Chapter III: Guided and Guideless Mountaineering (2)

A guide is as much a human being as any amateur in the party. If it is necessary for the manager to have constant care of the health and _morale_ of his friends, it is doubly so in the case of his guides. The _average_ guide is a peasant, with the limitations that frame peasant virtues. His guiding motive is the struggle for existence under hard conditions. His winters are spent in wood chopping, hard work and keeping warm, with cards, wine and village gossip for distraction. His public is preponderatingly masculine: in many mountain villages the proportion of boys to girls is five to three. His winter society consists of a fluctuating population, crudely packed for the cold months, and dispersed in parasitic occupations during the summer; it has therefore not even a parochial sense of responsibility in the creation of its prejudices. All talk circulates round ‘francs.’ His short summer season is a succession of conflicts with varying degrees of incompetence, in a business in which his conscious superiority is seldom challenged. It is impressed upon him that his most paying accomplishments are an obliging manner and a smattering of spoken tongues. He has small occasion to measure himself against other men or get an idea of his own personal value, because the world comes to him in its most artificial form, and plays him only at his own game with a fantastic handicap. He is a child, with a precocious development on a special line which gives him his one standard for manhood in general. Outside his valley he has to fear the antagonism, even the petty violence, of any local trade union; inside it he has all a schoolboy’s fear of outraging some point of rigid local etiquette. There is no more of William Tell and the edelweiss post card in the material life of a Swiss valley than there is of Robin Hood and Merrie England in an agricultural village. If the guide turns back on an ascent, after hearing some incomprehensible patois from a fellow-villager the evening before in a hut, or if he refrains from bullying a surly official on our behalf, on whose good offices he may be dependent, or if he shows no active sympathy in our condemnation of a recalcitrant porter, who may be his wife’s cousin, we have no right to expect anything different. If after a gorgeous sunset and a romantic ascent he still cares more for our francs than our fellowship, it is perfectly natural. We should look for nothing else, if we had not fashioned our typical guide in youth from the narrative of the great literary pioneers, who still found here and there a sympathetic village unspoiled by hotels and tourists, or a natural son of the hills whose responsive courtesy could reflect, if it did not comprehend, the symbolical attributes, born of the realization of romantic success and physical well-being, with which the imagination of the contented employer invested his guide’s leadership. We too find a few such men. But we recognize them as exceptions, or as beings who visit us in their full splendour only in the roseate hours of reminiscence following on a great climb.

The guide as we know him is hill-born, hill-bred,--that is, a child, with a child’s capacity for becoming much what we make him,--a companion, a valet or a machine,--and with a child’s suspicion and shyness, which he hides under an appearance of professional reserve or a formal politeness.

[Sidenote: The Right Footing.]

A leader must not be content with either the polite manner or the professional aloofness. He must first get to know his man thoroughly, watch his reactions on a climb, and notice his weak and strong points, where he is confident from knowledge and where he is merely bluffing. From his movements or silences he will soon be able to deduce more than from his speech. He should avoid direct opposition or discussion during the actual climbing. The guide is as sensitive and as inarticulate as any other uneducated handicraftsman on points that touch his professional skill or caste pride, and ill-timed interference will drive him to the polite manner for his protection. It is a mistake, also, to allow the relationship to become too personal, to expect a guide to act as valet or to perform small menial services in bivouac or hotel. There are many offices which a guide performs as part of his business,--cooking and carrying and the care of the party’s comfort as a whole. But when an amateur has been indebted to his guide for putting on his putties in peace-time, it is impossible for him to resent being treated as equally dependent when the crises of battle take place. The relationship cannot be changed in a moment, much less in a crucial moment. The footing established in the valley, in the hut or on the long tramp, will remain the footing on the mountain side. Small hardships and small comforts have to be shared equally, that there may be an equal sharing of the big responsibilities of the campaign and in the decisions that go to meet difficulty or danger.

