George Mallory died climbing Everest. His Great War letters reveal why for him, and many of his generation, life had to be lived to the full

For men like Mallory, Everest seemed a symbol of hope in a world gone mad

Death was - in the words of one young soldier on the Western Front - 'such a frail barrier that we cross it, smiling and gallant, every day'

Research revealed that three expeditions to Everest between 1921-1924 included 20 out of 26 men that had gone through the agony of war



George Mallory, who perished trying to conquer Everest, was posted to France during World War I

The body was discovered face-down in the snow, about 2,000ft below the summit of Mount Everest.



A shock of brown hair stuck out of a leather-flapped helmet, the right leg was badly broken and the buttocks and gut had long been pecked away by Himalayan ravens.

But the face was perfectly preserved, the eyes closed, with a stubble of whiskers covering the chin.

A hobnailed boot on the right foot clearly dated the corpse to the earliest British expeditions on the mountain back in the Twenties, yet the team of climbers who found it realised that they were in the final resting place of a legend only when they examined a clothing label bearing his name: George Mallory.

It had been 75 years since the June morning in 1924 when the most illustrious British climber of his era had set off from a camp at 23,000ft with his companion Sandy Irvine, a 22-year-old Oxford scholar.

They aimed to become the first men ever to reach the summit, but they were last spotted alive just after noon, two small objects moving up the ridge.



Then the clouds rolled in and they were never seen again, their disappearance haunting a nation and giving rise to the biggest mystery in the history of mountaineering.

The discovery of Mallory’s body in May 1999 rekindled decades-old debates about whether he and Irvine had reached the summit before succumbing to whatever fate had befallen them. But this is an issue which has never really concerned me.

Far more fascinating is the question of why, on that fateful day, Mallory kept going, knowing quite possibly that he was walking to his death.



And to understand this I wanted to find out what drew men like Mallory to Everest in the first place.

Twelve years ago, I began researching a book on the three expeditions to the mountain undertaken between 1921 and 1924, and what struck me was that nearly all of the men who ventured there — 20 out of 26 — had gone through the agony of World War I.

'Far more fascinating is the question of why, on that fateful day, Mallory kept going, knowing quite possibly that he was walking to his death'

The carnage had ended only three years before the first of those expeditions took place and letters, journals and official records from the time reveal how directly the Everest adventurers had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead.

After the war, when so many had died, life was precious but ephemeral.



Perhaps this explained a willingness to climb on, accepting a degree of risk that might have been unimaginable before the war.



They were not cavalier about death — they all wanted desperately to live — but they had seen so much that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, as Mallory knew all too well.

A vicar’s son from Cheshire who was said to have shinned up anything he could find as a young boy, he had found rather less scope for adventure as an adult, teaching maths, French and history at Charterhouse School and being able to indulge his love of climbing only in his spare time.

After marrying an architect’s daughter named Ruth and fathering the first of three children, he seemed well on the path to respectable conformity when World War I broke out.



Posted to France, he assured Ruth in a letter home that he would be positioned safely behind the lines, but on his first night a bullet passed between him and a soldier walking 3ft ahead.

20 out of 26 of the men who took part in three expeditions to the mountain undertaken between 1921 and 1924 had gone through the agony of the war

His subsequent letters alluded to the danger of being strafed from the air. But the more immediate horror, he wrote, was the prevalence of dead bodies, and life in a dugout carved into the chalk terrain.



Below ground was the scent of decay and the stink of rats, above, the smell of cordite and sweat.

‘If, hereafter, I say to a friend “Go to Hell”, he’ll probably reply: “Well I don’t much mind if I do. Haven’t I perhaps been there?” ’ he mused.

That same year found surgeon Howard Somervell, who was to become Mallory’s closest friend on Everest, attached to the 34th Casualty Clearing Station on the Somme front.

' ‘If, hereafter, I say to a friend “Go to Hell”, he’ll probably reply: “Well I don’t much mind if I do. Haven’t I perhaps been there?” ’ Mallory wrote to his wife



He recalled how he might enter a tent and find it strewn with corpses or piled high with amputated legs and arms. In a ward at night he would hear the groans and curses of the wounded crying out in delirium, a boy shouting ‘Charge!’ at the top of his voice.

