Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest

By Wade Davis

A magnificent work of history, biography and adventure.

If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expedtions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly died of disease at the Front, one was hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead.

In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: "The price of life is death." Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but "a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day." As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much of it that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive.

For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky, a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307401854

Reviews for Into the Silence

[breic-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It starts very slow, so much so that I gave up reading. There's far too much about World War I, but very little new information. But once it gets to Mallory's Everest expeditions, it becomes a page turner. There's probably still too much detail. But I had fun reading about their planning, tenacity, about the mistakes they made and how they tried to adjust to them. I also learned a little about the modern history of Tibet. > With such a ratio of suffering, it is not surprising that the British generals had come by 1914 to view war as something glorious. Their military strategy, successful in countless colonial encounters, was distilled in two short lines of Victorian verse, poet Hilaire Belloc’s famous ditty: "Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun and they have not." By the time Younghusband saw the glittering roof of the Potala Palace and passed with his soldiers through the West Gate of the holy city, more than twenty-six hundred Tibetans had been killed, against British losses in all ranks of just forty dead. … The Younghusband invasion had crushed the Tibetan army and left the nation defenseless even as it provoked the wrath of the Chinese and challenged them to exert their influence in a distant land they had long been content to ignore. The subsequent diplomatic betrayal of Tibet not only opened the door to Chinese aggression, it virtually obliged Peking to act.> "My generation grew up with a disgust for the appearances of civilization so intense that it was an ever present spiritual discomfort, a sort of malaise that made us positively unhappy. It wasn't that we simply criticized evils as we saw them and supported movements of reform; we felt such an overwhelming sense of incalculable evil that we were helplessly unhappy." Mallory

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a hard book to review because of the mix of good and bad. Davis spent ten years writing and a lifetime reading, the amount of research is epic, it's probably the definitive book on the first three Everest expeditions 1921-24, no small thing considering the many other books. Yet most of the book is background and logistics with not much time on the mountain by comparison. We learn about the history of the people involved (dozens), history of Tibet, history of WWI, trips to India, trips to Tibet, trips across Tibet, trips back from Tibet. It is highly researched and often boring by nature since so much happens that is banal. The famous 1924 expedition in which Mallory dies is well told but accounts for only about 50 of 576 pages, or less than 10% of the book. On the other hand there are parts that are really interesting, such as the WWI biographies, and Davis' central theme that the wars silent but ever present influence on the expedition ultimately decided its fate.The annotated bibliography is equally epic, nearly 50 pages long of recommendations for further reading, it's an impressive Everest Geek-fest, probably the best bibliography of its type and worth owning for alone. I'm not sure who to recommend this book to, certainly anyone who has been to Everest, or with an interest in Himalayan climbing history. If your looking for an introduction to Mallory or a gripping mountain adventure book, it may be a long hard climb.

[yukon92 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very interesting background information on the "original" climbers of Mt. Everest. Was at times a bit confusing with all the names, especially of the locations in Tibet and India, but still very good.One other thing..... this book is LONG!

[vivienner_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A magnificent, exhaustive and well-researched chronicle of the three British Everest expeditions of the 1920s. Davis sets the era and tone of post-war sensibilities by devoting a sizeable portion - about the first third of the book - to the Great War and how the climbers came through it. Mallory and the other personages don't even enter the picture until after that, and actual climbing is still a long way off. The person I most admired was Australian George Finch who, against great opposition for his science as well as his colonial origins, introduced the use of oxygen in the second and third climbs. Tibet is not regarded kindly by the climbers, but then snobbery, racism, and the class system was rife, even among the members of the buttoned-down Royal Geographical Society and Alpine Club. The 1924 attempt ended disastrously when George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared on the final climb to, or from, the summit. Mallory's badly injured body was found in 1999 still roped to Irvine until the fall broke the rope. After all their effort, I like to think they made it to the summit but that will never be known. This is an excellent book if the reader is prepared for an major undertaking and wants all the nitty gritty details of each climb, climber, the politics of the times and of the associations involved. (For example, now I know the difference between Mummery and Whymper tents.) If you just want to read about the life of Mallory and his experience on Everest, then Jeffrey Archer's Paths of Glory, a fictional work that is nevertheless accurate, would be a better choice.

