Flight by Elephant (15 page)

But all this stiff-upper-lip stuff disregards the horror.

A high percentage of the dead were found lying on their backs with their legs drawn up and their buttocks bare. It was said that 50 per cent of refugees had diarrhoea. In the later stages of the exodus, when the frailer refugees were coming through, almost all had dysentery. There was little solidarity on the routes.
Sauve qui peut
was about right. Older and slower refugees were abandoned by the faster and younger ones; children were left behind by parents, wives by husbands and vice versa.

Army officers recalling the evacuation tend to suggest that their men kept ranks. But in his report, Dorman-Smith wrote, ‘The worst feature of the Hukawng Valley evacuation was the misbehaviour of some of the troops, British, Indian, Chinese, they looted everywhere and everything … the Kachins were reduced to a state of starvation through the looting of their godowns and the mischievous destruction of their crops.’

Those of the Chinese forces who took the evacuation routes to India were brave but wild men in uniforms of ill-fitting denim without badges of rank, and wearing sandals, which they preferred to boots. The Chinese private was paid about two shillings a month and had no supply lines to speak of. So he stole what he needed. Rice dumps were plundered; the radiators of army vehicles were drained – because the Chinese soldier liked to drink his water hot. Then again, British and Indian soldiers on the walkout also stole what they needed. In the British Army this is called ‘winning’ an article … and how is stealing to be defined when there is no rule of law?

On the walkout, all soldiers were reduced to the status of infantrymen. When those soldiers who normally proceeded in tanks, trucks or cars turned to their infantrymen colleagues and asked, ‘How do we get to India?’, the latter are said to have taken pleasure in replying: ‘You walk, mate.’

To look briefly at the two main routes …

The core of the Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur route was a rough track stretching 130 miles from Imphal to Dimapur. Along this, the ITA had established its camps while coolie labour widened the track. Most of the refugees were ferried along this road in lorries supplied and driven by tea planters or their Indian labourers. The more southerly part of the route was fraught in a different way.

The first fifty or so miles, from the border town of Tamu, required more labour-intensive road building, there being less of a track to begin with. The refugees had to walk along this stretch, even as the road making proceeded. There was no jungle here, but arid, rocky mountains, and the road being scraped into these was just a winding ledge of scree.

The oil-lit receiving camp at Dimapur was next to the railway station, but as engineers expanded the sidings, so, too, the cemetery beyond the camp grew every week. It was said that grown men would collapse with relief at the sound of the locomotives. But they were not about to board the
Brighton Belle
. The refugees would travel in rough and crowded goods wagons. There were no lavatories: the facilities consisted of ropes dangling from the side of the wagons, to which the refugees were expected to cling, and so the defecatory nightmare continued. But many refugees could not be put onto the trains without treatment in the hospital camp. And however busy its doctors, the Dimapur mosquitoes were busier still.

In May 1942, Dimapur was like a nightmarish parody of a Victorian town, with its vastly overworked postmaster, railway staff and gravediggers. It was a dispersal camp, not a rest camp, and the rule of thumb was that anyone who stayed there for three days would die. The superintendent, Alexander Beattie, manager of the Woka Tea Estate in Assam, has been described as ‘a practical-minded Scot’, and he needed to be. He played host to 150,000 people, most of them ill in some way. He had brought with him the lorry from his own tea garden (about fifty miles from Dimapur), and seventy of his labourers. He ferried in vegetables, eggs and milk from his own, and neighbouring, tea gardens. His chief lieutenant was the wife of an officer in the ITA’s Scientific Institute, and she ran a team of planters’ wives and their servants.

The Dimapur camp abutted a school building, and that was needed for storing the food, so the camp itself – and the hospital it incorporated – was of bamboo and palm thatch. There were no walls, but then the nocturnal temperature never dropped below seventy degrees Fahrenheit. The monsoon was coming, certainly, and the rain would then blow in, but it was assumed the flow of refugees would stop when that happened. But the monsoon came early and the people kept coming. Soon the floor was six inches of mud, the bamboo mats floating upon it and sanitation a lost cause. We might picture Beattie walking under the palm-leaf roof of the camp by night, the oil lamps swinging as they are buffeted by the monsoon, notebook in hand, perpetually organizing; the tea planters were great organizers, great logistics men.

