 and 1924.– The accounts of the First World War are remarkable, Davis has collected and researched diaries of those who climbed the mountain which include many of their accounts of war, which are truly horrific. The fact that the British generals refused to use steel helmet which would protect a man’s head much better than the cloth cap they used, refuse to use machine guns and choose rifles which shot at a much slower rate than the machine guns used by the enemy and in some of the attacks on the Germans, Allied soldiers were made to walk rather than run and rush the German trenches and were mowed down like cattle in seconds. The generals were truly incompetent but idealising british history. A couple of quotes amongst so many include the following:- “Other witnesses remember Wakefield hesitating and then slowly beginning to sob as the flag drew back to reveal the names of those who had perished: caught on the barbed wire, drowned in mud, choked by the oily slime of gas, reduced to a spray of red mist, quartered limbs hanging from shattered branches of burnt trees, bodies swollen and blackened with flies, skulls gnawed by rats, corpses stuck in the sides of trenches that aged with each day into the colours of the dead.”- “Vera Brittain, a nurse who had already lost her brother and her two best friends, and in time would lose Roland [her fiance] as well. “The dugouts have been nearly all blown in,” he wrote, the wire entanglements are a wreck, and in among the chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men … Let him who thinks war is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking honour and praise and valour and love of country … Let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all youth and joy and life into a fetid heap of hideous putrescence! Who is there who has known and seen who can say that victory is worth the death of even one of these?”– The book then focuses on the initial scouting group in 1921 with an attempt to climb Mount Everest, followed by two more in 1922 and 1924. This is real boys adventure stuff but it’s also a fascinating look into different cultures and landscapes. I think Wade Davis writes with remarkable pros and he is one of my favourite writers whom I could listen to him talk about anything.– On a personal note I have travelled through Tibet, India and Nepal and it was interesting listening to the depictions of these countries and places that I have seen and visited, and hear as they were described at the turn of the 20th century. I’ve been to many places described, slept one night on Everest base camp (they have a Buddhist monastery there) in Tibet and visited many of these places described in the book. I’ve also drunk my fair share of Yak tea, cooked withYak dung - like watery tea strained through a smelly sock with the smell of petroleum. Tibet’s culture is truly remarkable and its people and beliefs are fascinating and well described. This is a book about death that can make you appreciate life. It could be travel reportage, boys' own adventure, a spiritual guide to different cultures and the very belief that ‘the price of life is death’ as so many of these men who tried to conquer the tallest mountain in the world had already lost so much.– For such a long book I really didn’t want it to end, I loved every word of it – the spiritual, physical, the characters who attempted to climb the tallest mountain on the planet because “it was there“. I would recommend anything Wade Davis writes and I would certainly recommend this book.

Kindle版出版社: Vintage (2011/10/18)ASIN: B004KPM1HG　のレビュー。　1921、22、24年、三回にわたるエベレスト遠征隊を描いた労作である。　1999年、マロリーの遺体が発見され、それに付随して数十冊の関連書が出版された。本書の著者は、その段階で、自身の著作の調査中断を出版社に申し出たそうだ。しかし、出版社側は著者に執筆を継続させ、10年もの調査にすえ、本書は完成した。　３回の遠征に参加した隊員・関係者（王立地理協会、アルパイン・クラブ、インド政庁、インド軍）すべてについて経歴を調査し、一時資料を捜索している。膨大な書籍も収集し、読み込んでいる。さらに関係者の子孫に会い、話を聞き、資料を見せてもらっている。　結果として、前半はとても登山関係の本とは思えない内容になっている。第一次大戦、チベットの外交問題、インド政庁の事情、ケンブリッジなど当時の上流とミドルクラスの生活感覚などが、事細かく描かれる。とくにいやでも目を引くのは、当時のミドルクラス、知識人の若者の間のfriendship（homosexualという語は英語に定着していないし、gayは昔からの意味しかない）のこと。そうとうに、あからさまな書簡が残っている。労働者階級とは隔絶した、特権的な生活であったわけである。　第７章でようやくチベット内に到着、この第一次1921年の記述が長い、長い、長い。E. O. Wheelerというインド軍の測量技師の活動が詳しく書かれているが、これは著者が子孫にあって日記を譲り受けた成果を発表したものでしょう。さらに著者は、実際にwheelerの調査した地をかなりの部分歩いている。ノース・コルまでは登っている。ちなみに、このWheelerという人物はその後もインド軍の測量技師として活躍し、第二次大戦中は、ビルマ戦線の地図制作に従事した。日本軍が戦ったのは、この男である。　しかし、ここまではまだ五合目だ。いよいよ、ノース・コルから本格的なアタックが始まるのは第二次1922の遠征である。　ここいらから、わたしの読み方が定まってきた。この三回の遠征は、もともと失敗・敗退すべきものだったのではないか？　単なる運の悪さや、ちょっとしたミスではなく、構造的な問題として、当時のエベレスト登頂が不可能だったことを書こうとしているのではないか？　わたしはそんな読み方で進んでいった。　隊員の人選をめぐるトラブル、予算獲得のための隊員への縛り、現地ポーターとの問題、年功序列やジェントルマンの階級意識、それらが遠征への大きな負担になる。装備・食料・医療知識・気象情報など、当時では解決できない問題が多々ある。第二次大戦後と大きく異なるのは、携帯無線機がないこと。これは第一次大戦時と同じで、ちょっと離れた部隊のようすがわからない。後方への連絡は走って伝令が伝えるしかない。エベレストでも各キャンプ間の連絡がとれず、さまざまなトラブルが起きる。第一次、第二次で、クライマーの犠牲がでなかったのが、幸運と言えるほどだ。　さて、主人公マロリーである。やはりこの人物の描写が一番くわしいが、〈友情〉事情ばかりでなく、さまざまなことが暴露されている。暴露というと、言葉が強すぎるかな？　当時としては普通の好青年だったのだろうが、現地人の利発な若者を妻に伝える手紙がすごい（p329)。　そして最後にマロリーが登頂に成功したかどうか、そんな関心から本書を読もうとする人がいれば、やめておけと言いたい。エピローグの最後に短くまとめられているが、結論は99.99%明らか。むしろ、なぜ、登頂に成功したかもしれないという希望が長く続いたかが、本書全体で語られている。　以上、緑陰の友というには、ヘビーでディープな著作でした。　索引がひじょうに詳しい。本文には注がなく、そのかわり各章ごとに文書館や図書館の所在情報が載っており、関連書籍の案内もしている。どうせ一次資料を見ることなんてない普通の読者にや、これで十分。　地図はkindleで見にくい。わたしはFire HDで見た。地名などもう少し詳しく載っていればいいかなあ。

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