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Lecco cragsman Ricardo Cassin; the latter to a pair of Germans and a pair of Austrians (including Heinrich Harrer, later the author of Seven Years in Tibet ) who had met by chance low on the wall and joined forces.
    In his essay, Devies is aggrieved that these formidable walls had fallen to foreigners, for, he insists, “Today in France there are certainly climbers of the same quality as the best Germans and Italians”—adding parenthetically, “(I count the Austrians as Germans).” He enumerates the usual excuses for his countrymen: bereft, for instance, of playgrounds such as the Dolomites in which to learn their craft, the French lagged behind their rivals in the mechanics of aid-climbing with pitons. With war clouds gathering, Devies notes disdainfully that Hitler had publicly congratulated the Eiger foursome, Mussolini the victors on the Walker Spur.
    Devies’s polemic ends with a clarion call to French mountaineers to match the deeds of those foreigners, who would, within the year, become their literal enemies in war. Throughout his essay he contrasts French and German cultural attitudes, arguing, for example that the French have the disadvantage of being slightly more cautious “because we do not attach any mystical value to death.” Instead, the best Gallic climbers, in contrast with their German and Italian peers, have “a much purer experience” in the mountains. “Their deeds are freer and more individual, they earn instead a truth that is personal and human.”
    Rhetoric of this sort had everything to do with the conception of the Annapurna expedition. On March 28, 1950, just before departing for Nepal, the chosen team members met with the Himalayan Committee in the offices of the Club Alpin Français in Paris. Devies gave the team a stirring pep talk, outlining the history of Himalayan exploration, reminding the men of their objectives. In Annapurna, Herzog quotes Devies’s speech at length, then observes the “solemn air” in the “dull and dreary office inwhich we were meeting.” All nine of the expeditioneers “devoutly longed to go to the Himalaya, which we had talked about for so many years. Lachenal put it in a nutshell: ‘We’d go if we had to crawl there.’ ”
    Then Devies abruptly announced that each member must take an oath of obedience, which he recited: “I swear upon my honor to obey the leader in everything regarding the Expedition in which he may command me.” A silence followed. Comments Herzog, “Mountaineers don’t care much for ceremonies.”
    At last Marcel Ichac, the cinematographer and sole veteran of the 1936 Gasherbrum I expedition, recited the pledge, with Terray softly murmuring in unison; then the others, one by one, pronounced the oath.
    For Herzog, the ceremony was deeply moving:
    They were pledging their lives, possibly, and they knew it. They all put themselves completely in my hands. I should have liked to say a few words, but I just couldn’t. . . . In that moment our team was born. It was for me to keep it alive.
    Writing in 1996, Rébuffat’s biographer, Yves Ballu, benefiting from Rébuffat’s own notes on the occasion, put the evening’s events in a very different perspective. Reading Herzog, one pictures the ceremony taking place in a small office, attended only by the Himalayan Committee and the team members. In fact, the first half of the event, featuring Devies’s speech, was a press conference in the CAF’s grand salon, with many journalists and officials present. Ballu underlines Devies’s absolute tyranny over the French climbing scene: at the moment, he was simultaneously president of the CAF, president of the Fédération Française de la Montagne (FFM), and president of the Groupe de Haute Montagne (GHM). Sitting at his right hand was Herzog, secretary of the GHM.
    Along with the stirring exhortations quoted by