Conquistadors of the Useless (5 page)

During one ascent of the Cardinal, for example, I got by mistake into a smooth, overhanging chimney. I overcame the problem by pulling up on a blade of rock that I had managed to jam between the two walls. Many years later I found myself by chance on the same mountain and went a bit out of my way to have a look at the well-remembered chimney. Despite my modern moulded-rubber soles and ten years' experience of the hardest routes in the Mont Blanc range, I was quite unable to climb the last few feet. The most dangerous thing in mountaineering is certainly the carefree confidence of youth!

During the months which followed, some order seemed to come back into the world. For those living in the valleys of the Alps nothing seemed to have changed: the tourists were back, the joyous chinking of flowing money was heard again. Youngsters avid of sensations and fugitive glory were grouped again around the chronometers at the Sunday ski-competitions, which were being contested with the old ardour. That winter was the apogee of my skiing career. In December I was selected to train for the national team. My summer season had put me into a state of exceptional fitness, and had given me the self-confidence essential to clearing the path of victory. I seemed highly likely to qualify when, in an unlucky fall, I badly injured my knee, and barely recovered in time to go in for the Dauphine championships for which I was still eligible. Nevertheless I won the downhill, the slalom, and the combined classification for the four events – for in those days they had the crazy notion to make the same men compete not only in the downhill and slalom, but also in specialised events whose techniques were as far apart as the cross-country race and the jumping.

A few days later, by a stroke of luck, I came second in the ‘combined downhill and slalom', and third in the overall classification in the national championships of France. Later in the season, at the ‘Grand Prix de l'Alpe d'Huez', fate took a hand to redress matters. A hundred yards from the finishing post I was several seconds up on the whole of the French national team when some spectators got in my way and I lost first place by a fifth of a second.

By the time the last snows gave place to the delicate corolla of the crocus in the saturated fields, I had good reasons for thinking that my old vision of reaching the highest ranks of the sport were not just the daydreams of a silly child. How I would have laughed in the face of anyone who predicted that it would be many years before I was to know again the enraptured feeling of more than human force that comes from the utter concentration of the fight against the clock.

At my mother's house I had bed, board and a little pocket money, so that for months I was as free as a mountain goat. I had no place in society to fulfil, no other task than what I saw fit to set myself. Animated by an appetite for physical exercise which amounted almost to frenzy, I led a life of intense activity and virtual asceticism. From the beginning of December to the end of May my ski training, and the many competitions in which I usually entered for all four events, left me almost no spare time. I even grudged the time taken out to give skiing lessons for a bit of extra money. In summer I accumulated climbs at the speed of a professional guide, and in the midst of all this intense activity I still found the energy for enormous cycling trips and to go in for swimming, athletics and gymnastics.

It has to be admitted that my intellectual activity was very much less, being limited to a few books whose serious nature contrasted oddly with the physical preoccupation of my life. About this time I read almost the whole of Balzac, Musset, Baudelaire and Proust.

Had I been less acutely aware of the fragile bases on which my way of life, so rich in action, reposed, it would have satisfied me so completely that the future would not have worried me at all. I have never thought an occupation any the better for being lucrative: on the contrary, money has a way of soiling everything it touches. Then as now, what mattered for me was action and not the price of action. The value was in the acting itself. My whole life has been a sort of tight-rope walk between the self-justifying action in which I have pursued the ideals of my youth, and a more or less honourable prostitution to the necessity of earning my daily bread. Could any mind be vulgar enough to suggest that the prostitution was worth more than the gratuitous act? In any case, outside of primitive societies where every gesture springs from the instinct for survival of the species, what in fact is a ‘useful' action? If, in order to forget the emptiness of their existence, many people become drunk with words and speak of their place, their mission, their social utility, how meaningless and conventional their words really are! In our disorganised and overpopulated world, how many people can honestly say they are useful today? The millions of dignified go-betweens who encumber the economy, the titled pen-pushers in their sinecures which drain society and frustrate the administration, all the hoteliers, journalists, lawyers and other such who could disappear tomorrow without anyone being a penny the worse? Can you even call the majority of doctors useful, when they fight like famished dogs for patients in the big cities, while all over the earth men are dying for the lack of their care? In this century when it has been shown a hundred times over that a rational organisation can vastly reduce the number of men needed for any task, how many can be quite certain that they are genuinely necessary cogs in the huge machine of the world?

