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In Mountaineering Holiday, Frank Smythe records 'an outstanding Alpine climbing season' - his 1939 summer holiday. Writing in his typically engaging style of keen observation, entertaining anecdote and remarkable knack for description, Smythe takes the reader with him on his trip into the Alps. Arriving unfit and out of practice, he gets stuck behind slower climbers and spends rainy days confined to the valleys before making an impressive number of successful ascents and historic climbs: Mont Tondu, the Aiguille de Bionnassay, the Brenva Face - and an ascent of the Innominata Ridge of Mont Blanc.There is a wonderful sense of familiarity about the book. Smythes's experiences and emotions are instantly recognisable by the modern climber, evoking memories of other trips and mountain days. And his examination of our need for mountains and wild places reaches conclusions that strike a chord with everybody who enjoys the great outdoors.Yet this is the 1930s. Mountaineering equipment and technique are in their infancy. Attitudes within climbing are markedly different to those of today and the first ascents of many major routes are still to be claimed. Europe is on the brink of war and fearful of the future. The book's final climb is made with four young Germans - mere days before World War II …
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Introduction
Chapter One To the Alps
Chapter Two Les Bans
Chapter Three Barre des Écrins
Chapter Four Interlude
Chapter Five Mont Tondu
Chapter Six The Tête Carrée
Chapter Seven Aiguille de Bérangèr and Dôme de Miage
Chapter Eight Aiguille de Bionnassay
Chapter Nine Mont Blanc and the Brenva
Chapter Ten The Rochefort Ridge
Chapter Eleven The Innominata Ridge
Frank Smythe was one of the leading mountaineers of the interwar period, an outstanding climber who, in a short life – he died aged forty-nine – was at the centre of high-altitude mountaineering development in its early years.
The astounding thing about Smythe is that he gained such distinction in the mountains without excelling in any technical or athletic sense. He was considered to have rather a frail constitution and poor physique for the great demands of alpinism and particularly, Himalayan climbing. (Smythe was deemed unfit for strenuous sport at school and was invalided out of the RAF in 1927.) Despite these handicaps he still managed to become a first class alpinist, superbly proficient on ice and mixed ground, and competent on rock. He was cautious, patient and shrewd in his mountaineering judgement, yet astonishingly bold when the situation was right. He built up an exemplary mountaineering career that is notable not only for its string of important ascents but also for its episodes of sheer ability, on mountains in all areas, and in all seasons. He is the exemplar of wise mountaineering. Apart from one notable occasion, Smythe never climbed with guides having learned his alpinism from impecunious youth. In the 1920s many keen climbers still used guides and guideless climbing, particularly on the harder routes was considered foolhardy.
Smythe was, perhaps, the first professional climber in a modern sense. He did not seek to become a guide but he found that literature, journalism, broadcasting, photography and lecturing provided for his needs. In this he was a precursor for many – e.g. Diemberger, Bonington, Scott, Messner. Smythe’s astonishing output of twenty-seven books in twenty years matched his mountaineering energy. The books were very popular and probably influential in shaping emerging public perceptions about climbing during a period of frequent Alpine and Himalayan tragedies.
Mountaineering Holiday is one of Smythe’s finest works, giving the reader a sense of his climbing activity during his most active period in the 1920s and 1930s. It deals with a single, very active, Alpine climbing season during the weeks before World War II. Ironically the final climb, the Innominata Ridge of Mont Blanc, is made in the company of four young German climbers during the last days of peacetime.
Although he loved the Alps it was as an expedition climber and as a high-altitude pioneer that Smythe was to find his true calling. On Kangchenjunga he was with a talented international group of climbers led by Professor Gunter Oskar Dyhrenfurth. After a catastrophe on what was to become the main route of ascent in later years, they went on make the first ascent of Jonsong Peak (24,344 feet) and reached several other high unclimbed summits.
A year later Smythe put his Kangchenjunga experiences to good use in the Garhwal, leading a happy team to success on Kamet (25,447 feet), the highest peak to be climbed at that time. The party then completed a comprehensive exploration of the ranges on the Gangotri/Alaknanda watershed.
