The White Spider

To return to our Italian party on the Eiger, that first Wednesday of July 1937. They started up the so-called Lauper Route on the North-East Face of the Eiger, a glorious and exposed climb in the old classical style. It is a route for masters, not virtuosos. Dr. Hans Lauper and Alfred Zürcher discovered it and in 1932 they climbed it with those fine Valais guides Alexander Graven and Josef Knubel. The Lauper Route certainly offers a training-climb on the way to the North Face, but only for the best-trained and the most accomplished of climbers. Others would not be good enough to tackle it. Let no one dream of starting on the Lauper Route as a “practice climb” unless he can wield his ice-axe with the same skill and assurance as the peasant of the valley swings his scythe on the precipitous slope, so that he strikes the ice in the right rhythm and at the right angle accurately to a fraction of an inch. Even in this era of the ice-piton and the ice-hammer the true criterion of the climber on ice is his axe. It is as wrong as it is useless to try to reverse the current of development, but it is the duty of every mountaineer to learn to cut steps as efficiently as did the guides of yesterday, even with their clumsy ice-axes, whose master-craft in providing ladders of steps was such that they were for a long time able to dispense with the use of the modern crampon. When people begin to use on moderately difficult ground equipment and methods suitable for the unusually severe, it is not just a sign of extraordinary prudence, but an indication that another step in the development of technique has been surmounted. It is, of course, possible to escape from a difficult situation with inadequate and unsuitable equipment; but it is not to be recommended.

Our two Italian guides Piravano and Detassis embarked on the Lauper Route, which looms up above the small ice-field of the “Hoyisch”, or “Hohen Eis”, a sharp-crested, steep route, armoured with glassy rock-slabs and towering ice-cliffs. Their object was to get to know the mountain from every side. At first they had no intention of climbing the whole Lauper Route, but only meant to reconnoitre part of it. This was an entirely new conception in the history of the North Face. It was a notion ahead of its times, a true guide’s notion. Giuseppe and Bruno intended not only to climb the North Face, but eventually to guide tourists up it. If that proved to be too difficult, dangerous and impracticable, they meant to withdraw from the whole enterprise. Even if their attempts and experiences finally proved negative, it was a notion worth bearing in mind; for it was not merely new, it was revolutionary. It must be recalled that the company of Swiss guides was still clinging to its old tradition, admittedly a grand and fine tradition. Their attitude towards the North Face was hardly a whit different from that of the old Berchtesgaden guide—the first man to climb the East Face of the Watzmann—Johann Grill-Kederbacher, who had come to the Eiger as long ago as 1883(!) with the intention of climbing its North Face. Kederbacher’s verdict had then been: “Impossible!” Now, in 1937, the Swiss guides were still saying “Impossible!” At a time when the two Italians, Bruno and Giuseppe, had arrived to climb the North Face—with a view to guiding tourists up it….

It was on a Wednesday that they started up the Lauper Route. On the Thursday they could not be seen, the weather was too bad. Snow-slides and heavier avalanches could be seen sweeping the route. That was enough to authorise a reporter to send off a telegram in a great hurry to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “the two Italians have probably fallen”. The report went the rounds in many papers. Many know-it-alls and ignoramuses added the opinion that Piravano and Detassis had entered upon their venture without sufficient thought and inadequately equipped. Yes, they were ready to denigrate even Italy’s best ice-expert.

But what had actually been happening?

The slabs and ledges on the lower half of the route were treacherous and slippery with fresh snow. The two Italians moved slowly upwards, using every known precaution. Above the first cliff they bivouacked, at a point reached by Lauper’s extraordinarily strong and thrustful party, in unusually favourable conditions, before mid-day. On the Thursday the pair climbed on up the mighty roof of the mountain.

That was when the accident happened. A snow-slide swept Piravano, who was leading, from his footholds. Bruno, belaying his companion on an ice-piton, managed to hold him; but he could not prevent Giuseppe from seriously injuring a leg. So that superb ice-climber, unfit now to lead or even to move without support, was completely out of action. Pride and the guides’ code forbade them to call for help. A descent was impossible, for avalanche-threats and snow-covered slabs forbade a retreat. A traverse across to the Mittellegi Hut was equally out of the question. Piravano had to be continually belayed from above, so that traverses were unthinkable. Yet the rocky upper pitches of the Lauper Route would be equally impossible, because a man with such leg injuries would be unable to stand the pain. So Bruno Detassis decided to climb straight up the fearsome ice-slope, steeper than the roof of a Gothic cathedral, and bring his injured friend up on to the top part of the Mittellegi Ridge, belaying him vertically from above.

