Part 7

George was wasted at Charterhouse, where, in my time at least, he was generally despised by the boys because he was neither a disciplinarian nor interested in cricket or football. He tried to treat his classes in a friendly way and that puzzled and offended them. There was a tradition in the school of concealed warfare between the boys and the masters. It was considered no shame to cheat, to lie, or to deceive where a master was concerned; yet to do the same to a member of the school was immoral. George was also unpopular with the house-masters because he refused to accept this state of war and fraternized with the boys whenever he could. When two house-masters who had been unfriendly to him happened to die within a short time of each other he joked to me: ‘See, Robert, how mine enemies flee before my face.’ I always called him by his Christian name, and so did three or four more of his friends in the school. This lack of dignity in him put him beyond the pale both with the boys and the masters. Eventually the falseness of his position told on his temper; yet he always managed to find four or five boys in the school who were, like him, out of their element, and befriended them and made life tolerable for them. Before the final Everest expedition he had decided to resign and do educational work at Cambridge with, I believe, the Workers’ Educational Association. He was tired of trying to teach gentlemen to be gentlemen.

I spent a season with George and a large number of climbers at the hotel at Pen-y-Pass on Snowdon in the spring of 1914. This time it was real precipice-climbing, and I was lucky enough to climb with George, with H. E. L. Porter, a renowned technician of climbing, with Kitty O’Brien and with Conor O’Brien, her brother, who afterwards made a famous voyage round the world in a twenty-ton or five-ton or some even-less-ton boat. Conor climbed principally, he told us, as a corrective to bad nerves. He used to get very excited when any slight hitch occurred; his voice would rise to a scream. Kitty used to chide him: ‘Ach, Conor, dear, have a bit of wit,’ and Conor would apologize. Conor, being a sailor, used to climb in bare feet. Often in climbing one has to support the entire weight of one’s body on a couple of toes—but toes in stiff boots. Conor said that he could force his naked toes farther into crevices than a boot would go.

But the most honoured climber there was Geoffrey Young. Geoffrey had been climbing for a number of years and was president of the Climbers’ Club. I was told that his four closest friends had all at different times been killed climbing; this was a comment on the extraordinary care with which he always climbed. It was not merely shown in his preparations for a climb—the careful examination, foot by foot, of the alpine rope, the attention to his boot-nails and the balanced loading of his knapsack—but also in his cautiousness in the climbing itself. Before making any move he thought it out foot by foot, as though it were a problem in chess. If the next handhold happened to be just a little out of his reach or the next foothold seemed at all unsteady he would stop and think of some way round the difficulty. George used sometimes to get impatient, but Geoffrey refused to be hurried. He was short, which put him at a disadvantage in the matter of reach. He was not as double-jointed and prehensile as Porter or as magnificent as George, but he was the perfect climber. And still remains so. This in spite of having lost a leg while serving with a Red Cross unit on the Italian front. He climbs with an artificial leg. He has recently published the only satisfactory text-book on rock-climbing. I was very proud to be on a rope with Geoffrey Young. He said once: ‘Robert, you have the finest natural balance that I have ever seen in a climber.’ This compliment pleased me far more than if the Poet Laureate had told me that I had the finest sense of rhythm that he had ever met in a young poet.

It is quite true that I have a good balance; once, in Switzerland, it saved me from a broken leg or legs. My mother took us there in the Christmas holidays of 1913–14, ostensibly for winter sports, but really because she thought that she owed it to my sisters to give them a chance to meet nice young men of means. About the third day that I put on skis I went up from Champéry, where we were staying and the snow was too soft, to Morgins, a thousand feet higher, where it was like sugar. Here I found an ice-run for skeleton-toboggans. Without considering that skis have no purchase on ice at all, I launched myself down it. After a few yards my speed increased alarmingly and I suddenly realized what I was in for. There were several sharp turns in the run protected by high banks, and I had to trust entirely to body-balance in swerving round them. I reached the terminus still upright and had my eyes damned by a frightened sports-club official for having endangered my life on his territory.

In an essay on climbing that I wrote at the time, I said it was a sport that made all others seem trivial. ‘New climbs or new variations of old climbs are not made in a competitive spirit, but only because it is satisfactory to stand somewhere on the earth’s surface where nobody else has stood before. And it is good to be alone with a specially chosen band of people—people that one can trust completely. Rock-climbing is one of the most dangerous sports possible, unless one keeps to the rules; but if one does keep to the rules it is reasonably safe. With physical fitness in every member of the climbing team, a careful watch on the weather, proper overhauling of climbing apparatus, and with no hurry, anxiety or stunting, climbing is much safer than fox-hunting. In hunting there are uncontrollable factors, such as hidden wire, holes in which a horse may stumble, caprice or vice in the horse. The climber trusts entirely to his own feet, legs, hands, shoulders, sense of balance, judgment of distance.’

