Flight by Elephant (2 page)

Unlike Australia or Canada, British India was not a colony in the literal sense. Its only settlers were the tea planters. In order to create their plantations they had to clear the jungle, but the jungle kept coming back. The tiger wandering through the living room of the bungalow was not an unknown sight to the Assamese planters and their wives, who wore galoshes in their flower gardens against snake bites. Elephants, when they were behaving, were the planters’ allies in the animal kingdom, whether they were used for uprooting trees – which an elephant does by leaning casually on the tree – or for carrying cargo, or simply as a runabout: a means of getting the planter to his club for the six o’clock whisky and soda. A late nineteenth-century manual for aspirant tea planters describes the elephant as ‘the most useful brute in Asia’.

Before the First World War, the planters’ main enemy was Mother Nature. Their military involvement had been confined to membership of picturesque part-time cavalry regiments which, in between mess lunches and polo tournaments, mounted occasional expeditions against troublesome local tribes. The First World War did not touch the tea planters of Assam directly, although many of them volunteered to fight in Europe or the Middle East. Gyles Mackrell himself chose the almost suicidal option of becoming a fighter pilot on the Western Front with the Royal Flying Corps, a job carrying an average life expectancy shorter even than the six weeks an infantry officer could bargain for. Later in the war he was posted to conduct what were mainly surveillance operations against the rebellious Muslim tribes on the North-Western Frontier. In the flimsy death-trap planes of the time, Squadron Leader Mackrell, as he had now become, patrolled the skies over Waziristan in temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit. At any one time more than half the flyers engaged on such missions were sick, which is not to say that the peril was not greater for the tribesmen beneath, who were sometimes bombed in their mud huts.

The volatile North-West Frontier was regarded as the Achilles heel of British India throughout the First World War, but, in the Second World War, the North-Eastern Frontier also became vulnerable as a result of the Japanese invasion of Burma. In the first half of 1942, the Japanese squeezed the British out of Burma like toothpaste from a tube, starting from the bottom. Tens of thousands of British soldiers, administrators and businessmen, and the million-strong retinue of Indian and Anglo-Indian servants and workers who had buttressed British rule in Burma, were harried into Upper Burma, from where they attempted to flee to the safety of Assam. They had no choice but to do so by walking through mountainous and malarial jungle in monsoon rain.

So the war came to the tea planters in the form of a tide of refugees. In response the planters mounted – their critics would say they were prevailed upon to mount – a relief effort. In conjunction with their wives, and their own Indian servants and workers, they deployed their logistical skills (the planters were great ‘organization men’), their medical supplies, their stores of food, their tractors, lorries, horses, ponies and elephants to assist what was called ‘the walkout’. The planters built roads and established staging posts in the jungles for the refugees to be given medical treatment, food and, above all, tea. The first sign of these camps to the starving refugees staggering in from Burma was a stall in the jungle from which tea and biscuits were being dispensed; tea would be kept brewing throughout their brief stay at these camps, one of which was officially called the ‘Tea Pot Pub’.

Tea is the British panacea and cure-all, and it is fondly suggested that our response to any disaster is ‘put the kettle on’. Here was the same reflex action on a huge scale, the disaster being the unprecedented collapse of a prop of the British Empire, triggering death by disease or starvation for hundreds of thousands.

What follows is the story of an episode within that epic disaster. It focuses on the most obscure and also the most treacherous of the evacuation routes from Burma. Before 1942 the number of Europeans who had followed that route could have been counted in single figures, and most of them were eccentrics with a taste for reckless action. None, however, were so mad as to attempt the feat in the monsoon season.

The hero of the story is probably the above-mentioned Mackrell. In 1942, he was fifty-three. In British India professional lives were foreshortened by the climate and the physical demands of the life. When a man reached his fifties, it was time to think of returning home, ideally to some coastal town – Eastbourne in Sussex was a popular choice – where bracing air would provide a corrective to years of stifling humidity. For Gyles Mackrell, fighter pilot, big game hunter, jungle wallah, the relief operation mounted by the Indian Tea Association provided a last chance to live life as he had grown addicted to living it: dangerously. The beauty of the situation to him was that, if he could take elephants and boats deeper ‘into the blue’ than they had ever been taken before, he would have the reward of saving lives.

