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Mount Everest Committee, an ad hoc assemblage recruited chiefly from the ranks of the Alpine Club. In France, the body was the Comité de l’Himalaya (or Himalayan Committee) of the Club Alpin Français (CAF), dominated by the autocratic Lucien Devies.
    The rationale behind choosing a leader such as General Bruce was that logistical acumen and tactical judgment were more vital to the role than climbing ability. In addition, it was tacitly understood that a less-talented mountaineer might more readily submerge his own ambition and choose the strongest pair of teammates for the summit attempt. Herzog, however, had less experience at logistics, less mountaineering judgment than men such as Terray and Rébuffat; and on Annapurna, Herzog would prove every bit as ambitious to reach the summit as his comrades.
    Another factor at play in the Annapurna expedition—all but obsolete today, but powerfully felt from the origins of mountaineering in the Alps in the 1780s all the way through 1950—was the distinction between guides and amateurs. The guide was a professional, born in the mountains where he earned his living, steeped in the nuances of weather and snow conditions. The amateur was a man who lived elsewhere, who climbed for pleasure and passion in his spare time. Even though amateurs such as Edward Whymper on the Matterhorn or Alfred Mummery on the Gréponhad spearheaded the finest climbs performed in the second half of the nineteenth century, they routinely climbed with guides. Well into the twentieth century, many pundits considered it scandalous and irresponsible to undertake “guideless” climbs.
    At the heart of this distinction lay a class bias. Guides were hired hands, technicians of rock and ice, closer in status to rural artisans than to the urbane milieu of the gentleman alpinist. It would never do, then, to entrust the leadership of a Himalayan expedition to a guide. Terray, Rébuffat, and Lachenal were guides. Herzog was a Parisian (born in Lyon), an executive in Kléber-Colombes, a tire manufacturing company: in short, everything that a mountaineering amateur ought to be.
    Finally, and most importantly, Herzog was Devies’s good friend. Both men were staunch Gaullists. Terray and Rébuffat had served as soldiers during World War II, but Herzog had been a captain, commanding a battalion of volunteers against the Nazis in several heroic campaigns. Of such stuff, the Himalayan Committee concluded, leaders were made.
    This class bias is overt in the preface Devies contributed to Annapurna: there he characterizes the redoubtable Terray and Lachenal as “locomotives,” as if all one had to do on the mountain was fire up their boilers and set them in motion. In contrast, Herzog is a saint of conquest: “Spending himself to the limit, reserving for himself the hardest tasks, deriving his authority from the example he set, always in the vanguard, he made victory possible.”
    With Devies pulling the strings offstage and Herzog in charge of the expedition, Annapurna was conceived as a grand nationalistic effort. Devies, one of the foremost French climbers of the 1930s, was highly sensitive to the prevailing notion that France had done next to nothing in the Himalaya. And in 1950, the whole country still lay mired in the humiliation of World War II—a once-proud nation conquered so easily by the Third Reich, liberated not so much by the Résistance as by the Allies.
    Even before the war, in 1939, Devies had written an essay called “Alpinisme et Nationalités.” A bizarre mélange of chauvinism and defensiveness, the piece makes for fascinating reading inthe light of Annapurna. At the time Devies wrote, the two “last prizes” of the Alps had recently been plucked, with the first ascents of the Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses and of the north face of the Eiger, both in 1938. The former had fallen to a strong team of Italians led by the visionary