The first climb on which I was taken was up Crib-y-ddysgel. It was a test climb for beginners. About fifty feet up from the scree, a height that is really more frightening than five hundred, because death is almost as certain and much more immediate, there was a long sloping shelf of rock, about the length of an ordinary room, to be crossed from right to left. It was without handholds or footholds worth speaking of and too steep to stand upright or kneel on without slipping. It shelved at an angle of, I suppose, forty-five or fifty degrees. The accepted way to cross it was by rolling in an upright position and trusting to friction as a maintaining force. Once I got across this shelf without disaster I felt that the rest of the climb was easy. The climb was called The Gambit. Robert Trevelyan, the poet, was given this test in the previous season, I was told, and had been unlucky enough to fall off. He was pulled up short, of course, after a few feet by the rope of the leader, who was well belayed; but the experience disgusted him with climbing and he spent the rest of his time on the mountains just walking about.

♦ “Crib-y-ddysgel” replaced with “Crib-y-ddysgl”

Belaying means making fast on a projection of rock a loop of the rope which is wound round one’s waist, and so disposing the weight of the body that, if the climber above or below happens to slip and fall, the belay will hold and the whole party will not go down together. Alpine rope has a breaking point of a third its own length. Only one member of the climbing team is moving at any given time, the others are belayed. Sometimes on a precipice it is necessary to move up fifty or sixty feet before finding a secure belay as a point from which to start the next upward movement, so that if the leader falls and is unable to put on a brake in any way he must fall more than twice that length before being pulled up. On the same day I was taken on a spectacular though not unusually difficult climb on Crib Goch. At one point we traversed round a knife-edge buttress. From this knife-edge a pillar-like bit of rock, technically known as a monolith, had split away. We scrambled up the monolith, which overhung the valley with a clear five hundred feet drop, and each in turn stood on the top and balanced. The next thing was to make a long, careful stride from the top of the monolith to the rock face; here there was a ledge just wide enough to take the toe of a boot, and a handhold at convenient height to give an easy pull-up to the next ledge. I remember George shouting down from above: ‘Be careful of that foothold, Robert. Don’t chip the edge off or the climb will be impossible for anyone who wants to do it again. It’s got to last another five hundred years at least.’

I was only in danger once. I was climbing with Porter on an out-of-the-way part of the mountain. The climb, known as the Ribbon Track and Girdle Traverse, had not been attempted for about ten years. About half-way up we came to a chimney. A chimney is a vertical fissure in the rock wide enough to admit the body; a crack is only wide enough to admit the boot. One works up a chimney sideways with back and knees, but up a crack with one’s face to the rock. Porter was leading and fifty feet above me in the chimney. In making a spring to a handhold slightly out of reach he dislodged a pile of stones that had been wedged in the chimney. They rattled down and one rather bigger than a cricket ball struck me on the head and knocked me out. Fortunately I was well belayed and Porter was already in safety. The rope held me up; I recovered my senses a few seconds later and was able to continue.

The practice of Pen-y-Pass was to have a leisurely breakfast and lie in the sun with a tankard of beer before starting for the precipice foot in the late morning. Snowdon was a perfect mountain for climbing. The rock was sound and not slippery. And once you came to the top of any of the precipices, some of which were a thousand feet high, but all just climbable one way or another, there was always an easy way to run down. In the evening when we got back to the hotel we lay and stewed in hot baths. I remember wondering at my body—the worn fingernails, the bruised knees, and the lump of climbing muscle that had begun to bunch above the arch of the foot, seeing it as beautiful in relation to this new purpose. My worst climb was on Lliwedd, the most formidable of the precipices, when at a point that needed most concentration a raven circled round the party in great sweeps. This was curiously unsettling, because one climbs only up and down, or left and right, and the raven was suggesting all the diverse possibilities of movement, tempting us to let go our hold and join him.

X

I was at Harlech when war was declared; I decided to enlist a day or two later. In the first place, though only a very short war was expected—two or three months at the very outside—I thought that it might last just long enough to delay my going to Oxford in October, which I dreaded. I did not work out the possibilities of being actively engaged in the war. I thought that it would mean garrison service at home while the regular forces were away. In the second place, I entirely believed that France and England had been drawn into a war which they had never contemplated and for which they were entirely unprepared. It never occurred to me that newspapers and statesmen could lie. I forgot my pacifism—I was ready to believe the worst of the Germans. I was outraged to read of the cynical violation of Belgian neutrality. I wrote a poem promising vengeance for Louvain. I discounted perhaps twenty per cent, of the atrocity details as war-time exaggeration. That was not, of course, enough. Recently I saw the following contemporary newspaper cuttings quoted somewhere in chronological sequence:

‘When the fall of Antwerp got known the church bells were rung’ (_i.e._ at Cologne and elsewhere in Germany).—_Kölnische Zeitung_.