Start with your guide on a right footing, so that he sees that you recognize your duties towards him as much as his towards you. See that he gets decent food in the hotels; some head-waiters, portly with that authority which a tourist traffic inevitably confers, never learn to handle a guide as anything but a servant in your employment and something less in their own; but the guide is generally too loyal or too aloof in spirit to tell you so. Let him have what wine he desires: he will have to carry it himself. No good guide drinks to excess, some not at all. But fine-drawn men, not regularly nourished on meat, will frankly admit that failing such reserves the extra stimulus is occasionally really needed if some feat calling upon all their strength or endurance has to be carried through. A well-trained body, under primitive conditions, knows by instinct what particular nourishment it needs, and responds to its stimulus with startling suddenness. A good guide, on serious work, will never take more than nature tells him is required, whatever your opinion of that amount may be. Of course if he is a regular or irregular sipper in idle moments it is best to get rid of him. Be careful that he has not too much to carry; when there are several of a party, and each adds some trifle of personal luggage without knowing that the others may have done the same, the load often gets far beyond what the leader intended in selecting the provisions. His own food--he generally prefers his own of its kind--should be unrolled and seen to with the other packages. Sleepy hotel-porters, under the heading of “provisions for guide,” are apt to stuff in mosaics of strange meats; and again the guide is too polite to tell you: it is not manners to worry the gentlemen. This is just the distinction which on all accounts you have got to break down. Consider his comfort as that of any other member of the party during the day, without seeming to fuss or to be condescending. It is hopeless to try and make him ‘one of yourselves’; he has his own pride, and would shrug his shoulders over premature familiarity. But quiet consideration will gradually convert the relations into a pleasant mutual understanding. Take his sack as well as your own if he is leading and you judge the extra weight is taxing him unduly. Take your turn at leading in deep, soft snow. This is the only task of sheer endurance in which I believe good amateurs can outlast good guides. Look after his getting his food and a proper place to sleep in, unobtrusively, when you get down from a big climb to new quarters, no matter how tired you are. It is in your own interest for the morrow. If possible, laugh him out of the common trick of dropping behind and making a sort of tail to your triumph as you return into the village or meet another party. He is taught that this is good manners and will please your touristship; but it is really insulting to both, if a man has been your companion or leader during a great climb of united effort, to accept this mock tribute to your poor dignity when there is no longer any chance of going a step wrong. The transparent imposition impresses nobody you meet, and least of all yourself or him. In the valley let the guide see that, as between yourselves, you consider that the fellowship remains unaltered, that you do not barter your right to be treated as his equal as a mountaineer for the sake of posturing as his ‘Herr.’ At the same time accept, for the sake of his comfort and his opinion of your tact, the outward appearance of differentiation which his training has taught him to consider consistent with his position and yours in this valley and hotel life. You will soon find out what you can or cannot do. You cannot traditionally invite him to dinner at the same table with other strangers in a large hotel, but he will join you for coffee at your separate table. Let him pay for you as you go. The confidence will make him feel of the party, and has the advantage of getting you large reductions through his local knowledge! Once he recognizes you as a human being and you have found the way through the crust of his professional suspicion and local upbringing, you will know him to be very human also, with a temperament as easy as a child’s to understand and as difficult as a child’s to manage; loyal, sympathetic, often sensitive, and naturally honest. He enters more into your aspirations than he ventures to show. Without sentiment, without sharing your thoughts or being able to exchange a word about all the varied interests that make up your own different outlook, without even understanding your motives, you may yet, if you are fortunate, find him a man who will become your close friend, with whom you can share silence and danger and sorrow in a community of feeling that needs no speech. In contact with elemental realities, it is the essential personalities, not their different decorations of race or education, that count and that make contact.

Anyone who has followed me so far will probably be yawning, and asking, “Is this really all necessary in order to enjoy a mountain holiday?” It is not. If you want to follow a hunt, you have only to learn to stick on; if your object is to cross the Atlantic, you can do it in a liner; if you want just to do mountains, you can engage guides, behave like a gentleman, and you will have got your desire. But if you ever wish to realize the incomparably greater pleasures of hunting your own pack or sailing your own boat, you will have to set about it in a different fashion. Ask a platoon-leader or good company-officer what proportion of time he gave to the study and training of his men before an offensive. And then be assured that mountaineering is a pursuit in which, just as there is no limit to the ascending scale of pleasures which it offers, æsthetic and physical, so also there is no end to the progressive study and preparation it demands from those who would follow its higher walks.

