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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-2565626.html
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Last word
Ben Macintyre
"We are in a very tight corner and I have doubts of pulling through,†Captain Robert Falcon Scott wrote as he prepared to die in 1912.
It was 70 degrees below zero outside the freezing tent. Petty Officer Evans, after a bad injury and psychological collapse, was dead. Roald Amundsen had beaten Scott to the South Pole by a month. Food and fuel were running out.
“Well, dear heart, I want you to take the whole thing very sensibly as I am sure you will,†he continued, in a spidery hand, fingers crabbed by the cold.
Scott’s last letter, now on display for the first time at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, is extraordinary: partly for its poignancy and historical significance, but also for its prose.
It could not have been written by anyone other than an Edwardian Englishman. The language is masculine English of a sort that would seem antique just a few years later, after the carnage of the First World War. Understated, underwritten, self-justifying without self-pity, tautly affectionate, restrained and breathtakingly brave, it is a testament to a certain sort of mind, at a very specific time.
The words usually remembered from Scott’s expedition are those attributed to Titus Oates — “I am just going out and may be some time†— but it is Scott’s last words that seem eternally frozen in time. Whatever his failings of character and leadership, Scott had a natural grasp of a particular English idiom, now long gone.
This was not a literary man, and he was not (at least, not primarily) writing for publication. The spelling is erratic, the grammar more so. There are no long words, no ornate flourishes, and he is not above the occasional cliché (“I . . . leave the world fresh from harnessâ€), but in its blunt clarity, the letter is one of the great works of literature.
It may seem strange for a man freezing to death in a tiny tent to be extolling nature, but in his love of physical hardship, even on the point of death, Scott speaks for a generation of Englishmen. “Make the boy interested in natural history if you can . . . I know you will keep him out in the open air,†he tells Kathleen Scott, soon to be his widow. The intense cold is “sometimes angering but here again the hot food which drives it forth is so wonderfully enjoyable that we would scarcely be without itâ€.
A consciousness of looming posterity and an urgent desire to do the right thing run through every word. “After all we have given our lives with something of spirit which makes for example . . .†In its combination of stoicism and self-sacrifice, Scott’s last letter prefigured thousands of similar letters from the young men who were shortly to march off to the trenches.
The language is, in part, Boilerplate Edwardian Heroic. But it is the tiny flickers of doubt behind the words that lend humanity. “I hope I shall be a good memory,†he writes. “You urged me to be leader of this party and I know you felt it would be dangerous — I’ve taken my place throughout, haven’t I?†The language of affection is conventional: “Dearest Darlingâ€, “dear heartâ€, “my own darlingâ€. Scott uses the word “love†only once (and then only as a past participle: “I have loved youâ€). Yet this is finally, and fundamentally, a love letter, not an epitaph.
This is a man getting his death in order: organising his son’s education, suggesting that a grateful nation should provide compensation (“I think both he and you ought to be specially looked after by the countryâ€), doffing his cap to his patrons and bidding farewell to his friends and relatives. Here, too, is the cadence of the hymnal. “You on whom my thought(s) mostly dwell waking or sleeping . . . your portrait and the boy’s will be found in my breast . . . oh what a price to pay — to forfeit the sight of your dear dear face.†But behind the practicalities and conventions lies real pain.
Scott wanted Kathleen to move on when he was dead. “Cherish no sentimental rubbish about remarriage — when the right man comes to help you in life you ought to be your happy self again.†This line is on a different emotional plane from the embrace of his own martyrdom (“the inevitable must be facedâ€).
The very abruptness and veiled anger of the line perhaps indicate how much it cost him to write. This, I suspect, was the price that Scott found hardest to pay. He knew that he was dying. He knew that he had failed.
He knew that his wife would find someone else in time, and that he must give her his blessing.
The most familiar image of bravery from the Scott expedition is that of Captain Oates, staggering into the blizzard in an exquisitely polite act of suicide.
But more heroic yet is the man with frozen fingers, finding the words to tell the woman he loved to survive him, to find love elsewhere, and press on.
