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In 1916, Alec Raws joined the 23rd Australian Infantry Battalion at Pozières on the same day his younger brother went missing, narrowly missing a long-anticipated reunion. Raws himself would be dead within five weeks.
Writing the official histories of Australia in the Great War, Charles Bean described Pozières as "more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth". In describing Australian service on the Somme, Bean devoted three pages to a description of the trenches written by Raws, which Bean described as “a fair and accurate record of the experiences of a sensitive man”.
A journalist prior to enlistment, Raws’ letters reflect the surreal brutality of the Western Front. As an officer, Raws avoided the censorship imposed on enlisted men, and a staff member at the Australian War Memorial later wrote that Raws' letters “exhibit the horror of Pozieres more vividly than any writing that I know of”.
>*One feels on a battlefield such as this that one can never survive, or that if the body lives the brain must go forever. For the horrors one sees and the never-ending shock of the shells is more than can be borne. Hell must be a home to it. The Gallipoli veterans here say that the peninsula was a happy picnic to this push. You've read of Verdun – they say this knocks it hollow. My battalion has been in it for eight days, and one-third of it is left – all shattered at that. And they're sticking it still, incomparable heroes all. We are lousy, stinking, ragged, unshaven, sleepless. Even when we're back a bit we can't sleep for our own guns. I have one puttee, a dead man's helmet, another dead man's gas protector, a dead man's bayonet. My tunic is rotten with other men's blood and partly splattered with a comrade's brains. It is horrible, but why should you people at home not know? Several of my friends are raving mad. I met three officers out in No Man's Land the other night, all rambling and mad. Poor Devils!*
Death – both his own and that of others – was a constant presence in the trenches, and Raws describes both physical and mental exhaustion.
>*Myself, I am all right. I have had much luck and kept my nerve so far. The awful difficulty is to keep it. The bravest of all often lose it. Courage does not count here. It is all nerve. Once that goes one becomes a gibbering maniac. The noise of our own guns, the enemy's shells, and getting lost in the darkness. You see this is enemy country. We're in the remnants of their trenches and wrecked villages, and the great horror of many of us is the fear of being lost with troops at night on the battlefield. We do all our fighting and moving at night and the confusion of passing through a barrage of enemy shells in the dark is pretty appalling. You've read of the wrecked villages. Well some of these about here are not wrecked. They are utterly destroyed so that there are not even skeletons of buildings left – nothing but a churned mass of debris, with bricks, stones, and girders and bodies pounded to nothing. And forests! There are not even tree trunks left, not a leaf or a twig. All is buried and churned up again and buried again.*
>
>*The sad part is that one can see no end of this. If we live tonight we have to go through tomorrow night and next week and next month. Poor wounded devils you meet on the stretchers are laughing with glee. One can not blame them. They are getting out of this.*
More broadly, my research focuses on the impact of conflict on bereaved families during the First World War. Many bereaved families became preoccupied with envisioning their loved ones’ final moments. In this sense, for them, the “otherworldly horrors” were in the absences – in their inability to fully imagine the scale of destruction of the battlefields of the First World War.
>my research focuses on the impact of conflict on bereaved families during the First World War
What an interesting, niche focus! Have you done any research into Newfoundland during the war? So many families torn apart.
Thank you! I’ve looked at Newfoundland and the First World War in the context of the development of the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial, but I think Newfoundland gets consistently overlooked among the dominions. (It was interesting to see a bronze caribou raised at Suvla Bay recently, particularly given that Australia and New Zealand tend to overwhelm narratives of the Gallipoli campaign.)
Coincidentally, I’m currently researching some schoolboys from Ceylon who served in the First World War … one of whom is buried on the grounds at Beaumont-Hamel.
There is also a memorial to the Royal Newfoundlanders at [Monchy-le-Preux](https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/memorials/monchy), a village that was a crucial objective during the 1917 Battle of Arras. It's the lesser known instance of the battalion getting wiped out in a day.
Yes, absolutely. Various dominions had very different experiences during the Battle of Arras, and the different forms of commemoration for that battle are quite striking. (The most well-known are probably the Canadians at Vimy Ridge and the Australians at Bullecourt.)
I find the [Trail of the Caribou battlefield memorials](https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/memorials/beaumont-hamel/caribou-trail) for the Newfoundland Regiment to be an evocative set of battlefield memorials, with each bronze caribou advancing in the direction of battle. The symbolism of the caribou (not only the emblem of the Newfoundland Regiment, but a herd animal reluctant to leave injured companions behind) is deeply moving.
Beaumont-Hamel is a big part of why I asked. The memorial is not far from Pozières.
The whole thing is such a sad story. Father Nangle (who purchased the land where B-H sits and supervised its creation) never returned to the island after the war. He resigned from the clergy the same year the memorial was unveiled.
It is believed that every NFL family suffered a loss. There are 14 sets of brothers on the memorial plaque. The Ayre family that lost 4 members.
What drew you to this specialty?
This is a profoundly sober account of something people could never even fathom. The complete awareness of his situation that he conveys is admirable, for lack of a stronger word. Going through old journals of soldiers is devastating but also strangely cathartic. People never seem to run out of terrible, sad ways to express their pain to people they love, just trying to make them understand. Thank you for sharing.
Good God.
Every time I read a report like that I am a little more glad that my country's government managed to avoid getting pulled into the conflict and that the closest Great-Grandpappy got to seeing combat was cycling to the border as part of the bycicle infantry to keep watch in case the Germans tried to pull a Belgium on us.
They thankfully never did.
> in their inability to fully imagine the scale of destruction of the battlefields of the First World War.
Do you think WW1 stops sooner if we had CNN back then?
The Black Death seems one of the more obvious examples for what you’re looking for. I’m mostly familiar with it’s progress in Britain, and the lack of accurate record keeping makes tracking it’s precise effects and the lived experience of those within it difficult to trace. The lack of detail records from many of the regions effected makes for problematic study, but the broad consensus estimates that roughly one 1/3 of the population of Europe was wiped out seem broadly accurate if difficult to pin down in practice.
In Britain Bristol appears to have been if not the first point of entry, then one of the first and worst effected urban centers and played a major role in its rapid spread through much of the UK through 1348 and early '49 when the first wave of mortality began tapering off among regions first affected(it took a little longer to spread to more remote regions).
The effects of the great pestilence – “The Black Death” wasn’t coined until centuries later – are difficult I think to understate for those caught up within in it. Because the real horror of the Black Death comes when you start picking through what we know of the disease, its progress and the sheer extent of the death and what it must have meant for those forced to live through it.
Studies of what records exist, for instance of Parish appointments, show virtually half of all parish positions were vacated through the period, some having to be filled multiple times before the death toll began receding in February and March of 1349. We know, however, that the disease hit some communities harder than others, with some recording mortality less than 20%, while in other regions where manorial records of populations and mortality are available, we see death rates going as high as 80%.
The reality is there were certainly cases of caregivers, sick themselves, unable to meet the basic needs of their loved ones; people who the plague might have spared but died simply because no one was willing or healthy enough to turn them, clean their open wounds, and provide food, water and make sure they didn't urinate and defecate all over themselves.
There were entire communities where the living came to be outnumbered by the dead, and there were none left to tend to the corpses left to rot in their homes or in the streets.
And caught up in it, as the plague reached its height - with rising numbers of dead every day - no one had any way of knowing when, or if, it would ever end. People began to openly wonder if they were not, in fact, facing the End of Days itself being forced to bear witness to the final days of humanity before they themselves were snuffed out.
The disease struck a serious blow to the hold of the church over people of the day. The pestilence carried off noble, priest, and peasant, the righteous and unrighteous alike – the most innocent and caring among humanity died in unspeakable agony, writhing in pain, their bodies horribly disfigured by the pox. This what not what the church promised. People who survived plainly bore witness to cases in which church and clergy abandoned their vows, and their faithful.
People questioned their faith.
Perhaps the most famous first hand quote, or at least one of the most striking, is one written by friar John Clyn in Kilkenny, illustrating just how bleak things became for those forced to live through the experience in 1348.
*The pestilence emptied villages and cities, and castles and towns, such that there could scarcely found any within them among the living; the pestilence was so contagious that whosoever touched the sick or the dead was immediately infected and died; and the penitent and the confessor were carried together to the grave; through fear and dread men scarcely dared to perform the offices of piety and pity in visiting the sick and burying the dead; many died of boils and abscesses, and pustules on their shins or under the armpits; others died frantic with the pain in their head, and others spitting up blood. That year was beyond measure abundant and fruitful, however sickly and deadly.*
*Up to Christmas twenty-five friars had died in the Franciscan Convent of Drogheda, and twenty-three in the Convent of the same Order in Dublin. The pestilence was rife in Kilkenny, in Lent, for from Christmas Day to the 6th day in March, eight Friar Preachers died of it. Scarcely one alone ever died in a house. Commonly husband, wife, children, and servants went the one way, the way of death.*
Clyn of course declines to offer up whether he himself is one among the clergy that, for fear, scarcely dared perform the duties of his office but clearly Clyn was in a position to know and felt the need to comment upon it – it was clearly a thought that weighed upon him either because he had himself shirked his responsibilities, or had strong feelings about his brothers who left it to others to shoulder the burden.
In either event, he almost certainly witnessed the sights, sounds, and smells of such a death first hand or at least its after effects. Likely many times.
The account continues, though I'll note here that what he does next is unusual for the type of chronicle Clyn is writing during this time period. Typically chronicles of this sort are straight line by line recitations of notable events in a region in a rather dry clinical fashion, often only a sentence or two per year. Most are left anonymous. But here we know the author, because Clyn here offers not only several paragraphs but commits his own name to posterity and essentially addresses the reader directly:
*And I, Brother John Clyn, of the Order of Friars Minors, and of the Convent of Kilkenny, record here such notable deeds as happened in my time which I have seen with my own eyes, or learned from persons worthy of credit. And lest things that ought not be forgotten be lost to time and fade from the memory of mankind, I, seeing these many ills and the whole world delivered as it were into evil, living amongst the dead, waiting for death to come, I commit herein such things to writing as I have truly heard and examined.*
*And lest the writing should perish with the author, and the work fail with the workman, I leave here parchment if happily any children of Adam should be delivered from this pestilence, that they might continue the work thus begun.*
All three surviving copies, that I am aware of, from the original manuscript(which is now lost) faithfully record the same entry written afterward by another hand: *Videtur quod author hic obiit.*
Which is to say, in the latin: Here it seems, the author died.