Two years later came the first (and most successful) of his three Everest expeditions on which Smythe, to the agreement of all, excelled. Alone, when Shipton was forced to retreat, he reached the highpoint of Norton, Wager and Wyn Harris. He was going well, with time in hand, and was only defeated by tricky but not impossible snow conditions where a roped party might have progressed to the final slopes and, possibly, pressed on to the top. In physiological terms, it can be argued that this was the most notable performance on Everest until Reinhold Messner made his solo ascent nearly fifty years later.
Any suggestion that Smythe was merely a ‘big expedition man’ was firmly countered by his lightweight trip to the Garhwal in 1937 in which his ascents of Nilgiri Parbat and Mana Peak were outstanding. The first was made with two Sherpas, Wangdi and Nurbu, whom Smythe effectively trained as they made the ascent. On Mana Peak he was partnered by the not-fully-fit Peter Oliver, who tired, leaving Smythe to make an inspired solo ascent of the final 800 foot rock buttress to a summit of nearly 24,000 feet.
Smythe has the rare knack of taking you with him on his adventures. The rigours of climbing in the days of primitive equipment and clothing have an uncomfortable realism, although the author usually ends his accounts with a sigh of acceptance and a wry joke at his own expense. For years some hardened mountaineers have tended to dismiss him as a merely a well publicised ‘professional’, writing for an armchair audience. But Smythe made honest efforts to record the emotional and reflective moments of climbing, and maybe unconsciously, tried to counter the cynicism, materialism and ruthless ambition he saw in the emerging mountaineering culture of the 1930s. His restrained, indeed humble, descriptions forged a bond between him and his readers. Above all he loved mountains and his pen captured some of the most poignant and joyful moments in climbing.
We might look back and wonder what dreams and inspirations drove Smythe. We might also ponder whether in today’s pressurised and hectic climbing scene such dreams are not, in their simplicity, moving beyond our grasp.
The French Alps.
There is no holiday like a mountaineering holiday. For eleven months the mountaineer has lived, perhaps in a city, perhaps amidst fields and hedges, on ground tamed, cultivated, and built upon by the hand of man; and he has sighed for a glimpse of mountains, for the mountain wind on his cheek, keen, pure, and cold, for the lilt of the mountain stream, for the feel of rock in his hand, for the crunch of frozen snow beneath his feet, for the smell of mist and the fragrance of alp and pine forest.
In his spare moments he has read about mountains, pored over maps, and studied guidebooks. Then comes the day when he inspects his boots, his ice axe, and his rope. He packs his suitcase and his rucksack. He buys his railway ticket. The incredible has become credible. For two weeks, three weeks, or a month he will escape from civilisation and all its works; he is off to the mountains.
Jim Gavin and I met at Victoria Station on the afternoon of July 29, 1939. The rush to the Continent was at its height, and the platform was crowded with holidaymakers. I remember that, as I stood watching the bustle, I longed for the quiet silent places, where I should not have to listen to the explosions of the internal combustion engine, breathe the sickly fumes of petrol, jostle my way along crowded pavements, eat in the glare of electric light, wake up to an array of chimney-pots crouched beneath a looming pall of smoke.
A boat train is an interesting spectacle, collectively and individually. Many curious types and conditions of English people venture abroad for their holidays. Gentlemen, who normally only wear plus fours when playing golf, feel compelled to don them when visiting the Continent. Perhaps they want the foreigner to recognise them as Englishmen, and the foreigner, be he Frenchman or German, Turk or Italian welcomes them. He knows instinctively, and from long experience, that they may be imposed upon in all manner of ways. In the tourist business the plus-foured Englishman is a palpable means of wealth.