But the crisis brought out the best in other people as well, and the characters of the drama are presented as an ensemble cast. They are, in the main, middle-class British men, and they were often accompanied by Indian servants or received other assistance from the indigenous peoples, and to these two groups must go a great deal of the credit for such successes as the white men achieved, as Gyles Mackrell and most of the other principals pointed out. In particular Gurkha soldiers gave assistance, playing their habitual role of rescuing the British from messes of their own making. But it is the white men who kept the diaries, and they are therefore in the foreground of our story, which begins not with Mackrell and his elephants, but with two men for whom some elephants would have been very useful indeed.

On 19 May 1942 two Englishmen, Guy Millar and John Leyden, entered the Chaukan Pass in Upper Burma with the aim of reaching civilization in Assam, India. The pass – a vaguely defined groove through mountainous sub-tropical jungle, with fast-flowing rivers coming in from left and right – was either unmarked on most maps or dishearteningly stamped ‘unsurveyed’.

Millar and Leyden did not want to be in the Chaukan Pass, but they had no choice.

John Leyden himself had been overheard describing the pass route as ‘suicidal’ shortly before he set off along it. We know that Millar, who was keeping a diary as he entered the pass, was uneasily aware that very few Europeans had ever been through it before, and he seemed to recall that fatalities had usually been involved.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a few European parties had been through the Chaukan: Errol Gray, an elephant expert resident in Assam, had done it, as had a certain Pritchard, whom nobody knows much about. Prince Henri of Orleans also traversed the pass in that decade, but then here was a man whose life seems marked by a determination to get himself killed. (Henri of Orleans discovered the source of the Irrawaddy river in 1893, earning himself a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society in London, despite his being, as the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
of 1911 puts it, ‘a somewhat violent Anglophobe’. In fact, he was somewhat violent full stop, and in 1897 he wounded, and was himself wounded by, the Comte de Turin in a duel.) All the above were accompanied by numerous elephants and porters.

In 1892, a quite well-known double act of English exploration, Woodthorpe and MacGregor – that is, Colonel R. G. Woodthorpe, a surveyor in the Royal Engineers, and Major C. R. MacGregor of the Gurkha Light Infantry – went from Assam to Burma
and back
through the Chaukan. But, then, they were accompanied by two fellow officer of the British Indian Army, forty-five Gurkhas, twenty-five men of the Indian Frontier Police ‘together with’ – as Major MacGregor airily informed the Royal Geographical Society on his return – ‘the usual complement of native surveyors, coolies, & c’. They also had with them a great builder of bamboo bridges and rafts (in the person of Colonel Woodthorpe himself), together with something called a ‘Berthon’s collapsible boat’ – the collapsing and uncollapsing of which caused wonderment among the tribes they encountered – and ‘some’ elephants, the number of which MacGregor does not specify.

The rule of thumb in Upper Burma and Assam in 1942 was that a human porter carrying 50lbs of rice through the jungle must himself consume a minimum of 2lbs of that rice every day. An elephant, by contrast, can carry only 600lbs of food on its back and doesn’t need to eat any of it, since it eats the jungle as it goes. Alternatively, an elephant can carry six large men on its back, together with its human assistant, the mahout (who is usually very small). An elephant’s normal marching speed is six miles an hour, twice as fast as a man. With men on board, elephants can climb steep embankments – which they usually do on their knees. They can also carry men across fast-flowing rivers, and this is where the elephant really comes into its own on the Assam–Burma border: as a portable bridge. This is a territory where rivers are the problem and elephants are the answer.

But Millar and Leyden didn’t have any elephants with them. Instead, they had an elephant
tracker
, a young Assamese man called Goal Miri (Miri denotes his tribe) who was skilled at finding and following the tracks that wild elephants made through the jungles, and was retained by Millar as his personal servant. They also had a dozen porters recruited from the Kachin, one of the Upper Burmese tribes more sympathetic to the British, and Leyden’s spaniel bitch, Misa, who was pregnant.

