36 - Lloyd M. Wells, "From Anzio to the Alps: An American Soldier's Story" (2004)

Lloyd M. Wells, From Anzio to the Alps: An American Soldier’s Story, University of Missouri Press, 2004

SOLDIER TOURISM

 

Chapter 13 – The Last Offensive: Eight Days in the Mountains

When we got back from the front, there was only a week left to prepare for the opening of the spring offensive. That gave us little time for anything other than having our losses made good, getting resupplied, and trying to relax. The plan of operation for ending the war in Italy was complicated. As a junior officer I knew only that the British Eighth Army would go in first and we would follow in our sector a few days later.

The end of the war was so near and yet so far. I saw more clearly than ever now the probabilities of getting killed in the last push. I guess I had too much time to think about the odds. All the fears and feelings I had experienced after Porretta Terme came surging back stronger than ever. I tried to dilute a flood of powerful emotions with alcohol.

There were always people to help in that kind of endeavor. I shared with one of the mortar platoon leaders a large room on the first floor of a big house. We kept a plentiful supply of cognac, gin and wine on hand. Every night after evening meal, we lined our bottles up on the mantle above the fireplace and held open house. When a group had assembled, either I or my roommate would officially open each session by taking a long drag off the bottle and yelling, “Fire in the hole! After that it was every man for himself. The detonations would continue until after midnight. But still what Winston Churchill called “the black dog” refused to be frightened away.

On an impulse one morning I sought out the old man. In actual age he couldn’t have been more than five years my senior but in terms of maturity there was a great gap between us. He was a man; I was still a scared little boy.

There were no preliminaries to go through. The colonel and I were quartered in the same house. I simply went upstairs, knocked on his bedroom door, and heard him invite me to come in.

The old man was shaving. He asked what was on my mind, and I told him I wanted to talk for just a few minutes. He invited me to sit down while he continued to scrape the stubble off his face.

His informality put me at ease. I hadn’t wanted an official audience. I still don’t know what in the hell I did want from him and he must have wondered too. Some would say I was really asking the colonel to go easy on me on this trip. Maybe so, but I had no conscious intention of asking that. Nor have I ever believed the old man thought that was what I asked. I would like to think I just needed someone at his level to talk to.

It was a short interview as I had wanted it to be but I told him things I had never told another human being, things I had tried to conceal from my best friends. I began by saying I didn’t know how I was going to react this time up. I explained how I had felt after Porretta, how I had thought everything was under my control the last time at the front, but now, I told him, with the end of the war in sight, the old feelings of being doomed had returned stronger than ever. I concluded by promising that I would do my best and wouldn’t bug out.

The old man was still shaving as he began his response.

“You really didn’t expect to live through this war, did you?” he asked. He turned his head to glance at me briefly then looked back at the mirror, pulling at one side of his face to give it better exposure to the razor.

Startled by this question, I confessed that I had hoped and prayed for survival.

He finished his shave and toweled off but continued to stand, facing me now with his back to the mirror.

“If we do our jobs,” he said softly, “There is no way we can live. Consider the odds. If we don’t get to the next hill, it will be the one after that or the one after that.” And, he concluded, “After Italy and Europe, there is always Japan.”

I told him he was probably right but it was most difficult to accept. He said he knew it was. Then he came over and sat down.

I had nothing new to offer. He asked about the platoon. I told him it was a good platoon and seemed to be ready. We exchanged comments on recent losses and the problem of integrating replacements into the outfit. I stood up and he did the same. I told him again I would do my best.

“So will I,” he said and smiled. “So will I.” HE clapped me on the shoulder. “Thanks for coming in,” he said politely. “And good luck to you.”

“Good luck to you too,” I responded. We shook hands.

Much later, James Jones in a book called World War Two reflected on the evolution of a combat soldier. The ultimate stage, the logical culmination toward which everything moves, Jones thought, was a stage in which the individual soldier gives himself up for dead. Having recognized that he can’t survive, he is relatively free of fear, free to do his job, free to savor every precious moment he has left. Apparently the old man had entered the ultimate stage. I, quite obviously, had not.

Preparations for the offensive were completed. By April 11 we were in a forward assembly area in the mountains west of Highway 64 ready for the attack to begin next day. The American Tenth Mountain Division had responsibility for taking the heights immediately to our front. It was a specially trained and equipped unit which had come over from the States during the winter and had already demonstrated its worth. All of us had heard about the February attack in which the division greatly surprised the Germans by putting an entire battalion on heights as sheer, it was said, as anything in the Alps. From our assembly area I got a good look at some of the Tenth Mountain troops. They were fresh, confident young men.

The attack didn’t go in on the twelfth. We were informed on the afternoon of the eleventh that the date had been postponed for a day because of bad flying weather. It will not have escaped your attention that after April 12 comes April 13, and it did not escape my attention that April 13 was on a Friday. That was a fatal omen. I was very conscious of the dates on which I had been hit. Of the last two times, one had been on a Friday, August 13, and the other on Friday, October 13. Those were warning signs just as clear as the warning signs which precede a fatal heart attack. The old man was right. There was no way I was going to come out of this alive. Friday the thirteenth of April 1945 was my appointed time.

My gloom lifted a bit on April 12 when we learned that the date of the attack had been postponed again. We would not be going in on Friday the thirteenth after all. That was a good omen. The Lord God of Hosts, for reasons known only to Himself, had decided to spare me for yet a little while. I was grateful.

Lt. Howard “Fiesty” Able, our communications officers, came up with the ration party that night and visited my CP. He brough both good news and bad news. The good news was that we might not have to make this attack at all because the Russians were already in Berlin. As for the bad news, word had come in that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was dead.

I dismissed his good news as just so much wishful thinking. It was the bad news that I took to heart. Roosevelt and I were oldtimers. We went back a long way. I had grown up with him as president and had been heartened by the comforting inaugural speech in 1933 when he had said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear himself.” Now there were tangible grounds for misgiving. There were enemy soldiers out there with real guns. Roosevelt was dead and I was sure to be next. It was the end of an era. It was not that I was superstitious, you understand. Everyone knows there are signs and portents which modern science can’t explain.

 

SATURDAY, APRIL 14

When the attack finally began on the morning of the fourteenth, I felt a sense of relief. It was a little bit like feelings I had experienced before a big high school football game where tensions were highest just before the kickoff. Once the first whistle blew and the action began, you could settle down, forget the crowd and play the game.

All that morning the artillery was booming as I had heard it do on the breakout at Anzio almost a year earlier. The big difference this time was air power. Ground-air coordination had been brought to a peak of efficiency none of us had ever seen. Capt. Abe Tucker, an air liaison officer, was attached to the battalion, furnished with a jeep, a driver, and a radio. At battalion request Abe would contact a “Rover Pete” hovering in the sky above; and Pete, in turn, could dispatch to our aid the nearest fighter units, a number of which were circling around like hungry predators looking for prey. I assumed that other battalions had the same capability. There was no reason to believe that we were specially favored.