Then there is the hiker who dresses himself in his oldest, shabbiest, and dirtiest clothes. He will be seen any day during the tourist season at Victoria attired in a pair of filthy shorts or stained flannel trousers, an open-necked shirt, and a tattered sports coat. On his legs are a pair of gaudily-topped stockings, on his feet a pair of clumping boots, and on his head a felt hat, the appearance of which suggests that it has been previously kicked for some miles through the streets of London. Lastly, on his back is an enormous rucksack, which in age, condition and appearance matches itself perfectly with the items already described. Further to prepare for his Continental holiday, he has omitted to shave for the past few days.
Certain questions inevitably occur. Why is it necessary for him to start his holiday in this condition? What will be his appearance at the end of the holiday, and what will be the reactions of those among whom he spends his holiday? Is it his intention to impress the foreigner by the ‘toughness’ of his demeanour and appearance, or is it simply a manifestation of the Englishman’s innate love of hard living, open air, cold baths, roast beef, etc. etc.?
Then there is, I regret to state, a certain type of mountaineer, whose objects appear similar to those of the hiker. He is wreathed around with ropes; crampons and ice axes radiate from him at uncomfortable and dangerous angles; his boots, armoured with sharp saw-edged nails, are a source of constant anxiety to others less heavily shod in passport and customs queues, and a perpetual menace to parquet and polished floors. His clothing exudes a peculiar stale, musty odour. He has a lofty and superior mien, and looks superciliously at those not similarly attired and equipped, as much as to say: ‘I am better than you. I am tough, a He-man. Look at my rope, my ice axe, and my boots. I am a mountaineer; as for you, you are kittle-kattle, mere tourists.’
These strange personages are happily in a minority, if a very evident minority. The majority of the travellers consist of ordinary tourists. Some of these would not like to be described thus, for they are bound for places, expensive places, where ordinary tourists do not congregate. They are select, well groomed, languid, and they exude, in contrast to the mountaineer already mentioned, expensive perfumes. They are experienced travellers, and one feels instinctively that the hotel labels on their luggage are genuine, and not purchased as a mixed bag in Paris.
Then there are genuine tourists, those incapable of fending for themselves, the products of Messrs Cook, Lunn, Frame, and other agencies. Their centre of gravity is a courier, a harassed, nervous person usually to be seen hurrying about with folios of tickets in his hand, whose life is spent in constant fear lest something go wrong, whose mind is a sort of perpetual motion machine of time-tables, reservations, passports, and landing tickets. It is interesting to speculate as to what would happen to his flock were he to be taken ill, fall overboard, go on strike, die, or simply, to vanish.
Off at last! Waving hands and a flutter of handkerchiefs, a last barrage of kisses, and the packed train steals out from beneath the grim, smoke-grimed vault of Victoria. The holiday has begun.
The train does not get very far. After labouring heavily for some ten minutes it comes to a halt in a suburb of London. There it waits for five minutes, then continues for a short distance, only to come to another halt in another suburb. We remember that we are on the Southern Railway and take stock of our surroundings.
The foreigner’s first entry into London must be a depressing experience. He sees suburbia, an expanse as monotonous as any desert, but without a desert’s charms of distance and serenity. As Karel Capek wrote in Letters from England:
The train flies past a whole town, which is beset by some terrible curse; inexorable Fate has decreed that each house shall have two pillars at the door. For another huge block, she has decreed iron balconies. The following block she has perpetually condemned to grey brick. On another mournful street she has relentlessly imposed blue verandas. Then there is a whole quarter doing penance for some unknown wrong by placing five steps before every front door. I should be enormously relieved if even one house had only three.
Yet if Fate has condemned man to be the slave of outward appearance, signs of diverseness in his character and intellect are discernible in the gardens that adjoin the railway. Some are desolate wastes in which dustbins stand in sordid repose, and a few blades of grass eke out a grimy and a precarious existence, but others bear evidence of his struggle to preserve a feeling for beauty amid the uglinesses of his own construction, and cheek by jowl with a patch containing nothing more exciting or original than a few cabbages blackened by the smoke and soot of passing trains, exists a well tended lawn, with perhaps a surround of flower beds together with one or two shrubs, a sundial, a bird bath, and a tiny greenhouse.
