March 1919 – The Climb Up Mt. D'or
This is the fourth in a series of excerpts from letters that my grandfather, Garfield V. Cox, wrote home from France during his service with the American Friends Service Committee during and immediately following the end of World War I. For the first half of his time in France he was stationed in Ornans near the Swiss border. The first diary in this series is from the first letter he wrote after transferring to Aubreville near Verdun in the war zone. The second describes a hike he took along the battle lines in the Argonne Forest and the third is from a letter to his mother and father in which he recounts that same hike but also describes some of his work and the conditions he and his crew were working under.
This diary will be a mixture of excerpts from that same letter, dated March 20, 1919 (and continued through March 23rd), and from two earlier letters while still at Ornans, dated March 2 and March 6, 1919, in which he recounts a hike he took up Mount D'or on the Swiss border. The former letter describing it to his parents and the later two to his wife.
The trip can be dated to somewhere around Feb. 13, 1919. From the letter to his parents:
March 23rd (Sunday 3:30 P.M.)
… After five weeks of delay I must try to tell you something about my Swiss border trip which I took when I received my Friday and Sat. leave.
And to grab the names of his companions, from the letter to his wife dated March 2:
Holmgren and I had planned several days ahead to go and when other fellows learned it all wanted to go. The chief, however, limited our number to eight. Holmgren & I took Homer Chafin of Kansas and Roy Buchanan of Illinois. The other four fellows went a day later than we and made the trip in two days on bicycles.
We have long had a photo of my grandfather and an unknown friend on bicycles along a mountain pass and never known who his friend was.
Another letter describes what I believe is the taking of this picture and identifies the friend on the left as Richard Holmgren of East Lynn, Massachusetts. Holmgren is a regular feature of many of these letters as they roomed together a good bit of the time and made many of these hikes and bike trips together.
Their journey started with a train to Besancon where they visited a local art museum and then toured the local citadel. From the letter to the parents:
After noon we went to the citadel, one of the strongest fortresses in France. It is a successive series of huge walls, moats, and drawbridges and towers upon a rock to the southeast of the city. From the top room in the highest hour [sic] one can see over the country in every direction for many miles.
(photo credit: Philippe Verbaere)
And from the previous letter to his wife:
The sentinel let us pass because our uniform is known there. We passed through walled gate after gate always climbing, and crossed moats by means of drawbridges. A French soldier who has been in America accosted us and took us all through the place, including a pit where deserters are shot. One had been shot there only a few hours before & many more were in prison awaiting sentence. He said over a hundred deserters had been shot there recently & that the total in all France was over 2,000. He showed us a scar in his breast and back where a bullet had passed through his breast while fighting at the front. His point of view is entirely militaristic – the same as that of the abbe, tho' less ably put.
The abbe referred to is one from the Ornans area from whom my grandfather tried to learn French but to which he was in the end unable to commit the time.
It is interesting to note in these and other things he wrote before America entered the war the change over to our current militaristic society. It was not always this way. Today we take rampant militarism as a natural feature of being America and society treats it as the primary form of patriotism. When World War I started American society was very much against getting involved in European affairs and there was a strong feeling current at that time that war might well be a thing of the past repugnant to democratic and capitalist societies. It is hard for those of us that have grown up (four generations now) in a highly militarized society to imagine such a strain of thought being mainstream in America.
From here he begins to describe the journey to where they will begin their hike. His training in writing and speaking shows through in his descriptive abilities. It also allowed me to track his trip via maps of France though with some difficulty as there are multiple places with the same or similar names in the area. Bouncing between the two letters...
At the station at Pontarlier we were held up by the gendarmes as we had expected to be, but after looking over all our official papers and questioning us some, they let us pass. We went to a hotel where we had each to fill out an elaborate circular of information about ourselves to satisfy the gendarmerie that we weren't allied deserters or German prisoners escaping into Switzerland.
We put up at the Hotel de Paris, the best hotel in the city, yet it is unheated even in the dead of winter.
The next morning they take another train.