After a safe interval to allow the Tenth Mountain to clear, Sandosky and I accompanied Captain Tucker to the top of the hill behind which we had sheltered. In peacetime the view from the top would have stunned the senses. That morning it had an awesome added dimension. Every village, farmhouse, barn, shed, or outbuilding had either been leveled or was smocking from the bombardment. I looked through the glasses trying to find a single man-made structure which had remained untouched. I couldn’t find any. With support like that, how could we fail?

From the hills across the valley to our front, we could hear heavy small-arms fire, ours and theirs. Occasionally we could see smoke and get glimpses of tiny little figures going forward as the Tenth Mountain pressed its attack.

My machine-gun platoon was attached to the lead company of our battalion, a company now commanded by Lieutenant Dubak. That afternoon we moved up to a place called Roia. The old man led the way and set a sizzling pace as he usually did. Some of the overloaded machine gunners had difficulty keeping up. They cursed him and freely wished he had their load stuck up his ass.

We met a dozen or so prisoners coming out of Riola. They looked to be just kids, not over fifteen or sixteen years old.

The Tenth Mountain was making remarkable progress. We could tell from the frequency of our own forward movements. It was not at all like other times when we were in reserve.

After dark we moved out of Riola and down into the valley to our front. There was a considerable traffic jam down there. We got hemmed into a tank column which was also trying to advance. After we had struggled through the dust, the fumes and the noise for a little while, the old man led us off the road and into the field where we could make better progress.

We halted, waited, and then moved in behind our sister battalion commanded by Lt. Col. Samuel Urban. Their objective was Suzzano which was known to be a German strong point. After Urban’s battalion had taken Suzzano, we would move through to attack first Mt. Radicchio and then Mt. Milano.

About 2230 hours Lieutenant Dubak’s company with machine guns attached moved up to relieve a company of Colonel Urban’s command. The remainder of my battalion dub in to protect Urban’s flank and to be ready to go after our objectives when Suzzano had fallen.

Runner and I slept in an old shed. I didn’t break out my bed roll. The way the attack seemed to be going, I thought we might be moving out at any time. That proved to be a mistaken judgement. Runner and I shivered under the only blanket he had brought along.

 

SUNDAY, APRIL 15

Urban’s battalion jumped off for Suzzano at first light. Dubak’s company and the machine-gun platoon stayed in place. We were told the company we had relieved the night before was on a wide, flanking movement against Suzzano.

As the morning progressed, the old man came up. He led us and the rest of the battalion forward, out into the bareassed open. Orders were to dig in. the men needed no urging. We were drawing enough mortar and artillery fire to keep the picks and shovels flying. Casualties from our sister battalion kept filtering back through our positions. I tried not to see or to think about them. I remembered Cheney.

Colonel Urban0’ battalion paid a heavy price; but by the end of the day they were in Suzzano although not yet in complete control of it. After dark we moved up to high ground overlooking the town and were ordered to dig in for the rest of the night. Lieutenant Dubak as company commander, assigned the field on the right of the road to Quinn’s rifle platoon and the field on the left to mine. When we moved off the road, someone hit a trip flare which illuminated all of us in its harsh glare. We hit the ground. The expected enemy fire didn’t come, but in a couple of moments someone activated another flare and someone else yelled that we were in a mine field.

There was momentary panic with men running in different directions. A part of my platoon joined the stampede. It took us almost thirty minutes to round them up and even at that two men were still missing. When no mines exploded and there were no signs of an enemy counterattack, the panic subsided. We found ready-made shelter, posted guards and settled down in our foxholes.

 

MONDAY, APRIL 16

At daylight we got a good look at our immediate surroundings. We were in the midst of positions which the Tedeschi had prepared to defend Suzzano. There were trip flares, barbed wire, and booby traps on both sides of the road. No dead bodies. It looked as if the enemy had abandoned this position without a fight.

I had no casualties serious enough to require evacuation although I and several others had torn our battle dress on the wire. I still had two men missing but the platoon sergeant thought they had got lost of their own free will.

About 0630 hours we moved out for a new assembly area from which to launch the attack on the first of our objectives. The route was long and winding. We changed directions several times, going first north then west then north again and finally east, as we tried to approach Mt. Radicchio from the flank. Our approach marc took us over ground the Tenth Mountain had traveled in its drive. This area was sprinkled with dead bodies, some of them Tenth Mountain, but German dead outnumbered American on the order of three to one, a somewhat unusual ration for troops in the attack.

In the afternoon we caught up with forward elements of the Tenth Mountain. They were busy fending off a German counterattack on the crest of Mt. Mosca. We went into an assembly area behind Mosca to await orders. It was almost 1700 hours before we were ordered over the crest and into the attack.

Dubak’s objective was a village called Malfolle which sat back toward the rear end of a long, rather narrow ridge. Artillery, mortar and sniper fire had pecked at us intermittently all day; but now, approaching the first elevation of Mt. Radicchio, we got the undivided attention of whatever the enemy had left.

They proved to have plenty of artillery, mortars and sharp shooters left to say the least. As we moved forward through the valley, a heavy barrage caught us. I heard men scream. Some of them were my men. We left two casualties when we went forward. Only one was seriously hurt.

The machine guns were now in support of Lieutenant O’Neil’s platoon. Since the trail leading to the top of the ridge would not permit a wider deployment, we were going up to Malfolle in a column of platoons, with Lieutenant Jarman’s platoon in front, O’Neil second, and mine third in line. At least that is the way we started out.

At the top of the first little hill, the terrain took a dip, slanted downward and then more sharply upward again. When I got to the top of the first hill, forward movement had stopped. I soon saw the reason why. Litter bearers were carrying someone back down the hill to our front. Word spread that it was Lieutenant Jarman. He had been with Frank’s company at Anzio but was now working for Dubak. Jarman was lying face down on the litter, unconscious, bleeding from a sever wound in the mouth where a sniper had got him. I watched them pass and thought he was done for. Those goddamn Nazi sons of bitches!

We took a little time to reorganize. Jarman’s now leaderless platoon came back. O’Neil moved to the point and my platoon was second in line.

O’Neil and I went up to where Jarman had been hit and forward progress had stopped. We established a new line of departure. O’Neil took off on the run. His platoon followed.

Waiting for his men to clear, I may have been a bit tardy in moving. My section leader at the head of the platoon with me inquired gently, “Do you want to go first, Lieutenant?”

In truth I didn’t want to go first or last or anytime. But I bristled.

“You’re goddamn right I want to go first. That’s my job. Just see that you take care of yours.” Later I was sorry I reacted that way.

I took off in a run. A sniper opened up as I left the line of departure. I tried to run faster. But when a stream of machine-gun bullets burned past my face, I hit the ground. Looking back, I saw the platoon had followed my example. I could also see something else. A mortar barrage was walking its way up the trail toward our rear. We had been in similar situations before. Better to risk the small stuff in the front than the heavy stuff behind.

I got up, gave the signal, and raced forward. The platoon followed and none too soon. When I hit the ground and looked back again, I saw the barriage coming down where we had been. Most of it fell behind us.

When I caught my breath, we moved forward again. It was getting dark. The lead platoon halted and I went forward to contact O’Neil.