On July 1, 1916, the first day of the infamous Battle of the Somme, Somervell and his colleagues were told to expect no more than a thousand casualties.



Instead, he and one other surgeon found themselves surrounded by a charnel ground of suffering, hundreds upon hundreds of limp figures bandaged in blood, boys and men, white cold and still.

‘Never in the whole war did we see such a terrible sight,’ he recalled. ‘We surgeons were hard at it in the operating theatres. Occasionally, we made a brief look around to select, from the thousands of patients, those whose lives or limbs we had time to save. It was a terrible business.

‘Even now I am haunted by the touching look of the young, bright, anxious eyes as we passed along the rows of sufferers. There, all around us, lying maimed and battered and dying, was the flower of Britain’s youth.’

Every man had to come to terms with such experiences in his own way and, for men like Mallory and Somervell, Everest seemed a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.

Oxford scholar Sandy Irvine, 22, who accompanied Mallory on the fateful expedition that cost them both their lives

Since Victorian times, when the surveyors of the Raj had estimated its height at 29,002ft, Everest was acknowledged to be the world’s highest mountain. Yet the impetus to conquer it came about only when Britain lost the race to both of the Poles in the years preceding the Great War.

Those men prepared to attempt it were very different from previous generations who regarded climbing as a sport for aristocrats, their safety in the Alps ensured by trained Swiss guides.

In those early days, Mallory and his fellow climbers looked like their more genteel predecessors — the men who undertook the first expedition to reconnaissance Everest in 1921 wore Norfolk jackets, knickerbockers and puttees. They also shared their taste for living in style — the supplies list for the fatal 1924 expedition included 60 tins of quail in foie gras and 48 bottles of champagne, Montebello 1915.

The difference was that they were determined to succeed at any cost — as well they needed to be.

Among the first victims claimed by the British attempts on Everest was Scottish physician Alexander Kellas, a slight and modest little man with spectacles and an academic’s stoop.



During that first expedition of 1921 he suffered a fatal heart attack brought on by exhaustion and was buried in what Mallory described as ‘an extraordinarily affecting little ceremony on a stony hillside.’

Not everyone felt so moved.

‘Kellas was buried during the morning,’ wrote Canadian surveyor Oliver Wheeler. ‘I was sorry not to be there, but I do hate funerals.’

Given that the two were part of a party of only nine men, this seems rather cold until we look to Wheeler’s wartime experiences.

In November 1914, he was a subaltern with a company of sappers and miners on the Western Front near Lille when they were ordered over the top to destroy German trenches extending dangerously close to the British defences.

The resulting melee saw men fighting hand to hand in the dark with knives, clubs and bayonets. Wheeler saw to the wounded and then, under constant fire, directed his men through the night as they filled in the German trenches, burying the dead from both sides who lay at their bottom and haunted by the idea that, in the darkness and confusion, some of his own men might well have been buried alive.

George Mallory indulged in his love of climbing in his spare time. He is pictured in 1909 on the Moine ridge of the Aiguille Verte mountain in France

For all Wheeler’s understandable reluctance to attend the interment, Kellas’s death was undoubtedly a blow to the early Everest expeditions which were largely about solving practical problems, such as reaching a mountain which was 400 miles off the map and working out the best route up it.

It was Kellas who first enlisted the help of local Sherpa tribespeople as porters — somewhat to their puzzlement. The motivations of the climbers remained a mystery for these Tibetans for whom the idea of risking one’s life to crawl over ice and rock into nothingness was the epitome of ignorance and delusion.

Indeed, in Tibetan, there is no word for a mountain summit; the very place the British so avidly sought, their highest goal, did not even exist in the local language.

Kellas also advised on the dangers of oxygen deprivation at high altitudes. It was known that at the summit of Everest a climber breathing normally would absorb only a third of the oxygen available at sea level, but the idea of overcoming this deficit artificially met with scorn among colleagues like Mallory.

