Free Conquistadors of the Useless by Geoffrey Sutton Lionel Terray David Roberts Page B

happy and proud as I did later on reaching the most inaccessible summits in the world.
    The Montenvers camp came to an end about the end of September. My eyes still full of the splendour of the high summits, I returned after three months’ absence to the more modest hills of Beaufortain. As before, I was sent to Roseland; and as our two old troops had been merged, Rébuffat went with me. Our life during the latter months of 1941 may not have called for efforts quite as prolonged and spectacular as those we had left behind, but it was still very tough and a great deal less inspiring. There was no more daily adventure, no more unceasing comradeship or joy of victory. J.M. was building two big chalets at Roseland, each designed to hold thirty men. The work was being done throughout by the youth corps itself, under the direction of the usual leaders. There were one or two professional masons to plan the work and put the finishing touches. Despite my rank as a climbing leader I only counted as a volunteer still because my eight months were not yet up, and I was set to work as a labourer. Well-directed and organised the work could have gone ahead in a happy atmosphere of creativeness, but unfortunately the prevailing climate was as morose and degrading as that of a prison.
    We were heaped together twelve to an ordinary-sized room, and to say nothing of the discomfort or the difficulty of breathing in an atmosphere like a rabbit-hutch, any privacy was out of the question. The food was almost exclusively composed of bread and overripe boiled vegetables. On twenty-year-olds working eleven hours a day at nearly six thousand feet in temperatures often below zero, the effect of this diet was to induce a state of semicoma suitable neither to good feeling nor good workmanship. Worse still, the huge quantities of vegetable matter we absorbed had a highly irritant effect, so that it was usual to have to get up four, five, and even six times a night.
    The dining room consisted of an old barn. Through the gaps in its walls the wind blew gaily, and during those autumn months it froze hard inside. The barn was in any case half a mile from where we slept and over a mile from where we worked, so that every day we were forced to walk six miles or more simply in order to eat and get to our work. Given the excellent spirit which prevailed in the J.M. we would no doubt have accepted this brute existence in good part if only the work had been productive and properly organised. But we were short of tools, and the actual materials arrived at irregular intervals and in no order of priority, so that we would often be kept waiting for hours in an icy wind, only to have to work subsequently at a positively Stakhanovite pace.
    In such conditions the great goodwill which animated almost all of us quickly disappeared. Everyone tried to get away with the minimum amount of work, and the universal motto was ‘get out quick’. As almost always happens among men when conditions get too close to the survival mark, selfishness became pronounced, and the fine ideal of fraternity gave place to the law of the jungle, in which intrigue and mutual accusation flourished. I suppose that the terrible conditions in which the whole country lived at that time excuse a good part of this muddle, but how in that case can it be accounted for that in other J.M. centres the morale remained high, the food adequate, and the work productive? The responsibility must rest above all with the commandant of works, an arrogant, selfish brute, unfit to command. He took his sadism to the length of getting us up before dawn to do P.T. in the snow, clad only in shorts, while he directed us from his window, warmly clad in a fur-lined anorak. I remember that one day he made us roll around in eight inches of fresh snow. My rage was such that for the only time in my life I felt the urge to kill.
    After three more months of this kind of existence I came to the end of my statutory time in