Our climbing was over. The ridge had widened out. We started moving forward more slowly; and as we approached Malfolle, I deployed a section of machine guns on the left flank to cover O’Neil’s attack on the houses.

Warren Dubak, a company commander accustomed to being at the center of action, came forward. He and O’Neil approached the first house together. They drew fire from a wadi to our left front. The machine-gun section fired into the wadi, and I heard what I must confess were satisfying screams of agony coming from the ditch. If they thought they could dish it out, this would advise them we could too. They had taken some of ours; now we had taken some of theirs.

We got into the houses, took a few prisoners, and heard sounds of men scrambling down the back side of the ridge. I left my machine-gun section in place on the left flank prepared to fire into the wadi again if that proved necessary, and with the rest of the platoon, entered a house on the edge of a cliff.

The former occupants had obviously fled this place in a great hurry. Our approach had interrupted their dinner. There was a table set for four. A large pot of soup sat on a still warm wood stove. There was a half-filled jug of Vino Rosso on the table with a plentiful supply of black bread.

The vino was passed around as far as it would go. We tore off hunks of the black bread and chewed them as if we were starved to death. I don’t think anyone tried the soup. I wasn’t a bit hungry but I ate the bread, and its flavor was greatly enhanced by the symbolism. This was our victory celebration, a final act asserting supremacy over people who had tried to kill us rather than let us come up here.

But were we in Malfolle after all? When things settle down a bit, a runner came down from the company commander indicating he thought he might have made a mistake. We might not be in Malfolle but in some other village. If we were not in the right place, I was informed, we would go for Malfolle in the morning.

I didn’t have a map and didn’t know whether we were in Malfolle or not, but it didn’t matter much to me. We had won here and I had gained a small, temporary personal victory over fear of violent death. That was enough for the moment.

In all of the commotion the platoon sergeant and I found ourselves without either blankets or bed rolls. Not to worry. After scouting around a bit, we located a barn with lots of warm straw. Our only companions were a wounded pack mule and an undetermined number of rats. The mule was too weak to resent our intrusion and the rats scurried away at our approach. When we settled in, I found I had sprained my ankle somewhere along the line but the pain was not enough to keep me from sleeping.

 

TUESDAY, APRIL 17

The platoon sergeant and I counted heads in the morning and found a total of three men, including one section leader, unaccounted for. I didn’t expect any of them to return although the section leader might. He could have gone to the aid station after running into some kind of trouble which no one noticed in the dark. Whatever the case, we made arrangements to get along without him and the others.

Before sunrise we were on our way to Malfolle number two. We met sniper fire along the way but nothing else of consequence. Our objective proved to be a very small place. We moved in and found we had one prisoner, a church, an onion patch and more black bread. Small wonder that Dubak had missed this place, whatever it was, in the dark.

The old man came up, and shortly thereafter Frank’s company moved through to attack Mt. Milano. The men seemed grim-faced and abstracted. They made little response to our jibes and shouts of encouragements but they took their objective without serious loss.

Down in the valley on one side of us we could see all kinds of German vehicles and soldiers, milling about, looking as if they were confused and on the run. It was the first time I had ever seen so many of them on the loos without being deathly afraid. There was no way those people down there were going to counterattack and take our onion patch away from us.

That afternoon we moved off our objectives and hiked down the mountain to Vergato. This former German strong point had held us up all winter but had fallen to the Eighty-First Reconnaissance Squadron on the first day of the offensive. There was not much left of the place except rubble.

We could now see Pioppe di Salvaro, Pt. 286, and Mt. Sole from what had been the enemy’s line all winter and into the early spring. The high ground above their positions must have looked to the Germans as threatening as the Alban Hills did to us a year ago.

In our assembly around Vergato, the old man greeted me with about as much warmth as he ever greeted anyone. He was not a demonstrative man, but I knew he had been watching me as I had been observing him since the morning I had interrupted his shave. We chatted briefly, nothing memorable. It was shop talk, talk about the situation, the terrain, the weather. I’m sure he asked about my casualties; he always did. I understand now that the old man was shy and aloof only with strangers just as I was. But he and I were no longer strangers.

Our brief conversation was satisfying somehow. Quite apart from anything said, I felt bonded to him as a distinct human being with whom I had shared personal secrets. That was enough. Saying goodnight to the colonel, I crawled under a jeep and almost immediately sent oof to sleep.

 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18

We mounted half-tracks early in the morning and moved up Highway 64. Along the way I got another view of the church at Salvaro which had given us so much trouble less than a month ago. It seemed to me as if years had passed. Everything had changed. When I had studied Salvaro through the glasses in March, the church radiated menace. In the daytime it was exceptional to see anything move down there; and, except for artillery fire, all was still. The church and the town had appeared as major obstacles, problems to be studied and solved.

Now army vehicles moved up and down the road at normal speed, slowed from time to time by traffic jams. Routine human activity had been resumed. The church, still intact although said to have an unexplored artillery round in its belfry, seemed nonthreatening, even serene. People driving the highway and taking for granted the access it provided must have wondered what delayed us so long here. I wondered myself until I remembered how it was. I wanted to linger for a closer inspection, but we moved quickly by.

Unfortunately we didn’t stay on Route 64. Shortly after passing through Salvaro, we turned left on a secondary road leading back into the mountains. Just below Suzzano we stopped, got off the half-tracks and were fed from the kitchen. Suzzano was another place which had changed greatly. A few days ago the enemy had punished our sister battalion severely for trying to enter the town. Now the place was swarming with American vehicles and troops.

We rested in the assembly area that afternoon but were alerted for a move to begin at midnight. The platoon cleaned and oiled weapons again. I made notes for my journal, wrote letters home, and slept. At midnight we were on the half-tracks.

 

THURSDAY, APRIL 19

It was almost 0900 hours when we closed into a new assembly area. The movement, shielded by darkness, had been uncontested except for a few snipers

I learner we were in the Samoggia River Valley and involved in a flanking movement against. Mt. Ombraro, a German strong point which continued a fierce resistance with all arms in an area north of Tole. We would leave our half-tracks here and ride up to Ombraro on the backs of the tanks.

Riding tanks into battle was something we had prepared for but something we dreaded as a dirty and dangerous job. It was dirty because the dust from a column of tanks would mix our sweat to produce a kind of mud which caked our faces. And then there were the fumes, likely to be especially bad on a full day of stop and go driving. We had been issued Plexiglas dust respirators but had thrown them away in favor of bandanna handkerchiefs tied below the eyes in the fashion of bad men out of the old west. The handkerchiefs were easier to carry and seemed to provide more real protection.

But there was no help against enemy artillery, mortar, antitank and sniper fire. These dangers were always clear and present when tanks were involved. It was impossible to conceal a column of tanks for long. They inevitably announced their presence to all who could see and hear; and their presence, almost as certainly, would bring enemy reaction with whatever force they had available. Infantry soldiers clinging precariously to the back of a tank made inviting targets for enemy small-arms fire; and the roar of tank mortars, the clanking and screeching of their treads masked the sound of incoming artillery. Our sense of hearing had been sharpened by experience and we had from the beginning made friends with the ground. To be even partially denied these major sources of protection left us feeling naked and vulnerable.