[schmerguls · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

5567. Into the Silence The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, by Wade Davis (read 9 Jul 2018) Back in 1948,when I was 19 years old, I read Kingdom of Adventure: Everest, by James Ramsey Ullman, and became greatly interested in mountain climbing. When I heard of ths book,published in 2011, I remembered the fascination which my 1948 reading aroused in me and decided to read this book. It tells of the British expeditions in 1921, 1922, and 1924 to seek to reach the top of Mount Everest. It also explores the experiences of the men in the parties during the Great War, and explores the horrors of the Somme and other British slaughters endured in the War. The accounts of the War experiences are of course horrific. I found the account of the 1921 effort to scale Everest too detailed. The accounts of the 1922 and 1924 attempts i found more absorbing. But the attraction of 1948 did not quite get matched in my reading of this book. I had not raalized that Mallory's body was found in 1999, so that was news for me. This book is probably the definitive work on the British efforts to scale Everest in the 1920-s.

[stevage_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow. A simply stunning work. Meticulously researched, beautifully written, this epic tome takes a step back from merely reporting on Mallory's exploits to include how early explorations of Nepal and Tibet, and the First World War led to them. It works. The threads come together, and you're left with a rich, coherent picture of both the culture of the Raj and the post-war Britain. The feats of the British were superhuman, even as they made terrible lapses of judgment in rejecting excellent climbers from their expeditions for questions of class or morality.It took a little while to get into, but once I was in, I thoroughly enjoyed returning again and again to this grand opera of snow, ice and weary marches through the valleys of Tibet.

[trundlebear-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fortunate enough to read an advance copy of this -- like many people I got started on mountaineering books with Into Thin Air and haven't put them down since. This gives not only an excellent history of Mallory and Everest, but a fascinating and well-researched look at the period that shaped him and the forces that drove him.

Other books I've read have described the history of Everest and the first attempts to summit (at least, from the perspective of the West), but never in such detail or so thoroughly fleshed out as this.

[pcorrigan_18 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The summit of historical literature. Suffice to say 5 stars without any reservations. Read it slowly and appreciate the immensity of the research job performed by Wade Davis. He could have written an excellent book just about the expeditions without all the rich and detailed biographical, historical and cultural background but it was an immeasurably greater book for having done so (the bibliography and notes are simply outstanding). There may be mountaineering books written in a more scintillating fashion but this was far more. It was an extraordinary and moving paean to a time and place in history, nature itself, and some remarkable people who survived the worst cataclysm imaginable, then lived or died on terms that most would not choose but they did.

[kokipy_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book was a marvel. Although it covers ground in some ways well trod already, the depth and detail of the meticulous research into all aspects of the events of the three British attempts to climb Mt. Everest shed full light on the people involved, their motives, their characters and their actions. Showing the climbers' experiences in the Great War before describing their struggles in Tibet helps understand the driving need they all seemed to feel. I particularly appreciated the author's keen understanding of Tibetan spirituality and ethos, and his ability to see how far the British, for the most part, were from having any comprehension of the people they lived among and worked with while in the mountains on their great quest. This was a book I did not want to end, and it has fueled much additional curiosity in me about the people, the events and the place. Sadly it appears much of the primary source material is not available.

[michaelbartley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book. a wonderful history of not only the first attempts to climb Everest, but also a history of ww 1, of Tibet. The men that attempt to climb Everest were cultural, intelligent, and driven.

[kvrfan9 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This will likely stand as the definitive account of the first expeditions to attain the summit of Mt. Everest--attempts which finally culminated in the deaths of renowned mountaineer George Mallory and his climbing partner Sandy Irvine. A reader could hardly ask for more detail. In fact, the book bogs down a bit in the middle, as in reporting the first expedition (which was essentially a scouting/mapping expedition of unknown territory) there is so much geographic detail I felt I needed a topo map beside me to track what was going on.

What's especially helpful is how the author puts the obsession with Everest in context. Coming out of World War I, Britain was devastated, having lost of generation of the "best and brightest" of its young men. It's confidence was shaken, its sense of Empire severely shaken. Not only did the nation itself seek a purpose--symbolized by conquering the highest peak in the world--but the mountaineers themselves, having experienced the horror of the trenches, were driven to find a new meaning in life. When the organizers of the Everest expeditions then employed some of the same propagandists that had stoked British bloodlust during the war to promote the need to conquer the summit, enthusiasm among the general populace was then built into a frenzy.

This is a strong book, highly recommended. Just don't forget your topo map.