High up on the embankment, the passer-by looks down dispassionately on this evidence of human activity. He may feel sad or glad according to his mood, but for the most part he will gaze unseeing, for suburbia has come to be an accepted part of the twentieth century system. Yet the struggle goes on. Every flower that is planted in these little gardens is indicative of some flicker, some spark to set the human soul afire.
The countryside, when at last the train has struggled through the suburbs, inspires altogether different reflections. Foreigners regard it with horror. ‘Why,’ they say, ‘in our country this would be cultivated. Here it is mostly going to waste.’ And they gaze from the windows of the train at the broad acres of Kent as though at a criminal who stands morally and socially condemned. To such outspoken condemnation, the Englishman replies lamely that industrialisation is responsible and that the yeomen of England have gravitated to the towns. He goes on to explain that it is cheaper to import butter, eggs, and bacon from Denmark and Holland, meat from New Zealand and the Argentine, that farming doesn’t pay, that agricultural wages are too high to make it pay, and so on and so forth. To all this the foreigner listens politely but without much attention. His eyes are fixed on the fields that flash by, upon the derelict-looking farms, upon tracts of coarse sedge grass and deserted grazing-land.
‘But you could be self-supporting if you cultivated this. In my country … ’
Sevenoaks marks the limit of suburbia, though some would maintain that Tonbridge is now within the grip of Greater London. Beyond Tonbridge there is indisputably country. When I was a child I lived near the railway between Tonbridge and Paddock Wood, and the Continental expresses held an irresistible fascination for me. I used to ask myself whether I should ever travel in one and cross the sea to a new land.
For a few instants I saw the house where I lived between the trees. The trees were a little higher, but the house was unchanged, and so were the oast-houses beyond it. Here I was, en route to the Continent and the Alps. I was thirty-nine years of age, but for a split second I lay again on the same daisy-sprinkled bank, my chin cupped in my hands, and watched the Continental express roar past towards new lands.
Marden, Staplehurst, Headcorn, Pluckley – these are sleepy little villages on a long straight stretch of railway between Tonbridge and Ashford, where engine drivers of Continental expresses do their best to make up for lost time. They do not appear to have changed, nor does the Weald of Kent. The fields, the copses, the woods, the oast houses are much the same as they used to be, and in the north beyond the Weald, loom hills in the same blue line. This is the real England; this England changes little; this England is not concerned with a hurrying industrialism; it is slow, and essentially conservative; in this lies its strength, its beauty, and its happiness. If you were called upon to think of some scene, some vista typical of England, of what would you think, what picture would form in your mind? I have sometimes asked myself this and the answer is always the same. It is a simple English countryside, the countryside seen from the window of any train. I come from Kent, and I think of the Kentish countryside. For all the aeroplanes that drone overhead, the motors that rush along the roads, it is very peaceful. It calls to mind the pealing of church bells through a still air, the rushing of water over a millstream sluice, a chorus of rooks from tall elms, the scent of new-mown hay, and freshly gathered hops.
Through such memories men best discern the meaning and the value of their native land. The English tradition lies not in towns, coal mines, and factories, but in fields, hedges, woods, and slow running streams; in mellowed bricks and ivy; in tall trees and smooth green lawns; in smoke-blue distances and soft grey skies.
Beyond Ashford, through which the train jolts at high speed with a tirade of wailing and whistling, the character of the country changes. For a few miles it is undulating and wooded, then, suddenly, like a single bold stroke of a pen, come the South Downs. Here is something different from the trim and fertile Weald. The latter is circumscribed by hedges, fields, ditches, and roads, the former knows no such restrictions or limitations. The Downs are not mere earthy undulations, they are hills. They inherit the same freedom as the sea, the freedom of wind, storm, and sunshine, and they share with the sea an uncompromising simplicity of design. The face of the Weald changes according to the whims and fancies of man, but the Downs remain aloof and uncultivated, and because of this changelessness they epitomise the spirit of the past. In the Weald a man may escape back into the Middle Ages, but in a fold of the Downs he can travel farther than this; he can hear the tramp of Roman legions and the twanging of Saxon bow-strings, and he will feel deep down within him a heritage of hard-won experience, a pride, a solemnity, and a tradition.