By the end of the winter of 1941 I realised that the foundations of my free and wonderful life were becoming daily more uncertain. Despite her unending kindness, it was obvious that my mother could not go on keeping me like a race-horse forever. At this crucial moment a way suddenly opened up in front of me.

1. 1. Guido Lammer.
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1. 2. A method of descending steep rocks. The climber slides down a rope which has been doubled round a spike hammered into the rock, then recovers it by pulling one of the ends. It is also known as abseiling.
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1. 3.
   Translator's Note.
   The phrase ‘grandes courses', meaning the climbs which in any era are outstanding for length, seriousness and sustained difficulty, has no exact equivalent in English and is often used untranslated by British climbers.
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1. 4.
   Translator's note.
   In climbing parlance the crux of a climb is its hardest pitch. The crux of a pitch is its hardest moves, and so on.
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The traditional military service had now been replaced by a kind of civilian service aimed at the virtues of manliness, industriousness, and public and team spirit, much extolled by the national leaders of the day. An institution called ‘Les Chantiers de la Jeunesse' was set up to put young men of twenty-one through an eight months' training. A similar but much smaller organisation called ‘Jeunesse et Montagne', or J.M. for short, was formed on parallel lines. Only volunteers could serve in this corps d'elite, the idea of which was to inculcate qualities of service and leadership among youth by the practice of mountaineering, skiing and a rough life among the mountains generally. The J.M. was endowed with a body of instructors consisting of professional guides and skiing instructors plus a few amateurs who were admitted after a difficult entrance examination. The pay was poor, but the life, dedicated entirely to mountains, seemed fascinating.

I possessed all the necessary skills to pass these examinations without much trouble, and I realised that in this way I could find a method of supplying my material needs while pursuing my true ambitions. Since I was bound to get called up soon in any case for the ‘Service Civile', I decided to anticipate matters by volunteering for the J.M. I went in at Beaufort around the beginning of May.

In all walks of life during wartime there was a certain degree of disorganisation, or rather improvisation, which lent to things an element of fantasy which we quite miss in these productive days. The J.M. was still in the early stages of its formation, and a general chaos reigned quite happily side by side with rigid military discipline. For some days after my arrival I spent my time, in company with some thirty other recruits, in planting potatoes. Then, by one of those mysterious dispensations which always seem to occur in organisations of this sort, despite the fact that a good third of the new personnel were farmers' boys, I was designated to be a muleteer!

I had been quite used to cows from childhood, but had never come close to a mule in my life. Worse still, I entertained a wholesome terror for them, having heard that they were vicious, stubborn, and endowed with a most redoubtable capacity for kicking. When our group leader announced my new profession I asked him, my features tense with fear, just what I would be expected to do. He replied with the succinctness which characterises all great leaders of men:

‘Nothing to it. You go to the stable, you take the mules to drink at the trough, you give them one truss of hay per four mules, and you clean out the stable. That's all for the moment.'

The only thing he forgot to tell me was that, owing to a short admin course, no one had appointed a new muleteer, and consequently the animals hadn't eaten for two days. I went into the stable with all the innocence of the newly-converted going to his baptism, and if the animals seemed a trifle agitated I hardly noticed it.

‘It's because they don't know me yet', I said to myself.

Dodging a kick vigorous enough to propel me into the next world, I squeezed in between two of the beasts in order to set them loose, then did the same for four others. Only then did it begin to dawn on me that I had done something rasher than climbing the Whymper couloir at four o'clock in the afternoon.
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Wild with hunger and thirst, the mules stampeded in all directions, and one of them, baring his long yellow teeth, tried to bite me in the most uncivilised fashion. Only the agility which enabled me to climb like a flash into the hayrack saved me from being trampled to death. I would probably have been stuck there for hours if, finding the door open, the mules had not burst out into the village in an unbridled cavalcade. Fortunately I was speedily relieved of my duties as a muleteer, and sent off to be part of a team building new military quarters about five thousand feet up in the high pastures of Roseland.

