Essentially an
attractive personality, with strong likes and dislikes, he excelled in
making his followers his friends by a few words of sympathy or praise: I
have never known anybody, man or woman, who could be so attractive when
he chose.
Sledging he went harder than any man of whom I have ever heard. Men never
realized Scott until they had gone sledging with him. On our way up the
Beardmore Glacier we were going at top pressure some seventeen hours out
of the twenty-four, and when we turned out in the morning we felt as
though we had only just turned in. By lunch time we felt that it was
impossible to get through in the afternoon a similar amount of work to
that which we had done in the morning. A cup of tea and two biscuits
worked wonders, and the first two hours of the afternoon's march went
pretty well, indeed they were the best hours' marching of the day; but by
the time we had been going some 41/2 or 5 hours we were watching Scott for
that glance to right and left which betokened the search for a good
camping site. "Spell oh!" Scott would cry, and then "How's the enemy,
Titus?" to Oates, who would hopefully reply that it was, say, seven
o'clock. "Oh, well, I think we'll go on a little bit more," Scott would
say. "Come along!" It might be an hour or more before we halted and made
our camp: sometimes a blizzard had its silver lining.
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