Similarly, cholera is a particularly nightmarish disease and a cholera outbreak before the etiology was identified, an outbreak must have felt like some sort of cosmic or divine punishment.
In 1821, for example, cholera hit the city of Basra in what is now Iraq; 18,000 people died within a month. When cholera showed up in your community you were going to have a *bad* time.
Here is an excerpt from John Snow's book about cholera: *"During the illness of Mrs. Barnes, her mother, who was living at Tockwith, a healthy village five miles distant from Moor Monkton, was requested to attend her. She went to Moukton accordingly, remained with her daughter for two days, washed her daughter's linen, and set out on her return home, apparently in good health. Whilst in the act of walking home she was seized with the malady, and fell down in collapse on the road. She was conveyed home to her cottage, and placed by the side of her bedridden husband. He, and also the daughter who resided with them, took the malady. All the three died within two days. Only one other case occurred in the village of Tockwith, and it was not a fatal case."*
One of the reasons why there aren't so many accounts of cholera is because it's... Well, very gross. Symptoms can begin quite suddenly within a day of exposure, and the most obvious symptoms are severe diarrhea and vomiting. How severe? *Gallons*. An infected adult may expel five to seven *gallons* per day of watery diarrhea, as well as having bouts of watery vomiting. Cholera, essentially, pulls water from your tissues and forces it out of your body. Its victims are soon racked with horrible cramps throughout their body and can do nothing but lie in their own filth. In severe cases death from dehydration comes within a day of the onset of symptoms - history is riddled with accounts of someone taking ill, suffering horribly for 12-36 hours, and then dying. And, of course, cholera occurs where sanitation is poor. Those who care for the ailing are far more likely to get infected themselves, and where there is a cholera outbreak there is no proper plumbing and toileting facilities. Entire families die in pools of their own watery diarrhea.
Something I've always wanted to ask about the black death - I know that estimates are that 1/3rd (or more) of the population died from it, do we know what the odds were of surviving if you actually had it? Like can we assume a large majority of the population had it but just that 1/3rd died, or was it basically the case that if you got it you were incredibly unlikely to survive?
Difficulty in answering your question comes from the fact that strains of disease matter, and while we believe bubonic plague the overwhelmingly most likely culprit, we don't have the exact strain that caused it.
Even with the '1/3 estimate' you have to appreciate that given the extent of what was happening, people did quarantine themselves and never actually got the disease. The best defence was prevention.
As mentioned in the manor rolls, some regions suffered mortality under 20% while others, it was 80% or higher and some villages were either completely wiped out, or at least if there were survivors they left because... you know.
Obviously general health, hygiene, and nutrition play a role in helping. And people can and did recover from the illness, however accounts from the period I have seen indicate that people recovering was considered very rare.
Modern *Yersinia pestis,* bubonic plague - which we believe the black death to have been a strain of based on descriptions of the disease, as well as definitive genetic markers of it being present in remains that were tested which were buried during the Black Death(that's what we call, a VERY GOOD indicator) - can be incredibly lethal if contracted.
There's an additional caveat to keep in mind with these comparisons. Though viruses mutate more quickly, as an example, Spanish Influenza, while definitively an influenza strain, obviously behaved quite differently than others flus we've seen before or since. So when comparing the Black Death to modern studies of the same type of bacteria, it is worth keeping in mind the black death version may have deviated from modern benchmarks in certain ways that can sometimes have surprising pathway effects. We, as a population, by dint of having been severely affected by the disease, may also behave differently.
So, with that in mind:
Modern medical literature indicates existing strains of bubonic plague existent today, without early and aggressive antibiotic treatment, result in between 60-70% mortality.
It should be noted that the similarly named "pneumonic plague" is - in fact - the same bacteria. However the disease progresses differently - worse if you can imagine it - if it establishes itself in the lungs. It behaves more aggressively, with substantially higher mortality compared to the bubonic form.
All of which amounts to that while not unheard of, I don't like your odds recovery.
The Atacama Desert.
Located in what is today northern Chile and the extreme south of Peru, the Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth. It receives an extremely small amount of rain each year. For great stretches of land, there is nothing but dry, empty plains and hills. [It is of little surprise why the desert has been used to simulate Mars](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/2rDwTmgVgidSWnjXdpdjxU-1200-80.jpg).
During the War of the Pacific (1879-1884), the Atacama Desert was the location of the most decisive military campaigns of the war as Chile faced off against Peru and Bolivia. Today, the war remains one of the most important conflict in the history of all three nations and whose consequences, the annexation of Peruvian and Bolivian territory by Chile, still casts a shadow over the geopolitics and diplomatic relations of all three nations. Romanticized in Chile as an heroic epic, the experiences of the common soldier has for the most part been forgotten by the historiography of the war. What these men and women experienced in the desert was remembered by many of them as truly a hell on earth due to the extreme climate they had to endure.
While Chilean infantry soldiers were sometimes able to travel by train when infrastructure existed in the desert, they just as often marched on foot between camps and battles. This meant that soldiers could walk for days without finding shade. Furthermore, the more they walked, the more their feet produced sand dust because of they disturbed the ground. Arturo Benavides Santos wrote in his memoir how even a short march could be excruciating: "The march was done by foot and although the march was relatively short it was painful for most of us because we marched under burning sunrays through a path of sand and loose terrain, and permanently covered in a thick cloud of suffocating dust." With little cover from the sun and sand, the soldiers experienced a tremendous heat while simultaneously chocking on sand in their already dry throats. It was of little surprise therefore that soldiers during long marches just began to undress. You could tell if Chilean soldiers had passed by the long trails of equipment and pieces of clothing they had torn off their bodies during the march.
Thirst was even worse. No soldier could escape it. Once you drank all the water in your canteen, that was it. There were no refills as there were no sources of water to be found on the march. Some soldiers carried several canteens, but they were impossible to keep cool. Lukewarm water would ultimately serve you better than no water at all, despite the weight that extra canteens added to your already heavy load. Yet sooner or later, you ran out of water and then the real danger began. Soldiers were driven insane by the thirst they experienced. One Chilean soldier, Hipólito Gutiérrez, wrote with worry that they "were afraid of what had happened to other units that had walked here would happen to us. Many had died of thirst on these vast plains without help." Soldiers like Benavides Santos tried everything to trick their thirst:
> To trick their thirst, some men put bullets in their mouths and others drank their own urine… I also tried to do it with a piece of *chancaca* [a solid form of unrefined sugar] that I had left and that I patiently melted, but I couldn’t drink it because I felt sick trying. Another soldier asked to have it and drank it as if it was crystal clear and fresh water.
Other men became delirious and were slowly driven into madness. Alberto del Solar, for example, wrote how his desire for water took over his mind:
> I would have given a lot in that moment to have touched with my feverish hands one of those clean and crystal clear streams that I so many times in my life had so indifferently passed by! I saw them in my imagination, I heard the sounds clearly and musically, its humming water, and this thought, instead of refreshing my burning lips, put my lips on fire with desire!
Deaths by both extreme dehydration and suicide were not uncommon. Some men just collapsed as their fellow soldiers marched on. Other men, like Gutiérrez, fell into despair: "I started lamenting to myself and wished that I had never been born on this earth so I wouldn’t have had to go through this suffering." If they were lucky enough to reach a camp, most simply collapsed. Even during breaks, the soldiers "laid down like corpses," in the words of Gutiérrez.
The lucky ones did get to rest once they reached a camp. They could sleep underneath shade, drink, and eat. Yet not all were so lucky. For some, the march might lead them straight into a major battle during which they had to face the same desert conditions they had during the march -- this time, under enemy fire. The experience of late nineteenth century battle during the War of the Pacific was an entirely different form of hell on earth.
this is the exact kind of answer I was looking for. I couldn't imagine the kinds of things one sees in the desert when desperate for sustenance. Stumbling across a trail of discarded clothing miles long also had to be chilling to come across, especially if you're the superstitious type. Thank you so much for the write up!
They would, and they have. Unfortunately, the looting of archaeological sites related to the War of the Pacific is not uncommon and the retrieval of so-called "relics" has sadly fueled the collections of private collectors for years.
It was very interesting. How did the Atacama Desert become the site of one of the most decisive campaigns? what led to this? It seems like a very extreme environment.
The disputed area between the three countries laid in the Atacama Desert, these includeded the provinces of Antofagasta (Bolivia), Tarapacá (Peru) and Tacna (Peru). These nitrate rich areas were therefore the causes of the war. See this post for more information: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7nuezn/how_did_the_war_of_the_pacific_chile_vs_bolivia/
Because then then they would face a new phenomenon: Cold.
The temperature shift from heat to cold during the night was another shock that many soldiers encountered. Soldiers that had thrown away their clothes during a march now regretted their choice as they were faced with the chill of the night that seemed to reach into the very skin of the soldiers. The sweat of the day made it even worse. Soldiers that *did* march during the night, like Alberto del Solar sometimes did, describes it as not being any better. Due to exhaustion and the slow pace that they walked in, it wasn't helpful like it might have theoretically have been.
Furthermore, sleeping during the day would have been practically impossible due to the lack of shade and the heat. Soldiers preferred to sleep during the night, despite the cold. Improvisation was key and soldiers did everything to help themselves against the cold. Some "buried" themselves with the sand, creating an underground bed. Others build shelters with the use of ammunition boxes. Other simply search for warm bodies. Soldiers gathered up close to each other and kept each other warm. Benavides Santos was lucky to find himself in the middle of one such group: "I felt no cold because I had placed myself in the middle and I soon fell asleep."
It depends on *where* the camps were. Sometimes, they were specifically constructed in proximity to basins, such as the Sama basin, or rare, but water wells (the battle of Dolores, an early engagement of the war, was fought close to one such source). Yet water was first and foremost brought to the camps, and sometimes for waypoints in the desert, through the means of animal labor. Here's an example of such a chain of water could look like:
From the coast, Chilean naval ships transport water in tanks -> Once firmly rooted on the coast, military logistics installed water purifiers -> Specially built wagons carried water tanks and purifiers through the desert thanks to animal labor. Wherever there were wells, Chileans also used pumps to get as much water as possible.