‘According to the _Kölnische Zeitung_, the clergy of Antwerp were compelled to ring the church bells when the fortress was taken.’—_Le Matin_ (Paris.)

‘According to what _The Times_ has heard from Cologne, via Paris, the unfortunate Belgian priests who refused to ring the church bells when Antwerp was taken have been sentenced to hard labour.’—_Carriere della Sera_ (Milan.)

‘According to information to the _Carriere della Sera_ from Cologne, via London, it is confirmed that the barbaric conquerors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their heroic refusal to ring the church bells by hanging them as living clappers to the bells with their heads down.’—_Le Matin_ (Paris.)

When I was in the trenches a few months later I happened to belong to a company mess in which four of us young officers out of five had, by a coincidence, either German mothers or naturalized German fathers. One of them said: ‘Of course I’m glad I joined when I did. If I’d put it off for a month or two they’d have accused me of being a German spy. As it is I have an uncle interned at Alexandra Palace, and my father’s only been allowed to retain the membership of his golf club because he has two sons in the trenches.’ I said: ‘Well, I have three or four uncles sitting somewhere opposite, and a number of cousins too. One of my uncles is a general. But that’s all right. I don’t brag about them. I only advertise the uncle who is a British admiral commanding at the Nore.’

Among my enemy relatives was my cousin Conrad, who was the same age as myself, and the son of the German consul at Zurich. In January 1914 I had gone ski-ing with him between the trees in the woods above the city. We had tobogganed together down the Dolderstrasse in Zurich itself, where the lampposts were all sandbagged and family toboggans, skidding broadside on at the turns, were often crashed into by single-seater skeletons; arms and legs were broken by the score and the crowds thought it a great joke. Conrad served with a crack Bavarian regiment all through the war, and won the ‘Pour le Mérite’ Order, which was more rarely awarded than the British Victoria Cross. He was killed by the Bolsheviks after the war in a village on the Baltic where he had been sent to make requisitions. He was a gentle, proud creature, whose chief interest was natural history. He used to spend hours in the woods studying the habits of wild animals; he felt strongly against shooting them. Perhaps the most outstanding military feat was that of an uncle who was dug out at the age of sixty or so as a lieutenant in the Bavarian artillery. My youngest brother met him a year or two ago and happened to mention that he was going to visit Rheims. My uncle nudged him: ‘Have a look at the cathedral. I was there with my battery in the war. One day the divisional general came up to me and said: “Lieutenant, I understand that you are a Lutheran, not a Catholic?” I said that this was so. Then he said: “I have a very disagreeable service for you to perform, Lieutenant. Those misbegotten swine, the French, are using the cathedral for an observation post. They think they can get away with it because it’s Rheims Cathedral, but this is war and they have our trenches taped from there. So I call upon you to dislodge them.” I only needed to fire two rounds and down came the pinnacle and the Frenchmen with it. It was a very neat bit of shooting. I was proud to have limited the damage like that. Really, you must go and have a look at it.’

The nearest regimental depot was at Wrexham: the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The Harlech golf secretary suggested my taking a commission instead of enlisting. He rang up the adjutant and said that I was a public-school boy who had been in the Officers’ Training Corps at Charterhouse. So the adjutant said: ‘Send him right along,’ and on 11th August I started my training. I immediately became a hero to my family. My mother, who said to me: ‘My race has gone mad,’ regarded my going as a religious act; my father was proud that I had ‘done the right thing.’ I even recovered, for a time, the respect of my uncle, C. L. Graves, of _The Spectator_ and _Punch_, with whom I had recently had a tiff. He had given me a sovereign tip two terms previously and I had written my thanks, saying that with it I had bought Samuel Butler’s _Note Books_, _The Way of All Flesh_ and the two _Erewhons_. To my surprise this had infuriated him.

The fellows who applied for commissions at the same time as myself were for the most part boys who had recently failed to pass into the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and were trying to get into the regular army by the old militia door—which was now known as the Special Reserve. There were only one or two fellows who had gone into the army, like myself, for the sake of the war and not for the sake of a career. There were about a dozen of us recruit officers on the Square learning to drill and be drilled. My Officers’ Training Corps experience made this part easy, but I knew nothing about army traditions and made all the worst mistakes; saluting the bandmaster, failing to recognize the colonel when in mufti, walking in the street without a belt and talking shop in the mess. But I soon learned to conform. My greatest difficulty was to talk to men of the company to which I was posted with the necessary air of authority. Many of them were old soldiers re-enlisted, and I disliked bluffing that I knew more than they did. There were one or two very old soldiers employed on the depot staff, wearing the ribbon of Burma, 1885, and of even earlier campaigns, and usually also the ribbon of the ‘Rooti’ or good service medal awarded for eighteen years of undetected crime. There was one old fellow called Jackie Barrett, a Kipling character, of whom it was said: ‘There goes Jackie Barrett. He and his mucking-in chum deserted the regiment in Quetta and went across the north-west frontier on foot. Three months later he gave himself up as a deserter to the British consul at Jerusalem. He buried his chum by the way.’