[librarycin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.25 starsGeorge Mallory made three attempts to summit Everest in the early 1920s. On his third attempt in 1924, he and a young, inexperienced Sandy Irvine went missing, and no one knows whether they made it to the top or not. This book looks at all three attempts, plus the people who were involved, many who also fought in WWI. I really liked the last 1/3 of the book (4 stars worth), but the first 2/3 were hit or miss for me. There were parts that seemed really good, but they just didn’t hold my interest. Some of the stuff on the war was very well-written, but overall, that part of the book just wasn’t all that great for me. However, in the last 1/3 of the book, which followed the last two attempts at Everest in 1922 and 1924, I was fascinated (as I usually expect to be when reading about Everest!). It is possible (but hard to say for sure) the not-holding-my-attention in the first 2/3 of the book (over 400 pages!) could simply be due to stress in my life at the moment. There were also a lot of people involved, so sometimes I would lose track of who was who.

[alexbolding · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Magnificent, incredible, completely irresistible, crafty piece of work that must have cost Davis at least 10 years of his life, and makes us, the readers, eternally indebted to him as well as overawed. I started reading this last year and was so impressed I gave my copy away to my father to read when I was only halfway myself. This is history as it should be – lived, deep, exhaustively researched. I mean the man looks odd (on the author picture), and he has written 15 books already and then he comes with this… He is not even British! Yet, no one, absolutely no one, has captured the spirit of the British Empire and the aftermath of the Great War so utterly comprehensively and in such a compelling way. For those looking for a book trying to explain what World War I meant – what it did to the participants – read this book. Why climb that insuperable mountain? That’s the question foremost in the minds of the Sherpa’s and ordinary Tibetans. Why sit in a crevasse in the ice in complete individual isolation for five years as a Buddhist hermit, wonder the British mountaineers. The answer to both questions is probably similar. To redeem something of life, to give meaning to the senseless, to be able to see the bigger picture, to be humble, to pay the price of life, which is death. The last is exactly what Mallory, the most enigmatic and energetic of the mountaineers did in the end. Three failed attempts in succession (1921, 1922, 1924) ended in disaster for Mallory and young Irvine. It took another 30 years before a New Zealander of all people, jointly with a Nepali, conquered the Everest (1952). If you want to know what the British Empire meant in terms of its front-line staff (the English, Canadian, Scottish, Welsh and Irish sahibs and gentlemen) read this book. The life histories of the 26 white participants to the 3 expeditions provide a profound insight in education, sports, war experience, colonial merit, and what have you. The only slight oversight on the part of Wade Davis might be the lack of depth of the Sherpa’s experience and their legacies at national and family level. I’m sure there is more to be written about that than was done by Davis. But otherwise, a deep, deep bow and hats off for the archival, academic and field work of Wade Davis. My God, you are a complete master!

[markpsadler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The sub-title to this tome is The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, all three complex subjects that could be described in separate volumes but that Davis has combined a 580 page story that reads like a fantastic yarn of British school-boy adventures.
We are treated to a history of England’s elite young men, the poets and dreamers of the public-school variety as they interact in Britain’s schools, until they are called up and led away to the slaughter of World War I; the best and brightest left dead and dying in the mud of the battlefields in France and Germany defending their hearth and home. The great detail that Davis delves into on the dreadful spectacle of battle in the trenches shoes his aptitude for history, a s does the fact finding he went to in procuring the intricate backgrounds of the climbers that where sent on the mission to be the first to conquer Everest.
In 1921 this elite group of men joined forces in India and trekked through the country, sometimes on foot, horse or yak and led a British unit of climbers assembled on a mission not just to climb Everest but to explore, chart the geography of unknown regions of the world and to explore and bring back samples of fauna and flora from the entire region on behalf of the Royal Geographic Society.
As we read we ravel with this noble group as they discover and describe the complications of a trek of this nature and learn the pitfalls that will befall this and any subsequent mission. Mallory the lead climber, who ultimately perishes upon the slopes of the grand giant of a mountain he helps popularize for the world, is a complex character unto himself and thanks be to all the historical notes and letters he and his fellow climbers on the expedition wrote we can find out now all the intrepid adventures and people they discovered on the way to the world’s greatest adventure.
A fine story told in a masterfully readable way Into the Silence shows how the British where the backbone of the world during the time of the Empire.

[deadseasquirrels · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's a very academic book and quite dense. There's a lot of spent on World War I and I think it distracts from the main point about the mission to summit Everest. I understand it was important to set the tone of the time and also define where these climbers came from (namely from a terrible time, when men put their lives on their line for something called honor), but I don't think it was handled well and there was just too much focus on it.

