Flight by Elephant (11 page)

He was accompanied by his colleague at MacGregor’s timber merchants, a Lieutenant Eric McCrindle. There was also Captain Noel Ernest Boyt. He, too, was a forestry man, but in his case with the firm of Steel Brothers. Boyt was wiry, capable, pipe-smoking. In his diary, Gardiner presents him as amusingly gung-ho. Uniquely among the Chaukan refugees, he had no reservations about the pass, and was willing to march into it ‘with just biscuits and cheese’.

Then there was Second Lieutenant William Arthur ‘Bill’ Howe, at thirty the youngest of the four. He had been an employee ‘up country’ (in north Burma) of the Anglo-Burma Rice Company. He was not therefore a forestry man; he was, as Ritchie Gardiner noted, without any disparagement, a ‘non-jungle wallah’.

Like Gardiner, Bill Howe kept a diary, a very ebullient one in the circumstances. (On the apocalyptic Sumprabum road, he had found on the back seat of one of the abandoned cars a manual called
Sexual Improvement by Exercise
; it had flicker pages at the back to show what might happen if you followed the book’s advice. ‘Odd situation,’ he wrote, ‘everything burning, the Japs presumably coming up the road, and us having a giggle.’)

Whatever their regiments, it seems that Gardiner, McCrindle, Boyt and Howe were also attached to something called the Oriental Mission. It sounds like one of the American evangelical churches that brought Christianity to Upper Burma, but was in fact something rather more glamorous: a network of small Special Operations units whose job was to foment resistance to the Japanese. But so far it hadn’t done much fomenting, just ‘a lot of marching about in the jungle’, according to young Howe. Along with Gardiner, McCrindle, Boyt and Howe at this early stage, but forming a separate team or bond of friendship, there was also a Major Lindsay, a Captain Steve Cumming and Corporal Sawyer, a radio operator. These three had actually been functioning as a unit of the Oriental Mission, as opposed to just training, but there were no diarists among them, so they are doomed to a shadowy role in this story. We will call all these seven ‘the Commandos’, and Sir John called them ‘a dashed stout crowd’.

The Commandos had set off from Sumprabum on 13 May in good heart. They were carrying two wireless sets, and they had just made contact with ‘Calcutta’, who replied that arrangements would be made to meet them coming through the Chaukan Pass, together with essential rations, medical stores and guides. The Commandos were accompanied by their own thirty Kachin porters, with whom they were on good terms. They paid them in silver rupees – ‘at a rate,’ Ritchie Gardiner wrote, ‘which would be considered fantastic in normal times’ – and opium. (‘No opium,’ wrote Gardiner, ‘no coolies. It is perhaps a shock to those unacquainted with local customs to learn of this.’) After their first two days’ march, Gardiner wrote, ‘My only fears now are malaria and knees’. (He had weak knees.) He was ‘Taking ten grains of quinine every other day for former and trusting God for the latter!’

But soon the word ‘heavy’ begins to recur in the diary: ‘very heavy going’, ‘heavy mud’, ‘heavy evergreen jungle … and LEECHES, in numbers I have never seen before.’ Each Commando would at some point find a leech up his urethra, and Ritchie Gardiner woke up one night after dreaming of eating a succulent bit of steak, to find a leech attached to the roof of his mouth.

When, on that 24 May, the Commandos met up with Sir John, they told him of the expected relief party, which he pronounced ‘very cheering news’. He now had two irons in the fire, the first being Millar and Leyden.

Ritchie Gardiner declared Sir John’s camp on the Nam Yak in a plantation of young poplars a ‘topping site’. From it, the Chaukan Pass could be seen: a gap in the treeline disappearing into clouds. Gardiner wrote, ‘It cheered me as a timber man to see our first pines – a group of 5 trees with fine clean stems of 70–80 feet, and 7–8 foot girth at breast height.’ Edward Wrixon Rossiter appreciated them, too; he identified them as
Pinus excelsa
. This Trinity College Dublin intellectual then cooked everyone a curry, perhaps from a recipe taught him by his Shan wife, and he managed to serve cake and coffee afterwards. But Eric Ivan Milne, railwayman, stayed in his tent when dinner was served around the fire. Dr Burgess-Barnett confirmed that Milne’s temperature had risen to 105. He was in no state to resume the trek.