The chalet in which we had to install ourselves was primitive in the extreme. Everything normally considered necessary to the maintenance of a group of men, even in the hardest sort of conditions, was lacking – camp-beds, mattresses, blankets, even a stove. All these things needed to be got up as quickly as possible, but, the season being very late that year, Roseland was still half buried in snow, and the last two or three miles of the road were unusable. The only method of transport was our own backs. The work of my own team consisted mainly of doing all this carrying. We had to do just one trip a day which, with a load of about a hundred pounds, took around three hours for the return journey. The hours were thus short, but the work required more than average energy, particularly inasmuch as, sleeping on the bare ground and eating inadequate food, simply to survive demanded a constant output. For this reason the team was made up of the stronger men. Used to working with mules, I was perfectly designed to replace them when the need arose!

The rough life we led at Roseland suited me ideally, except that three hours of work, however laborious, were not enough to appease my energies, so that I had to look around for other methods. With a few friends of similar tastes, I used to get up before dawn every day and climb the two thousand feet to the Grande Berge, a peak overlooking Roseland, on skis. After a swift downhill run came breakfast, then I would do a first carry, and in the afternoon another. Then the loads began to seem too light, so I started taking a little more each day. Some of the other porters joined in the game, which became a daily competition, until we were carrying up to a hundred and thirty odd pounds at a time.

It should be added that in those early days of the J.M. there reigned a wonderful team spirit and good humour. Our ideal may have been rather too simple, but most of us really did have an ideal for which we were willing to give our utmost strength. It was all very inspiring. In this atmosphere of shared high spirits and exhausting labour I passed days of intense and utter happiness. In the words of Schiller, ‘In giving of itself without reserve, unfettered power knows its own joy'.

Once the snow had melted, the life of our troop changed completely. Our time was divided between forestry, ski-mountaineering, physical culture and, in a milder sort of way, climbing. The professional guides and instructors played a purely technical role, and the disciplinary side was looked after by the various grades of ‘leaders'. These were mostly officers or non-commissioned officers from the disbanded air force. Most of them knew little about mountains and their lore, and some of them loathed the whole business. For this reason mountain activity was not always taken as far as it should have been, despite the enthusiasm of both the instructors and the volunteers.

The activity of each group depended a lot on the tastes of its leader, who might give priority according to his preferences to skiing, climbing, hill-walking, manual labour or cultural activities. By a stroke of luck our leader was an ex-N.C.O. of alpine troops, an experienced mountaineer, and a one-time ‘Bleausard'.
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Thanks to him our time was mainly spent on long ski excursions along the high ridges of Beaufortin, or else in rock climbing. We worked out a number of practice grounds along the foot of the limestone pinnacles and crags above Roseland. At least twice a week we had to undergo half a day's climbing. I had no trouble in outclassing most of the others on these occasions, but one, named Charles, sometimes outdid me. Tremendous competitions resulted when, our safety ensured by a rope from above, we would strive to surpass each other by means of the most spectacular rock-gymnastics.

It was now that I first met Gaston Rébuffat. He was attached to a troop quartered in the picturesque Arèche valley, with its dense pine forests and lush pastures dotted with old rustic chalets. There being no rocks to climb in that pastoral area, this troop was forced to come up to Roseland for the purpose. Caught by the rain one day, they took shelter in our chalet, and somebody told me that among them was a young fellow from Marseilles who claimed to have done some big climbs. I had often heard about the wonderful training ground formed by the ‘calanques', the rocky coast near Marseilles, and I excitedly got myself introduced to the new phenomenon.

In those days Rébuffat was of rather startling appearance at first sight, tall, thin and stiff as the letter I. His narrow features were animated by two small, black, piercing eyes and his somewhat formal manners and learned turn of phrase contrasted comically with a noticeable Marseilles accent. All this took me a bit by surprise, but after a slightly strained beginning a mutual sympathy grew up quickly, and we spent the whole afternoon walking around in the rain talking climbing. As you would expect, each asked the other what he had done. I was astonished to learn that, without any other experience than the rock gymnastic technique learnt in the Calanques, Rébuffat had done high mountain routes equivalent to my ultimate ambitions. The conversation came round to our future projects next, and again, his seemed completely extravagant to me. His whole conception of mountaineering, normal enough today, was far in advance of its time and entirely novel as far as I was concerned.

