Into The Silence Read online

  These were the men who understood, as Noel did, what had really happened to Cecil Rawling. He had survived the long winter of 1915 in the Ypres Salient and the fighting at the Somme, the taking of Fricourt, Mametz Wood, and the capture of Gueudecourt. Promoted to brigadier general, he spent the spring and summer of 1917 engaged in the fighting on the Hindenburg Line, before moving north for the assault on Passchendaele, a battle that would be remembered by the historian A. J. P. Taylor as “the blindest slaughter of a blind war.”

  The goal was yet another fantasy of General Haig’s, a plan to break out of the Ypres Salient and capture Antwerp and the channel ports of Belgium. For the British soldiers it was the worst battle of the war. The ground was flat, sodden, shattered by shell fire. On the first night of the assault, the last day in July, the rains began, and after a brief respite in September, they did not cease until November. Three thousand British guns fired more than four million explosive shells, nearly five tons of high explosive for every yard of German trench. The result was a muddy quagmire, a sea of black waste and shell holes, carcasses of horses and men, rats the size of cats, clouds of yellow and brown mist, an unbearable stench of rot and gangrene, and the sweet scent of violets, which was the smell of gas and thus also the odor of death. To slip wounded off a duckboard was to drown in the fathomless morass. Gunners worked thigh-deep in water. To advance over open ground, soldiers used the bodies of the dead as stepping-stones. On the day after the final assault, a senior British staff officer close to Haig, Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, made his first ever visit to the front. Reaching as far as his car could advance, appalled by the conditions, he began to weep. “Good God,” he said, “did we really send men to fight in that?” The man beside him, who had been in action, replied flatly, “It’s much worse farther up.”

  After three months, during which time the British suffered some 400,000 casualties, the village of Passchendaele, the objective of the first morning, had yet to fall. Once again, as at the Somme, it was noted in official documents that “the clerk power to investigate the exact losses was not available.” The German high command compared Passchendaele to Verdun, a battle where more than a million French and German soldiers had been killed or severely wounded. “The horror of Verdun,” wrote Erich Ludendorff, “was surpassed. It was no longer life at all. It was mere unspeakable suffering. And through this world of mud the attackers dragged themselves, slowly but steadily, and in dense masses. Caught in the advance zone of our hail of fire they often collapsed, and the lonely man in the shell hole breathed again.”

  The Germans simply fell back to a second and a third line of defense. British generals begged Haig to call off the attack, but he refused. When the onset of winter finally drowned out the guns, Haig famously asked Sidney Clive, his senior liaison to French headquarters, “Have we really lost half a million men?” He had, and all for an advance of five miles. Among the dead was Brigadier General Cecil Rawling, killed on October 28 when a shell landed outside his field headquarters at Hooge. Nothing of his body was found. The corpses of more than 90,000 British dead at Passchendaele were recovered too severely mutilated to be identified. Rawling was one of 42,000 who disappeared without a trace.

  MORE THAN ANYONE in the hall, John Noel had reason to be haunted by Rawling’s fate. At the outbreak of the war, with his own regiment still in India, he had been attached to the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, which he’d joined in Dublin on August 13, 1914, the day before the battalion embarked for France. Within a week he was at Mons, in defensive positions on the south bank of the canal, as the Germans launched their all-out offensive. The fighting on August 23 was intense, and though the British line held, in the evening orders came to retreat. The Germans had broken through the French on the right, and reports of enemy cavalry sweeping in great numbers through the open country between the British and the seacoast left the entire British Expeditionary Force in danger of encirclement.

  Noel’s battalion retired, marching twenty miles through the night to take up new positions at Le Cateau on the afternoon of August 25. The following dawn they faced the overwhelming force of the German army. By noon the Suffolk Regiment, to their right, had been destroyed, exposing their flank, and in the attacks that followed, Noel’s battalion lost 600 men and 20 officers. The official casualty list in the Times reported Noel “Missing, believed killed.” In fact, he’d been taken prisoner, one of a handful of survivors. He somehow managed to escape before reaching a prison camp, and for ten days made his way back to the British forces. He had no map or compass, no knowledge of the war-torn country, and his only source of food was what he could scavenge from the pockets of dead men. He took his bearing from the star Arcturus.

