True Summit by David Roberts Page B

were few and far between for the beleaguered team. They had spent most of those seven weeks trying to get to Dhaula (as the team had nicknamed the great mountain) and find a feasible route up it, only to be thwarted at every hand. “Morale is really low,” Lachenal noted as early as May 5. Terray had came back disgusted from a reconnaissance up the Dambush Khola: “Lionel’s first words were of Dhaula: ‘You can just stick it up your ass.’ ” (Needless to say, this outburst appears not in Annapurna but in Lachenal’s unexpurgated diary.) Terray went so far as to venture the opinion that Dhaulagiri would never be climbed. (The mountain finally succumbed in 1960 to a Swiss team led by Max Eiselin.)
    Impressed by his power on the trail and his ability to carry very heavy loads, the porters had nicknamed Terray “the strong man.” Throughout those seven weeks, even while ill, he had pushed the search as vigorously as any of his teammates. Now even the strong man seemed ready to throw in the towel.
    The monsoon could arrive within as little as two weeks, and the expedition had accomplished nothing grander than sorting out the errors on the Indian Survey maps. The team faced the prospectof returning to France empty-handed, without even having set foot on either of the 8,000-meter peaks that Devies had sent them off to conquer.
    W HEN T ERRAY HAD MET L ACHENAL five years before Annapurna, one of the great partnerships in mountaineering history was born. Its inception, however, was far from auspicious. During the last months of the war, in the spring of 1945, Terray was changing trains in Annecy. A “poorly dressed young man,” as Terray later recalled, came up to him, pushing a bicycle with one hand and holding a can of milk in the other, and said, “Aren’t you Lionel Terray?”
    When Lachenal offered his name, Terray realized that the two had been briefly introduced on the streets of Chamonix three years before. Then Lachenal had been wearing his Jeunesse et Montagne uniform, which made him “a rather more dashing figure” than the apparent vagabond in the train station (“The youth’s rather pitiful condition made me wonder if he was out of work”).
    Lachenal’s reputation as a climber had reached Terray’s ears. The two adjourned to a bistro for a beer. Yet at the outset of their chat, a fundamental difference in values nearly quashed any chance of friendship. Though no Gaullist, Terray was a patriot. With Germany in retreat, he had joined the underground Compagnie Stéphane, a crack outfit devoted to guerrilla warfare in the mountains. Terray would later recall, “The eight months I spent in [the company] were among the most wonderful in my whole life.” In the middle of winter, Terray and his comrades climbed technical routes in the Alps to gain aeries from which they might direct grenades and bullets against high Nazi outposts. Several of his friends were killed, and he had a number of close calls.
    Now, in the bistro, as Terray later put it, “I extolled the thrilling life we were leading on the Alpine Front.” Instead of agreeing, Lachenal “vehemently proclaimed his horror of war and of the army.” Lachenal was a pacifist, who, rather than face the compulsory labor service his country demanded, had fled to Switzerland.
    Terray left that first meeting with Lachenal with mixed feelings:“I liked his uncomplicated passion for the mountains, but his way of talking and his anti-militarism rather irritated me.”
    Terray himself, however, harbored a deep ambivalence about the war. The mountain campaigns he pursued so skillfully seemed in an important sense to corrupt his beloved climbing. Even as he prepared to fire upon a company of Germans who, unaware of the French patrol that had climbed above them, sunbathed and skied around their outpost, his feelings were torn. “After a few minutes of this cruel