Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (9 page)

The urge to experiment was in Pugh’s nature. He had been an insatiably curious child, consumed by what Emmanuel Kant described as “the restless need to make sense of things,” but in his most formative years he had lacked anyone to help him find answers to his many questions, and he often had to rely on his own resources.

In 1914, at the age of four, he had been left for five years isolated with his three-year-old sister on a Welsh country estate in the care of a nanny. During that time he had no formal schooling, practically no discipline, and little contact with the outside world, and he spent most of his time playing outside in almost complete freedom. It was then, in his hungry search for knowledge, that Pugh was first stimulated to conduct homespun experiments. The instinct to try to get to the root of a problem by creating his own experiments remained with him for the rest of his life.

Later, as a medical student at Oxford, Pugh attended some classes on experimental physiology given by Professor Claude Gordon Douglas, a close friend and colleague of J. S. Haldane, the eminent scientist of the so-called “Oxford School” of physiology.
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Haldane invented one of the most important tools in the applied physiologist’s armory—the Haldane gas analyzer, used for measuring the proportions of oxygen and carbon dioxide in samples of breath. Douglas invented the Douglas bag, a rubberized canvas bag (later plastic) in which exhaled breath could be collected for analysis. Gas analyzers and Douglas bags were to become Pugh’s trusty companions throughout his career. Douglas was semiretired when he taught Pugh, but earlier in his career he had taken part in what is generally accepted to have been the first major
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high-altitude expedition, to Tenerife in 1910.
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In Switzerland Pugh began doing physiological experiments on his fellow guests at Haldengütli, subjecting them to all kinds of tests when they arrived and again a week later, to measure the changes in their fitness and acclimatization. Their ski trips were interrupted for sessions of breath-holding and pulse-taking. The same urge to experiment took hold of Pugh as soon as he arrived at Cedars.

When, just six weeks after Pugh’s arrival, Middle East High Command ordered Cedars to start carrying out detailed research, Pugh found himself ahead of their game plan. GHQ was concerned that the British Army lacked any understanding of how to select, train, or equip troops for mountain warfare, and knew even less about efficient troop mobility in mountainous terrain. There was a complete dearth of army manuals on these subjects. Therefore, a “most important” directive emanated from Cairo, ordering that in addition to teaching soldiers to ski, the ski wing must now also start to train them to “act as long-range mountain patrols.” They wanted research into all aspects of “fighting in the snow,” including “equipment and the maintenance of the human body in fighting trim in such conditions.” The experience was to be used “to formulate a doctrine for the training of troops in this kind of warfare.”
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At this point, Pugh must have seemed a godsend to Riddell and Head. He was given full responsibility for the physiological research and the training of the long-range patrols. Ten days later he wrote to his wife:

I am handling all the advanced training as well as the medical scheme for finding out the best way of picking men for this kind of work . . . Everything has to be built up from the beginning & all the equipment worked out. It is all tremendously interesting & already results are beginning to show themselves. Being a doctor is a great help in finding the best training methods.
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Pugh’s career in physiology took off at that moment. He had an almost unlimited supply of experimental subjects, about 60 miles of varied terrain at between 4,600 and 9,800 feet, a wide variety of weather conditions, and the freedom and authority to research whatever he wanted. He responded by throwing himself, with huge energy, into the study of almost every aspect of “man in the mountain environment.”

He read up on physiology, statistical methods, and theories on experimental design from textbooks obtained from the American Library in Beirut, which also gave him access to the limited academic papers that had been written on topics like adaptation to altitude, the physiology of exercise, and the effects of cold stress on physical performance. He had to be extremely adaptable, devising his own experiments with hardly any specialist equipment.

Pugh was given a free hand to form his own commando unit of elite “guinea pigs” who served as subjects for many of his experiments. He claimed they needed at least three months’ fitness training to prepare them for his grueling six- to eight-day, long-range patrols. The patrols—designed to be entirely self-sufficient—covered as many as 120 miles on skis and climbed around 22,000 vertical feet, carrying loads of around 55 pounds, containing all their food and equipment.