He denounced the use of oxygen tanks as a ‘damnable heresy’, while in London, Arthur Hinks, secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, opined that ‘only rotters’ would cheat by using such apparatus.

Battle of the Somme: Surgeon Howard Somervell, who was to become Mallory's closest friend on Everest, was attached to the 34th Casualty Clearing Station on the Somme front

Mallory, the only man to undertake all three expeditions, would eventually agree to use oxygen tanks. But many other dangers remained, not least avalanches such as the one that claimed the lives of seven Sherpas and ended the second expedition, in 1922.

To maintain their spirits during times of such adversity, Mallory played cards with Somervell in the tent they shared, or read from the volume of Shakespeare’s plays he had brought with him.



This was an echo of his time in the trenches when he sought solace in a pocket edition of four of the Bard’s plays, including Hamlet and Romeo And Juliet.

His true feelings were saved for his beloved Ruth. In a letter to her, written during the final stages of his third and last expedition, he wrote of fears about his own fitness and that of the rest of the party.

‘Even now I am haunted by the touching look of the young, bright, anxious eyes as we passed along the rows of sufferers. There, all around us, lying maimed and battered and dying, was the flower of Britain’s youth', says surgeon Howard Somervell



Freak storms over India had brought heavy snow across the Himalayas, with temperatures at night dropping to -39 degrees, and there was much anxiety whether they would make it to the top before the onset of the monsoon season.

‘Dear Girl, this has been a bad time altogether — I look back on tremendous efforts and exhaustion . . . looking out of a tent door on to a world of snow and vanishing hopes.’

That letter was written on Tuesday, May 27, 1924. Eight days later, Howard Somervell and the expedition leader Edward Norton decided to strike out on a final attempt towards the summit.

They were within 1,000ft of the top when Somervell collapsed, unable to breathe. Frostbite had scorched all of his airways, leaving every surface raw. When he finally managed to clear the obstruction by pounding his chest, he realised that what he had coughed up was the entire lining of his throat.

Norton, meanwhile, had continued on and become snow-blind. Suffering from double vision, which was madly disorientating and excruciatingly painful, he went on until he could do no more, turning back finally at 28,126ft, less than 1,000 feet from the summit.

Then things became dangerous. His nerves cracked from exhaustion. In one moment he had been fearlessly pressing on, climbing in waist-deep snow up a chute that exposed him to death with every step. Then the instant he gave up the chase, a world of fear and intimidation closed in on him.



On July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme (pictured) Somervell and his colleagues were told to expect no more than a thousand casualties

Fortunately, Somervell had managed to catch up with him and could lead him back down across the ice-covered slabs. Together, the two men made it back to camp after being exposed to the wind and the agony of the heights for more than 15 hours with nothing to eat and precious little to drink.

Mallory and Irvine would not be so fortunate. Two days later, on the morning of June 6, 1924, they set off on their own abortive summit attempt.



To this day we do not know exactly what fate befell them, although Mallory’s broken leg and a rope tied around his waist indicate the two men fell together, only to die a violent and separate death.

As for the possibility that they may have reached the summit before their deaths, this was investigated by American mountaineer Conrad Anker, who discovered Mallory’s body and is arguably the finest climber of his generation.

Given their primitive equipment and the weather conditions, Anker thinks it unlikely.



Haunted by the horrors: George Mallory and his men had seen the flower of British youth lying dead in the trenches

However, he envisages one scenario in which they might have reached the Second Step — a vertical 100ft cliff, beyond which the way to the summit was free with no serious obstacles, save exhaustion and exposure.

If the very storms that battered the 1924 expedition had covered the most difficult patches of the Second Step in snow, then Mallory and Irvine might simply have walked up it, traversing the barrier with the very speed and ease reported by expedition member Noel Odell, the last man to see them alive.

Had this occurred, then Mallory would surely have insisted that they walk on, whatever the dangers ahead. After all, for him as for all of his generation, death was — in the words of one young soldier on the Western Front — ‘such a frail barrier that we cross it, smiling and gallant, every day’.