We had at least seven hours on the tanks that day and were shelled almost all the way up. The closer we got, the more intense the enemy reaction.

Runner, Gimo, Mitch and I on the lead tank of the platoon clambered from one side of the turret to the other away from where the artillery seemed to be landing most frequently. Whenever the column halted for a few minutes, we dismounted in accordance with our training and went into hiding under the tanks. The sound of a driver revving up his motor was enough to bring us out regardless of what was taking place outside. No one wanted to me smashed up by the tank treads. We hoped the tank commander would wait for our all clear signal before moving, but we didn’t have complete confidence in the system.

As we neared the end of our journey, an artillery round scored a direct hit on the tank immediately in front of ours. Everyone on that tank was either killed or severely wounded. I saw one man decapitated and not very nearly. I thanked God we had been spared. I thanked God for the interval between tanks and for the fact that none of the killed and wounded belonged to our platoon.

Late in the afternoon we left the tanks and dug in on high ground around Ombraro. From there we had our first really good look at Po Valley. No one was much interested. Heavy artillery and mortar fire continued to rain down on us until well after dark.

At dusk, thinking I would not be seen, I made a reconnaissance part way down the forward slope of the hill we were on and drew a frightening flurry of small-arms fire as well as fire from mortars and artillery. For a while there it seemed as if every gun in Ombraro had zeroed in on me. Once again I cursed my stupidity. So much, I guess, for the theory that remaining enemy troops were nearsighted. I had to crawl back on my belly.

After dark I toured the gun positions and made a few adjustments.

Then I crawled under a light tank which was in partial defilade to get some sleep. It was warm under there, and the tank provided excellent overhead protection against air bursts. I was sure I would have adequate warning if the tank commander started to pull back. I could see no possibility that his movement would be forward.

There were no counterattacks and no enemy patrols coming in. I slept well, except for the fact that I was rather severely shaken up by an artillery round which landed just outside my place of shelter. My body bounced off the ground, my head came up, making contact with the underpinnings of the tank, and I saw a thousand little bright lights. The headache was gone in the morning; the lump on my head was a bit tender, but it soon went away too.

 

FRIDAY 20 APRIL

We remained in position all day. The men continued to dig. I had not see so much voluntary digging since Anzio. Word spread down the line that Lieutenant O’Neil had taken a patrol into Ombraro last night and was missing in action. The best we could hope for was that he had been captured without having been seriously wounded.

After a full day of looking down on Ombraro, we were pulled back. The rumor which seemed most plausible to me was that the higher command had decided to bypass resistance here, letting Ombraro die on the vine, while we moved to its read for more profitable undertakings.

My notes do not reveal how we made it out of there, whether on foot, by half-track, or some other means and I don’t remember the journey. All I remember is that we moved to a somewhat sizeable village where I was ordered to report to a CP in a big, blacked-out house in the middle of the town.

It must have been the forward headquarters of the Combat Command because Colonel Igo, a bird colonel, was there along with the old man and another lieutenant colonel I didn’t know. When I reported in, I couldn’t help thinking how unreal, how much like a Hollywood movie set it was. There were candles spluttering on the table, the rumble of artillery in the background. The bird colonel, the old man, and the other light colonel were talking quietly but intently and pouring over maps. We junior officers stood whispering in the rear as we waited for orders. Frank was there, looking haggard as he always did after the first three or four days, but ready to go on for as long as necessary.

The conference at the table finally broke up. I received my orders, no explanations, nothing more than a map showing me where I was supposed to go and how to get there. My assignment was to set up road-blocks on the other side of a town which showed on the map as Castello. I was to be supported by two medium tanks. Karchmer, the man who almost took Salvaro on the second try back in March, was to precede me with two light tanks. I was to relieve him and remain in place awaiting further orders. It didn’t sound too bad. Better to relieve Karchmer at Castello than try to relieve the Germans of that town.

 

SATURDAY, APRIL 21

We mounted the half-tracks before daylight. Either they had come up during the night or we had ridden them in. whatever. Before we moved out, I got the bad news. Karchmer’s platoon had been stopped at Castello and he had been hit pretty hard in the shoulder. I was glad it was no worse. Some of us had been afraid he was going to get it. But with Karchmer down and his platoon stopped, we might have to try to relieve the Germans of Castello after all. That didn’t sound good.

With one of the Sherman tanks in front, I felt a little better as we pushed off. Daylight was breaking as we neared the town. Just outside Castello about fifty yards off the road over t our right, we saw two German soldiers standing in a field. At least they wore German battle dress. Their behavior was more than a little strange.

The two men were facing each other, seemingly engaged in conversation. They appeared completely oblivious to our approach even when we fired over their heads. We scanned the fields for their companions. They seemed to be alone. Perhaps they were drunk. Maybe they wanted to commit suicide. We never knew. When they didn’t heed our calls, we killed them with a long burst of fire from the .50 caliber.

The tank in front stopped on the outskirts of town. We could hire the crackle of small-arms fire up ahead. I got the platoon off the tracks and went forward on foot to contact Lieutenant King who had taken over when Karchmer went down. Runner accompanied me while the platoon sergeant directed the half-tracks into shelter and held the platoon in readiness to move forward when I sent for them.

We found King and his men in some houses on the other side of town. The enemy was set up about four hundred yards down the road in and around a big Casa Colonica and its substantial barns and other outbuildings. I sent Runner to bring up the platoon so we could relieve King’s men. While waiting I helped guide the tanks into positions behind the houses we held. After we got in place, we settled in for an exchange of fire which lasted for most of the day.

At first I tried somewhat halfheartedly to break the stalemate by directing tank fire into the Casa Colonica. There was a considerable damage to the structure and I thought we had inflicted casualties, but couldn’t tell. The volume of enemy fire seemed to increase, if anything, each time the tank fired a round. Maybe the Tedeschi were taught to do that.

About the middle of the morning my friend and patron, the major at battalion headquarters, called me on the radio. While I don’t have a verbatim transcript of the conversation, its tone and substance were substantially as follows:

“What are you guys talking about out there?” was his opening question. I put on my false face in preparation for my devil-may-care act and gave him the answer he expected.

“Booze and pussy,” I replied. “What else is there to talk about?” He laughed.

“What have you got?” he asked seriously.

“Maybe a platoon, maybe a company,” I answered.

“Not just a squad? Or maybe an old man and a little boy?” he chided.

“Have I ever lied to you?” I countered.

“Not lately. Not lately.” And then seriously again, “Any little brothers or big brothers?” He wanted to know whether the enemy had tanks or assault guns.

“Not so far,” I replied, “but who knows?”

“I do,” he said. “We want you to hold what you’ve got. You probably hit a rear guard. Those people won’t be comin’ in.”

At that moment a burst of machine-gun fire came through the window. The slugs buried themselves in the wall in the back of me and brought down plaster. I scrambled to the floor.