“I love these long-range patrols,” Pugh wrote home to his wife, “particularly the ones that end up by the sea.”
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Nothing escaped his eye. He tested the army ski suits, originally designed for troops in the Arctic, and pronounced them “quite unsuitable” for the mountains of southern Europe. He designed an experimental suit made of a lightweight double-layered fabric, incorporating practical details such as air vents in the trousers to keep sweating to a minimum (previous solutions had been “opening fly buttons and rolling up trousers”). Deeming the ski boots equally unsuitable, he designed a flexible boot specifically for ski-mountaineering. He studied load-carrying and worked out how much weight mountain troops could carry without becoming exhausted or compromising their speed. He modified the rucksacks to distribute the weight more efficiently. He researched dietary requirements and devised ration scales for mountain exercises, applying the principle that men taking strenuous exercise at altitude tend to have faddish appetites and will not eat if they do not like the food. In addition to providing adequate nutrition, the rations had to suit individual tastes.

He examined fluid intakes and concluded that while on patrol, his commandos needed to drink approximately eight pints of water a day. The Primus stoves took an extremely long time to melt water from snow, so he designed a more efficient stove which the army adopted.
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He modified the ski bindings to make them safer. The army’s tents were heavy and inefficient, so he designed a lightweight, double-skinned tent for long-range patrols. He worked out how to construct snow holes and igloos in the unusually powdery Lebanese snow, and occasionally chose to sleep in his own snow hole rather than in a tent. He also made recommendations about safety, hygiene, navigation, snow craft, and survival in extreme conditions.

Jimmie Riddell wrote that Pugh became the “ambient, free-ranging central pivot around which this physically arduous school revolved. . . . Every man-jack whose path he crossed came to regard him both with respect and admiration—affection even—and yet with no little apprehension for whatever tests he next might have in mind! Everyone knew full well he never would ask for any effort he was not always ready to undertake himself . . .”
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Pugh’s own letters home radiated a sense of comradeship and belonging:

I am afraid I am getting awfully bad at writing. We have such a busy time and I have a lot of lecturing & writing to do in the evenings. I should really give up my game of chess after dinner & write letters instead, but the Colonel won’t hear of it. It is such fun sitting in his room playing chess with the door leading to Jimmie’s room open & the sound of the wireless coming through. One can always hear good music here, usually from Italian or German stations. Chess & skiing make a good combination. Do you remember Lotto & me playing almost every evening at Haldengütli?
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At the end of Pugh’s first season, Head and Riddell were summoned back to London to report to an elite army committee headed by General Sir Alexander Hood and General Godwin-Austen.
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Much of their report had been written by Pugh.
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It was extremely well received, and Riddell and Head both spoke so highly of Pugh that he too was summoned to the War Office.
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His moment of glory was delayed, however, because in July 1943 he was recalled by the Royal Army Medical Corps and sent to take part in the Allied invasion of Sicily.
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Genuinely pleased to be in the thick of battle at last, he tried to explain how he felt to his wife by quoting Ernest Hemingway: “War is the most exciting as well as the most terrible thing men can do to one another.”
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He never spoke much about the experience afterward, except to say that he had “seen and felt an awful lot,” and that the survival rate for men in his regiment was only six weeks. “I was very lucky I came out of there without a scratch.”

The Sicilian Campaign ended successfully in mid-August, and in September Pugh went to London. The War Office Committee on Mountain Warfare was sufficiently impressed to send him back to Cedars to carry out an expanded program of research for a new British manual of mountain warfare. He was promoted to the rank of “acting major,” and given the title of Military Physiologist to the Mountain Warfare Training Unit.