The train passes between the shoulders of the Downs and the house-tops of Folkestone come into view, rows and rows of them slated and grey, with a single hideous gasometer brooding over them like some Cyclopean pillbox. Beyond the houses is the quivering glint of the sea.
When an Englishman is safely back in England from the Continent and the horrors of the Channel crossing are forgotten, he will exclaim, ‘Thank God for the channel!’ In crossing those twenty miles of water he way lose the contents of his stomach but he will gain a wonderful feeling of security. When leaving England the sensation is different. Though he be under the aegis of Thomas Cook & Sons with his fare paid from beginning to end (including tips), he becomes an adventurer. For a few days or weeks England will know him not. He will see no English policeman; he will drink no English beer; he will eat no English beef; he will not hear ‘Paridownercarplee’ and other English sounds.
Between Folkestone and Dover it is possible to examine the state of the sea and estimate the chances of internal survival. On the present occasion they seemed excellent. Only the gentlest of waves lapped the chalk cliffs and the Channel stretched level and unheaving beneath a sky of pale hazy blue. As we emerged from the last tunnel Dover’s stately castle came into view frowning down on the mean, ugly little town at its feet.
In another minute we arrived at the harbour station. The porters here are for the most part taciturn, grim-visaged men. Doubtless they have much to endure at the hands of excitable foreigners with a limited command of the English language. Having exchanged our luggage for a numbered token we took our places in the passport queue. Many uncomplimentary things, some deserved and some undeserved, have been written, and will yet be written, about the passport and customs arrangements at Folkestone and Dover. I have stood in the same puddle of water described by one infuriated writer to The Times; on the other hand, I have found the customs officials invariably courteous and scrupulously fair. For some reason they always seem to believe me, and I can only suppose that this is because I always tell them the truth. On one occasion only have I experienced trouble and that was when I forgot to declare an article of silk because I had forgotten its existence. The manner, in which the officer divined that I had got such an article and ferreted it out, had in it more than an element of the occult. There is, however, the story of the old gentleman in the top hat. One day a stately old gentleman attired in a frock coat, and an unusually tall and glossy silk hat, presented himself at the customs. His luggage was duly examined and found to be devoid of dutiable articles. The examining officer’s attention was then drawn to the unusual size of the silk hat.
‘Would you mind removing your hat, sir?’ he asked.
At once the old gentleman bridled up.
‘Certainly not,’ he replied. ‘What nonsense! I refuse to do any such thing.’
This naturally aroused the official’s suspicion and he said:
‘I’m sorry, sir, but I must insist that you remove your hat.’
‘I will do no such thing,’ returned the old gentleman angrily.
This put the customs official in a quandary and he went off in search of a higher authority. In the end, the old gentleman was taken to the Chief Customs Officer, but declined as resolutely as before to remove his hat, and to the threat that it would be taken off by force replied that to do so would be an assault on his person. Finally, a police warrant was procured and the hat removed. There was nothing inside it. After that, there was, of course, a blazing row. The police blamed the Chief Customs Officer, and the Chief Customs Officer blamed his underling. After that, at odd intervals, the old gentleman used to be seen attired as usual in his frock coat and tall silk hat. He became quite a well-known figure and none of the customs officials had the temerity to ask him to remove his hat a second time. One day, however, there was appointed a new junior customs official, a short tempered and abrupt young man. To him the old gentleman presented himself, and to his intense astonishment was asked for the second time to remove his hat. He was even more indignant than on the previous occasion and worse than that, he was rude, very rude.
His rudeness was too much for the customs official. He was short tempered himself, and he had had a trying day. Leaning across the counter, he deliberately knocked the silk hat from the old gentleman’s head. It was packed with drugs.
Passengers often complain bitterly of queues. A voluntary queue is distasteful to most freeborn Englishmen, but to be compulsorily herded is peculiarly galling.