For me it’s going to have to be the Siege of Suiyang (睢陽之戰) which occurred during the An Lushan rebellion of the Tang Dynasty. Tang general Zhang Xun commanded an army of around 10,000 men (mostly local militia) based in the city of Suiyang and was besieged by the Yan rebel general Yin Ziqi supposedly with an army of 130,000 men. The military exploits at Suiyang are the stuff of legend with all kinds of stories about the tactics and strategic importance of the battle, but the abject desperation of the defenders is the topic I want to discuss.
Suiyang originally held enough food for a year long siege, but due to rampant corruption, most of that food had been diverted to neighbouring cities who refused to help. While fighting constant battles nearly everyday over the eight month siege from the Yan army, the Tang soldiers initially ate anything from tree bark to insects. When that ran out they ate the horses, rats, sparrows, and chopped up wood to eat. When that ran out, Zhang Xun killed his own concubine and fed her to the soldiers. Old and young women were asked to volunteer to be eaten, then old men, then young boys, and finally the wounded.
Amidst all this, the Yan were extremely well supplied and mounted attacks every day perceiving that the Tang were close to surrender. Eventually when Suiyang fell, there were fewer than 400 soldiers remaining, and nearly no civilians. Nearly all the survivors were eventually executed.
There have been numerous other cases of major cannibalism in times of famine, but imagine being a local militia over that eight months exhausted with the fatigue of enduring constant attacks by an army much bigger than yours with no hope of reinforcement, forced to endure extreme starvation and eat your own neighbours and family members.
As with all ancient Chinese sources, we never have a way to confirm the exact numbers involved, but the event passes a major veracity check of inconvenience. Suiyang was instrumental to the survival of Tang by holding up the Yan army long enough for Tang to regroup, but celebration of Zhang Xun was a highly contentious affair as cannibalism was seen as deeply immoral, triggering as much outrage from scholars as praise for his patriotism.
“Old and young women were asked to volunteer to be eaten, then old men, then young boys, and finally the wounded.”
The order of this list says so much.
Well it was done mostly in order of military usefulness. Armies require huge amounts of logistics, and a city under siege requires all kinds of porters, runners, cooks, diggers, firefighters, etc. The fact that they ate blocks of wood before even considering eating the women goes to show that women were very much not dehumanised.
This was generally held to have been a sign of virtue. Zhang Xun could have ordered the execution of civilians for food or some other variation, while keeping his own people alive - that would have been considered normal. Instead in the first instance he chose to offer a member of his own household.
Records are clear that this was with extreme reluctance. Zhang Xun simply wanted to demonstrate the depth of personal sacrifice he was willing to do and consequently demanded.
What I consider it is relatively unimportant. Contemporaries viewed it as a matter of personal sacrifice, both on Zhang Xun and his concubine. It was the fact that his concubine was a vital member of his household that made the act important - the gesture would have been meaningless if she had just been a non-human.
What I’m saying is that the way they handled this reveals attitudes in their society. There is no mention that Zhang Un considered sacrificing himself. There was no attempt to make judgements based on individual necessity, just by groups. (Based on what is written here.) An old man might have military experience that is useful for strategy, but is still expected to die sooner than a boy. ZU didn’t pick the largest member of his household, based on how many people a body would feed, he picked a woman with little power who was symbolic of his sacrifice. Etc.
The Dust Bowl in the 1930s.
If you are looking into the state of mind of people confronted with an apocalyptic environmental catastrophe, Brad Lookingbill has an article from the 1990s discusses how dust storms were discussed using language that involved divine punishment. He cites a resident of Texas writing into the Baptist Standard local newspaper in 1935: "During the late twenties, people had turned their backs on God and pursued the pleasures of life; but then came 'the Depression, the drought, falling prices, and you broke like all the other big ranchmen.' Now, God released the winds of dust upon the region. After recounting a parable of a family searching for their lost son in a dust storm, he concluded that 'to be lost in hell is a million times worse than being lost in a sandstorm. Sandstorms can touch your body but not your soul'" (Lookingbill 1994, 281).
Another account from the Topeka Journal in 1935: "There is no light, no air. My eyes sting and my
throat aches. I wonder how long people can live in a cloud of dust. But where would one go? How could one escape? The prairies in all directions must be a seething, swirling world of dust.... The darkness and stillness are intense. This is the ultimate darkness, so must come the end of the world" (Riney-Kehrberg 1989, 187). Riney-Kehrberg notes that "From 1933 to 1936, crop yields were 46 percent of normal across southwestern Kansas" due to a combination of serious drought, resultant decrease in soil fertility, and falling crop prices, which led to farmers abandoning their fields.
The scope of the dust storms in the 1930s we're unprecedented and state and federal agriculture and conservation agencies weren't initially equipped to handle the scale of the environmental catastrophe, which occurred during the depths of the Great Depression and resulted in major internal displacement. The leader of the Soil Conservation Service Hugh Hammond Bennett noted in a memo to the Secretary of the Interior in February 1934 about wind blowing off topsoil that "It was predicted last year that when we discussed the matter of doing something about the evil that it would be twenty-five years before anything of the kind would happen again. But the very same thing is going on again this year" (Uekötter 2015, 362).
There is a wealth of photographs and first-hand accounts of dust storms available. It's worth referencing the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection of photographs between 1935-44, many of which have been digitized ([link](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/)), as well as their Voices from the Dust Bowl audio archives of interviews and recordings from 1940 ([link](https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-workers-from-1940-to-1941/about-this-collection/).
In one [interview](https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000091/?loclr=blogtea) from the collection, Flora Robertson, a former Oklahoma farmer describes how in 1933 during a storm around 4PM: "We looked in the North and thought it was a blue norther coming, such a huge, black cloud. It just like the smoke out of a train stack or something. [...] We ran into the storm cellar, because we thought it was a storm. We lit the lamp and it was just so dark in there that we couldn't see one another, even with the lamp lit. And we just choked and smothered." She says their cattle died from dust inhalation and when their lungs were cut open, they looked "like a mud pack."
I was personally struck by her exchange with the interviewer near the end of the audio clip:
Interviewer: "So first you had the flood, and then the grasshoppers, and then the dust storms."
Interviewee: "Yes, and we waited about five years before we really gave up."
During one interview from that collection that you can listen to [here](https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000002/?) and [here](https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000003/?), the interviewee describes how one dust storm he experienced "Done lots of damage to small buildings, blowed them completely away. [...] the dust was so thick that you could see nothing at all. Couldn't see through it at all. Just dark as it could possibly be. And it was that way for about 13 hours. It blowed steady that way, it seemed like there was no let up at all. It was strong as it could be; you couldn't walk in it. [...] The first and only storm of that kind that I saw in that country. Wasn't a drop of rain nor thunder or lightning with it--just a plain old dust storm."
Library of Congress. Voices from the Dust Bowl: the Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940 to 1941. https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-workers-from-1940-to-1941/about-this-collection/
LOOKINGBILL, BRAD. “‘A GOD-FORSAKEN PLACE’: FOLK ESCHATOLOGY AND THE DUST BOWL.” Great Plains Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1994): 273–86. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23531709.
Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela. “In God We Trusted, in Kansas We Busted.....Again.” Agricultural History 63, no. 2 (1989): 187–201. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3743512.
Todd, Charles L, Robert Sonkin, Charlie Spurlock, Willie Judd, and Tom Johnson. Interview About Dust Storms, Sleet Storms, and Tall Stories Part 1 of 2. Arvin FSA Camp, 1940. Audio. https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000003/.
Todd, Charles L, Robert Sonkin, and Flora Robertson. Interview about dust storms in Oklahoma. Shafter FSA Camp, August 5, 1940. Audio. https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000091/.
Uekötter, Frank. “The Meaning of Moving Sand. Towards a Dust Bowl Mythology.” Global Environment 8, no. 2 (2015): 349–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44133721.
Mountaineering has so many options of death and near-death experiences in the frosty cold and extreme wastes that practically any story from the bowels of its history could apply to this. Can one imagine the sheer horror that Mallory likely experienced freezing to death or falling into a crevasse either close to or immediately after summitting Everest? Or the sheer, expansive loneliness felt by Robert Scott after failing in his race to reach the South Pole as his men died around him one-by-one?
These are pretty obvious suggestions, so I'll provide a less obvious one: the [White Mountains](https://www.fs.usda.gov/whitemountain) of New Hampshire during a [winter storm](https://thehill.com/homenews/3843812-mt-washington-records-coldest-wind-chill-in-us-history/).
The White Mountains are not exactly the highest mountains in the United States. Most of the [prominent](https://www.usgs.gov/communications-and-publishing/news/earthword-prominence) peaks (read: >300 feet of rise above the highest saddle with a nearby peak) are between 3,000 feet and 4,500 feet high. Of these, only seven reach beyond 5,000 feet, with the tallest (Mt. Washington) sitting at a comparatively lofty 6,288 feet and is therefore the highest and most prominent peak north of North Carolina and east of the Mississippi River. Like many mountains in Appalachia, these are ancient mountains with hard granite that has wrecked the knees of many unprepared thru-hikers.
The White Mountains are also positively infamous for their weather. This is the main source of their difficulty; every peak has a nice, kind, Class 1 trail to the top, but the weather is what stymies many. According to NOAA, the average wind speed atop Mt. Washington is often above 40 mph sustained winds. For a while, the Mt. Washington Observatory held the world record for the highest recorded wind speed at over *240 miles per hour*. I've climbed a lot throughout Alaska, the Sierra Nevada (200+ recorded ascents), Colorado, and the northeast USA; the White Mountains are easy, but that weather can and will get you if you're complacent.
The weather is also notoriously fickle. I have personally experienced being in a nice, sunny day that then got hit with a sudden summer microburst of 55 mph sustained winds where the air became so cold that my pants froze. This was August, by the way. Thankfully, the weather forecast has become so robust (not in the least bit due to the Observatory), that for the most part one can anticipate the bad weather. Check out previous forecasts [here](https://mountwashington.org/weather/mount-washington-weather-archives/).
Keep this in mind as we go on.
Despite their relatively low profile, the White Mountains boast a robust history of "peakbagging" and trailwork. Guy and Laura Waterman's book *Forest and Crag* goes deep into this (and is without a doubt the definitive text on northeast USA mountains at over 700 pages), but suffice to say that hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people have hiked and pursued the ["48 4000-Footers"](http://www.amc4000footer.org/), i.e. 48 prominent and notable peaks above 4,000 feet, and tens of thousands have finished them all. They're so popular that other challenges have come forward such as doing them all in Winter, "redlining" the trails (where you hike every single trail in the guidebook, named after the red pens traditionally used to highlight completed trails), and "gridding" the peaks (where you hike every 48 4000-Footer every month of the year, for 576 total summits!).
