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.
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.
On the Mountain.