We left the train at Pouisson and hunted up the mayor. We found him in a meat shop buying his breakfast. He took us to his office and wrote out a permission for us to climb Mt. D'or, but warning us that the snow was too deep. From there we walked on 15 kilometers to the foot of Mt. D'or. We stopped a few miles out and ate a breakfast, using a pile of freshly sawed lumber for a table. While there two gendarmes appeared suddenly from nowhere and demanded our papers. These satisfied them. We were next stopped while passing a Canadian lumber camp at Labergement. The Canadians tho't we were Germans, so they sent a gendarme after us. We had some difficulty with him, but finally he let us go on. From Labergement on to Roch-Jean we walked on a good road through a dense mature forest of pine. We crossed a roaring brook and for a short distance paralleled the international railroad which had tunneled through the ridge we were crossing and at this point ran in a deep gorge cut in the rock. Suddenly we came out upon the valley formed by the headwaters of the Doubs & there below at our feet lay Roche-Jean to the right & Longeville to the left. The valley ran north & south & across it rose a low range heavily covered with timber and above that rose the bald snow covered ridge called Mt. D'or, a white line with four knobs rising above the rest. We had to cross the valley by a circuitous route through Roche-Jean. There the customs officials held us up, but were satisfied with our papers. They said, however, that the snow on the mountain was hip deep and that we couldn't climb it. They said three American soldiers had tried it that week, floundered all day, failed, & returned exhausted. But we insisted we should go as far as we could, so they directed us & we started.
It is interesting to me that this is March 1919 and the armistice was signed 5 months earlier in November 1918 and yet French deserters are still being shot and there is still this heavy a concern for the potential of deserting soldiers or escaping Germans. Still, technically the war was still on and a final peace had not yet been signed so I guess it makes sense.
That last was from the March 2 letter to my grandmother. He had to close at that point and it was 3 more letters before he picked up the tale again on March 6. Perhaps I should stop this diary here and not finish the tale for a few more days... naaaa....
March 6, 1919
(9 P.M.)
… Several days ago I got you to the foot of Mount D'or and left you there. The oldest men at the equipe here had told us to go through Roche-Jean & on to Longeville and to start climbing from the latter place. But the customs officials at Roche-Jean insisted that a better and shorter route would be to start to climb directly up from the latter place. So we decided to take their advice. They insisted also that we must remember that if we were to step over onto Swiss soil we'd be pretty certain to be shot as escaping Germans prisoners of war or as deserters.
And the climb begins... (if you are interested in a map of the terrain see here)
For an hour after we started to climb (or from nine to ten in the morning) we had first a wagon track to a farm house and then a faint path through six inches of snow. Then we entered a dense forest of pine and spruce and began to ascend sharply while the soft snow grew deeper and deeper. We were walking almost directly above the Franco-Swiss tunnel under Mount D'or which is from 4 ½ to 5 miles long. By eleven o'clock we had reached an altitude where the trees were smaller and the stand less dense. The sun beat down hard & the reflection from the snow was almost painfully bright. Suddenly we came to the crest of a ridge and saw that before reaching a higher point we'd have to descend a slope and climb up again! The snow had become hip deep and we sank often so far that we could only dig out “on all fours.” We took turns breaking the path. One man could last for only a few rods at a time. Our feet were wet and the snow was beginning to melt through our wrappers (leggings) and trousers. No one admitted it then, but we have all confessed since that we thought at the bottom of that vale that we'd not reach the top.
Frankly from his description of this hike I'm surprised they made it. Climbing a mountain like this in the best of weather conditions would be exercise enough. Doing it in hip deep snow when you don't know the terrain sounds lunatic to me. How would you know when a deeper drop was about to occur and you'd sink 6 or 8 feet or more and not just hip deep? He doesn't mention walking sticks but I hope they were wise enough to have at least the lead man using one for measuring the depth in front of them.
But we struggled on. By noon we had passed above timberline. Here we passed by a point where the roof of a deserted farm house and buildings protruded above the drifted snow. The snow was a little solider in the open and we didn't sink so often to our hips. We stopped occasionally and looked back over the way we had come. Six kilometers down the slope and parallel to the ridge lay Lake St. Point glistening and blue by alternation. While between lay slope after slope covered with magnificent forests and here and there bare fields covered deep in snow. Beyond and to right and left of the lake rose line after line of hills, the farther ranges losing their green in the blue and purple hues of the distance. We could see the massive pile called Mt Poupet, which is twenty-five miles west of Ornans, and Haute-Pierre could be plainly seen, too. The French Jures lay stretched out before us, but on the Swiss side we could see nothing but the sky.
I took some time looking through maps at the surrounding terrain to match his descriptions to the maps. If you are intrigued as I was go back to the link I provided earlier and browse around the area for awhile and see what he is talking about.
