Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
not idiotic ones. Several heartfelt words in the right tone, not the ritual phrases of con-
solation.”
On July 1, with the return of a courier, Lachenal was overjoyed to receive several
letters from Adèle. Yet reading them filled him with a deep melancholy at the thought
that his house in Chamonix, in July, “would be all beautiful (flowers, grass), waiting
for me, and that I would return terribly deformed.”
On July 2, Oudot performed his first amputations. The penicillin had reduced the
men's septicemia, but many digits were clearly unsalvageable. On a meadow beside the
river, Oudot first went to work on Herzog. Lachenal says that four of Herzog's toes,
including both big toes, were the first to go; Herzog's own account has a little finger
cut off first. “This gave me rather a twinge,” writes Herzog in
Annapurna,
with a kind
of gallows humor. “A little finger may not be much use, but all the same I was attached
to it!” According to Herzog, the operation was performed without anaesthetic (why, if
Oudot had novocaine?).
Then it was Lachenal's turn. As Oudot snipped away with his scissors, “I cried like
a baby and howled. Ichac and Lionel held my foot.” Later that night, however, “calmed
by morphine, I spent an excellent evening with Pansy with a pack of Gauloises and a
bottle of cognac.”
By now, the halting caravan of Annapurna survivors had spent a full month on the
march out. Wrote Herzog, “The expedition had turned into a limp and anemic body
straggling without much spirit on a course the reason for which escaped us. We were
buoyed up by a single wish: to get to India as quickly as possible.” As always, Lachen-
al was beside himself with impatience. “What a lot of time we're wasting!” Herzog
quotes him as complaining toward the end of the long march.
“We'll have to be patient, Biscante; things aren't always easy.”
Finally, on July 6, three trucks that Noyelle had gone ahead to arrange arrived at the
men's camp. After the wounded had been loaded aboard, the trucks drove them to the
railway terminus at Nautanwa. From there, the train would speed the men to Delhi.
Yet on the first leg of that journey, in 113 degree heat inside the railway car, Oudot
performed a last set of amputations. After Lachenal had removed his own dressings,
the doctor waited for the brief halts of the train at successive stations, then quickly cut
away with his scissors. “At the station before Gorakhpur,” wrote Lachenal laconically,
“two toes fell from my right foot. At the stop at Gorakhpur, three more from the right
foot.”
In his sweaty haste, Oudot dropped his smaller pair of scissors down the window
slot. Cutting with the larger pair, he sliced into living flesh. Lachenal screamed and