The better a man knows his child-guide, the more he will know how to manage him, so as to get the best out of his mountaineering precocity. The happiest arrangement is no doubt to keep a careful eye open, during your preliminary years of training under the first professional, so as to mark down any enterprising young guides or porters. The young guide need not yet be an expert; it is for the amateur to give him the opportunity for developing his technical skill in their seasons of progressive climbing, while _pari passu_ the amateur is establishing his own position in the partnership and perfecting himself in his own department.

The companionship of amateur and guide as friends is the ideal combination for great mountaineering wherever the ground permits of it. So soon as a second professional is added the amateur is in a minority; and no matter how close his personal association with his first guide, the professional comradeship, recalling the atmosphere of youth, may always override his influence for the day. A single amateur, therefore when he finds it necessary to take on extra help for a season or for some expedition, will do well to choose some young man, the most athletic possible, who has his name to make and is still only thinly crusted with professional tradition. His inexperience may keep him at least silent in the discussion of important decisions.

[Sidenote: Before the Ascent.]

The principles of management are the same, whether the amateur is alone or with friends, and whether the guides are old friends or comparative strangers taken on for the season or even the day. Your concern is primarily with the guide’s state of mind, so that he may make the best use of his skill. If your object is merely an ordinary ascent, it is still important that the leading guide should be kept in the right mood, both because of the greater contribution to the social pleasure of your party if things go rightly, and because, if checks of weather or of circumstance arise, as they always may, you have then neglected nothing that can contribute to a successful continuance of your climb. If your intention is something beyond the ordinary, your task of preparation is more difficult. For the greater the technical difficulties of a climb, the larger must be the technical expert’s (or guide’s) share in deciding whether they can or cannot be overcome. The idea of the ascent has generally first to be made the guide’s own by subtle suggestion at convenient moments. If you have got him up out of the valley in good health and spirits, you have still the danger of the hut to meet, where the patois of local guides, should your plan leak out, will affect his next day’s humour fatally, even if it does not turn you back at once. In view of this danger it is sometimes best to treat your attempt as an ‘exploration’ only, until you are safely off on to the lower glaciers, otherwise you may find, when you wake in the hut, that the ‘wrong rope’ has been brought or ‘the weather’ is miraculously portentous. A mountaineer may hear these and similar whispered euphuisms, which are the preliminary to retreat, passing between a ‘prompted’ guide and his expostulating employer any night in any full hut. He will not feel it his business to intervene on behalf of another employer unless he is very sure of his ground. After all, the guide may have good reason to mistrust his employer’s competence, and have chosen this polite way of saving his life or comfort in anticipation. But the leader will be wise if he takes good note of the machinations, and of all their meanings, for his own protection in like case. Of course this kind of excuse may, in cases, be dictated by actual cowardice and not only by hut talk. My disregard of this possibility lost me one of the finest climbs I have planned. After all the gambits of hut excuses, ‘weather’ and ‘rope,’ had been countered, and we were actually on the mountain, my single guide, of fine reputation and great name, at the first sight of our formidable final ridge developed a ‘sprained wrist.’ It was a forlorn hope, which put an end to our association, and proved the downward turning-point in a promising career.