Among all the climbers I had met up to that time mountaineering was a sort of religious art, with its own traditions, hierarchies and taboos, in which cold reason played quite a small part. Having grown up among the priesthood, I had blindly observed all the rites and accepted the articles of the creed. To Rébuffat this was all a lot of outdated rubbish. His sceptical mind was free of all prejudices: in his view what mattered was to be a really good rock climber, and will-power and courage would look after the rest. In support of his theory he cited examples of well-known German and Italian climbers who, with no other experience than what they had gained in the Dolomites and other lower limestone ranges of the eastern Alps, had put up some of the hardest high mountain routes. With implacable logic he drew the conclusion that what was possible for Germans and Italians was possible for Frenchmen too. Pushing his argument to its end, he reasoned that since he considered (rightly) that he was a really good rock climber, and had plenty of will-power and courage, he would shortly climb the fiercest faces in the Alps, even including the north faces of the Eiger and the Grandes Jorasses, then ranked as the ‘top two'.

For one who, like myself, climbed instinctively because, when the glaciers were shining in the sun and the rock-needles picked out against the blue of the sky, he felt an impetuous need of action surge through his muscles, this methodical will, these carefully worked-out theories, this self-confidence and cold ambition were quite bewildering. As I listened to him I was plunged into an indefinable mixture of amused scepticism, respectful admiration and vague desire.

Some time after this encounter I was chosen to go on a leader's course at the J.M. Central School at La Chapelle-en-Valgaudemar, in the south of the Oisans range. My rival Charles and Rébuffat were both going along too. At Roseland our leader had been changed, and all the pleasantness of our life went with him. Commanded by a narrow-minded brute, set to work on boring and ill-organised projects, we led a pointless existence which began to weigh heavily on me. The news of my departure for the mountains made me happy again, and some of my comrades told me that when the order was read out by the leader my face was so lit up with joy that nobody could help noticing it despite the fact that we were standing rigidly to attention.

I had now lived for some years in the over-civilised Chamonix valley where cable-cars, rack railways and comfortable refuges combine to make climbing a less rugged pastime. I was used to the elegant majesty of rock spires, to the splendour of Mont Blanc's masses of hanging ice, and to the charms of the green pastures of Savoy. When I got to La Chapelle-en-Valgaudemar, I felt as much out of my own world as if I had suddenly been transported to Tibet. Everything in this valley was new to me, both man and nature. There were no elegant rock spires soaring into the sky like flames, no imposing glaciers to gladden the heart with the contrast of their whiteness against the blue of the sky and the green of the meadows. There were no fat pastures speckled with flowers; no prosperous-looking herds with bells tinkling among the peace of nature; no big chalets with wide, pine-shingled roofs looking as though built to last forever; no noisy bands of tourists; no mechanical contrivances disturbing the solitude of the summits.

Here nature was in a harsher mood, but remained almost unspoiled. The inhabitants seemed to be living in another century. The mountains with their rounded crests resembled ruined castles, their dark walls mouldering into vast screes and arid patches of scraggy grass. Only a few dirty snow-gullies and moraine-covered glaciers relieved the sternness of the scene. At the foot of these somewhat unattractive summits was squeezed the valley, where men, apparently hardly out of the Middle Ages, lived wretchedly in moss-thatched hovels, fighting with a hostile nature for every inch of cultivable earth. Right up to the very edge of the mountain little fields of low grass and thinly sown com showed among the wastes of boulders like a green and yellow patchwork quilt.

In the village of La Chapelle the tarmacked road and a few small hotels formed the outpost of the modern world, but as one went farther up the valley the signs of civilisation gradually faded out. At the very end was the hamlet of Rif-du-Sap, perched between two avalanche gullies, where life was as primitive as in many parts of the Himalaya. Nevertheless the bareness and rusticity of Valgaudemar did have a certain austere poetry about them. They gave just the same kind of feeling of being at the ends of the earth that I recognised again with delight when, years later, I visited the remote mountains of Asia and America.

The J.M. Central School occupied a few old buildings in the middle of La Chapelle. Since we were going simultaneously through the courses for team leaders and rope leaders, we led a life so hard and active that, if I did not still possess notes made at the time, I would be tempted to think my memory guilty of exaggerating.