We feel how Scott is attempting to hold back the horror, but again and again a shrill cry of despair disturbs the peace he tries to assume. “We cannot go on like this.” Or, “One can only say, ‘God help us!’ and plod on our weary way.” “Tragedy all along the line!” he writes, and wishes for Providence to come to their aid, since none can be expected from men.

However, they drag themselves on and on, without hope, gritting their teeth. Oates is getting worse and worse at keeping up with the others; he is more of a burden than a help to his friends. They have to delay their march at a midday temperature of minus forty-two degrees, and the unhappy man feels and knows that he is bringing death on his companions. They are already preparing for the end. Wilson, the scientist, hands out ten morphium tablets to each of them to hasten their end if necessary. They try one day’s march more with their sick companion. Then the unfortunate man himself asks them to leave him behind in his sleeping bag and go on separately. They vigorously refuse, although they all realize that his suggestion would be a relief for them. Oates manages to go a little further on his frostbitten legs to their night quarters. He sleeps with them until next morning. When they wake and look out, there is a blizzard.

Suddenly Oates gets to his feet. “I am just going outside and may be some time,” he tells his friends. The others tremble: they all know what that will mean. But no one dares say a word to stop him. No one dares to shake his hand one last time, for they all feel, with respect, that Captain Lawrence E.G. Oates of the Inniskilling Dragoons is going to his death like a hero.

Three weary, weakened men drag themselves through the endless, icy, iron-hard wilderness, tired and hopeless, with only the dull instinct of self-preservation stiffening their sinews to a stumbling walk. The weather gets worse and worse, a new disappointment mocks them at every depot, there is never enough oil, enough warmth. On 21st March they are only eighteen kilometres away from a depot, but the wind is blowing so murderously that they cannot leave their tent. Every evening they hope for the next morning, so as to reach their destination, for meanwhile their provisions are running out and with them their last hope. Their heating fuel is finished, and the thermometer says forty degrees below zero. Every hope is extinguished; they now have only the choice between starving or freezing to death. The three men struggle against the inevitable end for eight days in a small tent in the middle of the white wilderness world. On 29th March they know that no miracle can save them now. So they decide not to go another step towards their fate, but wait proudly for death as they have suffered every other misfortune. They crawl into their sleeping bags, and not a sigh reaches the outside world to speak of their last suffering.

The Dying Man’s Letters

In those moments, facing invisible but now imminent death while the blizzard attacks the thin walls of the tent like a madman, Captain Scott remembers all to whom he is close. Alone in the iciest silence, silence never broken by a human voice, he is heroically aware of his fraternal feelings for his country, for all mankind. In this white wilderness, a mirage of the mind conjures up the image of all who were ever linked to him by love, loyalty and friendship, and he addresses them. Captain Scott writes with freezing fingers, writes letters at the hour of his death to all the living men and women he loves.

They are wonderful letters. In the mighty presence of death all that is small and petty is dismissed; the crystalline air of that empty sky seems to breathe through his words.