“Did you hear that?” I shouted into the radio. “Did you hear that? That son of a bitch almost took my head off. You sure you know what you’re talkin’ about?”

“Have I ever lied to you?” he mocked.

“Probably not in the last two or three days.” I had not seen him in a week.

“Trust me,” he laughed. And then there could be no mistaking the fact that he was giving me an order.

“Well, hold what you’ve got. And another thing,” he paused. “Be careful out there.”

“You too,” I said. I hoped he would.

After I got off the radio, someone directed my attention to a view from an upstairs windows in the rear of the house. I looked and saw something I had heard about and read about but had never seen. A considerable number of American tanks was deployed in a skirmish line and moving slowly forward across a field to disappear from sight over a gently sloping ridge. That had to be the main body of the combat command. We were outposting their flank, and this was the kind of terrain they had waited for since coming to Italy.

Early that afternoon during a lull in the firing, a middle-aged, portly Italian man, sweaty, puffing, disheveled and excited, made his way into our lines. He had slipped away from his Casa Colonica to seek our help. The Tedeschi were moving out, he said, but all morning they have been killing his chickens and butchering his livestock to take with them. He wanted us to drive these thieves and butchers out before they destroyed everything he owned.

I started to explain my orders but cut that short. I didn’t want this man to carry tales to the enemy if we let him go back. He continued his efforts to get us to launch an attack. I told Runner to inform him that the entire Fifth Army would be up shortly and then we would most certainly round up his tormentors. After Runner had delivered some such message, the Italian gentleman went off muttering to himself, complaining, no doubt, that you could never find a policeman when you needed one. I got the impression that this padrone was accustomed to greater deference than he had received from us.

Late in the afternoon enemy fire dwindled down to occasional sniping. I was reasonably sure that the main body of the opposing force had moved back but was not about to go over and see. The orders to hold what I had suited me just fine.

At dusk we began to tighten up our defenses so as to provide all around protection for ourselves, the tracks and the tanks. I moved my CP from the house where the insistent Italian gentleman had confronted us. In the unlikely event that a German combat patrol came in now, they wouldn’t find us exactly where we had been that afternoon. Besides, Runner had found a bigger and better house for the CP. It was a large villa having the look of a castle. There were no civilians in evidence, but there were honest to God beds made up as if to receive company.

With all my chores taken care of, I took off my boots and crawled between the covers. What luxury! But it was not to last. Just as I dropped off to sleep, a message came over the radio instructing us to rejoin the rest of the battalion. We were on the road all night.

 

 

Chapter Fifteen

Normally, Edward Shirley Kennedy knew how to write. On occasion, however, he could produce blisteringly awful prose. In 1855, when he climbed Mount Blanc with the Reverend Charles Hudson – one of the Golden Age’s most talented climbers – he wondered why they should try such a tired old hill on which so many scientific experiments had been made: ‘May we add yet another drop to that mountain cup of knowledge, which is about to overflow?’ Kennedy asked purply. ‘The knapsack of Alpine lore is closing; and can we venture to assert that they who pack it leave one small corner unoccupied?’ His answer was that ‘the ascent of this monarch of mountains gave us unbounded gratification.’ In other words, they did it just for the fun – and for the satisfaction of attacking it from such a direction as to avoid the iniquitous charges levied by the Charmonix Compagnie des Guides. But he was right in one respect: the knapsack was closing, and as the throng of Alpine Club members picked off more and more peaks there remained only one that ranked alongside Mount Blanc as the ultimate challenge: the Matterhorn.

Travelers and scientists had seen the Matterhorn from afar. But they had never dared dream of climbing it. Why not? Because it wasn’t a mountain, it was a rock, the biggest rock in the known world, a rock that defied humankind with its absolute grandeur and its sheer faces. It was a decaying rock, and centuries of erosion had created an embankment of smaller rocks around its base. Twenty-four hours a day boulders dribbled down its flanks before smashing into the debris below. In winter its faces were covered with unstable snow; in summer the snow became a varnish black ice. There was no clear way up and its slopes were so impenetrably awful that nobody had ever though of finding one. Anyway, dragons lived there.

Tyndall did not believe in dragons. He believed in what he saw, and what he saw was beauty. ‘The summit seemed to smoke sometimes like a burning mountain,’ he wrote, ‘for immediately after its generation, the fog was drawn away in long filaments by the wind. As the sun sank lower the ruddiness of his light augmented, until these filaments resembled streamers of flame.’ In 1860 he and a friend named Vaughan Hawkins decided to climb the Matterhorn with the Oberland guide Johann Brennen. Everybody in the Alpine Club had a favorite guide, and Brennen was Tyndall’s. Tyndall had an uncomfortable relationship with his guides. In 1857, when he made his first ascent of Mont Blanc, he refused the services of Augustine Balmat – ‘the cunning of the boy did not please me’ – and chose a guide called Simond who was apparently even more unsatisfactory: ‘ Had a disaster occurred he certainly would have been clear of blame, for from beginning to end a word of encouragement never crossed his lips … Simond “fears” – his fears are perpetual. He is forever anticipating difficulty.’ Having accomplished the climb, Tyndall met again ‘that grasping little Balmat … [he] put me on the whole in a humor which would have found pleasure in kicking him.’ Later, of another respected guide named Christian Lauener, he wrote that he did not like him because his trousers were too baggy: ‘you prefer a machine whose parts work more easily, and do not expend their work in friction at the places of contact.’

In Bennen, however, Tyndall found the man he wanted. When he first met him in 1858 he described him thus:

 

His round shoulders were bent forward, and set firmly upon them was a thick pedestal of a neck, which bore a massive round head. He wore earrings. His trunk was of the same width throughout: his pelvis was broad, which set his legs rather far apart, but a slight bow neutralized this to some extent. His limbs were massive but moved with alacrity and firmness. The man’s countenance was firm and straightforward looking wile a light of good nature broke from his eye and made his face pleasant to look upon. In short, the whole man gives the impression of great physical strength combined with great decision of character.

 

Hawkins was equally enthusiastic, describing Bennen as ‘remarkable.’ He belonged to

 

a type of mountain race having many of the simple heroic qualities which we associate, whether justly or unjustly, with Teutonic blood, and essentially different from – to my mind, infinitely superior to – the French-speaking, versatile, wily Chamoniard … he surpasses all the rest in the qualities which fit a man for a leader in hazardous expeditions, combining boldness and prudence with an ease and power peculiar to himself, so he has a faculty of conceiving and planning his achievements, a way of concentrating his mind upon an idea, and working out his idea with clearness and decision, which I never observed in any man of the kind … any one who has watched Bennen skimming along through the mazes of a crevassed glacier, or running like a chamois along the side of slippery ice-covered rags, axe and foot keeping time together, will think that nothing could bring him to grief but an avalanche.

 

When Tyndall called him the Garibaldi of mountaineering, Bennen replied, ‘Am I not?’

In fact, Bennen was far less remarkable than Tyndall and Hawkins thought. He was hesitant, sometimes nervous, and wanted not so much as to lead as to be told where to lead. Having lost his wife he shunned society and moved homes with odd regularity on the grounds that people did not suit him. In 1860 he was living at Laax with his mother and three sisters where, as Hawkins surmised, ‘I guess him to be not perhaps altogether at home.’