Millar and Leyden had set off from Upper Burma on 17 May with enough rice, potatoes, onions, sugar, condensed milk and – being British – tea for fourteen days. They had to reach India before their supplies ran out because the jungle could not be guaranteed to yield up any food, and the country along their route was uninhabited. They were aiming for the Dapha river. Only when they reached it would they know they were on target for the plain of Assam, but they also knew that when they did reach the Dapha they would have to cross it. This wasn’t going to be easy. In 1892, Errol Gray had pronounced the Dapha ‘not fordable after early March’ on account of the meltwaters of the Himalayas. On top of that, Millar and Leyden were approaching the Dapha in the monsoon season, the rains having started about a week before they entered the pass. All previous expeditions through the Chaukan had taken place in the cold weather season – in December and January – when the many rivers are singing but not roaring.

On the morning of that first day, 19 May, Millar and Leyden crossed a relatively small but meandering river called the Nam Yak. They then crossed it a further seventeen times, each encounter preceded by the depressing sound of its rising roar coming from beyond the trees. They would half wade, half swim over the river. The water was chest-high for Millar and Leyden, but higher for the Kachins, most of whom were about five feet tall – one of the pygmy tribes, as the early British settlers in Burma would have referred to them.

After three days, Millar and Leyden emerged from the Chaukan Pass, but the mountainous jungle continued. In fact, as Millar noted in his diary, ‘the going became still more difficult’. They were descending only slowly from a height of about 8000 feet. They proceeded, slashing with their kukris (or large, curved knives) along the elephant tracks Goal Miri had identified, which at first, or even second, glance didn’t look like tracks at all. Or they would follow the banks of the rivers. Hitherto, these had tended to go across their direction of travel, but when they came out of the pass, Millar and Leyden struck a river that was going their way – that is, west. It was called the Noa Dehing.

They couldn’t cross the Noa Dehing, which was about 400 yards wide, and sunk in a deep, jungly gorge. They couldn’t even
see
across it, steaming rain having reduced the visibility to almost nil. They were therefore stuck on the right-hand bank – and this confirmed their appointment with the Dapha, which was a tributary of the Noa Dehing shortly to come thundering in from the right. Meanwhile, it was usually better to follow the bank of the Noa Dehing than hack away at the jungle.

So Millar and Leyden walked along the stones at the water’s edge – when there
was
an edge to the water – as opposed to a vertical wall of red mud. Some of these stones, Millar wrote, were about the size and shape of a cricket ball, and threatened to twist your ankle. Others were about the size and shape of a small house, so Millar and Leyden would climb up, across and down, often descending into deep pools, so that the leather of their boots began to rot. When the vertical mud wall was the only option, they proceeded monkey-like, holding onto the roots of trees or stout bamboos. It is unlikely that they talked much as they climbed. Their voices would have been drowned out by the crashing past of the river; and a malnourished man finds it hard to talk. It becomes a labour to formulate the thoughts and pronounce the words.

The rain made it hard to light the fires they needed at night to boil up their rice. They had to search the undergrowth for dry bamboo, which they cut into slivers to make kindling. This they then tried to ignite, but the Lion Safety Matches of India and Burma were considered by many of their users all
too
safe: the sulphur tended to drop off the end when they were struck, or they would break in half.

When bamboo does burn, it makes a mellow bubbling, popping sound. Every night after they’d eaten their rice, Millar and Leyden made tea: Assam leaves swirling in a brew tin full of river water. G. D. L. Millar was a tea planter from Assam – manager of the Kacharigaon Tea Company – and never let it be said of the British tea planters of India that they did not consume their own product.

On one those early evenings by the fire, Leyden took a photograph of Millar; it shows a tough forty-two-year-old, unshaven, standing in front of a bamboo fire. The porters crouch around him Burmese-style, like close fielders around a batsman; he wears loose fatigues and the manner in which he holds his cigarette is slightly rakish. Millar was christened Guy Daisy. In the Edwardian days of his birth, Daisy could be a boy’s name; it might be further explained in Millar’s case by the fact that he was born on a farm in Cornwall. Daisy means nothing more incriminating than ‘the day’s eye’ and you might think it would suit an outdoorsman. But Millar made that ‘D’ stand for Denny.