6/10/2023 0 Comments Into the Silence by Wade Davis![]() Davis remarks in a fascinating annotated bibliography (really a separate essay on the sources for the book, as well as his own connection to the story) that at one point he wondered “What possibly remained to be said?’’ The challenge, he concluded, “was to go beyond the iconic figure. The story of Mallory’s apotheosis - and of the unexpected discovery of his body in 1999 - has been recounted many times. ![]() ![]() These horrors - “early 1 million dead in Britain alone, some 2.5 million wounded, 40,000 amputees, 60,000 without sight, 2.4 million on disability a decade after the end, including 65,000 men who never recovered from the mental ravages of shell shock’’ - are devastatingly detailed in Wade Davis’s new book, which is at least as much a social history of Britain during this period as it is a tale of adventure and tragedy on the slopes of the world’s highest mountain. How terrible and melancholy is the long series of disastrous events, which have darkened its first twenty years.’’ One is sometimes tempted to think of the 1920s - the Jazz Age - as one long party, a great efflorescence of music and literature and art, and to lose sight of the actual backdrop, the hideous grotesqueries of World War I, which were still so terribly present. ![]() In a speech to his constituents on Armistice Day, 1922, Winston Churchill meditated on the mood of the nation, indeed, the mood of the world: “What a disappointment the twentieth century has been. ![]()
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