And he succeeded. It was a memorable and altruistic effort on the part of the guide from Trento. It was evening by the time they reached the Mittellegi Hut, perched like an eagle’s eyrie on the storm-swept ridge. And on Friday, July 8th the two men who had fought their way so gamely to shelter and safety, without calling for aid, were brought back safely to the valley by their Swiss colleagues, Inäbnit and Peter Kaufmann. Both expressed the greatest admiration for Bruno and Giuseppe.

Needless to say, the reaction of part of the Italian Press to the prematurely sensational reports from the Job’s comforters, already quoted, and the actual safe return of their compatriots was not exactly amiable. The national trumpet was blown fortissimo—without the assistance, or indeed the wish, of the two first-class guides from Trento and Bergamo—and a great triumph celebrated, when it was really only the sort of victory of courage and endurance one would expect of guides of that quality.

Unhappily, there were still many papers which had not sensed the great change of 1937 and were still pandering to their readers with sensational reports in the style of the previous year. And there were even professed mountaineers, shunned and despised by the fraternity, who either through a desire to show off or as mere parasites wished to cook their own little brew on the flame of public interest.

Andreas Heckmair, waiting at the foot of the Face with his friend Theo Lösch, withholding his name from all the inquisitive reporters, quietly studying the wall and its tricks—he even discovered a new line of ascent under the Rote Fluh and up by the right to the North-West Ridge, but did not publicise the variant because he thought it unimportant—this same Heckmair reported as follows on those strange lads who would have done so great a disservice to the cause of mountaineering had they not been shown up as the charlatans they were.

They told everyone, who wanted or didn’t want to know, about their Eiger intentions, climbed about on the approaches to the North Face in such an obvious way as to be an invitation to those interested to watch them, let themselves be entertained in Grindelwald, and generally gathered advance commendation wherever it was to be found. Not only we ourselves, but the Grindelwald guides were rightly infuriated by them. These Alpine crooks were attracted by the Eiger as a moth is drawn to a light. It is a relief to report that at the end of their ill-doing they received the punishment they had invited and finished up by getting the push out of Switzerland.

It can be imagined how delighted the real climbers, the quiet, serious men genuinely at work on the problem of the North Face, were when these parasitic impostors were ejected. Besides the Italians, besides the three Munich men, Wollenweber, Zimmermann and Lohner, besides Heckmair and Lösch, a number of others were either occupying the tents and hayricks or were just moving in. There was Rudi Fraissl, who had earned a great name in Viennese climbing circles by his first ascent of the North Face of the Peternschartenkopf in the Gesäuse. His rope-mate and close compatriot was Leo Brankowsky, a pleasant, helpful lad, whom all his friends called Brankerl. Leo was certainly no “Brankerl”, in the Viennese sense, no “softy”, but a tower of strength when an overhang had to be climbed or a companion held on the rope. Fraissl was a fanatical lover of freedom and an individualist who found it difficult to subordinate himself. The mountains could devise no way of encompassing his end. His craggy skull and his courageous tongue, never a respecter of authority, signalled him out for a harder death than any the mountains could have handed out to him. He died in Russia in February 1942, in the company of a number of the best climbers of the Army Mountaineering School, during an attack on which it was senseless to employ such hand-picked specialists. Rudi Fraissl protested beforehand—as if he were engaged in a trade-union meeting. He protested with all the inflexible strength of his Viennese tongue, with that very un-Viennese firmness he adopted on anything he had rightly made up his mind about. As an N.C.O. in the German army he dared to protest against his senior officer on behalf of his comrades and himself; he died, not as an N.C.O., but as a private soldier, reduced to the ranks as punishment for his crime. And he died as the leader of a roped party should.

At that time in July 1937, Fraissl and “Brankerl” were in their tent near Alpiglen; so were Liebl and Rieger; and Primas and Gollackner too, two men from Salzburg.

