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.
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.
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.