The young men who examine passports at Dover are as efficient as they are nonchalant. One flicks open the document and takes a peep, then passes it to another who takes another peep, shuts it up and hands it to the owner. In addition, there are sometimes to be seen men in Burberrys whose sinister and watchful mien indubitably classes them as detectives.
If I were a spy I should write my notes on the pages of my passport. As it is, I reserve these pages for the names and addresses of people I meet on my travels, hotels, prices, rates of exchange, notes on wines and eatables, mountaineering details, articles to be purchased, etc. etc. Only once have the defaced pages aroused suspicion in the foreign breast and that, of course, was in Italy where everything unorthodox is suspicious to the Fascist ear or eye.
The voyage was uneventful. I am bound to admit that on the whole the Channel has been kind to me, but there have been times when it has not. I have tried most of the seasick remedies. One preventative of seasickness is to get thoroughly drunk, taking care, however, not to mix the drinks. Another effective method is to get a friend to knock you on the head at the commencement of the voyage. A third, and infallible, cure is to tie a handkerchief round the neck, insert a walking stick, and twist.
The English Channel is no respecter of persons. A friend of mine was once crossing it on a very rough day. He is one of those disgusting fellows who strolls about smoking a large cigar when everyone else is wishing that he was dead. As he was promenading the deck, he espied a small man with a very green face huddled in a corner. My friend recognised him, and going up to him exclaimed with horrible heartiness: ‘Hullo, Admiral, what are you doing here?’ The Admiral, for such indeed he was, gave a gulp, looked up, recognised my friend, and whispered, ‘For God’s sake, don’t call me Admiral here.’
When the Channel is smooth I am glad to have been born an Englishman. I promenade the deck, thinking of tall ships, Nelson, and our heritage the sea. I look at the receding cliffs of Dover and thrill with patriotic pride and insular superiority. But when the sea is rough, I wish I had been born in Switzerland or Tibet, and creep away into a corner vainly hoping for a swift and merciful death. To outward appearance Calais is no more exciting than Dover. However, the trains run about the streets in a most intriguing manner and the railway porters carry loads which would make a British railway porter shudder. It is apparent also to the traveller that he has set foot on the Continent because of the tendency to wear uniforms. No longer is he in an atmosphere of nondescript shop keeping. He has entered the zone of efficient militarism, even though it is a democratic, and therefore benevolent, brand.
French customs officials are as courteous as British customs officials. Nevertheless, they have their foibles and weaknesses. At Dover, scents and cameras are greeted with hostility and suspicion, but at Calais and other French ports, an object of far less value titivates the official zeal and rouses the Gallic passion. New clothes, cameras, films, whisky, poufft! They are nothing; half a pound of tobacco is dismissed with a wave of the hand; but stay! What is this? Yes, it is, incredible, unbelievable, a packet of one dozen boxes of matches, costing eightpence at the local grocer’s. Alack and alas, it is borne off in triumph. Sadly we realise that we shall never see it again. In future, we must light our pipes and cigarettes with French matches. If we are lucky we get matches which when struck merely project molten sparks into the eyes. Remember, therefore, always to close the eyes when striking French matches. But if we are unlucky, we get matches which exude horrible sulphur fumes for some fifteen or twenty seconds, matches that in South America are called ‘Stinkerados’ and not without reason. Matches are the price the English pipe smoker must pay for a holiday in France. It would appear that the whole vigilance of the French customs is directed in a never ending search for matches. Bold and fortunate indeed is he who can smuggle a few boxes past them, and in particular, past the women examiners whose whole feminine acuteness and perception seem to be directed in search of matches.
Nothing here need be written about French railway trains, except to state that they are bigger, more comfortable, more efficiently heated, and are said to have more accidents than English railway trains. Notices on them are presented to the traveller in three languages, not including English, and the schoolboy translation of the most prominent of these is: ‘It arrives frequently that the agents travelling on the line are blessed by bottles or other objects solid.’