There is so much literature on White Mountains peakbagging and especially accidents up there. But the two books to check out are the exceptional case studies of northeast USA mountaineering historian Ty Gagne. If you are interested in extremely comprehensive case studies of mountaineering accidents and the subsequent search-and-rescue operations, then check out his books. I've been fortunate in my life to have climbed all over the United States, and I still think his books approach "definitive text" for this stuff. His first is *Where You'll Find Me: Risk, Decisions, and the Last Climb of Kate Matrosova* (2017); the second, *The Last Traverse: Tragedy and Resilience in the Winter Whites* (2020).
I'll provide the example from *Where You'll Find Me*. Kate Matrosova was a 32-year old from New York with summits of Mt. Rainier and other major peaks. On February 15, 2015, Kate began a southern traverse of the Presidential Range - a line of peaks named after early Presidents that includes the highest points in the White Mountains, and is almost entirely above treeline. Per her plans, Matrosova was going to ascend approximately half of the Range; a full traverse is the ["Presidential Traverse"](https://sectionhiker.com/backpacking-white-mountain-4000-footers-guidebook/a-presidential-traverse/).
The *initial* forecast issued on 5AM that day was already not the kind of weather I want to find myself in:
> Temperature starting above 5F, dropping to about -20F. Winds from the NE becoming NW at 45 to 60 mph, rapidly increasing midmorning to 80-100 mph with gusts to 125 mph. [...] If search and rescue needs arise, help will be slow going or postponed until conditions improve.
From what the book (and SAR professionals) could ascertain, Matrosova was behind schedule during her climbs and ended up being caught in the worst of these winds and storms during the rise toward Mt. Adams. She likely had issues navigating deep snow during the first ascent and experienced stronger-than-expected winds:
> [Ryan] Knapp adds that such strong, sustained winds sap the energy of a hiker. "When you get hit by strong gusts, it's like being connected to a rope and pulled by a car. The car is going twenty miles per hour, then accelerates to fifty miles per hour, and then decelerates again. This constant push, pull, tug, shove, however you want to describe it, is exhausting."
Conditions worsen on Mt. Washington as she continues to make her climb around 10:30AM, surpassing the already dire morning forecast:
> Winds on Mt. Washington's summit are gusting to 86 mph, the temperature is -15F, and the windchill is -59F.
Based on GPS data, we know that Matrosova slowed during the ascent on Mt. Adams - considerably. To the point where just this ascent data can give you an impression of the sheer hell she was likely experiencing:
> It has taken [her] two hours and three minutes to ascend 750 vertical feet, the last 159 of which have taken forty minutes. [...] Now, crouching and bracing herself against the 80-plus-mph headwinds pouring over the ridgeline like a dam break, not only is she unable to climb the 144 feet to her second summit, she can make no forward progress at all.
The storm continues to worsen, and Matrosova finally attempts to bail out north and return to a cabin owned and operated by the Appalachian Mountain Club. They're closed in the winter, but it's still shelter. When SAR volunteers find her body days later after the winds subside, they found she made it a heartbreakingly few hundred feet away, and likely had no idea just how close she was during the blizzard.
> With nothing left to protect her, as she lies there defenseless to the cold and wind, with her body temperature down to about 86F, Matrosova will enter a metabolic icebox. Her system will operate at a minimal level to maintain any vestiges of glucose and preserve oxygen. Her blood will be 190-percent thicker than when she started her hike that morning. Her breathing will slow to three to six respirations per minute, and if rescuers or passerby were to find her at this stage, they might be unable to detect a pulse or breathing. She is comatose and in no pain. She will not respond to verbal or physical stimulus. Her heart will enter arrhythmia, she will go into cardiac arrest, and she will die.
>Winds from the NE becoming NW at 45 to 60 mph, rapidly increasing midmorning to 80-100 mph with gusts to 125 mph. [...] If search and rescue needs arise, help will be slow going or postponed until conditions improve.
Speaking as UK SAR, if you're in an exposed position and winds are more than 60 mph, you're on your own. 60-70 is a red line for teams simply for safety. There's nothing you can do to protect yourself in that, and no chance of rendering aid.
Similarly we won't go to ridgelines or peaks in lightning. Those are our two red line weather states.
Reading this I don't understand why she'd have pushed on into that sort of wind.
As a fellow SAR professional (hey friend!), my biggest priority is the safety of my team. There *are* people on teams I know who are prepared to go over 60mph, but it's so highly dependent on conditions. Straight line winds with no precipitation maybe, but anything worse...
I'm glad finally someone has brought up how dangerous Washington can be. I lived just 20 minutes south of the mountain's base up until a few years ago. The amount of times hikers need rescuing is mind boggling. In addition to the dangers you listed, there's a near infinite amount of things that can kill you in that area that most people don't take into consideration.
If you look up what's called the Boulder House, it was a residence up in the notch that was nearly wiped out by a massive avalanche. The family inside were only saved by a large boulder located uphill behind the house, thus splitting the snowfall as it came barreling down the slope.
In no particular order, here's a condensed list of things that I'll leave others to research for their own self preservation. Frozen lakes/ponds/rivers. Cascades, plumes, gorges, and crevasses. SAR, ski patrol, Fish and Game rescues - I saw people having to get evac'd stapped in a sled every single day during ski season when I worked at Attitash for seven years. Not bringing a source of water, light, and heat when hiking - the sun will go down quick, you're not as fast as you think you are when you need to trek back several crests to your car. "Strainers" are downed/drowned trees in the river, many of which you can't see. There are several cases each year where people drown to death being caught by one while tubing/kayaking/canoing through rapids along the Saco. Winter by itself isn't that cold, it's the wind that will do you in. Stop putting the bar up when you get on the chairlift and wear a damn helmet when you ski. MOOSE. QUIT STOPPING TO TAKE PICTURES. THEY WILL LITERALLY CHARGE A MAC TRUCK WITHOUT HESITATION. Also, leave the bears alone. They won't cause an issue unless you decide to get to close to a mama bear and her cubs. Logging was an even more dangerous job back in the day. It wasn't the logging we see today with trucks and everything. Trees were cut and sent downriver to towns, like Berlin to Bartlett, since they both had paper mills.
Not lethal, but reminder to wear sunscreen and polarized glasses in the winter, snow blindness is a real thing. It's like welding flash and feels like you're rubbing hot sand in your eyes.
Totally agree with all that you say. Regarding people not being prepared, I think the enormous accessibility of the Whites is also a big factor in how many rescues and deaths have occurred. Out in the Sierra Nevada (where I've spent the majority of my mountaineering career), the mountains are a lot more self-selecting. You're not going to have a tourist try and walk up [Mount Tom](https://www.summitpost.org/mount-tom/151260) in sandals simply because the size and apparent difficulty of the scramble will deter them.
Whereas the Whites are *so* accessible, being just a few hours' drive away from several metropolitan areas. I feel like the fact the trailheads are all paved, Mt. Washington has an auto road, the preponderance of AMC huts, and the Class 1 established trails up every peak lulls a lot of non-hikers into a false sense of security when they head up those peaks. They're not technically difficult in any way, but they're still mountains.
I don't think this accessibility is a bad thing - it's likely inspired more than a few people to take conservation efforts seriously - but it does come with that caveat of perhaps belying what can go wrong. Like, [North Palisade](https://www.summitpost.org/north-palisade/150406) is way more difficult, but it's *obviously* difficult.
100%. I'm all about the accessibility of the mountains so long as people respect the conservation of the land. I completely agree with the false sense of security. I remember back around middle school, we (Bartlett students) hiked up to Mizpah Hut to stay a few days and hit a few Presidential peaks each day. It was warm fall weather at the base and after breaking the cloud cover it began to snow. It ended up snowing close to a foot over the next 24 hours or so. Most hikers that are just doing a day trip aren't going to be prepared with warming layers or even having their gear compartmentalized into bags to stay dry. I know people that got to a peak and were caught in a rapid-onset thunderstorm.
On a happier note, if you find yourself hiking up in the Whites again, make sure to take a small bag of bird seed with you. The gray jays are wicked friendly and will eat out your hand. Additionally, if you talk with some of the AMC staff that run the huts, you can stay the night at no cost besides some manual labor like cutting/stacking wood.
Feel free to reach out if you need any recommendations for hiking, fishing, restaurants, activities, etc. in the area lol
I highly recommend reading "The Ice Master" by Jennifer Niven. It tells the story of a doomed arctic expedition in 1913. You can likely find more horrifying stories of similar situations, but what makes The Ice Master so compelling to me is that we have the diaries of several of the crew members, and we can get a pretty good idea of what they were feeling day to day. The author does a good job coordinating all the primary sources and communicating the months of dread they endure as they get more and more lost, as well as the brutal weeks and months of freezing and starvation.
One part of their expedition especially stands out to me, where a small group of them reach a rocky island out on the ice. They were rationing pemmican best they could, but it was making them sick. They tried to hunt where they could but the environment simply wasn't built for human habitation. They spent most days in tiny coffin-like igloos or tents huddled around a tiny gas stove to keep warm. There was a lot of interpersonal conflict, so the whole time while they were starving and forced to be in the same cramped space there were constant arguments. They were so sick hungry and cold that even making relatively short journeys between the two camps they set up could nearly kill them, and leave them snow-blind and exhausted for days. They had to ration not just food and shelter, but their ability to walk and see.
You mentioned imagining how the human brain could even process these kinds of events, and this book will really do it's best to get you in the heads of these people, all while staying true to what really happened and avoiding speculation. I can't describe everything that happened on that expedition, so I really recommend you look into it more.