I must instance one other weakness that comes into special prominence in the bivouac or hut under the influence of other guides or of those fluctuations in mood to which the peasant is very subject in the prospect of some formidable climb. Very few guides know anything about ‘weather’ except a few local signs. But they will make use of their supposed instinctive knowledge to the utmost if they feel lazy in the morning or nervous of the undertaking. Possibly the ‘head-shaking’ is half genuine, as a guide has a child’s fear of two things chiefly: a cloud and a falling stone. But the leader must not be imposed upon, and must use his own judgment about starting. I remember once in a bivouac, literally under a huge stone, beside the Mer de Glace, twice sending out quite a decent guide to see if his ‘cloud-bank’ was thinning. On the third occasion, when I asked if there were really no stars visible, he murmured drowsily, “Only two now,” and snuggled down to sleep again. It is unnecessary to add that the guide and the party were wafted out of the gîte on the wind of the unspoken and ate their breakfast on the run.

I recall these instances only to emphasize the necessity of a close observation of character, so that flaws may be discovered in time, as well as the weak points shielded past the times of contact with external influences.

[Sidenote: On the Mountain.]

Once the climb is begun the task of shepherding is simpler; there are only the effects of untoward or premature mountain incident upon mood to guard against. But even so, occasionally, the effect of other parties on the same climb may have to be reckoned with. Their presence often extends the debilitating effect of ‘hut’ promptings to the mountain side. If the feeblest of several parties on a mountain turns back, it requires a serious effort to prevent panic, and the fear of later valley criticism, from inducing a general retreat. To relieve your guide of this chance you may have to make it very audibly apparent to the other parties that it is you, and not he, who are insisting upon the advance.

Similarly, a guided party ahead of you, which may happen to take even an obviously wrong route, will exercise a paralysing attraction upon your leading guide’s mind. It is overpowering if the two guides are acquainted. Once on a famous ridge of the greatest of Swiss peaks, when the guide of the party ahead of us chose the traditional but, on the day, the more dangerous of two lines, I had to say firmly that I should retreat rather than take the risk, before my own admirable guide could shake off the spell and consent to try the demonstrably better alternative route. Incidentally I may add that we had the satisfaction of sitting and watching from a secure ledge the sensational struggles of the other party for fully half an hour before they caught us up again. On the other hand, if the party ahead is led by a ‘foreigner’ or enemy guide, you may have to look out for the repellent effect upon your own guide, who will be only too ready to break off on any freakish alternative line which may give him the chance of cutting out his rival in front.

These cases illustrate a particular danger; but as a rule once the climbing commences the good guide is best left as much as possible to his free devices. Your authority must encourage the idea that in tactics the technical expert’s responsibility becomes greater, and that in details the leading guide conducts the operations without question or dissent.

[Sidenote: Fine Shades.]

If he has been judiciously nursed on to his mountain, a good leading guide will be equal, unaided, to all ordinary situations and to exceptional ones according to his ability. But if your climb proves to belong throughout to the exceptional class, you must remain on the watch, ready to employ in time those fine shades of management to which alone nerves and muscles working near their limit respond. A good first man on the rope, guide or amateur, is always an emotional subject, though his self-control may conceal his inward fluctuations. The leading guide’s mood in the early morning hours of climbing will frequently be clouded by his sense of the serious work before him and the threat of responsibility it shadows for him. If difficult problems present themselves before he has warmed to his work, as they are apt to do on a severe climb, or before he has realized the support of the harmonious working of the party behind him, his mood will exaggerate their difficulty and the discouraging prospect of a long day of such problems. If you can then lift him over the crucial point without risk to your party, your pains and study will have been well justified. You must not give direct orders. A guide who will hurl himself against anything because he is told to, against his judgment, is a bad guide, or at least one whose temper and discretion are spoiled for the day. Nor must you abuse the power of indirect suggestion which your study of your man will have given you. A guide’s instinct on technical points is an invaluable asset, and it may be harmed if it is tampered with tactlessly. You must first make up your own mind whether his objection to proceed is really based on genuine instinct or is only the outcome of a depressed and cumulative mood. And here your knowledge of the man and your observation of his condition before the crisis will help you even more than your examination of the obstacle which is checking him. Once you have decided that his objection is only due to mood, it is your business to bring him into the right key again; to make him feel that, while you realize the seriousness of the problem, yet your judgment, unbiased by the infection of gloom, is cheerfully confident that his skill can surmount it. Undue cheerfulness or obviously pretended confidence will defeat your object by merely making him think that you are out of touch with the situation or unaware of the gravity of the decision. Both words and tone, therefore, need very delicate choosing. The clouds must be given both time and a constant gentle impulse to clear off. Once the black hour is past, as it passes with most men as they warm to their work, the point comes, sooner or later, when every good guide catches fire. The amateur can then relax much of his attention even on a severe climb, enjoy the fun and attend to the lighter problems of mere climbing. A day comes back to mind, the occasion of a first ascent of the snow slopes of a famous peak, when weather and evening company had alike contributed to oppress the wayward spirits of a peasant guide. Every form of inducement, ‘exploration,’ ‘a nearer view for the next day,’ had had to be employed in turn in order to coax a gloomy morning progress up the glacier, over the bergschrund and up the initial ridges. And then suddenly, and fully a third of the way up the ascent, a Napoleonic attitude with outstretched arm appeared in silhouette against the snow wall above us. We heard a cheerful shout, “Who follows me to-day will reach the summit!” And we knew that all need for nursing on our part had ended for the day.