Not often at this date did Alpine Club members give much thought to their guides’ characters. With one or two exceptions they preferred them to be stereotypes and portrayed them as such. In almost every journal the guide comes across as simple, manly type with lungs like bellows, legs of steel, a hearty laugh, a keen eye and manners as perfect as any to be found in London society. Occasionally they were allowed wit, as in the face of Wills’s guide Franz Andermatten whose favorite, and oft-quoted, expression with regard to difficult ascents was ‘Es muss gehen!’ – ‘It must be done!’ or literally, ‘It must go!’ (It sprang from a mildly risqué joke that involved a priest, a lecherous old man and the latter’s chances of getting into heaven.) On one memorable occasion an Englishman pointed at a difficult peak and tried to cajole Andermatten into climbing it with the words ‘It must go!’ Andermatten replied that it might well go but he wasn’t.

When it came to Bennen the picture shimmered. He was agile yet recalcitrant, determined yet timorous, at one moment bold and at another frightened. He was hearty when heartiness was required but had a disturbing tendency to burst into tears. In private he was almost a misanthrope. Out of season he worked on his own as a carpenter and went chamois-hunting with a silent friend named Bortis. One gets the impression that he climbed for the same reason as did his employers: he sought release. Whatever demons might lurk on the peaks, they were imps against those that bedeviled him in the valleys.

The Matterhorn, up which Bennen was to lead Tyndall, lay on the boundary between Switzerland and Italy and could be approached from two different directions. One was from the north, from Zermatt. This was considered beyond the bounds of human capability. A single glance was enough to dissuade people from climbing it. Like most north faces in the Alps, it was sheer rock and seemed to offer not the smallest handhold. The other approach was from the south, from Breuil in Italy, where glaciers and a series of minor peaks presented a better chance of reaching the summit. Hawkins and Brennen had surveyed the Matterhorn in 1859 and had decided that they could reach the top from Breuil – ‘almost,’ according to Bennen – and so, with Tyndall (whom Hawkins had met by chance on the train to Basle), they set about conquering the giant.

Tyndall may have not believed in dragons, but Hawkins did – or if not dragons, then something similar. ‘The mountain has a sort of prestige of invincibility,’ he wrote, ‘which is not without its influence on the mind, and almost leads one to expect to encounter some new and unheard-of source of peril upon it.’ In 1860 the perils included not only falling rocks but a shroud of snow that obliterated the terraces up which they had planned their route. Even before they started they realized that they had little chance of reaching the top. But they went ahead anyway, if only to show that the mountain could be approached. They took with them a shaggy-haired, easy-going porter named César Carrel who was said to be the best man for the job. He was 40 or 50 – it was hard to tell – and had a sense of humor as well as a sense of what was possible. He was willing to go wherever he was directed but, as Hawkins wrote, ‘I don’t think his ideas of our success were ever very sanguine.’

The group left their hotel at Breuil at 3.00 am on Monday, 20 August, Carrel carrying a lantern to see them over the rough patches. Beyond its light the Matterhorn’s outline beckoned against a nascent dawn. ‘Measuring with the eye the distance subtended by the height we have to climb, it seems as if success must be possible,’ Hawkins recorded. It was a climb unlike any other that had been attempted before. Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, the Wetterhorn and even the Breithorn were by and large snow mountains. The Matterhorn was rock – except that in this year it was also ice within a thin covering of snow. Up they hacked, Tyndall shouting down constantly to remind Hawkins of what he called ‘the conditions.’ The conditions were that Hawkins should turn on his face if he slipped and drive his alpenstock into the snow. If he did not do so, or if he rolled onto his back, it ‘is all over, unless others can save you: you have lost all chance of helping yourself.’ Soon, however, they found themselves free of snow and were onto a plateau. ‘We are immersed in a wilderness of blocks, roofed and festooned with huge plates and stalactites of ice,’ Hawkins wrote, ‘so large that one is half disposed to seize hold and clamber up them.’ Bennen searched for an escape from this surreal landscape and eventually found one: it was a narrow ledge, above which rose a cliff that lacked any handholds and below which the mountain dropped sheer to the glacier below. The ledge was 1 foot wide and had a pronounced slope. They inched their way along it. Hawkins was scared: ‘if the nails in our boots hold not, down we shall go.’ At one point they rounded a jutting rock to find themselves under a waterfall. They strode through it. On the other side the ledge stopped.

Dripping, they surveyed their options. The only possible way up was via a chimney of rock. But Tyndall and Hawkins could not imagine how anybody could climb it. Its sides were covered with an inch of black ice; the top was out of their sight; and the bottom opened into space. Neither of the two Britons could explain what Bennen did next. One moment he was standing on the ledge, the next he had rolled ‘like a cat’ to the top of the chimney and was lowering a rope to help the others up. Tyndall went first, followed by Hawkins, who tried to brace himself against the walls but dropped, only to be saved by the rope. Carrel was hauled up afterwards.

Three hours later, after they had climbed an endless succession of ridges and snow slopes, Hawkins got fed up. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of such expeditions,’ he wrote, ‘and the impression had been gaining ground with me that the tide on the present occasion had turned against us.’ Bennen thought there was still a chance and Tyndall ventured no opinion; he would do whatever the guide thought right. When Bennen reached ‘a mighty knob, huger and uglier than its fellows, to which a little arrete of snow served as a sort of drawbridge’ and insisted on climbing it, with Tyndall pushing on his heels, Hawkins let go of the rope and sat down with Carrel to await the outcome.

As silence descended, and Carrel took out his pipe, Hawkins began to revise his opinion of both the climb’s practicability and the beauties of mountain scenery. ‘The air was preternaturally still,’ he wrote, ‘an occasional gust came eddying round the corner of the mountain, but all else seemed strangely rigid and motionless, and out of keeping with the beating hears and moving limbs, the life and activity of man. These stones and ice have no mercy in them, no sympathy with human adventure; they submit passively to what man can do; but let him go a step too far, let heart or hand fail, mist gather or sun go down, and they will exact the penalty to the uttermost. The feeling of “the sublime” in such cases depends very much, I think, on a certain balance between the forces of nature and man’s ability to cope with them: if they are too strong for him, what was sublime becomes only terrible.’ Had he been offered at that moment the finest Alpine sunset he would have seen not the vision of unearthly loveliness which so many had described so often, but only ‘the angry eye of the setting sun fixed on dark rocks and dead-white snow.’

Shouting up to Tyndall, he asked how long he intended to be. ‘An hour and a half,’ came the reply. Hawkins felt lonelier than ever. As if the Matterhorn was aware of his despair, it hurled down a boulder. It fell from the crags above, bounced down the rock face and then careered along a nearby couloir, narrowly missing Hawkins. Along its way it shed a splinter that hit Tyndall in the throat, nearly chocking him. This shot across their bows, plus the fact that time was running out, persuaded Tyndall and Bennen to retreat. ‘I was glad that he had not gone on as long as he chose,’ Hawkins recorded plaintively, as he heard the clatter of nails on rock grow louder.