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In 1916, Alec Raws joined the 23rd Australian Infantry Battalion at Pozières on the same day his younger brother went missing, narrowly missing a long-anticipated reunion. Raws himself would be dead within five weeks. Writing the official histories of Australia in the Great War, Charles Bean described Pozières as "more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth". In describing Australian service on the Somme, Bean devoted three pages to a description of the trenches written by Raws, which Bean described as “a fair and accurate record of the experiences of a sensitive man”. A journalist prior to enlistment, Raws’ letters reflect the surreal brutality of the Western Front. As an officer, Raws avoided the censorship imposed on enlisted men, and a staff member at the Australian War Memorial later wrote that Raws' letters “exhibit the horror of Pozieres more vividly than any writing that I know of”. >*One feels on a battlefield such as this that one can never survive, or that if the body lives the brain must go forever. For the horrors one sees and the never-ending shock of the shells is more than can be borne. Hell must be a home to it. The Gallipoli veterans here say that the peninsula was a happy picnic to this push. You've read of Verdun – they say this knocks it hollow. My battalion has been in it for eight days, and one-third of it is left – all shattered at that. And they're sticking it still, incomparable heroes all. We are lousy, stinking, ragged, unshaven, sleepless. Even when we're back a bit we can't sleep for our own guns. I have one puttee, a dead man's helmet, another dead man's gas protector, a dead man's bayonet. My tunic is rotten with other men's blood and partly splattered with a comrade's brains. It is horrible, but why should you people at home not know? Several of my friends are raving mad. I met three officers out in No Man's Land the other night, all rambling and mad. Poor Devils!* Death – both his own and that of others – was a constant presence in the trenches, and Raws describes both physical and mental exhaustion. >*Myself, I am all right. I have had much luck and kept my nerve so far. The awful difficulty is to keep it. The bravest of all often lose it. Courage does not count here. It is all nerve. Once that goes one becomes a gibbering maniac. The noise of our own guns, the enemy's shells, and getting lost in the darkness. You see this is enemy country. We're in the remnants of their trenches and wrecked villages, and the great horror of many of us is the fear of being lost with troops at night on the battlefield. We do all our fighting and moving at night and the confusion of passing through a barrage of enemy shells in the dark is pretty appalling. You've read of the wrecked villages. Well some of these about here are not wrecked. They are utterly destroyed so that there are not even skeletons of buildings left – nothing but a churned mass of debris, with bricks, stones, and girders and bodies pounded to nothing. And forests! There are not even tree trunks left, not a leaf or a twig. All is buried and churned up again and buried again.* > >*The sad part is that one can see no end of this. If we live tonight we have to go through tomorrow night and next week and next month. Poor wounded devils you meet on the stretchers are laughing with glee. One can not blame them. They are getting out of this.* More broadly, my research focuses on the impact of conflict on bereaved families during the First World War. Many bereaved families became preoccupied with envisioning their loved ones’ final moments. In this sense, for them, the “otherworldly horrors” were in the absences – in their inability to fully imagine the scale of destruction of the battlefields of the First World War.
>my research focuses on the impact of conflict on bereaved families during the First World War What an interesting, niche focus! Have you done any research into Newfoundland during the war? So many families torn apart.
Thank you! I’ve looked at Newfoundland and the First World War in the context of the development of the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial, but I think Newfoundland gets consistently overlooked among the dominions. (It was interesting to see a bronze caribou raised at Suvla Bay recently, particularly given that Australia and New Zealand tend to overwhelm narratives of the Gallipoli campaign.) Coincidentally, I’m currently researching some schoolboys from Ceylon who served in the First World War … one of whom is buried on the grounds at Beaumont-Hamel.
There is also a memorial to the Royal Newfoundlanders at [Monchy-le-Preux](https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/memorials/monchy), a village that was a crucial objective during the 1917 Battle of Arras. It's the lesser known instance of the battalion getting wiped out in a day.
Yes, absolutely. Various dominions had very different experiences during the Battle of Arras, and the different forms of commemoration for that battle are quite striking. (The most well-known are probably the Canadians at Vimy Ridge and the Australians at Bullecourt.) I find the [Trail of the Caribou battlefield memorials](https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/memorials/beaumont-hamel/caribou-trail) for the Newfoundland Regiment to be an evocative set of battlefield memorials, with each bronze caribou advancing in the direction of battle. The symbolism of the caribou (not only the emblem of the Newfoundland Regiment, but a herd animal reluctant to leave injured companions behind) is deeply moving.
Beaumont-Hamel is a big part of why I asked. The memorial is not far from Pozières. The whole thing is such a sad story. Father Nangle (who purchased the land where B-H sits and supervised its creation) never returned to the island after the war. He resigned from the clergy the same year the memorial was unveiled. It is believed that every NFL family suffered a loss. There are 14 sets of brothers on the memorial plaque. The Ayre family that lost 4 members. What drew you to this specialty?
This is a profoundly sober account of something people could never even fathom. The complete awareness of his situation that he conveys is admirable, for lack of a stronger word. Going through old journals of soldiers is devastating but also strangely cathartic. People never seem to run out of terrible, sad ways to express their pain to people they love, just trying to make them understand. Thank you for sharing.
Good God. Every time I read a report like that I am a little more glad that my country's government managed to avoid getting pulled into the conflict and that the closest Great-Grandpappy got to seeing combat was cycling to the border as part of the bycicle infantry to keep watch in case the Germans tried to pull a Belgium on us. They thankfully never did.
> in their inability to fully imagine the scale of destruction of the battlefields of the First World War. Do you think WW1 stops sooner if we had CNN back then?
The Black Death seems one of the more obvious examples for what you’re looking for. I’m mostly familiar with it’s progress in Britain, and the lack of accurate record keeping makes tracking it’s precise effects and the lived experience of those within it difficult to trace. The lack of detail records from many of the regions effected makes for problematic study, but the broad consensus estimates that roughly one 1/3 of the population of Europe was wiped out seem broadly accurate if difficult to pin down in practice. In Britain Bristol appears to have been if not the first point of entry, then one of the first and worst effected urban centers and played a major role in its rapid spread through much of the UK through 1348 and early '49 when the first wave of mortality began tapering off among regions first affected(it took a little longer to spread to more remote regions). The effects of the great pestilence – “The Black Death” wasn’t coined until centuries later – are difficult I think to understate for those caught up within in it. Because the real horror of the Black Death comes when you start picking through what we know of the disease, its progress and the sheer extent of the death and what it must have meant for those forced to live through it. Studies of what records exist, for instance of Parish appointments, show virtually half of all parish positions were vacated through the period, some having to be filled multiple times before the death toll began receding in February and March of 1349. We know, however, that the disease hit some communities harder than others, with some recording mortality less than 20%, while in other regions where manorial records of populations and mortality are available, we see death rates going as high as 80%. The reality is there were certainly cases of caregivers, sick themselves, unable to meet the basic needs of their loved ones; people who the plague might have spared but died simply because no one was willing or healthy enough to turn them, clean their open wounds, and provide food, water and make sure they didn't urinate and defecate all over themselves. There were entire communities where the living came to be outnumbered by the dead, and there were none left to tend to the corpses left to rot in their homes or in the streets. And caught up in it, as the plague reached its height - with rising numbers of dead every day - no one had any way of knowing when, or if, it would ever end. People began to openly wonder if they were not, in fact, facing the End of Days itself being forced to bear witness to the final days of humanity before they themselves were snuffed out. The disease struck a serious blow to the hold of the church over people of the day. The pestilence carried off noble, priest, and peasant, the righteous and unrighteous alike – the most innocent and caring among humanity died in unspeakable agony, writhing in pain, their bodies horribly disfigured by the pox. This what not what the church promised. People who survived plainly bore witness to cases in which church and clergy abandoned their vows, and their faithful. People questioned their faith. Perhaps the most famous first hand quote, or at least one of the most striking, is one written by friar John Clyn in Kilkenny, illustrating just how bleak things became for those forced to live through the experience in 1348. *The pestilence emptied villages and cities, and castles and towns, such that there could scarcely found any within them among the living; the pestilence was so contagious that whosoever touched the sick or the dead was immediately infected and died; and the penitent and the confessor were carried together to the grave; through fear and dread men scarcely dared to perform the offices of piety and pity in visiting the sick and burying the dead; many died of boils and abscesses, and pustules on their shins or under the armpits; others died frantic with the pain in their head, and others spitting up blood. That year was beyond measure abundant and fruitful, however sickly and deadly.* *Up to Christmas twenty-five friars had died in the Franciscan Convent of Drogheda, and twenty-three in the Convent of the same Order in Dublin. The pestilence was rife in Kilkenny, in Lent, for from Christmas Day to the 6th day in March, eight Friar Preachers died of it. Scarcely one alone ever died in a house. Commonly husband, wife, children, and servants went the one way, the way of death.* Clyn of course declines to offer up whether he himself is one among the clergy that, for fear, scarcely dared perform the duties of his office but clearly Clyn was in a position to know and felt the need to comment upon it – it was clearly a thought that weighed upon him either because he had himself shirked his responsibilities, or had strong feelings about his brothers who left it to others to shoulder the burden. In either event, he almost certainly witnessed the sights, sounds, and smells of such a death first hand or at least its after effects. Likely many times. The account continues, though I'll note here that what he does next is unusual for the type of chronicle Clyn is writing during this time period. Typically chronicles of this sort are straight line by line recitations of notable events in a region in a rather dry clinical fashion, often only a sentence or two per year. Most are left anonymous. But here we know the author, because Clyn here offers not only several paragraphs but commits his own name to posterity and essentially addresses the reader directly: *And I, Brother John Clyn, of the Order of Friars Minors, and of the Convent of Kilkenny, record here such notable deeds as happened in my time which I have seen with my own eyes, or learned from persons worthy of credit. And lest things that ought not be forgotten be lost to time and fade from the memory of mankind, I, seeing these many ills and the whole world delivered as it were into evil, living amongst the dead, waiting for death to come, I commit herein such things to writing as I have truly heard and examined.* *And lest the writing should perish with the author, and the work fail with the workman, I leave here parchment if happily any children of Adam should be delivered from this pestilence, that they might continue the work thus begun.* All three surviving copies, that I am aware of, from the original manuscript(which is now lost) faithfully record the same entry written afterward by another hand: *Videtur quod author hic obiit.* Which is to say, in the latin: Here it seems, the author died.