Just when Andreas Heckmair had pronounced it as unlikely that the weather-conditions would improve sufficiently to warrant an attempt on the Face and turned his back on it on July 15th, Ludwig Vörg and Hias Rebitsch arrived, followed a little later by Otto Eidenschink, the first to climb the West Wall of the Totenkirchl direct, and his fellow-member of the Munich Section, Möller. It was an élite of the climbing fraternity who were together at the bottom of the wall or succeeding one another down there during the summer of 1937. Heckmair left and Vörg arrived without actually meeting one another, or ever suspecting that they might be going to form a single rope resulting in a common success the following year.

And besides the “Storm Troops”, one kept on meeting members of the Voluntary Rescue Service, particularly of the Munich Section, ready to try the Face and, above all, to climb to the rescue if there was an accident. The guides of Grindelwald, too, were holding themselves in readiness, without orders or obligation—just as they had in 1936.

The large body of newspaper readers demanded to be kept continually informed of what was happening on the Eiger. “Every stroke of an axe, every tug on a rope is recorded,” remarked the Zürich paper Sport sarcastically.

Yes, the much sought-after sensation was on the way again. Not really a sensation but a tragedy; and yet not a sheer tragedy like those of recent years, but a very sad chapter in the long history of the Eiger. It started on Thursday July 15th, that same Thursday on which Ludwig Vörg, waiting for Hias Rebitsch down in Grindelwald, stood staring doubtfully up at the rain, which set in towards evening; the same Thursday, when Andreas Heckmair and Lösch went down to Grindelwald without knowing that a certain Ludwig Vörg was standing moodily at a nearby window. The Thursday on which Franz Primas and Bertl Gollackner started up the Lauper Route.

Primas was a well-known, extremely competent climber from Salzburg. He belonged to the climbing club, “Die Bergler”, formed by a number of the best Salzburg climbers. On a ski-tour in the Tennengebirge, close to their home, Primas had come to know Gollackner, hardly nineteen years old, but a good rock-climber and a plucky ski-runner full of the spirit of adventure. Secretly, without a word to anyone, these two decided to go and “have a look” at the North Face of the Eiger. It would be quite wrong to smile in a superior fashion at the mountain enthusiasm of men like these who, with empty pockets, mount their bicycles on the long pilgrimage, just to have a look at the peak of their dreams.

Primas was cautious and he also felt responsible for his youthful companion—he was perhaps lacking in that deep knowledge of the Western Alps which would have warned him to explore a mountain from every angle before tackling its most difficult side. But he was certainly not charging blindly up the North Face which, by a hideous pun, the masses had re-christened the Murder Face.1 He wanted to take a sideways look into the North Face from its eastern rim, approaching it by the Lauper Route. True, only a few days ago, the two Italians, Piravano and Detassis had only just escaped with their lives from a similar reconnaissance. But Primas and Gollackner only wanted to try the Lauper Route, that great climb thought out by the brains of the best Swiss climbers and opened up by the ice-axes of the best Swiss guides. Just the Lauper Route….

No, they had no intention of climbing the Eiger’s North-East Face; only a part of it, so that they could get their sideways look at the North Face. Just as they were starting to climb, Gollackner remembered that he had left his bag of provisions in the tent. Very annoying, but they would be back by evening, and Franz had enough along with him for both on a single day’s climb: a crust of bread and a hunk of sausage.

They started up and climbed on. Once again the mountain chose to be unkind. The conditions were even worse than those met by the Italians—avalanches, showers of stones, rushing torrents. Every foot of the climb was treacherous, slippery. Primas realised that there was no going back; a bivouac was unavoidable. A bivouac without a tent-sack—hadn’t they meant to be back by nightfall?—and without food. No, there was still some food: a smaller crust and a shorter sausage, to last till tomorrow. No, not till tomorrow, but till they got back to civilisation….

They endured a cold, wet, perilous bivouac on the precipice, and it robbed nineteen-year-old Bertl of much of his strength. But throughout the next day, another day of bad weather, Primas showed his great skill as a climber. He led up through the steep and dangerous wall; by evening both had safely reached the cornice of the Mittellegi Ridge. There they dug themselves a rough and ready cave in the snow for their second bivouac. In the night the storm rose to a blizzard. Their food ran out. The bitter cold numbed their muscles and their will-power; but next morning, Primas tried to force himself and his exhausted partner to move on again. And then something absolutely incredible happened: Primas led on upwards towards the summit of the Eiger. Surely he knew that down below, on the crest of the Ridge, there stood a hut, the Mittellegi Hut? Had he formed the opinion that a traverse of the summit was possible, a descent of the ridge impracticable?

