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| The camp at Mount Buckley |
The day on which Captain Lawrence Edward Grace "Titus" Oates made his famous suicide remark: "I am just going outside and may be some time."
The occasion was Captain Robert Scott's Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic, whose goal was to be the first to reach the South Pole (see also the blog entries for January 5 and especially January 15). They achieved the objective on January 17th 1912, but alas not the goal - Roald Amundsen's Norwegian expedition had beaten them to that by a full month.
The journey home was brutally cold, and frost-bite depleted their capacities. Edgar Evans died on February 17th, from a hand injury that had failed to heal, from severe frost-bite, and from an injury to his head after several falls on the ice. Somewhere around March 17th, when the condition of his feet had made walking impossible, Oates chose the opposite stance from the one he had taken during the Boer War; then, refusing to back down in the face of an ambush, he had sent out the message: "We came here to fight, not to surrender." The Boers were repulsed, but a bullet shattered his thigh, leaving him with a limp and one leg shorter than the other; these now came back to haunt him, and surrender was the only form of heroism remaining. The epitome of English gallantry, a man who knew himself to be crippled and did not want to be the cause of other people's deaths, he chose suicide. In the event it made no difference; the other four who had reached the South Pole with him likewise failed to survive.
I know that I ought to care deeply about Captain Oates, because I spent five years in a Prep School house named in his honour, and had our eponymous hero's virtues pummelled into me daily, as though this were the be-all and the end-all of the English character they were hoping to forge in me: team-spirit, rucked with spiked boots on the rugby fields of Eton, where Oates went to school; stiff upper lip and powers of physical endurance, holding sway over the intellectual or the creative. I hated it. What I could admire in Oates was the objective, and the goal, not the character. I mean, that a man should be able to reach his own south pole.
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