Talking about Antarctica

A white and inexpressibly horrid land | TLS

I learnt some things from the above review of a handful of new books about Antarctica.  The number of people who visit during summer, for example:

...every (southern) summer sees more than 30,000 visitors arrive, swelling the resident population of some 5,000 scientists and support staff, though in winter that number drops to just over 1,000, many of whom apparently regard themselves as the luckiest people on earth. 

The charms of penguins:

Gabrielle Walker recalls that she began her time on the ice determined to resist these “clichés of Antarctica”, distrusting the way their cuteness is used to reduce the continent’s alien vastness to a manageable human scale. She would write about them only “because there was interesting science to tell. That was all”. Her vow did not last long, however, and the day an Adélie penguin played statues with her – “each time I turned it was motionless. Each time I walked, it walked with me” – was the day she finally lost her battle with the anthropomorphic impulse.

 and the "Antarctic stare":

One of those lucky ones was Gavin Francis, who spent a year working as the base-camp doctor at a remote British research station on Antarctica’s Caird Coast. Empire Antarctica is his record of that year, an intense and lyrical portrait of the slowly changing polar seasons, at the heart of which lies the cold monotony of the lightless southern winter. At first, as the sun gradually dipped below the horizon, Francis felt he was adjusting well to the coming of the polar night. But by the end of the second month, he writes, the frozen darkness had lost any beauty it once held: “it became a pause, a limbo, a drawn breath between history and the future”. His colleagues on the isolated station grew listless and forgetful, while tempers frayed, owing as much to the lack of privacy as the lack of natural light. Some even developed the notorious “Antarctic stare”, brought on by months of isolation, as though zombified by the pitiless dark. 

On a related note, my handful of long time readers (hello?) may recall that I very much enjoyed the account of the Mawson expedition that is a large part of Heather Rossiter’s biography of Herbert Dyce Murphy.   (Heather actually commented here too about my post about the book.  It's good to be noticed by authors.)   The expedition came to mind again when listening to a Radio National show on Anzac Day last Thursday.

I think Heather may have mentioned it in her book, but one of the unfortunate crew who had to winter over for the second time when Mawson turned up hours too late to catch the boat was killed soon thereafter at Gallipoli.

Edward Frederick Robert Bage was an engineer.  Here's a photo of him with a particularly large pipe which presumably helped him get through two Antarctic winters.  Poor old (actually, he was much younger than he looked) Bage was killed following orders of dubious merit.  Googling around, this article in The Australian seems to be the script of the radio show:

BAGE returned to full-time soldiering, and five months later the Great War began. He joined the Australian Imperial Force, and was appointed deputy commander of an engineers company. Soon afterwards he announced his engagement to Dorothy Scantlebury, a university student.

He left Australia with the first contingent, trained his company's sappers in Egypt, and landed with them under fire at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. They rated him highly. "Besides being a good officer, Captain Bage was a fine fellow in every way," declared Tom Prince in a memoir of his war service. Another sapper, Jim Campbell, a 27-year-old carpenter, described Bage as "an excellent officer".

The engineers were given a series of urgent tasks during the chaotic first few days at Anzac. They widened roads, made bombs, strengthened trenches, carted ammunition, constructed loopholes and excavated emplacements for the artillery.

Bage spent the morning of May 7 surveying the terrain near Lone Pine. As it happened, the commander of the First Australian Infantry Division, Major-General W.T. Bridges, was appraising his tactical options in a nearby trench. He had just decided on his preferred course of action when Bage materialised along the trench. War historian C.E.W. Bean wrote that Bridges cried: "Here's the man!" When Bage found out why he was the man, he became concerned.

Bridges wanted the infantry to occupy a forward post, and wanted a reliable officer from the engineers to mark out the position beforehand as soon as possible. He wanted Bage to venture out in front of the AIF front line for 150m, and then bang in some marker pegs - this in broad daylight and in view of the Turks. Bage respectfully pointed out that the best chance of tackling such a risky undertaking successfully would be to do it at night. But Bridges was adamant that it had to be done that afternoon.

As a loyal and capable officer, Bage accepted that an order was an order. He resigned himself to his probable fate, and arranged for the dispersal of his belongings.

Bage did his utmost to carry out the task, which "could hardly have been more perilous", as Bean confirmed. Bage was hammering in a marker peg when he was killed by a fusillade of fire from Turkish riflemen and at least five machine-guns.

After his years at Antarctica, Bage was well known and widely admired. The way his life was imperilled so cavalierly by Bridges filled those on the spot with repugnance. It was "madness - he is a great loss to us", Campbell wrote. Indeed, what happened to Bage on May 7, 1915, confirms that Australian soldiers died not only as a result of incompetent decisions by British commanders; Australian commanders were also flagrantly culpable at times.

 Sad, hey?