He was excited but not a little apprehensive. In November, after meeting up with Riddell on his way back to Cedars, he wrote to his wife: “Jimmie & I have just had dinner in the officers’ club [in Tripoli] over a bottle of Champagne. We drank to our new experience. I am secretly rather overawed by the importance that is being attached to [the work], & I hope I shall do justice to my share of it.”
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Now considerably larger, the school inevitably became “much more military and formal, though not in an unpleasant way.” Riddell was still chief instructor, but Bunny Nugent Head had been sent to America to liaise with the military authorities there, and was “missed dreadfully.” Pugh was left alone to get on with his work.

As the expert on “selection,” he often went down to Cairo to vet whole regiments of men and select candidates for training. His view of the mental qualities required in mountain-warfare troops was strikingly close to the manly ideals cherished by the Everest pioneers: “Mental qualities are at least as important as physical . . . The chief required qualities are intelligence, willpower, courage, adaptability, and enterprise.”
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One particular group of trainees stood head and shoulders above all the others—the Gurkhas, born and raised in the Nepalese mountains: “Their courage, their good disposition and discipline, their intense determination and pride in achievement and their remarkable powers of endurance render them splendid material for mountaineer troops.”
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The Gurkhas achieved a 75 percent success rate in the training course compared with only half of the men selected from lowland countries. New Zealand and Australian soldiers also achieved good results, but for Pugh the worst were British soldiers, whose physical condition often shocked him. After one selection mission he commented: “This morning I examined two hundred soldiers, many from Glasgow. Poor undernourished bodies, twisted feet, crooked legs, cross eyes. Men from the slums who never had a chance when they were young . . .”
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Colonel Head, meanwhile, did the rounds of American institutions, undertaking similar research to Pugh’s, such as the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, of which the highly respected physiologist Bruce Dill was the unofficial director.
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Many of Pugh’s ideas were incorporated into the design of clothing and equipment for American mountain troops, and, from Dill, Pugh received a flattering offer of “a job at Harvard as soon as I am free.”

“I am amazed,” he wrote, “at the effects of those hundred pages of typescript written in a hurry last spring in the mountains.”
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At the end of the 1944 winter season, Cedars was closed down and the school and most of its staff transferred to Canada. Jimmie Riddell and several influential figures, including Dr. E. Arnold Carmichael of the Medical Research Council in London, tried to persuade the Royal Army Medical Corps to send Pugh to Canada, too, but the RAMC refused. From Canada Riddell wrote to Pugh, saying that his new commander was “all steamed up about it.”
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Carmichael thought that the RAMC’s refusal was “beyond understanding,” and when the highly respected head of the Medical Research Council, Sir Edward Mellanby, tried to intervene, the RAMC still refused.
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There seemed no chance of Pugh being allowed to go to Harvard either. Pugh’s past was catching up with him. As far as the RAMC was concerned, he had a blemished record. Used to making his own decisions from an early age, he had, at times, had difficulty in obeying orders if he didn’t accept the reasoning behind them. On one occasion it had gotten him into serious trouble.

Hitler had invaded Greece on April 6, 1941, and the situation in the hospital camp at Kephissia, where Pugh was stationed, changed radically.
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All the existing patients and most of the senior medical staff were evacuated, leaving behind just a handful of junior doctors. It was clear that Athens would soon be captured. Allied soldiers wounded in rear guard actions were being evacuated out of Greece rather than sent to Kephissia, leaving the doctors with no patients, but with the certain prospect, as noncombatants, of being taken as prisoners of war.

On the night before the German Army overran the hospital, Pugh took it upon himself to escape. He had convinced himself that he could be of more use to his country as a doctor on the front lines than as a prisoner of war. Several of his colleagues agreed with him but did not feel able to leave without formal orders. Pugh had prepared himself in advance with supplies of bully beef and chocolate and a suit of civilian clothes. Ready to live rough until he found a means of getting out of Greece, he eventually secured a place on an evacuation ship headed for Crete, which was also invaded shortly after he arrived there. He got out of Crete in the nick of time on another evacuation ship that was bombed by the Germans, and finished up in Cairo about two weeks later.