Resistance - True Summit - page 17

many journalists and officials present. Ballu underlines Devies's absolute tyranny over
the French climbing scene: at the moment, he was simultaneously president of the
CAF, president of the Fédération Française de la Montagne (FFM), and president of the
Groupe de Haute Montagne (GHM). Sitting at his right hand was Herzog, secretary
of the GHM.
Along with the stirring exhortations quoted by Herzog, Devies emphasized for the
press that a colossal fund-raising effort bolstered by a national subscription campaign
had raised 14 million francs ($350,000 in today's dollars) for the expedition. The im-
plication became explicit: Annapurna was a campaign of national honor.
Later, in comparative privacy, Devies announced the oath of allegiance. The silence
that greeted him owed less to the reticence of simple climbers, thought Rébuffat, than
to sheer surprise. For Rébuffat himself, and apparently for Lachenal, the demand went
beyond surprise: it was a shocking and distasteful requirement. Unquestioning obed-
ience was not characteristic of the alpinism these two Chamonix guides had perfected
over the last decade.
Against their own instincts, the men went ahead to recite the oath. They had no
choice if they wanted to go to Annapurna. It was in this context—not in bland affirm-
ation, as Herzog would have it—that Lachenal murmured (in literal translation), “On
our knees, we would go!” At once Rébuffat chorused, “With joy in our hearts!”
That these two independent-minded mountaineers thus mocked the very oath they
were forced to pledge emerges even more clearly in Rébuffat's notes. Rébuffat char-
acterized Devies as a “victoriste” (a coinage of Rébuffat's own). Of the unpleasant
charade culminating in the pledge of obedience, he jotted down: “Depersonaliza-
tion. . . . A certain Nazification.” In 1950, no epithet could have been more inflam-
matory. When Rébuffat's note was first published by Ballu, forty-six years later, the
guide's sour judgment on the expedition style of Devies and Herzog reverberated
throughout France.
G ASTON R ÉBUFFAT was born in Marseille on May 7, 1921, the son of a workaholic bank
official and an overpossessive mother. No less likely background for a great mountain-
eer could perhaps have been imagined—although that domestic conventionality may
itself have driven Gaston from the nest. From his earliest years, the boy was consumed
with wanderlust. At every chance, he set out on promenades among the limestone sea
cliffs near Marseille called the Calanques; and a visit when he was still very young to
a cousin's farmhouse in Provence imbued him with a love of nature.
At a Catholic summer camp to which his parents sent him for the school holidays,
Gaston discovered, in sports and organized hikes, the joys of comradeship. For the rest