Free The Ice Soldier by Paul Watkins

small forest called the Erikawald. There, in August, dozens of camps would spring up and the woods would echo with the sounds of every language in Europe. We were students, most of us, and in a shingle-roofed shrine to the Virgin Mary, erected at a crossroads in the wood, abandoned textbooks from the universities of Freiburg, Oslo, Warsaw, Paris, and Verona lay stacked. They were used either for reading material on rainy days or for starting fires, depending on the quality of the book.
    It was here that we heard stories of more distant mountain ranges. The Rockies, Patagonia, the Himalayas. Our nights were filled with plans for future expeditions.
    Back at Oxford, with finances a continuing problem, I made a wise switch from selling blood to writing about our expeditions in the View, the Climber’s Gazette, and other Alpine
journals. The publications didn’t pay much, but with the articles we began to establish ourselves as a mountaineering team worthy of following in the footsteps of earlier climbers, as well as their guides; men like Emil Boss, Melchior Anderegg, and Jean-Baptiste Aymond, whose names were almost too sacred to be spoken aloud.
    We became known as the Lucky Six, after the old dice roller’s expression. This was because of the way we seemed, to others, to be gambling with our lives. But it was also because of the way that our luck was holding out, since we had never suffered any mishap. This luck we did not take for granted. In the summer of 1938, climbers were dying at a rate of two a week on the slopes around Chamonix.
    Our good fortune came to an end when war broke out in September of 1939. By January of the following year, I and the rest of the Lucky Six had been called up.
    We went our separate ways.
    Whistler and Sugden went into the navy, Forbes joined the merchant marine, and Armstrong became a sniper in the army. Stanley, engaged in his “vital war service,” went into his father’s Bully Beef factory. Having authored several articles on mountaineering, I was appointed as a climbing instructor for the Royal Marines at the Achnacarry barracks in Scotland. Achnacarry was used mostly for the training of commandos, and later for American Rangers. There, I lived a spartan but relatively safe existence until August of 1944, when I was asked by the commanding officer at Achnacarry to assemble a handful of men skilled in mountaineering for an unspecified task in Europe.
    The commanding officer’s name was Sholto Lindsay. He had cavernously dark eyes, spiky gray hair, and usually wore a kilt, both on and off duty. Lindsay owned the land on which the
Achnacarry base had been built. In exchange for the use of the land, the army had put him in charge of running the base, a task he performed with humorless efficiency.
    On the day he asked me to assemble the team, Lindsay and I were out on the training ground beside a twenty-foot-tall wooden fence, off which soldiers were jumping into a pit of mud. The point of this exercise was that they should emerge from their fall with their rifles ready to shoot. We lost at least one man a week during training on this fence, from broken legs, dislocated hips, and damaged spines. Several had refused to jump at all. When this happened, their lockers were cleaned out and their mattresses rolled up and tied to the squeaky black frames of their beds. They were sent away and their names were not mentioned again. They were not pitied or envied. They simply vanished, as if they had never existed.
    We stood beside the mud pit, and as each soldier landed, a wall of cold slime sprayed across our uniforms.
    â€œYou can take a week to sort out a list,” said Lindsay. Oblivious to the dirt that spackled his face and clothes, he puffed on a small-bowled pipe, speaking to me with the pipe stem gripped between his teeth.
    â€œI don’t need a week, sir,” I replied. “I can give can you the names right now.”
    He cocked an eyebrow at me. The