On 10 May, the town of Imphal was bombed by the Japanese, and it is said that 60,000 died as a direct or indirect result. The raid sent a surge of refugees towards Beattie, who was beginning to run a temperature himself. He would die from typhoid on 12 July. The bombing of Imphal was the beginning of the end of Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur as a route for
civilians
, and the relief operation would be wound up by the end of June.

The Hukawng Valley route became the default option after the bombing of Imphal, even though it had been described, on that improvised road sign of April, as one of the ‘Valleys of Death’, and here, too, a road was being built, or at least planned: the Ledo Road, the northerly replacement for the Burma Road. The Indian Tea Association volunteers and their paid tea garden labourers were supposed to have been assisted in its construction by a Chinese labour force sent by Chiang Kai-shek, but such was the chaos on the Burmese side that it was not possible to muster any such force, and work on the road was put off. (The Ledo Road would be built from December 1942 by American soldiers – mainly African Americans, 1000 of whom would die – and 35,000 local tribesmen and tea garden labourers, many more thousands of whom would also die.)

As mentioned, the starting point in Burma for the Hukawng refugees was the village of Shinbiwyang. There was a full ITA camp roughly every dozen miles thereafter, with sub-camps – manned zyats – in between. Each main camp had a small hospital, and those on the Burmese side carried out a programme of inoculation against cholera, which prevented an epidemic. The first goal for the refugees, and their reward for crossing the eight mountains and eight rivers in spate, was a village called Lekhpani, where the ITA had established its forward receiving camp. This was known as the ‘Tea Pot Pub’ because of the meal refugees were served on arrival: tea, cheese and jam on biscuits. The sight of a tea pot must have symbolized the return to civilization.

There is an account of one group of refugees on the Hukawng route spending four hours trying to ignite damp bamboo in order to make tea. It was calculated that at Shamlung, a camp midway along the route, tea was consumed at a rate of five pounds per hundred people per day, in other words almost an ounce each, which is enough for ten cups; but then Shamlung was the camp that came before the highest part of the route, the 4000-foot Pangsau Pass, and the refugees needed fortifying for that. At the same camp, incidentally, the refugees consumed the same weight of Marmite as of tea.

After being given the once over at the Tea Pot Pub, the refugees left for the nearby railhead of Tipong. From there, they were taken by narrow-gauge train – built to serve the local collieries – to a reception camp at Margherita. This was in the heart of planter territory, as betokened by the rangy railway station, the telegraph poles, the bases of the roadside trees painted white with lime, giving the effect of the trees wearing bobby socks (it is done to deter ants), the dark green tea gardens rising gently on all sides, and the pretty nine-hole golf course on which the camp had been created. Here, finally, nature had been tamed. Bougainvillea flowered by the tees. The tents were on the fairways, and the camp HQ was the musty, wood-panelled interior of the clubhouse hall where tea and biscuits were always on the go, where many a dinner dance had been held, and where the names of past champions and club captains were proudly listed. From here, most began the 500-mile onward journey to Calcutta. The Margherita camp was overseen by a tea planter called Ronald MacGregor Thomson, a friend of Mackrell’s who was equally keen on shikar, and known to all his many friends as Tom-Tom.

Some vignettes from the Hukawng route …

Late evening at a camp … two unshaven planters lighting cigarettes under broken brollies before setting off towards the Burmese side to look for stragglers. (These were called ‘back reconnaissances’.)

The ITA camp at Nampong, on the Assamese side of the Pangsau Pass: half a dozen bamboo and palm-leaf huts – shaggy, lopsided bungalows with the rain falling on them and nobody about; the jungle rearing up vertically behind. (This was the destination for the elephants Gyles Mackrell had been dispatching from Namgoi Mukh.)

Another camp … a sea of black mud, with some rough lean-tos, a thoughtful looking soldier holding a rifle, rain falling and smoke rising from untended fires; a line of kerosene cans. It might be Passchendaele, except for the trees in the background.

