The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 Read Online Free PDF Page A

out of their misery, as he had the animals he had found in traps with a leg chewed nearly off in an attempt to gain freedom. But he hadn’t shot the men; he had loaded their ruined bodies into the top-heavy Ford and driven them to the hospital, many of them dying on the way. Then he would turn around and go out to do it again. No one had to ask or direct him and no one ever called him slow or suggested he was a dullard. He knew the routine, he knew his mission, and he performed ably and without complaint.
    In the midst of this hell, Dudley remained a gentle man. On one trip from the front, he brought a mortally wounded French soldier from the trenches to the hospital where he then watched him die. Before he returned to his camion, Dudley took out his pocketknife and cut a small lock of the man’s hair, wrapped it in a square of hospital gauze, and tucked it into his coat. Perhaps he intended to deliver it to the man’s mother, or his girlfriend back in Paris. But he did neither. He wrote the man’s name and where he died on a slip of paper, tucked it and the small bundle of hair into an envelope, and kept it locked in his desk drawer. Whatever the gesture may have meant, the lock of hair became one of Dudley’s most guarded possessions.
    He wrote frequent and often funny postcards and letters to his family, making his wartime activities sound more like an extended vacation, describing his ten-day leaves to Rome and Naples and collecting the exploded shells as souvenirs for Gwen. Sitting in a café in Milan, where he was on leave from the French front, Dudley wrote to Gwen, “Heigh ho, sisterlino Gwendolino! Hope you have a fine time Christmas vacation. But don’t eat too much! Give my best to all I know. Much love, Dud.” In one, he described watching an observation balloon get shot down by a “Boche” sniper, * then of seeing the observer come floating down in his parachute, almost at Dudley’s feet. Most often he wrote in between attacks along the front and would end the letters abruptly when a call came for ambulances—“and that means me.” But he always took the time to close the letters tenderly: “Give my love to all, Your loving brother, Dud.” Over the years, between Clifford’s rebellion and Grafton’s youth, he and Gwen had become the closest siblings and wrote long and detailed letters to each other.
    Finally, word came that Dudley’s commission for the French Foreign Legion had come through. As he was signing his release papers from the ambulance corps he learned that he was to be awarded the Italian Croce di Guerra, the Italian Red Cross medal, and the campaign medal for the Italian–Austrian War.
    On October 1, 1918, after ten months driving an ambulance, he finally donned the uniform of the French Foreign Legion but fought on the front lines for only a month. On November 11 the armistice was signed; the war was over. * Even though his active duty was short, he received more medals for his service: the French Volunteer Medal and the French Campaign Medal. After posing for a picture in his decorated uniform, one of his Grandfather Wolf’s handmade pipes proudly held in his right hand, he neatly tucked the ribbons and medals into their boxes and packed them away for his mother and grandfather.
    While Phillips Academy at Andover had rejected Dudley academically, after the war they proudly claimed him as one of their own, years later boasting that he had amassed more medals than any other “Andover man” during the Great War.
    As he was packing for home, Dudley learned that Clifford, who had been assigned to the western front, had been captured and was being held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Dudley went into high gear, writing to the American Field Office, the Red Cross, and the diplomatic corps to get information on Clifford’s condition, status, and, now that the war was over, his release. For the next two months, he badgered anyone and everyone he could find, until he finally received