I was on the square only about three weeks before being sent off on detachment duty to Lancaster to a newly-formed internment camp for enemy aliens. The camp was a disused wagon-works near the river, a dirty, draughty place, littered with old scrap-metal and guarded with high barbed-wire fences. There were about three thousand prisoners already there and more and more piled in every day; seamen arrested on German vessels in Liverpool harbour, waiters from big hotels in the north, an odd German band or two, harmless German commercial travellers and shopkeepers. The prisoners were resentful at being interned, particularly those who were married and had families and had lived peaceably in England for years. The only comfort that we could give was that they were safer inside than out; anti-German feeling was running high, shops with German names were continually being raided and even German women were made to feel that they were personally responsible for the Belgian atrocities. Besides, we said, if they were in Germany they would be forced into the army. At this time we made a boast of our voluntary system. We did not know that there would come a time when these internees would be bitterly envied by forcibly-enlisted Englishmen because they were safe until the war ended.

In the summer of 1915 _The Times_ reprinted in the daily column, _Through German Eyes_, a German newspaper account by Herr Wolff, an exchanged prisoner, of his experiences at Lancaster in 1914. _The Times_ found very amusing Herr Wolff’s allegations that he and forty other waiters from the Midland Hotel, Manchester, had been arrested and taken, handcuffed _and fettered_, in special railway carriages to Lancaster under the escort of fifty Manchester policemen armed with carbines. But it was true, because I was the officer who took them over from the chief inspector. He was a fine figure in frogged uniform and gave me a splendid salute. I signed him a receipt for his prisoners and he gave me another salute. He had done his job well and was proud of it. The only mishap was the accidental breaking of two carriage windows by the slung carbines. Wolff also said that even children were interned in the camp. This was true. There were a dozen or so little boys from the German bands who had been interned because it seemed more humane to keep them with their friends than to send them to a workhouse. Their safety in the camp caused the commandant great concern.

I had a detachment of fifty Special Reservists, most of them with only about six weeks’ service. They had joined the army just before war started as a cheap way of getting a holiday at the training camp; to find themselves forced to continue beyond the usual fortnight annoyed them. They were a rough lot, Welshmen from the border counties, and were constantly deserting and having to be fetched back by the police. They made nervous sentries, and were probably more frightened of the prisoners than the prisoners were of them. Going the round of sentries on a dark night about 2 a.m. was dangerous. Very often my lantern used to blow out and I would fumble to light it again in the dark and hear the frightened voice of a sentry roar out, ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ and know that he was standing with his rifle aimed and his magazine charged with five live rounds. I used to gasp out the password just in time. Rifles were often being fired off at shadows. The prisoners were a rowdy lot; the sailors particularly were always fighting. I saw a prisoner spitting out teeth and blood one morning. I asked him what was wrong. ‘Oh, sir, one no-good friend give me one clap on the chops.’ Frequent deputations were sent to complain of the dullness of the food; it was the same ration food that was served to the troops. But after a while they realized the war and settled down to sullen docility; they started hobbies and glee parties and games and plans for escape. I had far more trouble with my men. They were always breaking out of their quarters. I could never find out how they did it. I watched all the possible exits, but caught no one. Finally I discovered that they used to crawl out through a sewer. They boasted of their successes with the women. Private Kirby said to me: ‘Do you know, sir? On the Sunday after we arrived, all the preachers in Lancaster took as their text, “Mothers, take care of your daughters; the Royal Welch have come to town.”’

The camp staff consisted of:

A fatherly colonel of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, the commandant.

His secretary, by name C. B. Gull, one of the best-known pre-war figures in Oxford, owner of the _Isis_, and combined divinity, athletics and boxing coach. We used to box together to keep fit. He also sponsored me as a candidate for the local lodge of The Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes. The Grand Marshal who officiated at my initiation had drank four or five pints of ‘bitter-gatter’ and a glass or two of ‘juniper’ (these were secret words) and continually short-circuited in the ritual. He kept on returning to the part where they intone:

Grand Marshal: Spirit of true Buffaloism hover around I us!

Response: Benevolence and joy ever attend us!

The assistant-commandant, who alleged that he had ten years more seniority than any other major in the British army and made wistful jokes about his lost virility. His recurrent theme was: ‘If you only knew how much that would mean to an old man like me.’