On 25 May, Rossiter, mindful of his pregnant wife, was for pushing on. He did not think it necessary that
everyone
should wait for Milne. He and his party and the Commandos set off, but Sir John and the railway party remained behind with Milne, who couldn’t stand up. On 26 May, the railway party finally did set off, wading the Nam Yak and carrying Milne on a stretcher made from a ground sheet and two tree branches. That morning, an aeroplane passed overhead but ignored them. It was Sir John’s fate to be regularly ignored by passing aeroplanes. The planes in question were probably ferrying supplies from Assam to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in occupied China, flying over what the pilots – mainly Americans – called the Hump, the eastern end of the Himalayas. These flights were in default of a road link to China, the Japanese having cut the Burma Road in April. In response, a new road, the Ledo Road, would be built, work getting properly underway in December 1942, this one approaching China across Upper Burma, and beginning from Ledo in Assam.

The railway party entered what they took to be the Chaukan Pass at 11.20 a.m. on 28 May. Here they caught up with the Rossiters and the Commandos, and Sir John wanted to know where this famous relief party might have got to, since rations were ‘dangerously low … rice and a few tins of cheese and meat and practically nothing else’. Dashed stout crowd as they might be, the Commandos didn’t know.

What was this place they were in? They were on the border of India and Assam. They were at a height of 7000 feet above sea level. The trees had become more like the trees at home, but also less like anything on earth. There were what might have been chestnut trees, except they were improbably big, and there were rhododendron
trees
, not bushes. It was rather cool, raining in such a way that it was difficult to imagine it ever
stopping
raining, and there was no other sound. Sir John described the setting as ‘a weird, eerie forest which resembled the Wizard of Oz’s domain’. By coincidence, the Commando diarist Ritchie Gardiner said the same: the trees ‘are gnarled and look very old. They are frequently hollow at their base and the trunks and branches heavily festooned with moss, which gives them an unearthly and depressing appearance, reminiscent of the forest in “The Wizard of Oz”.’

You can see why
The Wizard of Oz
(released in 1938) might have been on their minds. What does Dorothy say after the tornado? ‘I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’ And ‘People keep disappearing around here.’ The strange, rain-filled, melancholic light of her enchanted forest, the ferns of incredibly bright green, the trees of enormous girth … these all might have seemed familiar to our Chaukan wanderers. (But, in the film, you don’t see the tops of those trees.) There were poppies in Dorothy’s forest, and opium was everywhere in eastern Assam. Our evacuees were trying to follow a red-mud rather than a yellow brick road, and their destination wasn’t the Emerald City … but it was verdant enough: the vast acreage of dark green tea bushes in Assam. Like the film, our story has featured a little dog that goes missing, and it will feature a potentially malicious monkey. On a more grandiose level, we could ask who or what corresponds to the Wicked Witch of the West, and the Wicked Witch of the East? And as for the Munchkins … better not to speculate, perhaps.

Gardiner thought the pass beautiful as well as frightening, and he picked five orchids that he did not think had been taken before, including an unearthly copper-coloured one. Since ‘there was nothing in their weight’ he put them in his pack.

The forest was all around, rising steeply on both sides, and there was no clear forward path to be seen. This country was in fact suspiciously unpass-like. There might be a very simple explanation for that, said Sir John, who liked simple explanations. Perhaps they were not in the Chaukan Pass at all. On the way up, Sir John had seen another saddle on a mountain to the south, and he’d been thinking for a while that that seemed a better route. It could hardly be a worse one.

And at this point, his frowning gaze turned towards Moses the Dutch Jew. He claimed to have been through the pass before, in December 1940. He had recommended the route to John Leyden at Sumprabum, which is probably why John Leyden had recommended it to his colleague Edward Rossiter by means of the dispatch runner. Moses had also sold the idea of the pass to Sir John. But now he was telling them he didn’t recognize the scenery. Chaukan means ‘leaning rock’ in Burmese, and nobody had seen a leaning rock.