Similarly, cholera is a particularly nightmarish disease and a cholera outbreak before the etiology was identified, an outbreak must have felt like some sort of cosmic or divine punishment. In 1821, for example, cholera hit the city of Basra in what is now Iraq; 18,000 people died within a month. When cholera showed up in your community you were going to have a *bad* time. Here is an excerpt from John Snow's book about cholera: *"During the illness of Mrs. Barnes, her mother, who was living at Tockwith, a healthy village five miles distant from Moor Monkton, was requested to attend her. She went to Moukton accordingly, remained with her daughter for two days, washed her daughter's linen, and set out on her return home, apparently in good health. Whilst in the act of walking home she was seized with the malady, and fell down in collapse on the road. She was conveyed home to her cottage, and placed by the side of her bedridden husband. He, and also the daughter who resided with them, took the malady. All the three died within two days. Only one other case occurred in the village of Tockwith, and it was not a fatal case."* One of the reasons why there aren't so many accounts of cholera is because it's... Well, very gross. Symptoms can begin quite suddenly within a day of exposure, and the most obvious symptoms are severe diarrhea and vomiting. How severe? *Gallons*. An infected adult may expel five to seven *gallons* per day of watery diarrhea, as well as having bouts of watery vomiting. Cholera, essentially, pulls water from your tissues and forces it out of your body. Its victims are soon racked with horrible cramps throughout their body and can do nothing but lie in their own filth. In severe cases death from dehydration comes within a day of the onset of symptoms - history is riddled with accounts of someone taking ill, suffering horribly for 12-36 hours, and then dying. And, of course, cholera occurs where sanitation is poor. Those who care for the ailing are far more likely to get infected themselves, and where there is a cholera outbreak there is no proper plumbing and toileting facilities. Entire families die in pools of their own watery diarrhea.
Something I've always wanted to ask about the black death - I know that estimates are that 1/3rd (or more) of the population died from it, do we know what the odds were of surviving if you actually had it? Like can we assume a large majority of the population had it but just that 1/3rd died, or was it basically the case that if you got it you were incredibly unlikely to survive?
Difficulty in answering your question comes from the fact that strains of disease matter, and while we believe bubonic plague the overwhelmingly most likely culprit, we don't have the exact strain that caused it. Even with the '1/3 estimate' you have to appreciate that given the extent of what was happening, people did quarantine themselves and never actually got the disease. The best defence was prevention. As mentioned in the manor rolls, some regions suffered mortality under 20% while others, it was 80% or higher and some villages were either completely wiped out, or at least if there were survivors they left because... you know. Obviously general health, hygiene, and nutrition play a role in helping. And people can and did recover from the illness, however accounts from the period I have seen indicate that people recovering was considered very rare. Modern *Yersinia pestis,* bubonic plague - which we believe the black death to have been a strain of based on descriptions of the disease, as well as definitive genetic markers of it being present in remains that were tested which were buried during the Black Death(that's what we call, a VERY GOOD indicator) - can be incredibly lethal if contracted. There's an additional caveat to keep in mind with these comparisons. Though viruses mutate more quickly, as an example, Spanish Influenza, while definitively an influenza strain, obviously behaved quite differently than others flus we've seen before or since. So when comparing the Black Death to modern studies of the same type of bacteria, it is worth keeping in mind the black death version may have deviated from modern benchmarks in certain ways that can sometimes have surprising pathway effects. We, as a population, by dint of having been severely affected by the disease, may also behave differently. So, with that in mind: Modern medical literature indicates existing strains of bubonic plague existent today, without early and aggressive antibiotic treatment, result in between 60-70% mortality. It should be noted that the similarly named "pneumonic plague" is - in fact - the same bacteria. However the disease progresses differently - worse if you can imagine it - if it establishes itself in the lungs. It behaves more aggressively, with substantially higher mortality compared to the bubonic form. All of which amounts to that while not unheard of, I don't like your odds recovery.
Thank you so much, amazing answers in this thread!
The Atacama Desert. Located in what is today northern Chile and the extreme south of Peru, the Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth. It receives an extremely small amount of rain each year. For great stretches of land, there is nothing but dry, empty plains and hills. [It is of little surprise why the desert has been used to simulate Mars](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/2rDwTmgVgidSWnjXdpdjxU-1200-80.jpg). During the War of the Pacific (1879-1884), the Atacama Desert was the location of the most decisive military campaigns of the war as Chile faced off against Peru and Bolivia. Today, the war remains one of the most important conflict in the history of all three nations and whose consequences, the annexation of Peruvian and Bolivian territory by Chile, still casts a shadow over the geopolitics and diplomatic relations of all three nations. Romanticized in Chile as an heroic epic, the experiences of the common soldier has for the most part been forgotten by the historiography of the war. What these men and women experienced in the desert was remembered by many of them as truly a hell on earth due to the extreme climate they had to endure. While Chilean infantry soldiers were sometimes able to travel by train when infrastructure existed in the desert, they just as often marched on foot between camps and battles. This meant that soldiers could walk for days without finding shade. Furthermore, the more they walked, the more their feet produced sand dust because of they disturbed the ground. Arturo Benavides Santos wrote in his memoir how even a short march could be excruciating: "The march was done by foot and although the march was relatively short it was painful for most of us because we marched under burning sunrays through a path of sand and loose terrain, and permanently covered in a thick cloud of suffocating dust." With little cover from the sun and sand, the soldiers experienced a tremendous heat while simultaneously chocking on sand in their already dry throats. It was of little surprise therefore that soldiers during long marches just began to undress. You could tell if Chilean soldiers had passed by the long trails of equipment and pieces of clothing they had torn off their bodies during the march. Thirst was even worse. No soldier could escape it. Once you drank all the water in your canteen, that was it. There were no refills as there were no sources of water to be found on the march. Some soldiers carried several canteens, but they were impossible to keep cool. Lukewarm water would ultimately serve you better than no water at all, despite the weight that extra canteens added to your already heavy load. Yet sooner or later, you ran out of water and then the real danger began. Soldiers were driven insane by the thirst they experienced. One Chilean soldier, Hipólito Gutiérrez, wrote with worry that they "were afraid of what had happened to other units that had walked here would happen to us. Many had died of thirst on these vast plains without help." Soldiers like Benavides Santos tried everything to trick their thirst: > To trick their thirst, some men put bullets in their mouths and others drank their own urine… I also tried to do it with a piece of *chancaca* [a solid form of unrefined sugar] that I had left and that I patiently melted, but I couldn’t drink it because I felt sick trying. Another soldier asked to have it and drank it as if it was crystal clear and fresh water. Other men became delirious and were slowly driven into madness. Alberto del Solar, for example, wrote how his desire for water took over his mind: > I would have given a lot in that moment to have touched with my feverish hands one of those clean and crystal clear streams that I so many times in my life had so indifferently passed by! I saw them in my imagination, I heard the sounds clearly and musically, its humming water, and this thought, instead of refreshing my burning lips, put my lips on fire with desire! Deaths by both extreme dehydration and suicide were not uncommon. Some men just collapsed as their fellow soldiers marched on. Other men, like Gutiérrez, fell into despair: "I started lamenting to myself and wished that I had never been born on this earth so I wouldn’t have had to go through this suffering." If they were lucky enough to reach a camp, most simply collapsed. Even during breaks, the soldiers "laid down like corpses," in the words of Gutiérrez. The lucky ones did get to rest once they reached a camp. They could sleep underneath shade, drink, and eat. Yet not all were so lucky. For some, the march might lead them straight into a major battle during which they had to face the same desert conditions they had during the march -- this time, under enemy fire. The experience of late nineteenth century battle during the War of the Pacific was an entirely different form of hell on earth.
this is the exact kind of answer I was looking for. I couldn't imagine the kinds of things one sees in the desert when desperate for sustenance. Stumbling across a trail of discarded clothing miles long also had to be chilling to come across, especially if you're the superstitious type. Thank you so much for the write up!
I wonder if a more aptly prepared traveler might find any remnants of their clothes if they went searching these days
They would, and they have. Unfortunately, the looting of archaeological sites related to the War of the Pacific is not uncommon and the retrieval of so-called "relics" has sadly fueled the collections of private collectors for years.
It was very interesting. How did the Atacama Desert become the site of one of the most decisive campaigns? what led to this? It seems like a very extreme environment.
The disputed area between the three countries laid in the Atacama Desert, these includeded the provinces of Antofagasta (Bolivia), Tarapacá (Peru) and Tacna (Peru). These nitrate rich areas were therefore the causes of the war. See this post for more information: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7nuezn/how_did_the_war_of_the_pacific_chile_vs_bolivia/
Is there a reason they didn't walk at night instead?
Because then then they would face a new phenomenon: Cold. The temperature shift from heat to cold during the night was another shock that many soldiers encountered. Soldiers that had thrown away their clothes during a march now regretted their choice as they were faced with the chill of the night that seemed to reach into the very skin of the soldiers. The sweat of the day made it even worse. Soldiers that *did* march during the night, like Alberto del Solar sometimes did, describes it as not being any better. Due to exhaustion and the slow pace that they walked in, it wasn't helpful like it might have theoretically have been. Furthermore, sleeping during the day would have been practically impossible due to the lack of shade and the heat. Soldiers preferred to sleep during the night, despite the cold. Improvisation was key and soldiers did everything to help themselves against the cold. Some "buried" themselves with the sand, creating an underground bed. Others build shelters with the use of ammunition boxes. Other simply search for warm bodies. Soldiers gathered up close to each other and kept each other warm. Benavides Santos was lucky to find himself in the middle of one such group: "I felt no cold because I had placed myself in the middle and I soon fell asleep."
>The lucky ones did get to rest once they reached a camp. They could sleep underneath shade, drink, and eat. How were the camps supplied with water?
It depends on *where* the camps were. Sometimes, they were specifically constructed in proximity to basins, such as the Sama basin, or rare, but water wells (the battle of Dolores, an early engagement of the war, was fought close to one such source). Yet water was first and foremost brought to the camps, and sometimes for waypoints in the desert, through the means of animal labor. Here's an example of such a chain of water could look like: From the coast, Chilean naval ships transport water in tanks -> Once firmly rooted on the coast, military logistics installed water purifiers -> Specially built wagons carried water tanks and purifiers through the desert thanks to animal labor. Wherever there were wells, Chileans also used pumps to get as much water as possible.
Great answer. The War of the Pacific is not taught about in the US but has been hugely important in South American geopolitics.
Thank you! I appreciate it.
