After the ‘fall’ of a man from above or on our level, or after the few inches of downward movement, more properly termed a ‘decline,’ which are all that a well-managed rope will permit to a man below us, it is better to lower the man down to a good stance, rather than yield to a universal inclination and attempt to haul him up over the ground he has lost before he has recovered wind and nerve. It means less effort for both.
The Case of the End Men.
A leader, or a last man down, does not fall. It is the first condition of his hegemony that he must not. His fall from any height must mean injury to himself, and may involve the whole party. In insular climbing, where distances to hotels and rescue are small and easy descents usually available, a man may, if he desires it, and his second man allows it, take the chance of falling and hurting himself, provided that his party is safely anchored. His injury then only involves certain hours of delay and dangerous exposure for himself, and such anxiety and fatigue to his friends as they may suffer in finding help and in rescuing him. But in the Alps, to fall as a leader is to fail lamentably and egregiously as a mountaineer. To fall, get injured and survive in the Alps is more actually dangerous to the rest of the party than to get killed. Its members must separate. One at least must risk exposure and other objective dangers and stay with the injured man. One, or two, if happily there are four in the party, must face the peril of descent alone, probably late in the day, certainly shaken by the accident, to seek help. The risks and difficulties of mountaineering are increased tenfold for a lonely man, or for a party returning thus shorthanded and unbalanced. More than once the partial incapacitation of one climber has resulted in the death of one of the friends who went to get help for him.
In big mountains we may not take chances, not even the youngest of us. Rock climbers who have learned how to take their risks only for themselves on our own hills, with open eyes and in no rash spirit, and think to take them also only for themselves when they go to the Alps, are all too commonly blind to their very different conditions and the far graver collective effects of an individual blunder. An injured man in the Alps means a crippled party. Those uninjured are handicapped in time, combination and nerve to meet the consequent race with darkness or the chances of night, and frost, and crevasse, and avalanche; but they are forced to take these risks in double measure, at double pace, and with reduced strength, disregarding most of the usual precautions on their own account, if they are to give their injured companion a chance of timely rescue.
The Measure of Courage.
A leader or a last man in the Alps absolutely must not fall. We may accept the fact that daring leaders will take risks, and that accidents can happen, provided every leader is aware of the distinction between the risks which no man may allow himself to take for his party even with their consent, and the risks which he may take for himself alone, but which his friends will be ill-advised if they allow him to incur.
We cannot but be grateful for the spirit, though it is but human to criticize the action, of men who find joy in a contest with forces greater than themselves. Too often the profitable by-products of successful courage are alone admitted as justifications for the spirit in which adventure is undertaken. Deaths above the clouds or under the water are taken as heroic incidents, excusable in the interests of human progress. Deaths upon rock or under snow, inspired by the like and often by an even more disinterested spirit of adventure, are condemned as folly. Mountaineering must be judged by a spiritual, not a utilitarian, standard. Courage, moral and physical, that has its source in vigorous vitality and its goal in the extension of human freedom, finds on the hills its hardiest school. It is a very wholesome emulation that leads men, as their skill and power increase, to measure them against ever-increasing natural difficulties. Our competition with the mountains injures no other human competitor by our success. Our conquest of them ends only in the conquest of ourselves. During these last years by none has the sacrifice been made more willingly than by our younger climbers. Their courage was that of the races from which they sprang: to mountaineering they owed its discovery and its training. We may not reproach it to the hills if the self-reliance they teach leads, here or there, some high heart into danger, before their harder lesson, of experience, has been learned.
And having said this, I must repeat that a leader in the Alps or big ranges, before he takes a chance, must make certain that the risk will be confined to himself, supposing such certainty can ever be attained. When he has made as certain of this as he can—he must not fall!
The Second Man’s Action.
But still, miscalculation is possible and accidents may occur. A hold may have broken, and an end man, leading or last, has fallen. In the case of a fall, the second man’s duty is to the party, and only in so far as the greater includes the less, to the leader. The leader has endangered the safety of the whole rope, which lay in his hands, by risking a fall; the duty devolves upon the second man to counteract the further consequences and to take up the leader’s duty to the collective security of the rope. No leader who deserves the position will have fallen on any but difficult rock, where the party are moving singly and where they are properly secured. His second man will therefore have him either well belayed, or be in a position calculated to meet the chance of his fall. On steep upward or downward climbing he will rarely be able to pull in much of the rope as it rushes past. If he is alone on the stance, he cannot take the chance, as a man often can on a traverse where he is well backed up, of doing anything that will risk the final jerk catching him unprepared. If he, too, falls, it is seldom that others of the party can arrest the twofold fall. His corrective action is practically confined to doing all he can to spring the rope, with arm, hand or body, so as to lessen the chance of its snapping.