Just below the steep step, where the fixed rope was hanging, now thickly encased in ice, Gollackner’s strength gave out. Yet another bivouac in the snow, in the storm. Primas shouted for help; Gollackner was past all shouting. But Primas did not seek his own personal safety, alone; he remained loyally by his friend’s side. His feet lost all sensation and were soon frost-bitten. His sacrifice was, however, in vain. On Sunday July 18th, their fourth day on the mountain, Bertl Gollackner, nineteen years old, died on the Mittellegi Ridge. The blizzard muffled his friend’s calls for help….

All the same, people were thinking hard about the two Salzburg climbers, even if their S.O.S. remained unheard. Though nothing could be seen of them, there were many who thought they had seen something when the cloud curtain lifted for a moment either on Saturday, or was it Friday? Somebody spread the rumour that Primas and Gollackner were climbing down. Then again, the latest news at the tents near Alpiglen was that a rescue party had left Grindelwald to search the Mittellegi Ridge and the upper part of the precipice.

But suppose they were lower down?

Matthias Rebitsch and Ludwig Vörg—whom we shall be getting to know more intimately later on—had erected their tent near Alpiglen on Sunday the 18th; but their worries about the two Salzburg climbers gave them no respite. If the guides were searching higher up, they would start a search lower down. They left their tent at about 4 a.m. on Monday the 19th accompanied at first by two friends anxious to help, Liebl and Rieger. A search of the avalanche-cones at the foot of the Lauper Wall revealed no trace of the missing men. Rebitsch and Vörg climbed on; but there was nothing to be seen on the rock-ledges further up. They then made rapid progress till brought to a halt by an overhanging step. The only way through it was up a chimney. At the moment there was a waterfall pouring down it, and there was no other way; so Rebitsch and Vörg went up it. Soaked to the skin, they searched the network of ledges in the central section of the cliff thoroughly. Here too they found no signs of Primas and Gollackner. So long as they had not fallen off, there was always hope for their survival.

Rebitsch and Vörg were the third party that July to find the Wall had sprung to dangerous life, cutting off their retreat. The warmth of the day had loosened parts of the cornice which came shooting down, endangering all below. There were avalanches, waterfalls, stones into the bargain. No, for Rebitsch and Vörg there would once again be no hope of a return to their tent at Alpiglen. For them, too, the only way of escape lay upwards.

They wanted to make a diagonal ascent across to the Mittellegi Ridge, in the neighbourhood of the Hut; but they were halted by an overhanging belt of rock such as even a Rebitsch and a Vörg could not climb in such conditions. It forced them to make a traverse, the like of which had not been seen on this face.

It was a roped traverse to the left, underneath the rock-step. A rope-traverse on rock dowsed with running water, on ice-glazed rock, on ice itself. A rope-traverse, did I say? A dozen rope-traverses. The ice crackled and creaked under the pressure of their crampons, when they leaned outwards and hauled on the rope, pushing off with their feet from the rock, trusting to the pitons they had banged in. It was nearly the end of the day. The pair had reached a steep ice-slope about 1,000 feet below the Mittellegi Hut. They could even see its roof, high up above, but where they were, there was no sheltering roof.

The two men took to their axes and hacked seats out of the ice and steps for footrests. They hadn’t a dry stitch on them, when they perched themselves on their tiny places for the bivouac. A single piton and the rope attached to it were their only protection against falling off the mountain, if one or the other fell asleep.

To a layman, or even to the average climber, such a bivouac may sound appalling and it may seem incredible that anyone could survive such an ordeal. But Matthias Rebitsch, one of the best, most experienced and toughest climbers of his day, and Ludwig Vörg, the first to climb the 7,000-foot West Face of Ushba in the Caucasus, nicknamed “the Bivouac King” by his friends, spent that night resting with a stoical calm. Next morning they climbed the steep slope to the Mittellegi Hut.