A French line ‘talks’ differently to an English line. The English line says, ‘Rumpety-rump, rumpety-rump’ in a slow traditional English way; the French line says, ‘Rumpty, rumpty, rumpty, rumpty’ in a hurried, impatient manner. The French countryside between Calais and Paris is altogether more spacious and more sensible from an agricultural point of view than the English countryside between Dover and London. The ploughman does not have to about turn so frequently, and can make a furrow half a mile or more in length. Also, of course, more land is under cultivation. It tells, as eloquently as any countryside can tell, of a thrifty, hardworking people, a people who do not play at farming as a sideline to industry, but whose life and livelihood are linked with the soil. Human efficiency, however, seldom spells beauty when applied to Nature, and it is natural for the Englishman to prefer his own countryside of useless acres and hedges behind which he revels in his privacy. Yet this countryside of northern France possesses a grandeur, a beauty, and a dignity. It is just such a countryside as Constable loved to paint, rolling in long undulations, with wide horizons, blue distances, and towering, slow-strolling clouds.
Paris is in odd contrast to the French countryside. If it were representative of France as a whole it would be spacious, staid, and dignified. It would go to bed early, get up early, and be thrifty and hard working. The great mass of Parisians are staunch to the standards set by France as a whole, but the Paris seen by the visitor is merely cosmopolitan. Precisely the same criticism may be levelled at the West End of London but not, I think, with the same justice. The garish ugliness of Piccadilly Circus finds its counterpart in Paris, but it is doubtful whether the country-folk who visit the West End of London find even that portion of the city quite so unrepresentative of national life and manners as French country-folk find the centre of their capital city. To the resident Londoner, there is, of course, nothing artificial in London; it is just London, and no doubt the same applies to the Parisians’ attitude towards Paris, yet the gulf between the French countryside and its capital always seems to me far wider than that between the English countryside and its capital. Possibly this is due to the difference in size between the two countries. To country-folk born and bred, a great city inevitably seems strange, bewildering, and exotic, yet it would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the midinette of the Paris boulevards and the simple, patient, hard working, peasant wife of France.
For the first time in my experience there was a dearth of porters at the Gare du Nord, due to the fact that France was steadily mobilising. I do not propose to enlarge upon the excitement of a taxi drive from that station to the Gare du Lyon, for this is a stock tourist subject. Suffice to say, that in spite of the driving, which appeared to border upon the miraculous, we arrived safely. There are fewer accidents in Paris than in London, and this is probably due to the quick reaction time of the Latin temperament.
While waiting for our train to Grenoble, we dined at a restaurant opposite the station. It is always a source of wonder to the visitor to Paris that so many restaurants can not only exist but also apparently thrive. It would be interesting to know how many Parisians eat their meals under their own roofs. The Englishman is often accused of lack of imagination, but to my mind nothing can be more unimaginative than a Parisian restaurant. I do not mean in the matter of food, for he would be a brave man who criticised French gastronomy, but in the surroundings in which food is eaten. No doubt the French love of food is responsible for the mirrors which surround the diner. Everywhere he looks he sees, actually or reflected, other people eating, and he is able in various directions to observe himself similarly occupied. French restaurants exist simply and solely to cater for the science of eating. In England, however, eating is not so much a matter of gastronomy as atmosphere. It is of more importance to the Englishman to know that Dr Johnson once dined in the same establishment than to know that the beefsteak is succulently cooked and tastefully embellished, and he is only too glad to pay for the privilege. Artfully shaded lights, old oak beams and tradition mean far more to him than scientific and imaginative cooking. He takes what he gets; the rest is atmosphere and tradition.
Such reflections inevitably lead to the conclusion that the Frenchman is a realist. Realism is fundamental in the French character. When the Frenchman eats he is concerned only with eating, when he loves he is concerned only with loving, and when he makes war he is concerned only with making war. The talk about Latin sentiment is nonsense; the French are the least sentimental of all races and the greatest realists. Hence the Maginot Line.