When the book shifts into George Mallory the pace is a bit faster and more interesting.

A dense book with many players. It was enjoyable, but I think only if you have a real interest in climbing or mountaineering.

[figgles_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A vast sprawling book but well worth the effort. Wade Davis, and adventurer himself has not only travelled to Tibet, but has brought a huge amount of research to the telling of the story of the first three British attempts to conquer Everest in the context not just of Empire, but of a generation that had experienced the cataclysm of the First World War. There is a slimmer book that could've been edited out of this book, but on balance I enjoyed it's detail and discursiveness. Definitely not a quick read and I had some niggles over the details of the maps and the photographs (many photos are described but not reproduced) but I'd recommend it to Everest tragics, adventurers, and those interested in how history spills over the neat lines we tend to try to corrall it into. I bought this at a lecture (on another topic) given by the author and interestingly enough his talk was vastly engaging and sprawled well over the allotted time - a characteristic of the author I suspect!

[kukulaj · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Davis covers quite thoroughly the Everest expeditions of 1921, 1922, and 1924. Certainly this is from the European perspective. We get some names of the various Asian participants, the porters and the cooks etc., and some glimpses into their characters. I doubt there would be any kind of written record for them, and hardly any oral history either. But for the European participants Davis traces back their upbringing and especially their experiences in WW1. That is a major theme of the book, the way that WW1 shaped these Everest expeditions, not just for the immediate participants but for the folks back home, the various sponsoring organizations, the media, and the public at large. While we don't learn much about the immediate Asian participants, we do learn a bit about some of the broader Tibetan context, from the abbot of Rongbuk monastery at the base of Everest, to the 13th Dalai Lama and the broader context of the Great Game where England, Russia, and China were competing to extend their Asian spheres of influence. A fascinating thread was the shifting attitude to technology. There was a kind of parallel between military and alpine shifts. At the beginning of WW1, the old British generals thought that sabers were more proper weapons than machine guns. Similarly, the old climbing guard held that to use oxygen at high altitude was improper. Another interesting shift was how climbing became more of a media event sponsored by advertisers etc. Davis includes copious excerpts from letters home from the various climbers, including several by Mallory which make it clear how conscious he was of his audience, of how he would appear in the media. Certainly he was a courageous and determined climber, but it seems he also felt a sense of obligation to fulfill a public role. Davis presents a remarkably detailed narrative of these three expeditions, but also provides enough layers of context to allow us to give rich meaning to the core details. Still today people risk their lives on all sorts of wild adventures: extreme sports, explorations in harsh environments, etc. Still today people can be consumed by their own myth, the myth they have become through the mutual co-construction of celebrity and public. Here Davis gives us such a story on the kind of grand scale that practically doesn't exist any more, as technology has so shrunk our world.

[sworldbridger · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am a big fan of Canadian writer Wade Davis. I have read several of his books and enjoy his approach to subject always with a metaphysical curiosity. Before I read this book I saw him speak about it in Ottawa at the Writers Festival and was mesmorized. This book took 10 years to write and it shows. Magnificently researched to give a full expression of what otherwise seems like an overshadowed and blotted out generation revealing a collective identity and a record of not just Mallory but well rounded perspective of everyone and everything involved. Yes, lyrical.

[terribooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm not an Everest junkie, but I love when history makes a good story. The strong ending of this book lets me be a bit forgiving about some of its faults. I didn't know anything about the early Everest expeditions, so "Into the Silence" opened up a fascinating little bit of history for me. Davis uses the British experience of the trench warfare of WWI and their notion of empire as a lens to explain some of the decisions, good and bad, that influenced the "assaults" on Everest. I think this is a fascinating idea, and it gave a reason for the providing all the background and biographies of the men involved. All this background is part of the reason the book is so long, but I really enjoyed reading it.Unfortunately, the length of the book is also its biggest fault. It just gets bogged down in the middle with too much detail about the three Everest expeditions. I think there could have been some editing to streamline it.On the other hand, by the time you get to the last section, the climbing in 1924, you really do know Mallory, Bruce, and the others. That certainly adds to an understanding of why these men made the choices and took the risks they did. I would recommend this if you have the stamina to wade through the details and you like to read about history. There are plenty of good parts to make it worthwhile.

[picardyrose · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Well, we know I will never actually read this.