  It is impossible to know what he saw and experienced in those days. The British positions were still fluid; the front had yet to form. The fields he crossed by night were a harvest of mutilated bodies. He reached a British unit on September 5 and was evacuated as a casualty to England, a fate reserved for those very seriously injured. His medical report shows that on September 14, at Queen Alexandra’s Military Hospital in London, it was decided to keep him away from active duty for at least two months, when his health would be reviewed. Again this was a drastic diagnosis, for the army at the time desperately needed professional officers. His disability was described as “strain of active service,” a curious euphemism that suggested that the doctors had no idea what they were seeing. “He is suffering,” the report noted, “from symptoms of marked nervous breakdown and is weak and debilitated.”

  At this early stage in the war, no one spoke of shell shock, a diagnosis that had yet to be distilled in medical language. Soldiers in past wars had no doubt experienced the trauma, but it took the battles of France, of unprecedented scale and horror, to bring both the military and medical professions to a point when the truth could not be denied. The full realization took a year, for it was only after Loos that a British medical officer, Captain W. Johnson, noticed the correlation between what he witnessed after that disastrous engagement and what he had seen during the retreat from Mons. Strong men, young and old, reduced to hysteria, twisted and contorted, mute with fear, shaking with tremors, eyeballs protruding with the brightness of madness. These were the refugees from a place that Siegfried Sassoon described as “the looming twilight of hell.” In quiet moments they sat in a daze, a state of coma, as if deaf and dumb, incapable of speech. Incontinent, they spewed apologies, cried aloud in their sleep, returning each night in haunted memory to the sector of the front where they had first confronted the livid faces of the dead.

  John Noel returned to active duty after two months and spent the first winter of the war in the Ypres Salient. He was there on April 22, 1915, when the Germans attacked, using poison gas for the first time. Entire British brigades were wiped out, and it was only the suicidal resistance of the 1st Canadian Division that prevented a massive enemy breakthrough. The gas corrupted the lungs, causing the victim to drown in his own toxic froth. “The men came tumbling from the front line,” wrote W. A. Quinton of the 2nd Bedford Fusiliers. “I’ve never seen men so terror-stricken, they were tearing at their throats and their eyes were glaring out. Blood was streaming from those who were wounded and they were tumbling over one another. Those who fell couldn’t get up because of the panic of the men following them, and eventually they were piled up two or three high in this trench.”

  Noel witnessed the attack, and on the same day was nearly killed by a high-explosive shell that dropped beside him. Severely concussed, he was evacuated from the field and once again to England. A medical board eleven days later, on May 3, 1915, at Caxton Hall noted of the patient, “He had been sent home last September for the same reason but returned to duty. He is in a very nervous condition and on one occasion threatened to take his own life.” Noel’s case of neurasthenia, or shell shock, was classified as “severe,” and it was anticipated that he would be incapacitated for three months. In fact, he would never return to the front. On
August 3 a medical board remarked that he was “improving slowly but cannot sleep well and still feels weak.” Yet another review, at the military hospital at Grantham on November 6, found that “there are still marked symptoms of neurasthenia which will probably last for many months.” It was not until March 9, 1917, nearly two years after the trauma, that a medical board finally concluded that he had “practically recovered.” He spent the rest of 1917 on light duty as a revolver instructor in the Machine Gun Corps and writing army manuals, including a recipe book for soldiers cooking in the trenches and a veterinary first aid guide for treating horses. It was not until February 1918 that he returned to field command, in a small force of six thousand men dispatched to northern Persia to prevent the Russian Bolsheviks from taking the oil fields of Mesopotamia. Of his medical condition during the war, he would never speak a word.