Now clouds began to gather and the sun was shut in. This worried us, so we pressed on as fast as we could. For another reason, too, time pressed. We wanted to be back down at Longeville station to catch a train at 3:46P.M.! About one o'clock we tho't we were just below the crest of the mountain and would be looking into Switzerland in a moment. That nerved us on, but when we mounted this knob there was another and much higher one ahead. We reached it about half past one. Just before this we noticed the wind growing rapidly stronger and colder. Here the snow grew thinner for it had been blown away. Suddenly we stepped upon the topmost point, and the four last strides had carried us, from a point where we saw nothing but our own mountain top and the sky, to a place where three ranges of the Swiss Alps and two great Swiss valleys burst into full view! I have read of the thrill one feels when he catches his first glimpse of the mountains; now I know how it feels. My pulse leaped and my heart thumped faster, for there stretching out before us as far as the eye could see was a valley apparently level and dotted here & there with red tiled villages while on the left of the valley rose a range of mountains like Mt. D'or and on the right rose tier upon tier of great, ragged peaks, dark and overhanging, with here or their a crown of ice and snow and a glacier-filled gorge down a slope. Apparently farthest distant, yet highest of all rose the conical, ice-capped peak of Mont Blanc with the light of the sun playing full upon it. For, tho' the sun had been shut in from us, it was still shining on part of the valley & the mountain range beyond. But clouds gathered swiftly. In five short minutes as we watched, the mists formed about Mont Blanc and it was lost from view. We took a few pictures. We could not stay, for a bitter wind was freezing the wet clothes on our bodies, and it seemed that our wet feet were freezing. But we gave the great, vast panorama one long, hungry look before we departed. We stood on the edge of a precipice 2000 ft. high. (Mount D'or is half of a mountain; on the French side it rises gradually to its crest, a long ridge running parallel with the Swiss border; but the other half of the mountain is gone, leaving a sheer drop into the valley below. The base of this cliff is the Swiss border. And there beneath us so far, and yet so near that one could have hurled a stone into it, was a Swiss town near the Swiss mouth of the International tunnel. We had to laugh at the caution of the customs officials that we keep out of Switzerland! I wouldn't have worried about Swiss sentinels at the foot of the cliff if I had stepped over the border! They couldn't even have found the greasy spot!
Can he write a story or what? His descriptive abilities are superb. He builds the tension throughout the climb and then brings you “Suddenly!” to the climax as you look out across the vast expanse of the Alps.
I hope my providing the story in excerpts hasn't lessened the experience any. It is difficult to cut out any piece of these letters as even the mundane parts are well expressed and tell a story themselves. I think I can leave out his continual worrying over whether they should buy or rent furniture upon his return but even that is interesting and amusing in its own way but it is difficult in a letter like this one to only mention the train trip and his description of the countryside... both for itself and for the way in which it builds to the climax of cresting the mountaintop and looking into Switzerland.
The previous description comes from the letter to my grandmother as it was the fuller description of the two. Though some of the lines he wrote to his parents were particularly good. But you get some insight into his letter writing approach with the following he writes them about an interruption in his letter to them just as he has brought them to the crest of the mountain.
… But, even as we watched, the mists gathered about it and it was almost hidden from view.
Here at 10:30 P.M. (I quit away back the line to get supper) with a dozen fellows crowding me, talking and scuffling, or standing between me and our only lamp, the thrill I felt when I beheld the Alps has all leaked out, and I can't collect my literary powers sufficiently to send a single shiver down your spine as you read this. I'm tired and much annoyed – tired as I was then, tho' not so cold, so I'll hasten to conclude my story and get the letter in the mail.
He then goes on to describe the descent and return to Ornans. His “literary powers” may have failed him but his description of the trip to his parents was pretty darn good nonetheless! He concluded it with an interesting note:
A few days after this Walter Abell received a letter from his father in which the latter urged him to see the Alps before his return to America. He went on to say that after having in his early years spent six months in Switzerland he considered the view of the Alps from Mt. D'or to be the best single panorama obtainable!
Another feature of these letters is an almost comical series of problems he had with photographs and developing film. It is clear that he took many pictures and that, even with all the problems, most of them should have made it home. Sadly we have only a few and none from the top of Mt. D'or. I suspect they, along with many others from France, are lost to the ages. There is one line of cousins I need to contact that may have these photos but I've not had the opportunity yet to do so. I suspect not but... maybe.
After much searching I did manage to find this photo gallery of Le Mont d'Or & Haut-Doubs including winter photos, the sheerness of the drop, snow covered farmhouses, views of Mt Blanc and panoramas of the Swiss Alps. Enjoy!