The journey through the night towards Grenoble was not very comfortable, for we had decided, on grounds of economy, not to book a sleeping compartment, and in addition to ourselves our compartment contained a young French artillery officer and a sailor, which made it impossible for us to put our feet up. Frenchmen, I have always noticed, slumber peacefully in any position, and appear never to want to put their feet up. Englishmen, however, endure agonies if they cannot raise their feet above floor level. Possibly the British climate and a heritage of gout and rheumatism have something to do with this?
Although we travelled on the P.L.M. Railway, which I have been told on good authority stands for Pour la Morgue, the night passed without accident. Truth compels me to admit that I have only been in one French railway accident. This took place near Lyon. I was slumbering peacefully when I awoke to find myself on the floor of the compartment beneath a pile of other passengers and luggage from the racks. Among the passengers was a tall, sad faced young man, a courier as it transpired, and when we had sorted ourselves out, and tended to our bruises and abrasions, he said quite calmly: ‘Don’t be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen, this is nothing. A little while ago I was travelling in the Riviera when there was a serious collision. I was among the survivors and was being transferred from the scene of the accident in another train when the engine of that blew up.’ English people are a trifle unfair to the French in the matter of their railways. I have travelled from Marseilles to Paris at night through almost continuous dense fog and have arrived on the stroke of time. What English train could perform this feat? It goes to show that French signalling arrangements are highly efficient, though certain cynical persons have affirmed that I was lucky.
The night was pleasantly cool and, to our unbounded surprise, the window was not only opened but allowed to remain open. Thus I am debarred from making any of those time honoured witticisms which have to do with the conflict of opinion between the fresh air loving Englishman and the fun loving foreigner as to the ventilation of a railway compartment. Truth further compels me to state that the French sailor left the corridor door wide open, and that I, feeling chilly, stealthily closed it. I feel that I must endeavour to rehabilitate the self respect of the British nation by quoting a notice which I suspect is entirely fictitious. It runs: ‘In the event of a dispute between passengers as to whether the window shall be opened or shut, the dispute shall be referred to the conductor and the window then shut.’
Dawn found me stretching my legs in the corridor. The train was passing across a well-cultivated plain intersected with the usual rows of poplars, and dotted with crinkly tiled farmsteads and cottages. In the middle distance, a smooth surfaced river threaded level water meadows. Here and there lay drifts of thin white mist, and these added to the impression of distance, so that the plain seemed to stretch endlessly eastwards. As I gazed, the glowing disc of the sun rose into a cloudless sky. It leapt up beyond a high irregular edge forming the crest of a great line of hills, spanning the whole width of the eastern horizon. It came to me with a sudden queer thrilling feeling that I was looking at the Alps. I remembered then, as though it were yesterday, how, as a boy, I had gazed thus from the window of a train and first seen the Alps. Age and experience may dim the vision of high mountains, but I never fail to recapture something of that initial exaltation when for the first time in a mountaineering holiday I see the far-off loom of the high mountains.
It is a queer thing this feeling men have for mountains. How is it that some can look unstirred upon a scene that will rouse emotion in others? How is it that some are alive to beauty, and others are not? Is not the Buddhist theory that we go from life to life retaining not memory but instinctive knowledge the most logical explanation? Some have gained knowledge; others have yet to gain it. If this is so, then I am thankful that I have gained this knowledge of beauty, that I can gaze at a high hill and its beauty, and sense my destiny in the quietness and peace of Nature. If this is spiritual progress then ours is a gracious and glorious journey, and ugliness is but a passing phase to set off beauty and render its value perceptible to the spirit, just as strife and unhappiness are the perfecters of peace and happiness, a paradox which when understood lifts one edge of the veil from the mystery of human existence.
Quickly the sun lifted over the Alps. The mists were infused with opal, the river was transmuted to a stream of gold and distantly the great hills grew and grew in the eastern sky.
An hour or two later we were past Lyon and among the foothills of the Alps. This is a curiously tip-tilted country of stratified limestone; the earth has been eased up in bits and pieces so that one may walk up a slope of pasture and forest only to be brought up short by a sheer precipice. These first uplifts of the Alps have a charm of their own, and for anyone who wishes to walk and camp, here is a district open in nature, and commanding varied and beautiful views.