MOUNTAIN CRAFT
CHAPTER I
MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP
A party consists usually of from two to four climbers, exclusive of guides. A larger number inevitably divides into two or more units for mountaineering purposes. The management devolves upon the most experienced mountaineer. His selection as leader, in this sense, is more often than not tacit and unexpressed, especially among British climbers.
Over-management is fatal to the effective co-operation of a party; and a formal selection of a leader[1], or a precise insistence upon the performance of particular duties by individual members, may only disturb the pleasant relationship of friends on a climbing holiday. If a man is not felt to be qualified as leader by personality and experience, no vote will make him so.
Large or democratic parties, of equal inexperience, can carry out very delightful sub-alpine wanderings without leadership. If they attempt serious mountaineering, it is usually at the cost to their friends of sleepless nights and of expensive search parties.
Among men of equal experience, equally able to grasp a situation and to co-operate without words of command, the duties of leadership are slight and their operation never obtrusive. Experience teaches them to accept, as a matter of convenience, the management of their daily routine by some one of their number, and to acknowledge, as a matter of security and of economy of time, the leadership of the most expert in the incidents of the climbing day. In a pursuit so exacting as mountaineering, charged with the unexpected and dependent upon continuous harmony of action for its ordinary progress, some such voluntary subordination is essential. The leader may be only the focus of the collective opinion of an experienced party: like the conductor of an orchestra he may not be equally competent to play all the instruments he directs; but if there is no one to whom to look for the word, in mountaineering as in music the time is lost and the harmony vanishes for easy and for difficult passages alike.
In parties of unequal experience the leader’s responsibility is greater, and his direction has to be the more formally and unquestioningly accepted. A child has to learn to take his elders’ ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as final in the crisis of some new experience: there is often no time to give him reasons, and his experience would be insufficient to enable him to convert them into the immediate action required. But it is more difficult for a man, possibly with a brilliant record behind him upon British rocks, to accept a decision unquestioningly, especially if he has been accustomed in moments of crisis to depend upon his own skill or judgment. To delay, however, or to argue is as fatal as to disobey. The leader may be wrong, but his error will probably be on the side of over-caution, since he will be consciously directing for a party that has not yet learned to work together. To prove him wrong, by the successful issue of our disobedience or disagreement, is as destructive of the future harmony and activity of the party as to prove him right, by its ill-success, may be to the actual safety of the party at the moment. A good-tempered party of beginners, with a mild leader, may continue to climb together on these undefined terms, but there will be hesitation and consultation where there should be decisive action; it will never grow fit for any serious expedition. A leader of greater experience or shorter temper will clear matters up at once. He will know that though his judgment may not be infallible, the fact that it may be questioned at a moment of crisis must be dangerous. A mountaineering party has to establish a habit of friendly discipline. Most young men when first taken out to the Alps have had experience of this discipline in other pursuits; but in moments of excitement the national spirit of independence, or the instinct of self-preservation, is apt to assert itself, and these moments, if they occur before the party is welded into a climbing unit, may be fatal to its constitution. A wise leader will insist on a reasonable discipline or suggest a dissolution as the lesser evil.
If it is the duty of the young mountaineer to learn to accept a constitutional authority for the good of his party, it is that of the leader or manager to see that it is used only for the good of the party, and to make it personally the less obvious, the more it grows to be accepted in understanding.
An early alpine tradition, historically traceable to the isolated and responsible position of the first guideless parties, who had to face the dangers of the mountains, still unfamiliar, and the army of their hostile critics as if going forth against an enemy, made the leader an absolute autocrat, the commander of a forlorn hope. Many leaders of this type were frankly bullies, ordering their friends for their good like old-time schoolmasters. Occasionally, when one man was marked out by experience or personality, the results were effective in climbing. But the tyranny would not now be considered tolerable, and under modern conditions it would constitute bad leadership. Knowledge of the craft is far more widely spread, and the climbing attempted is of a standard that demands an equal share of responsible work from us all. It is now recognized that the strength of a party lies in its collective capacity, not in its leader as one outstanding exponent. But the tradition still survives, and some oppressed parties will still awaken in the casual climber a wonder at the large amount of hectoring they will endure from their leader compared with the little which his methods enable them to achieve.