“It wasn’t a matter of style,” Jim said, “or consideration for animals. They killed their ponies and dogs too, only without ever admitting they were going to have to do it, so that sometimes they didn’t have pistols there for the job. Wilson had to knife some of them to death, while Scott sat in the tent wringing his hands about how bad he felt. It was sheer incompetence.”
He had also been a bad judge of character, Jack added. He had been the sycophantic disciple of bad men; he had chosen bad men to work for him; he had led them badly. He had had bad friends.
“Oh come on,” Elspeth objected. “Wilson cannot be called a bad friend. He was a wonderful man.”
“He was too good to be good,” Jack said, which cracked Jim up. “A passive Christlike martyr in the making. And the rest of them were buffoons.”
Except for the ones who had ripped Scott privately in their diaries, of course, who all turned out to have been wise men. But the rest—buffoons.
“He also seems to have gotten in trouble with a girl in America,” Jack said, with another suggestive glance at Val. “And his marriage …”
He had married a woman too beautiful for him, it seemed, too ambitious and smart. An Edwardian Lady Macbeth, who had pushed him south “and then had an affair with Nansen at the very same time Scott was dying on the ice,” Jack said, shaking his head woefully.
He had been a scientific dilettante as well, Jim went on, only using the sciences as a cover for his desire to get to the Pole. He had had sulks and depressions lasting up to a month. He had sent Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard into needless danger and exhaustion on the Winter Journey, while the rest of his men sat around the hut writing a newspaper and putting on skits, rather than learning to ski or control their dogs. As for ponies, he had obtained glue-factory nags from Siberia in the first place, then killed half of them during pointless excursions during the winter, little trips which read like rehearsals for a Keystone Kops Ice Capades.
Then during the trek south he had overworked his men, demanding that they keep up with his unhealthily strong strength. He had gotten into a race mentality with the second sledge team, thus breaking Lieutenant Evans. He had seriously underestimated the provisions needed to feed four people to the Pole and back; then at the last depot he had decided to take five people instead of four, sealing their fate.
“Now that was a mistake,” Val admitted in her murmur at the stove. She had heard all this before, of course. It was a frequent topic of conversation on these expeditions, naturally. Everyone who joined a Footsteps expedition was an expert; it only took a half-dozen books to fill you in on the entire history of Antarctica, and after that everyone had an opinion. Including her. But she had learned to stay out of the discussions, having become tired of the faintly condescending responses she got if she joined, responses all the more irritating because even though these were outdoor people, they still seemed to share the desk-jockey notion that anyone doing physical work for a living must have had all thoughts fly forever out of their head. She knew this was only the defensiveness of the couch potato, but it still bugged her. And it was always the same discussion anyway.
Jim and Jack were by no means finished with the litany of Scott’s mistakes. Jim focused on technical errors of competence, Val noted, Jack on moral turpitude. Jim pointed out that Scott had failed to notice that the cannisters they were using allowed their stove fuel to evaporate out of the cap screws. He had also ignored all signs of scurvy. He had hiked facing into the sun on the return from the Pole, when they could just as well have reversed their schedule and hiked with the sun to their backs, as Amundsen had done. Jack took over and insinuated that Scott had probably pressured Oates into committing suicide, and then probably invented Oates’s famous last words, “I am just stepping outside and may be some time.” It was certain that he had altered other diary entries when publishing them in his books. (“Oh heaven forbid,” Elspeth interjected.) In general he had been too good a writer; and in the end he had written his way out of responsibility for the fiasco—out of responsibility and into legend. In fact, Jack said, he had probably preferred to die heroically, rather than return to England as the second man to the Pole. And so he had no doubt coerced Bowers and Wilson into staying in their final campsite, rather than brave a storm to try to reach their next supply cache only ten miles away, a storm that Amundsen would have waltzed through with barely a note for it in his journal, except perhaps “some wind today.”
No. Scott was an idiot. He had read Tennyson; he had believed Tennyson; he had been the disastrous end product of a decaying empire, whose subjects had told themselves any number of comforting delusional stories about amateurs muddling through to glory, as at Waterloo or in the Crimea. This was the crux, even Jim maintained it: Scott had believed in bad stories. J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, had been one of his best friends. And so he and his men had never grown up. They had been Peter Pans, they had been Slaves to Duty like Frederick in The Pirates of Penzance; they had not had the sense to notice that The Pirates of Penzance was a satire. No, it was Browning and Tennyson and G. A. Henty and the Boy’s Own Weekly for them, all the stupidities of the Victorian age turned into cast-iron virtues by the stories the boys were told. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred; onto the plateau of death manhauled the five.
“P. G. Wodehouse made fun of that stuff all the time,” Jim mentioned as they started dessert, which consisted of immense chocolate bars and brandy. “That’s why he was so funny.”
“They were Woosters!” Jack exclaimed. “They were a bunch of Bertie Woosters on ice, without their Jeeves along to help them out.”
“It’s worse than that,” Jim said. “The Jeeveses were right there at hand being ignored—men like Bowers, or Crean, or Lashly—the able seamen from the working classes. Those guys were very very tough, and they almost managed to haul the toffs out of there despite everything. In fact that’s what Crean and Lashly did with Lieutenant Evans, on their retreat from the last depot.”
After Scott had taken five men to the Pole, as Jim now reminded them, there had only been three to return from the last depot, and for these three it had been a very close thing indeed. Lieutenant Evans had collapsed, a victim of scurvy, and seamen Crean and Lashly had had to haul him on their sledge five hundred miles back to Cape Evans, an ordeal that included emotional moments such as sticking the lieutenant’s frozen feet onto their exposed stomachs, right through clothing and the membrane of class itself, to save him from a fatal frostbite. Finally Crean, at the end of four months of a manhauling regime so intense that it killed everyone else who tried it except Lashly, hurried ahead for help, covering forty miles of the ice shelf and getting down its edge to Hut Point, in a push of thirty-four straight hours of walking.
“And in the end Bowers almost managed to do the same for Wilson and Scott,” Jim added, “like he did for Wilson and Cherry-Garrard on the Winter Journey.”
Little Birdie Bowers, Val thought, remembering the spring trip to Cape Crozier. Henry Robert Bowers—never cold, never tired, never discouraged. But even he hadn’t been able to Jeeves his way out of that last trip. Worked into the ground like the poor knackered ponies, until he had died in his traces.
“No,” Jim insisted. “Bertie Woosters. And Scott the worst of them—the one who killed them. He’s the one who had the authority. He could have studied the problem, and figured out solutions. It’s not like the solutions weren’t there, because they were. But he couldn’t be bothered. And so he tipped the balance, from life to death.”