  AT THE CLOSE of Noel’s lecture, as was the tradition at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society, distinguished members of the audience were invited to comment. The first to speak was Douglas Freshfield, who made some general remarks about climate and geography before endorsing an approach to the mountain from Kampa Dzong through Tibet, thus avoiding the problem of Nepal. Kellas agreed and outlined in considerable detail the various routes from the north and east, including the one that Noel had taken in 1913. Farrar then suggested the use of modern airships as a way of overcoming the problems of supply that had, as he put it, “baulked previous travelers.” More important, as president of the Alpine Club, he promised financial support and the services of “two or three young mountaineers quite capable of dealing with any purely mountaineering difficulties as are likely to be met with on Mount Everest.” The floor then yielded to Sir Francis Younghusband, who spoke on behalf of the RGS.

  “It is now twenty-six years ago,” he began, “since our old friend Captain Bruce—now General Bruce—made the proposition to me that we should go up Mount Everest. It did not come to anything then, but years afterwards, in 1903, when I was at Kampa Dzong in Tibet I had for three months a magnificent view of Mount Everest … The lecturer hoped that it would be an Englishman, or at any rate a Scotsman, who would first climb Mount Everest, I need only say I think we are all determined that it shall be a British expedition. Our own Society is interested in the project, and we have heard the president of the Alpine Club say he has magnificent young mountaineers ready to undertake it, and it must be done.”

  When the applause died down, Holdich, as president of the RGS, closed the evening, thanking the speaker for a splendid account of “his most adventurous and plucky journey.” He then remarked that while he looked forward to hearing more about the proposed expedition, it was his conviction that any successful effort to reach the mountain must come through Nepal.

  In truth, no one present that evening, with the possible exception of Kellas, had any idea what was in store for those destined for the mountain. Something of their naïveté was captured the following morning in a satirical report, “Himalayans at Play,” published in Punch. “Sir Francis Oldmead said his preferred route to the summit was up the Yulmag valley to the Chikkim frontier at Lor-Lumi, crossing the Pildash at Gonglam and skirting the deep gorge of the Spudgyal … The chairman having expressed his regrets that Sir Marcon Tinway was not present to describe his experiments with manlifting kites and trained albatrosses, the assembly dispersed after singing the Tibetan national anthem.”

  Buoyed by the success of the evening, not to mention the attention of the press, however irreverent the coverage, on March 28, 1919, Younghusband sent a letter seeking a meeting with the secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu. His faith in the goodwill and reason of his government, expressed forcefully in his remarks following Noel’s speech, was not rewarded. A wire received back from the government of India on April 19 reminded Whitehall that the Japanese were actively seeking control of all of China’s internal telegraph and wireless infrastructure. To counter the aggression, the British had entered into secret negotiations with the Tibetans, seeking approval for the installation of wireless stations at Gyantse and Lhasa. The outcome was uncertain but, the wire noted, “the presence of a party of explorers on the borders of Tibet would not be likely to make the execution of this scheme any easier.”

  Younghusband was not about to be rebuffed and, despite the setback, proceeded with Farrar of the Alpine Club to devise plans for a two-year Everest effort, much along the lines of Rawling’s original proposal: a reconnaissance mission that would chart the approach and identify the route of attack, and a second expedition the following season during which the summit would be attained. As Farrar considered personnel and logistics, Younghusband set his considerable will toward influencing the political process, a task made easier in June 1919 when he succeeded Holdrich as president of the Royal Geographical Society. The key, as he saw it, was to circumvent Whitehall and the India Office in London and seek influence directly with the viceroy and the government of India, where he believed the real power in regard to Tibet resided. He had just the man for the job, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Kenneth Howard-Bury, an officer and a fighting soldier whose experiences of death and survival lay far beyond those of ordinary men. Mentioned in despatches on seven occasions, the recipient of every medal of valor save the Victoria Cross, he was linked by blood and class to the highest levels of British society, and as ward of his cousin Lord Lansdowne, former viceroy of India, he had ready access to the halls of power in Simla and Calcutta.