Right glad they were to reach its shelter. They found wood there and soon a fire was crackling in the tiny hearth. They were able to dry their drenched things. They took a brief rest….

But early in the afternoon some guides came in from above, bringing the utterly exhausted Franz Primas with them. They also brought the bitter news that Gollackner lay dead up there, 500 feet below the summit.

Without hesitating an instant, Rebitsch and Vörg volunteered to bring the boy’s body down next day.

Early next day they raced towards the top. There they found Gollackner. The pathetic young face looked relaxed, at peace with the world, as so often happens when death comes by freezing, for the last dreams of those who die that way are magical ones of succour, warmth and life.

Vörg said afterwards: “It was just as if he were sleeping and one had only to awaken him.” With every care not to disturb the last sleep of their young climbing-companion, they carried him down. They said nothing of the tremendous labour involved in bringing a body down the endless razor-blade of the Mittellegi Ridge.

Down below, it was not yet known that Gollackner was dead. Nor had the news filtered through of the magnificent feat of Vörg and Rebitsch, or of the Grindelwald guides, in the service of rescue and recovery; nevertheless, the Eiger was, at the moment, a red-hot source of public interest and controversy.

The following is from the Zürich paper Sport on July 19th:

What measure of psychical greatness would not the Eiger register if it were personified and given a soul. Year after year, a few ludicrous earthworms camp at the foot of its North Face, planning to force a passage with ropes and pitons. It is only necessary for a tiny icicle on the giant’s hat-rim to sneeze in order to annihilate the intruders. When one is lying in complete peace among the pasturing cattle, the sky seems stretched very high overhead and beautifully blue above the world. The Eiger’s Face glitters under its shields of ice, the echo of the falling stones rattles from wall to wall and one can enjoy the rush and rustle of the snow-slides.

Is it either good or necessary that this realm of nature’s tremendous forces should be invaded by beings which were not created as carefree mountain eagles or climbing-plants, but as human beings? The urge to achieve things cannot be used as an excuse for self-annihilation. It is easy enough to push the sporting aspect into the foreground, but Sport does not necessarily mean the ultimate in achievement. To clear one’s mind it is only necessary to recall the mens sana in corpore sano of the Ancients. The ascent of the Eiger North Face is forbidden. It is not the Administration in Berne which has pronounced the veto. It is the Eiger itself speaking with a dumb-show language no one can fail to understand. If anyone fails to comprehend its message, he must be deaf and deserves to be hauled away from the danger area exactly as one would lead a blind man off the tram-lines on to the pavement….

This article might have been controversial, though still off the target, in earlier years. In 1937 it had a reactionary air and to find it then, especially in so respected and serious a newspaper as Sport, was in some ways quite astonishing. A passive observation of nature and the passionless bliss which can be won from it is known to mountaineers as well as others; but it does not constitute their whole nature. An idyllic poem might be born of inactive observation of nature’s forces and it might bring pleasure to the reader. Among mountaineers, too, there have been and still are many sensitive, artistic men, who are as familiar with the howling of the tempest, the hammer-tattoo of the stones, as they are with cold, with steep ice-slopes and with overhanging rocks. They absorbed their awe-inspiring experiences irrespective of whether they were going to clothe them later in literary form or not. But while they were on the mountains, in difficulty and in danger, they behaved simply like ordinary men. The men who discovered the Poles or ventured into unexplored deserts and jungles or mastered the air-space high above the clouds were certainly not of the type which observes nature passively. Yet, one might just as well have said to those pioneers: “Don’t go into the Arctic or Antarctic, for you are neither polar bears nor penguins. Don’t go into the jungle or the desert, for you are neither monkeys nor lions. Don’t venture up into the air, for you will be upsetting the rhythmic balance of the silvery clouds in their silent march!”

Admittedly, man is small and insignificant in nature’s scheme; but he is part of it. And are we to think less of the man who exposes himself to nature’s forces than of him who just delights in looking at her, safe from dangers and tempests? Even those ridiculous earthworms know that an icicle can “sneeze”; but they have learned by observation when and where it happens, and will do their best to avoid the danger with that clear-eyed alertness which they owe to their own daring. They are not deaf; they too hear the mighty voice of the mountains, but they understand and interpret it in a different way from those who enjoy it so passively and with such self-satisfaction.