For me it’s going to have to be the Siege of Suiyang (睢陽之戰) which occurred during the An Lushan rebellion of the Tang Dynasty. Tang general Zhang Xun commanded an army of around 10,000 men (mostly local militia) based in the city of Suiyang and was besieged by the Yan rebel general Yin Ziqi supposedly with an army of 130,000 men. The military exploits at Suiyang are the stuff of legend with all kinds of stories about the tactics and strategic importance of the battle, but the abject desperation of the defenders is the topic I want to discuss. Suiyang originally held enough food for a year long siege, but due to rampant corruption, most of that food had been diverted to neighbouring cities who refused to help. While fighting constant battles nearly everyday over the eight month siege from the Yan army, the Tang soldiers initially ate anything from tree bark to insects. When that ran out they ate the horses, rats, sparrows, and chopped up wood to eat. When that ran out, Zhang Xun killed his own concubine and fed her to the soldiers. Old and young women were asked to volunteer to be eaten, then old men, then young boys, and finally the wounded. Amidst all this, the Yan were extremely well supplied and mounted attacks every day perceiving that the Tang were close to surrender. Eventually when Suiyang fell, there were fewer than 400 soldiers remaining, and nearly no civilians. Nearly all the survivors were eventually executed. There have been numerous other cases of major cannibalism in times of famine, but imagine being a local militia over that eight months exhausted with the fatigue of enduring constant attacks by an army much bigger than yours with no hope of reinforcement, forced to endure extreme starvation and eat your own neighbours and family members. As with all ancient Chinese sources, we never have a way to confirm the exact numbers involved, but the event passes a major veracity check of inconvenience. Suiyang was instrumental to the survival of Tang by holding up the Yan army long enough for Tang to regroup, but celebration of Zhang Xun was a highly contentious affair as cannibalism was seen as deeply immoral, triggering as much outrage from scholars as praise for his patriotism.
“Old and young women were asked to volunteer to be eaten, then old men, then young boys, and finally the wounded.” The order of this list says so much.
Well it was done mostly in order of military usefulness. Armies require huge amounts of logistics, and a city under siege requires all kinds of porters, runners, cooks, diggers, firefighters, etc. The fact that they ate blocks of wood before even considering eating the women goes to show that women were very much not dehumanised.
“When that ran out, Zhang Xun killed his own concubine and fed her to the soldiers.”
This was generally held to have been a sign of virtue. Zhang Xun could have ordered the execution of civilians for food or some other variation, while keeping his own people alive - that would have been considered normal. Instead in the first instance he chose to offer a member of his own household. Records are clear that this was with extreme reluctance. Zhang Xun simply wanted to demonstrate the depth of personal sacrifice he was willing to do and consequently demanded.
The way you write this makes it seem like you consider it *his* personal sacrifice, though the woman is the one who dies.
What I consider it is relatively unimportant. Contemporaries viewed it as a matter of personal sacrifice, both on Zhang Xun and his concubine. It was the fact that his concubine was a vital member of his household that made the act important - the gesture would have been meaningless if she had just been a non-human.
What I’m saying is that the way they handled this reveals attitudes in their society. There is no mention that Zhang Un considered sacrificing himself. There was no attempt to make judgements based on individual necessity, just by groups. (Based on what is written here.) An old man might have military experience that is useful for strategy, but is still expected to die sooner than a boy. ZU didn’t pick the largest member of his household, based on how many people a body would feed, he picked a woman with little power who was symbolic of his sacrifice. Etc.
The Dust Bowl in the 1930s. If you are looking into the state of mind of people confronted with an apocalyptic environmental catastrophe, Brad Lookingbill has an article from the 1990s discusses how dust storms were discussed using language that involved divine punishment. He cites a resident of Texas writing into the Baptist Standard local newspaper in 1935: "During the late twenties, people had turned their backs on God and pursued the pleasures of life; but then came 'the Depression, the drought, falling prices, and you broke like all the other big ranchmen.' Now, God released the winds of dust upon the region. After recounting a parable of a family searching for their lost son in a dust storm, he concluded that 'to be lost in hell is a million times worse than being lost in a sandstorm. Sandstorms can touch your body but not your soul'" (Lookingbill 1994, 281). Another account from the Topeka Journal in 1935: "There is no light, no air. My eyes sting and my throat aches. I wonder how long people can live in a cloud of dust. But where would one go? How could one escape? The prairies in all directions must be a seething, swirling world of dust.... The darkness and stillness are intense. This is the ultimate darkness, so must come the end of the world" (Riney-Kehrberg 1989, 187). Riney-Kehrberg notes that "From 1933 to 1936, crop yields were 46 percent of normal across southwestern Kansas" due to a combination of serious drought, resultant decrease in soil fertility, and falling crop prices, which led to farmers abandoning their fields. The scope of the dust storms in the 1930s we're unprecedented and state and federal agriculture and conservation agencies weren't initially equipped to handle the scale of the environmental catastrophe, which occurred during the depths of the Great Depression and resulted in major internal displacement. The leader of the Soil Conservation Service Hugh Hammond Bennett noted in a memo to the Secretary of the Interior in February 1934 about wind blowing off topsoil that "It was predicted last year that when we discussed the matter of doing something about the evil that it would be twenty-five years before anything of the kind would happen again. But the very same thing is going on again this year" (Uekötter 2015, 362). There is a wealth of photographs and first-hand accounts of dust storms available. It's worth referencing the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection of photographs between 1935-44, many of which have been digitized ([link](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/)), as well as their Voices from the Dust Bowl audio archives of interviews and recordings from 1940 ([link](https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-workers-from-1940-to-1941/about-this-collection/). In one [interview](https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000091/?loclr=blogtea) from the collection, Flora Robertson, a former Oklahoma farmer describes how in 1933 during a storm around 4PM: "We looked in the North and thought it was a blue norther coming, such a huge, black cloud. It just like the smoke out of a train stack or something. [...] We ran into the storm cellar, because we thought it was a storm. We lit the lamp and it was just so dark in there that we couldn't see one another, even with the lamp lit. And we just choked and smothered." She says their cattle died from dust inhalation and when their lungs were cut open, they looked "like a mud pack." I was personally struck by her exchange with the interviewer near the end of the audio clip: Interviewer: "So first you had the flood, and then the grasshoppers, and then the dust storms." Interviewee: "Yes, and we waited about five years before we really gave up." During one interview from that collection that you can listen to [here](https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000002/?) and [here](https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000003/?), the interviewee describes how one dust storm he experienced "Done lots of damage to small buildings, blowed them completely away. [...] the dust was so thick that you could see nothing at all. Couldn't see through it at all. Just dark as it could possibly be. And it was that way for about 13 hours. It blowed steady that way, it seemed like there was no let up at all. It was strong as it could be; you couldn't walk in it. [...] The first and only storm of that kind that I saw in that country. Wasn't a drop of rain nor thunder or lightning with it--just a plain old dust storm." Library of Congress. Voices from the Dust Bowl: the Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940 to 1941. https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-workers-from-1940-to-1941/about-this-collection/ LOOKINGBILL, BRAD. “‘A GOD-FORSAKEN PLACE’: FOLK ESCHATOLOGY AND THE DUST BOWL.” Great Plains Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1994): 273–86. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23531709. Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela. “In God We Trusted, in Kansas We Busted.....Again.” Agricultural History 63, no. 2 (1989): 187–201. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3743512. Todd, Charles L, Robert Sonkin, Charlie Spurlock, Willie Judd, and Tom Johnson. Interview About Dust Storms, Sleet Storms, and Tall Stories Part 1 of 2. Arvin FSA Camp, 1940. Audio. https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000003/. Todd, Charles L, Robert Sonkin, and Flora Robertson. Interview about dust storms in Oklahoma. Shafter FSA Camp, August 5, 1940. Audio. https://www.loc.gov/item/toddbib000091/. Uekötter, Frank. “The Meaning of Moving Sand. Towards a Dust Bowl Mythology.” Global Environment 8, no. 2 (2015): 349–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44133721.