Remember that however well things are going, unforeseen circumstances may always upset humour, and that you must be always looking out for its effects. You have to bring your party up, for each round with the unforeseen, at the top of its climbing form. A guide in the lead must be relieved of all anxiety about the performance of the rest of the party; his judgment of the succeeding problems must be kept clear of bias from extraneous considerations. He must feel that the whole party is in tune behind him, and is confident in him, or he will not be free to put out his best powers.

Mood or circumstance may, however, on occasion prove too much for your management, and then you need not hesitate to take over the lead yourself for a while. It is well for this, and for many other reasons, to have accustomed your guides to the idea of your leading. When this extreme course is taken, it should be done quietly and, if possible, under pretext of trying some alternative line of your own. So soon as the guide’s humour readjusts itself, as it will all the quicker for watching your mistakes, the lead can be as quietly surrendered again. I remember a new ascent we made upon a formidable rock peak. Our excellent guides, overawed by the terrific threat of the sections far above us, tried prematurely to prove the whole climb impossible, by taking a fancy line early in the day which obviously led to a hopeless impasse. As it is the huntsman’s privilege and duty, when scent is overrun, to make the cast and lift the pack on to the right line again, we exercised it from the tail-end of the rope. Our ultimate success helped us to a mutual forgetfulness of the incident.

[Sidenote: The Terms of the Association.]

If you are climbing alone with a guide, of course either goes first as may be convenient at the moment. This should be taken for granted. Whether the your party contains guides or not, you should always insist on taking your share of leading and encourage other amateurs to take theirs. It is good for your climbing to do so, it is far the best fun, and it promotes a proper footing with the guides. A guide has no prescriptive right to the pleasantest place. Only where the climbing is difficult, or danger is involved, the best man must lead; and this may mean more usually the guide. It is a mistake for an amateur, however brilliant, to let himself appear to be competing with a guide on his own ground. The guide will always be politely admiring of brilliance, but he is really only concerned to know that an amateur climbs safely, and equally safely all the day. The common good is better served by your appearing to take his superiority in the technical field for granted, and confining your attention to deserving the command you intend to exercise in the field of general responsibility. It is a sign that you are beginning to take your proper position, in your own sphere, when your guides cease to assure you that you are climbing, like a ‘chamois’ or a ‘devil.’ But a young mountaineer is apt to feel injured that guides take so much longer in learning to pay him the first _real_ compliment, the admission by their acts and not their speech that he has learned to go ‘safely.’ I remember in early days bitterly resenting being coddled on a short rope down an ice slope by two guides with whom I had just been sharing a sensational day, during at least four hours of which, if I had slipped, no effort of theirs could have saved the party. A guide, until he is trained by a good manager, never unlearns the most deep-rooted tradition of his caste. For him all amateurs alike remain _the_ amateur, that is, a thing to be watched over, so long as the mountain remains a mountain, that is, a thing up which the guide leads. For years after he has forgotten to bother about his amateur on difficult places, where he has other things to think about, a return to familiar ground will recall to him the familiar tradition, and he will begin again to coddle his employer exasperatingly. And for seasons after he has unlearned this habit, a guide will continue to prefer the ‘backing up,’ in a bad place, of a second-rate professional to that of the best amateurs in the Alps. Perhaps this is natural; the two natives can calculate on each other’s actions and reactions more closely their co-operation must always be more instinctive and consequently more reassuring to one another.