Two teenage English boys in a zayat, one sitting on the bench watching the rain, the other reclining on the ground in front of him; but the one reclining is dead.

From late June, military purposes reasserted themselves on the Hukawng route. Back reconnaissances were sent out to pick up stragglers. In late July, the RAF flew the ITA Chief Liaison Officer, a man called Dudley Hodson, over the route. At Shamlung, he thought he saw a lone European man waving at him from among the abandoned huts. As far as the authorities were concerned, the principal evacuation routes were now closed.

But the drama was still unfolding on the other route to the north, another Valley of Death. In his book of 1946,
Forgotten Frontier
, Geoffrey Tyson speaks of ‘a more exclusive, clubbable route’, as if a garden party were taking place in the jungles of the Chaukan Pass.

On Saturday 6 June, when Mackrell encountered the Buddhist funeral at the village of Miao, our original pair, Millar and Leyden, finally arrived at the Indian Tea Association base camp on the golf course at Margherita. We might picture the flags that were left on the greens rippling in the hot monsoon wind as Millar and Leyden enter the clubhouse. They were received like heroes, or like ghosts. ‘Our arrival from the Chaukan,’ Millar wrote, ‘caused considerable surprise and stir.’ It would do. In late May an RAF plane had spotted a small party in the Chaukan; it had not been envisaged that it would ever come out. It is likely that Millar and Leyden were offered a very large number of cups of tea indeed.

Here they took tiffin with three officials: Tom-Tom Thomson, who ran the camp, Major General Ernest Wood, Administrator-General, Eastern Frontier Communications (a role that made him responsible for the overall Burma evacuation), and a senior police officer called Eric Lambert, who was designated Political Officer, Margherita. A Political Officer was an official administering an area of strategic or military importance, usually on the fringes of the Empire. Lambert was shortly to launch his own evacuation rescue – in his case he would locate the Chinese 5th Army, which had got lost in the Naga Hills during a monsoon. It is a testament to the Chinese reputation for unruliness that it was thought necessary to protect the head-hunting Nagas from
them
. Lambert had been a magistrate in the Naga Hills, and had led expeditions to try to stop head-hunting, so he knew the territory. He would find the Chinese (about 3000 men), then escort them into Assam, shielding the local Nagas from their depredations. As a reward, he would be presented by Chiang Kai-shek himself with the Chinese Army Medal (First Class) and, in spite of being Irish, he would be commissioned a general in that army. But that wouldn’t happen until July.

Meanwhile, Lambert, like Thomson and Major General Wood, was in a slightly embarrassing position
vis-à-vis
Millar and Leyden: pleased to see them, but owing them an explanation as to why no ground party had been sent to look for them. Lambert explained that it was the combination of the Chaukan Pass and the monsoon that had been decisive. Nobody could survive
that
. Anyhow, the message from Millar and Leyden was that the party spied by the plane must have been the railway party of Sir John and the Rossiters, and that Gyles Mackrell had gone to look for them.

Guy Millar, ever eager to do anything but go to bed for about a week (to which he would have been thoroughly entitled), proposed a plan. He would be driven at speed to the airbase at Dinjan, where he would board a plane and be flown over the Chaukan. He would try to spot Sir John, or at least try to spot Mackrell, with whom he had arranged, during their nocturnal parley, a system of communication by signals. What Millar proposed to do next, having signalled to Mackrell, is not recorded, but it doesn’t much matter, because Major General Wood scotched the plan immediately. He explained to Millar that three RAF planes had been ‘lost’ flying over the Chaukan in search of evacuees. It seems it was as dangerous to fly over the Chaukan in the monsoon as it was to walk through it. There was the ever-present danger of crashing into a mountain, what with unpredictable thermals, lightning and the likelihood of the windscreen wipers being overloaded by rain.

On the other hand, the rescue could not be left in the hands of Mackrell who, even with his twenty elephants, was essentially undertaking a one-man mission. And so phone calls were made, telegrams were sent, runners were dispatched through the steaming rain and another, bigger, rescue party was assembled. It would comprise two units of Assam Rifles under the command of an amiable Yorkshireman called Captain John Reginald Wilson, who – very much
unlike
Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith – was known to all as ‘Reg’.