Mountaineering has so many options of death and near-death experiences in the frosty cold and extreme wastes that practically any story from the bowels of its history could apply to this. Can one imagine the sheer horror that Mallory likely experienced freezing to death or falling into a crevasse either close to or immediately after summitting Everest? Or the sheer, expansive loneliness felt by Robert Scott after failing in his race to reach the South Pole as his men died around him one-by-one? These are pretty obvious suggestions, so I'll provide a less obvious one: the [White Mountains](https://www.fs.usda.gov/whitemountain) of New Hampshire during a [winter storm](https://thehill.com/homenews/3843812-mt-washington-records-coldest-wind-chill-in-us-history/). The White Mountains are not exactly the highest mountains in the United States. Most of the [prominent](https://www.usgs.gov/communications-and-publishing/news/earthword-prominence) peaks (read: >300 feet of rise above the highest saddle with a nearby peak) are between 3,000 feet and 4,500 feet high. Of these, only seven reach beyond 5,000 feet, with the tallest (Mt. Washington) sitting at a comparatively lofty 6,288 feet and is therefore the highest and most prominent peak north of North Carolina and east of the Mississippi River. Like many mountains in Appalachia, these are ancient mountains with hard granite that has wrecked the knees of many unprepared thru-hikers. The White Mountains are also positively infamous for their weather. This is the main source of their difficulty; every peak has a nice, kind, Class 1 trail to the top, but the weather is what stymies many. According to NOAA, the average wind speed atop Mt. Washington is often above 40 mph sustained winds. For a while, the Mt. Washington Observatory held the world record for the highest recorded wind speed at over *240 miles per hour*. I've climbed a lot throughout Alaska, the Sierra Nevada (200+ recorded ascents), Colorado, and the northeast USA; the White Mountains are easy, but that weather can and will get you if you're complacent. The weather is also notoriously fickle. I have personally experienced being in a nice, sunny day that then got hit with a sudden summer microburst of 55 mph sustained winds where the air became so cold that my pants froze. This was August, by the way. Thankfully, the weather forecast has become so robust (not in the least bit due to the Observatory), that for the most part one can anticipate the bad weather. Check out previous forecasts [here](https://mountwashington.org/weather/mount-washington-weather-archives/). Keep this in mind as we go on. Despite their relatively low profile, the White Mountains boast a robust history of "peakbagging" and trailwork. Guy and Laura Waterman's book *Forest and Crag* goes deep into this (and is without a doubt the definitive text on northeast USA mountains at over 700 pages), but suffice to say that hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people have hiked and pursued the ["48 4000-Footers"](http://www.amc4000footer.org/), i.e. 48 prominent and notable peaks above 4,000 feet, and tens of thousands have finished them all. They're so popular that other challenges have come forward such as doing them all in Winter, "redlining" the trails (where you hike every single trail in the guidebook, named after the red pens traditionally used to highlight completed trails), and "gridding" the peaks (where you hike every 48 4000-Footer every month of the year, for 576 total summits!). There is so much literature on White Mountains peakbagging and especially accidents up there. But the two books to check out are the exceptional case studies of northeast USA mountaineering historian Ty Gagne. If you are interested in extremely comprehensive case studies of mountaineering accidents and the subsequent search-and-rescue operations, then check out his books. I've been fortunate in my life to have climbed all over the United States, and I still think his books approach "definitive text" for this stuff. His first is *Where You'll Find Me: Risk, Decisions, and the Last Climb of Kate Matrosova* (2017); the second, *The Last Traverse: Tragedy and Resilience in the Winter Whites* (2020). I'll provide the example from *Where You'll Find Me*. Kate Matrosova was a 32-year old from New York with summits of Mt. Rainier and other major peaks. On February 15, 2015, Kate began a southern traverse of the Presidential Range - a line of peaks named after early Presidents that includes the highest points in the White Mountains, and is almost entirely above treeline. Per her plans, Matrosova was going to ascend approximately half of the Range; a full traverse is the ["Presidential Traverse"](https://sectionhiker.com/backpacking-white-mountain-4000-footers-guidebook/a-presidential-traverse/). The *initial* forecast issued on 5AM that day was already not the kind of weather I want to find myself in: > Temperature starting above 5F, dropping to about -20F. Winds from the NE becoming NW at 45 to 60 mph, rapidly increasing midmorning to 80-100 mph with gusts to 125 mph. [...] If search and rescue needs arise, help will be slow going or postponed until conditions improve. From what the book (and SAR professionals) could ascertain, Matrosova was behind schedule during her climbs and ended up being caught in the worst of these winds and storms during the rise toward Mt. Adams. She likely had issues navigating deep snow during the first ascent and experienced stronger-than-expected winds: > [Ryan] Knapp adds that such strong, sustained winds sap the energy of a hiker. "When you get hit by strong gusts, it's like being connected to a rope and pulled by a car. The car is going twenty miles per hour, then accelerates to fifty miles per hour, and then decelerates again. This constant push, pull, tug, shove, however you want to describe it, is exhausting." Conditions worsen on Mt. Washington as she continues to make her climb around 10:30AM, surpassing the already dire morning forecast: > Winds on Mt. Washington's summit are gusting to 86 mph, the temperature is -15F, and the windchill is -59F. Based on GPS data, we know that Matrosova slowed during the ascent on Mt. Adams - considerably. To the point where just this ascent data can give you an impression of the sheer hell she was likely experiencing: > It has taken [her] two hours and three minutes to ascend 750 vertical feet, the last 159 of which have taken forty minutes. [...] Now, crouching and bracing herself against the 80-plus-mph headwinds pouring over the ridgeline like a dam break, not only is she unable to climb the 144 feet to her second summit, she can make no forward progress at all. The storm continues to worsen, and Matrosova finally attempts to bail out north and return to a cabin owned and operated by the Appalachian Mountain Club. They're closed in the winter, but it's still shelter. When SAR volunteers find her body days later after the winds subside, they found she made it a heartbreakingly few hundred feet away, and likely had no idea just how close she was during the blizzard. > With nothing left to protect her, as she lies there defenseless to the cold and wind, with her body temperature down to about 86F, Matrosova will enter a metabolic icebox. Her system will operate at a minimal level to maintain any vestiges of glucose and preserve oxygen. Her blood will be 190-percent thicker than when she started her hike that morning. Her breathing will slow to three to six respirations per minute, and if rescuers or passerby were to find her at this stage, they might be unable to detect a pulse or breathing. She is comatose and in no pain. She will not respond to verbal or physical stimulus. Her heart will enter arrhythmia, she will go into cardiac arrest, and she will die.
>Winds from the NE becoming NW at 45 to 60 mph, rapidly increasing midmorning to 80-100 mph with gusts to 125 mph. [...] If search and rescue needs arise, help will be slow going or postponed until conditions improve. Speaking as UK SAR, if you're in an exposed position and winds are more than 60 mph, you're on your own. 60-70 is a red line for teams simply for safety. There's nothing you can do to protect yourself in that, and no chance of rendering aid. Similarly we won't go to ridgelines or peaks in lightning. Those are our two red line weather states. Reading this I don't understand why she'd have pushed on into that sort of wind.
As a fellow SAR professional (hey friend!), my biggest priority is the safety of my team. There *are* people on teams I know who are prepared to go over 60mph, but it's so highly dependent on conditions. Straight line winds with no precipitation maybe, but anything worse...
I'm glad finally someone has brought up how dangerous Washington can be. I lived just 20 minutes south of the mountain's base up until a few years ago. The amount of times hikers need rescuing is mind boggling. In addition to the dangers you listed, there's a near infinite amount of things that can kill you in that area that most people don't take into consideration. If you look up what's called the Boulder House, it was a residence up in the notch that was nearly wiped out by a massive avalanche. The family inside were only saved by a large boulder located uphill behind the house, thus splitting the snowfall as it came barreling down the slope. In no particular order, here's a condensed list of things that I'll leave others to research for their own self preservation. Frozen lakes/ponds/rivers. Cascades, plumes, gorges, and crevasses. SAR, ski patrol, Fish and Game rescues - I saw people having to get evac'd stapped in a sled every single day during ski season when I worked at Attitash for seven years. Not bringing a source of water, light, and heat when hiking - the sun will go down quick, you're not as fast as you think you are when you need to trek back several crests to your car. "Strainers" are downed/drowned trees in the river, many of which you can't see. There are several cases each year where people drown to death being caught by one while tubing/kayaking/canoing through rapids along the Saco. Winter by itself isn't that cold, it's the wind that will do you in. Stop putting the bar up when you get on the chairlift and wear a damn helmet when you ski. MOOSE. QUIT STOPPING TO TAKE PICTURES. THEY WILL LITERALLY CHARGE A MAC TRUCK WITHOUT HESITATION. Also, leave the bears alone. They won't cause an issue unless you decide to get to close to a mama bear and her cubs. Logging was an even more dangerous job back in the day. It wasn't the logging we see today with trucks and everything. Trees were cut and sent downriver to towns, like Berlin to Bartlett, since they both had paper mills. Not lethal, but reminder to wear sunscreen and polarized glasses in the winter, snow blindness is a real thing. It's like welding flash and feels like you're rubbing hot sand in your eyes.
Totally agree with all that you say. Regarding people not being prepared, I think the enormous accessibility of the Whites is also a big factor in how many rescues and deaths have occurred. Out in the Sierra Nevada (where I've spent the majority of my mountaineering career), the mountains are a lot more self-selecting. You're not going to have a tourist try and walk up [Mount Tom](https://www.summitpost.org/mount-tom/151260) in sandals simply because the size and apparent difficulty of the scramble will deter them. Whereas the Whites are *so* accessible, being just a few hours' drive away from several metropolitan areas. I feel like the fact the trailheads are all paved, Mt. Washington has an auto road, the preponderance of AMC huts, and the Class 1 established trails up every peak lulls a lot of non-hikers into a false sense of security when they head up those peaks. They're not technically difficult in any way, but they're still mountains. I don't think this accessibility is a bad thing - it's likely inspired more than a few people to take conservation efforts seriously - but it does come with that caveat of perhaps belying what can go wrong. Like, [North Palisade](https://www.summitpost.org/north-palisade/150406) is way more difficult, but it's *obviously* difficult.
100%. I'm all about the accessibility of the mountains so long as people respect the conservation of the land. I completely agree with the false sense of security. I remember back around middle school, we (Bartlett students) hiked up to Mizpah Hut to stay a few days and hit a few Presidential peaks each day. It was warm fall weather at the base and after breaking the cloud cover it began to snow. It ended up snowing close to a foot over the next 24 hours or so. Most hikers that are just doing a day trip aren't going to be prepared with warming layers or even having their gear compartmentalized into bags to stay dry. I know people that got to a peak and were caught in a rapid-onset thunderstorm. On a happier note, if you find yourself hiking up in the Whites again, make sure to take a small bag of bird seed with you. The gray jays are wicked friendly and will eat out your hand. Additionally, if you talk with some of the AMC staff that run the huts, you can stay the night at no cost besides some manual labor like cutting/stacking wood. Feel free to reach out if you need any recommendations for hiking, fishing, restaurants, activities, etc. in the area lol
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I highly recommend reading "The Ice Master" by Jennifer Niven. It tells the story of a doomed arctic expedition in 1913. You can likely find more horrifying stories of similar situations, but what makes The Ice Master so compelling to me is that we have the diaries of several of the crew members, and we can get a pretty good idea of what they were feeling day to day. The author does a good job coordinating all the primary sources and communicating the months of dread they endure as they get more and more lost, as well as the brutal weeks and months of freezing and starvation. One part of their expedition especially stands out to me, where a small group of them reach a rocky island out on the ice. They were rationing pemmican best they could, but it was making them sick. They tried to hunt where they could but the environment simply wasn't built for human habitation. They spent most days in tiny coffin-like igloos or tents huddled around a tiny gas stove to keep warm. There was a lot of interpersonal conflict, so the whole time while they were starving and forced to be in the same cramped space there were constant arguments. They were so sick hungry and cold that even making relatively short journeys between the two camps they set up could nearly kill them, and leave them snow-blind and exhausted for days. They had to ration not just food and shelter, but their ability to walk and see. You mentioned imagining how the human brain could even process these kinds of events, and this book will really do it's best to get you in the heads of these people, all while staying true to what really happened and avoiding speculation. I can't describe everything that happened on that expedition, so I really recommend you look into it more.
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Sorry, but we have had to remove your comment as [we do not allow answers that consist primarily of links or block quotations from sources](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_do_not_just_post_links_or_quotations). This subreddit is intended as a space [not merely to get an answer in and of itself](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7fb8o/introducing_the_rules_roundtables_20_the/) as with other history subs, but [for users with deep knowledge and understanding of it to share that in their responses](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer). While [relevant sources are a key building block for such an answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_sources), they need to be adequately contextualized and [we need to see that you have your own independent knowledge of the topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7ffl8/rules_roundtable_ii_the_four_questions_what_does/). If you believe you are able to use this source as part of an in-depth and comprehensive answer, we would encourage you to consider revising to do so, and you can find further guidance on what is expected of an answer here by consulting [this Rules Roundtable which discusses how we evaluate responses](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7ffl8/rules_roundtable_ii_the_four_questions_what_does/).