The way down, in which Bennen repeated his mysterious trick with the ice chimney, was, in Hawkin’s opinion, as bad as they way up. Tyndall, however, seemed impervious to all perils. ‘Splendid practice for us, this!’ he cried as he clambered across each successive difficulty. Roped between Tyndall and Carrel, who was now in such a haze of relaxedness that he had to be reminded constantly not to let go of the rope, Hawkins felt a touch of queasy. After two hours they had overcome most of the major obstacles and were faced with the choice of continuing by the way they had come up or taking a short cut via a funnel of snow which issued onto the glacier below. Bennen was all for the snow: it was now afternoon and the rocks would be slippery with melting ice. But the funnel was ‘portentously steep, deeply lined with fresh snow, which glistens and melts in the sun.’ It was perfect for an avalanche, as well as an obvious conduit for rocks falling from above. After a brief discussion, they opted to go down it.

Tyndall must have been either touched by the sun or very tired. Already he had relaxed his rules to allow Carrel – the last in the line, an important position – to hold the rope rather than tie it around himself. Now, instead of sticking to the hard ground as was his wont, he decided to go down the snow – precisely the same decision that killed the four me on the Col du Géant. There were a few small outcrops at the bottom of the funnel which he persuaded himself would halt them in the event of a slide – a strange theory, given his knowledge to the contrary, but one which he often used to justify a dangerous move. Hawkins was less sure: ‘Their tender mercies seem to be doubtful,’ he wrote. The four men spreadeagled themselves and began to climb down the funnel following a zigzag course set by Bennen. No rocks fell but, sure enough, there was an avalanche. It fell to their right just after they had zagged to the left. It was a small one, but it slid with terrible speed. Hawkins, who was nearest, said it was like being in the carriage of a provincial train as the London express passed by. Luckily – incredibly luckily – that was their only bad moment. They reached the bottom without further adventure and floundered waist-deep over the glacier, heedless of crevasses. Above them, storm clouds gathered over the Matterhorn.

On reaching dry ground Tyndall ran as fast as he could for Breuil, leaving Hawkins, Bennen and Carrel to follow. They did so with a degree of dignity, stopping off at a chalet for a drink of milk for which they offered the cowherd 40 centimes. He refused the payment, saying it was too much. Hawkins was bewildered and humbled. Like Forbes and other climbers, he could not help reflecting on the difference between his world and the one inhabited by these simple, hospitable people. In the industrial age it seemed as if the ancient projections were true: the Alps did harbor an alien race.

Bennen, Tyndall, Hawkins and Carrel had achieved something quite impressive. They had climbed to a height of 13,000 feet on what was never intended to be more than a reconnaissance mission – despite Hawkin’s earlier hopes – and on their final burst Tyndall and Bennen had spied a relatively easy route to a peak that seemed to be a stepping stone to the summit itself. But Tyndall was discontented. ‘Had I felt we had done our best in this occasion,’ he wrote, ‘I should have relinquished all further though of the mountain; but, unhappily, I felt the revers, and thus a little cloud of dissatisfaction hung round the memory of the attempt.’ He never stated explicitly what caused his dissatisfaction, but it may have been Bennen’s behavior. On the final stretch, while he and Bennen were scrambling up the rocks in just the hazardous fashion that Tyndall liked best, Bennen had announced excitedly, ‘I will lead you to the top!’ Tyndall was equally excited and would have shouted ‘Bravo!’ had he not been squashed like a frog against the rock, in such a position that filling his lungs for a shout would have dislodged him. Later, however, Bennen dithered, became doubtful and – one of the worst crimes a guide could commit, in Tyndall’s view – asked his employer what to do. Tyndall offered no opinion, and after further deliberation Bennen decided to retreat.

Tyndall was willing to be beaten by a mountain but he was not going to be beaten by a guide’s nervousness. In 1861 he arrived at Breuil, primed for a second attempt. Alas, Bennen announced it was not to happen. On inspection he found the mountain more difficult and dangerous than he had imagined. It was impossible to reach the top in a day and if they tried to spend the night on the slopes they would freeze to death. Tyndall was puzzled: people had slept on Mont Blanc without dying. Might they, he wondered, reach a slower peak, which was a long way below the main one but only 400-500 feet above where they had turned back the previous year? To this Bennen replied, ‘Even that is difficult. But when you have reached it, what then? The peak has neither name nor fame.’ Tyndall did his best to keep an even temper. While listening to Bennen’s speech he stroked his beard thoughtfully; once the guide had gone he kicked the ground in anger, grinding his hobnails into the grass. Not being able to climb even one portion of the Matterhorn was ‘like the removal of a pleasant drug or the breaking down of a religious faith. I hardly knew what to do with myself. One thing was certain … the mountains alone could restore what I had lost.’

That year Tyndall embarked on a ferocious campaign of mountaineering. From Gimsel he climbed the Eggishorn. From the Eggishorn he descended to the Aletsch Glacier and fell in love with the view to be had from the hotel at Bel Alp. He discovered a pine tree growing horizontally from the gorge at the end of the glacier and climbed along its trunk to bathe his frustrations in the cold breath that came from below: ‘I hugged its stem, and looked down into the gorge. It required several minutes to chase away my timidity, and as the wind blew more forcibly against me I clung with greater fixity to the tree. In this wild spot, and alone, I watched the dying fires of the day, until the latest glow had vanished from the mountains.’

From Bel Alp he saw the gray pinnacle of the Sparrenhorn. He went up it. Later he went up the Monte Moro and after that the Old Weissthor too, during which he and Bennen were caught in a rockfall. They had risked a traverse across a gulley when a single boulder rumbled down on them. They ducked behind an outcrop and sprang over their heads. In its wake, however, came a shoal of smaller rocks each of which was ‘quite competent to crack a human life.’ At that moment they hung on a horribly steep slope of ice, which could only be crossed by hacking steps. A single slip would have meant death. ‘”Schnell!” wit its metaling clang rang from the throat of Bennen; and never before had I seen his axe so promptly and vigorously applied.’ Bennen chopped footholds and handholds – mere scratches, according to Tyndall – and led his party on a fingernail escape to the other side of the couloir. It was an astonishing display of coordinatin: while carving steps Bennen also had to dodge the cannonade of stones and at the same time protect his employer. ‘He once caught upon the handle of his axe,’ Tyndall wrote, ‘as a cricketer catches a ball upon his bat, a lump which might have finished my climbing.’ Hacking, ducking and batting, Bennen led them with a final jump to an embankment that was out of the line of fire, ‘and we thus escaped a danger extremely exciting to us all.’ Tyndall may have found it exciting but the others did not. The experienced guide Franz Andermatten, who was part of the team, was so shaken that he slipped on the next traverse, knocked Bennen off his legs and might have dragged everybody with him had he not halted his fall. Had he heard Tyndall’s later opinion that the rope ‘was not made in England, and was perhaps lighter than it should have been,’ he would have been more shaken still. Eventually they reached the summit and had a bite of cold mutton washed down with champagne.