  HOWARD- BURY, for his part, knew nothing of Holdrich’s approach to the India Office in the last weeks of 1918, and he was quite unaware at that time of any official plans for an Everest expedition. What he knew of the mountain lay in his own imaginings, nursed through four years at the front and several months in captivity. As late as December 1918, he remained a prisoner of war in a German camp at Clausthal, 2,000 feet up in the Harz Mountains, where he had been transferred after a daring escape from Fürstenberg, another POW camp south and west of Berlin. As his fellow officers created diversions, he had cut through three ranks of wire, tearing his clothes and skin to shreds in the process, only to be seen at the last moment as he scaled the final palisade. A hail of gunfire chased him to a nearby woods, and by the time he regained his breath he could hear the approaching dogs and the sentries beating the bush. He crawled into a ditch and submerged himself among the nettles and reeds. The water was cold, and he remained in it for two hours, motionless even as one of his pursuers parted the reeds not three feet from his head to drink from the stream. An hour after dark, he crawled out only to run immediately into a sentry, who fired a revolver at close range as he raced for the woods. There among the Scotch pines Howard-Bury hid out for another six hours until, with the dawn, he stripped off his khaki outer garments to reveal a peasant disguise, a farmer’s corduroy trousers and waistcoat, which he augmented with a black coat and German felt hat. A green rucksack completed the feint, and with a stout walking stick cut on the spot, he began a long march north toward the Danish frontier.

  In driving rain and darkness Howard-Bury covered some twenty to thirty miles each night. For food he had only what he could scavenge from damp fields—raw turnips, cabbage, and potatoes. By day he holed up in whatever shelter he could find, but with the sleet and cold, sleep was not an option. For nine days he did not rest. His luck ran out on the tenth night, when he drifted off to sleep just after midnight only to wake an hour or so later to a dog barking in his ear and the muzzle of a rifle in his face. Taken by train to the nearest prison camp, he was thrust into a punishment cell, where he remained in solitary confinement until released for escort back to Fürstenberg. In another war he might well have been shot. But the Germany of 1918 retained a sense of honor and deference, especially for those of aristocratic rank.

  In Howard-Bury they had captured the great-grandson of the sixteenth Duke of Suffolk. His father, Captain Kenneth Howard of the Royal Light Horse, was a lover of plants, a world traveler, a big-game hunter, and a very fine painter who worked mostl
y with watercolors. His mother was an Irish heiress, Lady Emily Alfreda Julia Bury. They had met and fallen in love on a botanical expedition in Algeria and after marriage had settled at Charleville, a Gothic castle in Ireland that was the ancestral home of the Bury lineage. When Charles Howard-Bury was three, his father died, and Lord Lansdowne, confidant and counselor to King Edward VII, became his guardian. Charles remained, however, at his mother’s side, moving between Charleville and a family chalet in the Dolomites, where he developed a love of mountains and mountaineering. Privately educated by a German governess, he entered Eton in 1897, where he excelled in history and languages, and though he could have matriculated to Oxford or Cambridge, he chose a career in the army and entered Sandhurst in 1902, graduating three years later with the rank of captain.

  In India his travels began in earnest. In 1905 he slipped into Tibet in disguise, crossing the high passes that led to the flanks of Kailash, the sacred mountain. Severely reprimanded by Lord Curzon for the unsanctioned adventure, he turned his attention to Russia, and in 1906 he traveled south from St. Petersburg to the Pamirs and Russian Turkistan, again in disguise, his skin stained brown with walnut juice. A year later he spent his leave in Kashmir and the Karakorum. Drawn always to the sacred, he read the works of Krishnamurti and Kahlil Gibran, and visited in his many journeys the Buddhist monks of Angkor Wat, the high priests and shrine guardians of China, the mystics of Tibet. In India he embarked on pilgrimage along the waters of the Ganges, anointing his body with scented oils to receive the teachings of Sanskrit scholars at Badrinath. In the holy city of Amarkantak, his reputation was made when he shot and killed a tiger that had carried off and eaten twenty-one fakirs, or holy men. A brilliant writer, a fine photographer, and a keen and accomplished naturalist, he became fluent in no fewer than twenty-seven Asian and European languages. Not surprisingly, a military report dated December 17, 1908, recommended him as a “splendid candidate for diplomatic or intelligence work, or for any missive of secret service requiring a clever brain and active body.”