In his diary, Ritchie Gardiner attempted – and failed – to clarify the situation regarding Moses:

Sir John would describe his entry into the pass as a ‘mistake’; it was ‘the worst of all routes to India’. The Kachin porters evidently thought the same, because once they’d had a good look at the pass they decided to turn round and go home. They had been peeling away for a few days, and the Commandos had been forced to abandon their two wireless transmitters in order to carry more rice.

Sir John wrote, ‘All the Kachin porters refused to go one step further as they were afraid of being caught by the heavy monsoon and so not being able to cross the numerous rivers on the return journey. No amount of cajoling or money would induce them to go on and so they all cleared out, back to Putao district.’ The porters took some of the supplies with them, and other supplies had to be left behind, since it was impossible to carry them. ‘The immediate result of the desertion of the porters,’ Sir John continued, ‘was that one month’s food had to be made to last three months …’ He would later add, ‘The major hindrance to our progress, irrespective of other conditions, was the fact that all the Kachin porters deserted us at the Chaukan Pass, that is when we still had some 200 miles to reach Margherita. If these porters, as they had promised, had taken us to the Dapha–Noa Dehing confluence all would have been well …’

Thirty-year-old Commando Bill Howe viewed the departure more sentimentally: ‘Coolies fixed up our camp and then after their food said their goodbyes and left us. I thinking they were as sorry to leave us as we were to see them go. Said a special goodbye to Ah Pong, Jap Naw and the headman … How I hate this running away and leaving these damn fine people.’

On 29 May nothing happened. The parties stayed put at the entrance to the pass, hoping for the promised rescue party to turn up. Here are the meals eaten by Ritchie Gardiner on that day:

7 o’clock – one cup very weak tea with no milk or sugar

11 o’clock – rice and bamboo shoots

3 o’clock – one cup very weak tea as above

7 o’clock – rice and bamboo shoots with a few potatoes and onions.

On 30 May two newcomers stumbled into the camp. They looked haggard even by the standards of the Chaukan Pass; they were Captain John Fraser of the Burma Frontier Force and Sergeant Pratt of the Seventh Hussars. Young Bill Howe was delighted to see Fraser, a friend of his. (More or less everyone knew more or less everyone in British Burma.) They had been delayed for some reason in Myitkyina, and had then ‘run into some Japs’. They were taken to a Japanese officers’ mess, which had been set up in a chummery – a base for forest workers – outside the town. Fraser and Pratt had been paraded before some Japanese officers; things had then happened as they do in films.

Fraser and Pratt were tied hand and foot, and put into the walled garden to the rear of the house. Their guards took Pratt’s boots and Fraser’s glasses, which seems lax of them. (Why not, for example, take Fraser’s boots as well?) Furthermore, one of the guards, seeing that Fraser and Pratt’s wrists and ankles were becoming swollen, considerately loosened the bonds before going back into the house. While wriggling about the garden that night, Fraser and Pratt found a cigarette tin, and the prised-away lid was sharp. They managed to scrape it against the ropes at their wrist and so freed themselves. They then ‘beat it’, although Fraser had lost his spectacles, and was practically blind without them, and Pratt had to walk in his stockinged feet.

They found the track to Sumprabum, and the wrecked cars, one of which had been wrecked by Fraser himself – which was his right, since it was his own car. Most of its contents had been purloined, but inside the glove box he found his prescription sunglasses, and so John Fraser would go through the mist, rain and jungle-gloom of the Chaukan route wearing a pair of round wire-rimmed sunglasses. As for Sergeant Pratt, he did manage to find some boots.

On their trek towards the Chaukan, Fraser and Pratt had fallen in with 102 Indian soldiers, from those two martial peoples of British India the Gurkhas and Sikhs, mainly the former. These men were pouring into the Chaukan camp even as Fraser and Pratt told the story of their escape from the Japanese. There seems to have been a fleeting attempt by Sir John to offer them money in return for their services as porters, but the men wanted to push on. They were all other ranks, officerless. In Myitkyina, a British officer they’d never seen before had ordered them to evacuate via the Chaukan, a route about which they had heard bad things. They knew that the longer it rained, the more impassable would be the tributaries of the Noa Dehing. They had their own supplies of rice. They stayed one night in the camp, and on the morning of 31 May they continued on.