The Old Weissthor aside, Tyndall’s greatest achievement that year was the first ascent of the Weisshorn, a mountain that was 14,780 feet high and which was the most impressive thing to be seen from Zermatt other than the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa. ‘I have always regarded [it] as the noblest mountain of the Alps,’ he wrote semi-truthfully to Faraday. He set out for it at 4.30 am on Friday, 16 August 1861, leaving Bel Alp for Randa, near Zermatt, while ‘the eastern heaven was not with the glow of the rising sun.’ he had instructed Bennen to reconnoitre the Weisshorn – for once, the prognostication was favorable – and he had two pairs of rugs sewn together and forwarded to Randa in case sleeping bags were needed during the ascent.

Tyndall, Bennen and a guide named Wenger started for the Weisshor from Randa at 1.00 pm on 18 August. Tyndall, as usual, had neither eaten well nor slept well but was fortified by a draught of milk at a chalet. ‘The effect … was astonishing, he wrote. ‘It seemed to lubricate every atom of my body, and to exhilarate with its fragrance my brain.’ The sleeping bags were needed, and the team spent their first night in the open. Come sunset, Tyndall was agog. ‘An intensely illuminated geranium flower seems to swim in its own color, which apparently surrounds the petals like a layer, and defeats by its luster any attempt of the eye to seize upon the sharp outline of the leaves. A similar effect was observed upon the mountains … the crown of the Weisshorn was imbedded in this magnificent light.’ He watched the stars wheeling over him and at length he covered his eyes with a handkerchief for fear he be blinded by the sight. He did not sleep.

At 3.35 am the climb resumed. Tyndall shed his tweed jacket – ‘The sunbeams and my own exertion would keep me only too warm during the day’ – and stowed it against his return. After three hours of slow progress they glimpsed the peak of the Weisshor for the first time since leaving Randa. It looked as if it was within their grasp. When Tyndall remarked on this, Bennen replied grandly, ‘I do not allow myself to entertain the idea of failure.’ Down below they could see the figures of two Randa guides who had set out with the idea of following them – maybe even beating them – to the summit. Tyndall was not worried: let the poor fools do their best; they were no match for Bennen, Wenger and himself; anyway, it could only be a short time before they were at the top.

Six hours later, however, the summit seemed no nearer and Tyndall was feeling unaccustomedly tired. ‘There is scarcely a position possible to my body into which it was not folded up at one time or another during the day,’ he wrote. ‘Sometimes it was a fair pull upwards, sometimes an oblique twist round the corner of a rock tower; sometimes it was the grip of the finger ends in a fissure and lateral shifting of the whole body in a line parallel to the crack. Many times I found myself with my feet highest and my head lowest.’ The worst moment came when they reached a 20-yard ridge that spanned two sets of rocks. It was topped by a ridge of snow, and precipices sloped away on either side. Tyndall balked: ‘How to cross this snow catenary I know not, for I did not think a human foot could trust itself upon so frail a support.’ Bennen looked at it, trod the snow down and then walked across it on a path that was little wider than a hand’s breadth. Tyndall ‘followed him, exactly as a boy walking along a horizontal pole, with toes turned outwards. Right and left the precipices were appalling.’ At the other side Tyndall could not only marvel at Bennen’s sagacity. Ever the scientist, he wondered how Bennen knew that the snowy molecules would compress into ‘a semi-solid rather than a mass of powder.’ Bennen replied that he’d given it a tread and it seemed firm enough.

By this time they were all flagging and Tyndall feared they would never make it: ‘Wenger complained of his lungs, an expression of deep weariness shaded Bennen’s face, while I was half bewildered and stupefied by the incessant knocking about.’ The summit, once so attainable, now seemed ‘hopelessly distant.’ Wenger and Bennen fortified themselves with food and wine. Tyndall, for whom this was not an option, steeled himself with patriotic sentiment. ‘I thought of Englishmen in battle, of the qualities which had made them famous: it was mainly the quality of not knowing when to yield – of fighting for duty even after they had ceased to be animated by hope. Such thoughts helped to lift me over the rocks.’ These selfsame qualities had also driven many British explorers and soldiers to their deaths, but this he did not dwell upon. The team struggled on, over false horizon after false horizon, until, four hours later, they met a knife-edge of pure snow that ran up to a little point. At first Tyndall refused to believe it was the summit, but when he slithered along the ridge and stood, shakily, on the peak he realized that at last he Weisshorn has his.

‘Bennen shook his arms in the air and shouted as a Valaisian’, he recorded, ‘while Wenger yelled the shriller cry of the Oberland.’ Some 3,000 feet below, the rival Randa climbers heard the shouts. ‘Again and again the roar of the triumph was sent down to them,’ until Tthey acknowledged defeat and turned for home. Bennen then stripped the head from one of their axes and stuck the shaft in the snow with a red handkerchief tied to it. Tyndall was too awestruck to share the enthusiasm. All he could do was stare. He could not even bring himself to make scientific notes. ‘I had never before witnessed a view which affected me like this one,’ he wrote. ‘I opened my notebook to make a few observation, but soon relinquished the attempt. There was something incongruous, if not profane, in allowing the scientific faculty to interfere where silent worship seemed the “reasonable service”’. What gave him greatest happiness was not the view, however, but the contemplation that nobody in Randa had believed the Weisshorn could be climbed, least of all by a puny beanpole who couldn’t even eat the food he was served. Tyndall had proved them all wrong and had done so on nothing more substantial than twelve meat lozenges.

The descent was hazardous. As Kenedy had on the Bristenstock, Bennen chose a different route from the one they had taken going up, and at one point Tyndall, now weary beyond belief having eaten little and slept not at all for more than forty-eight hours, feared they had climbed themselves into a dead end. ‘I felt desperately bleak,’ he recorded, as he stared at the cliffs in front of them. But Bennen found a way down. Sa they descended, the Weisshorn gave a dramatic display of contempt: a single boulder fell from the summit; it bounced down, raising clouds of dust and bringing hundreds of smaller rocks in its wake, each of which puffed more dust into the air. Within seconds a major rockfall was under way. ‘The clatter was stunning,’ Tyndall wrote, ‘Black masses of rock emerged here and there from the cloud, and sped through the air like flying fiends. Their motion was not one of translation merely, but they whizzed and vibrated in their flight as if urged by wings. The echoes resounded from side to side, from the Schallenberg to the Weisshorn and back, until finally, after many a deep-sounding thud in the snow, the whole troop came to rest at the bottom of the mountain.’ The rocks came nowhere near them but, after his experience on the Old Weissthor, Tyndall was shaken. It was ‘one of the most extraordinary things I had ever witnessed.’

They reached Breuil at 11.00 pm, when Tyndall managed to swallow a bowl of broth and a piece of boiled mutton. Then he had a hot footbath and slept for a whole six hours. It was a welcome climax to a season of unparalleled triumph and hardship. When he woke, however, the Matterhorn still niggled at his mind. He was determined to conquer it, and told Bennen so. By 1861, he declared, the ‘savage’ would be his.