An amateur must be content first to study the trade-winds of mountaineering, and then gradually try his wings on the more complicated cross-currents of its direction. Once he is qualified for his duties as manager, his old guides by habit, and any new guides by instinct or discovery, will soon concede him his full authority. With this as his fulcrum he will find it, in due time, easy to secure that both he and other amateurs of his party shall be left free to do their own share of the climbing on their own climbing merits, and only receive assistance (or what is intended for it) when they ask for it. When these terms are established it is happier for the party, and far happier as a permanent teaching for the guides. I was puzzled once to read in a hut book a notice that for the third year in succession the same gentleman had been forced to turn back by ‘wind’ at the same point of an easy ascent, although the book showed that on the same day other climbs on the mountain had gone well. Then we remarked that he had employed the same two guides on each occasion. They were earning their money, apparently, without undue exertion or interference in a permanent engagement. Possibly they may even have discovered that there is a humorous value in repetition! A few years later I heard of them as men of ‘unmanageable stiff-neckedness,’ and out of employment. But climbers will know of countless instances; and we must all have seen the village street tragedies of once famous guides drifting downward to chance engagements, trading on their names, irascible with their few patrons, still efficient, but spoiled, arrogant and accomplishing nothing.

[Sidenote: The Rare Crisis.]

No matter how well the guide’s temperament is analysed and his moods managed, every guide’s nervous system has a snapping point, when self-control may be momentarily lost. As I have said when speaking of amateurs, to some it comes sooner, to others later; but to the best guides, as to men of little or less education, it will come sooner than to the best amateurs. The crisis is a disagreeable one, and very rare. A thunderstorm, with its dangers that cannot be met by any skill, may produce it; a sudden fall of rocks or ice where they had no right to fall; or the shock of a realization of imminent peril. It will be always the unexpected. The amateur is then happy who has never weakened his influence by making mistakes outside his province or by exhibitions of his own temper or lack of self-control. If he has never given himself away under pressure of shock or disappointment or fatigue, then the greater the crisis the more effective will be his personal intervention. A few sharp words, startling but not angry, will prove with all good guides sufficient restorative. I have had occasion even to pay off an hysterical shouting guide on a mountain side before his frenzy,--the result of an uncontrolled temper and sudden panic,--yielding then to the fear of a solitary descent, died down sufficiently to make it safe to take him on the rope again. He was a bad guide, and dismissed on that account. But for the case of a good guide who has been tried too highly, the momentary correction will suffice, and the incident should not afterwards be recalled. I know of no other occasion which should justifiably tempt us into sharp speech or the exhibition of direct authority during an actual climb. The secret of maintaining control is never to appear to claim it.

[Sidenote: The Reward.]

In effect, an amateur is free now to take or not to take guides in accordance with circumstances and not with tradition. If he engages them, except as a beginner, it must be on the terms of mountaineer with mountaineer and not tourist with professional. He should get to know them as human beings, make friends of them if he keeps them, and treat them with the same tact as his other friends. In addition he has to give them the increased study and supervision which primitive temperaments, unknown antecedents, probable prejudices and possible personal value to his party deserve. His reward will be to find that his guided party remains free from many of the anxieties and disappointments with which other guided and guideless parties have to put up. He will find that the modern guide, if he has little of the demigod of last-century tradition, has the potentialities of any wholesome, hill-bred human being. He will also, if he has deserved it, discover that the better a man, guide or amateur, becomes as a mountaineer, the closer he grows as a companion; until a point is reached, in the fellowship of great ascents, when the distinction altogether disappears.