Flight by Elephant (24 page)

… That is to say, the rain had eased … but the heat and humidity were rising, and more or less everyone at the Dapha camp was ill. The larger amount of food had brought a larger number of insects and dysentery was rife. There was a shortage of porters, and a shortage of elephants. More of either went to the base at Miao than ever came back from it. The porters would abscond even if they were owed money.

The Mishmis were also fleeing. Mackrell and Wilson might have been able to keep more of them if they’d had more opium, but in early July they only had the small amount that Commando Boyt had brought with him, which prompts the question of whether Boyt himself ever put two and two together and smoked the opium he carried in the pipe that he also carried. Another difficulty with the Mishmis was that their headman, the one who had originally guided Mackrell to the Dapha for ten rupees, was now severely ill with dysentery. He was attended by Dr Bardoloi, but did not improve because, Mackrell wrote, ‘he refuses to diet’. He was too ill to command his men, and they would not take orders directly from Wilson or even Mackrell.

The ninth of July was a particularly grim day at Dapha. The air was unbreathable; the camp was swarming with insects, attracted by the spilled food sacks. And one of the few remaining porters, a Naga, who was working on the east side of the river, stocking the camps along the track towards the Tilung Hka, died that day. His brother, also employed at Dapha, confronted Mackrell and said that his brother had died because he had been pressed into portering some of the way for Iman Sing, bearer of the chit for Sir John. This surviving brother said he would wait until Iman Sing returned, and then he would ‘cut him up’. Mackrell eventually talked the Naga man down, and he (the Naga) left for Miao that evening, as did the very ill Mishmi headman.

The next day, two elephants arrived at Dapha from Miao. Sitting up behind the mahouts were a Lieutenant Colonel Pizey and a tea planter called Black, a senior man in the Indian Tea Association. They were emissaries from the government bungalow at Margherita. Word had reached Margherita that Mackrell and Wilson were ill, and Pizey and Black had come to talk them into leaving Dapha and reconsidering the rescue effort.

Tea was served beneath the big tarpaulin, and a conference was held. Mackrell was happy to agree to the proposal as long as ‘reconsidering’ meant establishing the effort on a stronger footing. That night Black and Lieutenant Colonel Pizey stayed at Dapha. Both were kept awake all night by sandfly bites. The next day, Pizey left, taking Captain Wilson with him.

Mackrell insisted on lingering at Dapha because he was sure that Iman Sing would be back imminently with a reply from Sir John (an expectation he had concealed from the porter who wanted to murder Iman Sing). The senior ITA man, Black, insisted on staying at Dapha in case Mackrell’s fever, which was generally abating, should incapacitate him once again. And so Black was kept awake for another night with sandfly bites.

On 12 July, as already noted, Iman Sing’s two men did return to Dapha, carrying the chit from Sir John and Rossiter. In his diary, Mackrell speaks highly of the two Gurkhas. They had done the trek from the Tilung Hka in just eight days, and on very little food. They were brothers, and he records their names: Tami and Gunga Bahadur. Mackrell made a meal for the brothers and pondered the chit in which Sir John said he was being fed from the air (which Mackrell knew by now) and that he was staying put, being in want of sixty or seventy porters. So Sir John was not expected imminently. It seemed a few days could be spared in which to return to base, and solicit help for a bigger and better rescue attempt.

On the evening of 12 July, the senior ITA man, Black, left the Dapha camp for Miao. The plan was that everyone remaining in the camp would then leave with Mackrell.

On the 14th, Mackrell and Dr Bardoloi were attending to the stores in the camps on the east side of the river – it was the familiar chore of rigging up the sacks in the trees so they would be out of the reach of wild elephants. This was a precautionary measure. Nobody was expected at the river in the immediate future, but that had never stopped people turning up. Suddenly a plane came low over the trees, and it was not the sociable George Chater in his Dakota; this plane did not display the RAF roundel. It displayed the red Japanese rising sun. Mackrell and Dr Bardoloi walked briskly – they did not run – into the jungle ‘in case of machine gunning’. The plane circled twice, went away, then came back.

It circled two more times before heading east.

On the 15th, half a dozen elephants came through from Miao, and these would enable Mackrell to quit the Dapha. Before doing so, he rearranged the white stones that had spelt out the code for ‘DROP MESSAGE HERE’ so as to spell out the code for ‘PROPER TO ABANDON POST AND MARCH WEST’. This was to forestall food being dropped on an empty camp. On the 16th, he saw another plane approaching, and he was pretty certain this
was
RAF. To underline his rearranged message, he threw kerosene on some of the bamboo huts and set fire to them. They burnt fiercely as the plane circled above.

Mackrell left the Dapha camp on 17 July. It was a very hot day, and, as his elephant awaited, he lit his pipe and gazed at the burning bamboo huts, the collapsed tents, the hundreds of sacks, many containing rotting food from split tins, each sack surrounded by a cloud of flies. As he puffed on his pipe, he reflected knowledgeably on the insects and their associates. This, after all, was the boy who had taken
Acidalia trigeminata
: ‘Early dim-dams, then huge horse flies, all day leeches, at dusk midges and at dark and onwards sandflies in myriads and some mosquitoes. No wonder this area is uninhabited.’

But of course it
was
inhabited, and he had just listed its inhabitants. As Mackrell and the mahouts, the remaining Rifles and porters and Dr Bardoloi trailed away through the hot mist, its rightful owners regained possession of the Dapha camp.

As Mackrell departed from the Dapha river heading west on 17 July, Sir John Rowland was beginning to consider approaching it from the east. He was tired of being ‘in the blue’, which is how he referred to deep jungle. True, on 3 July he had received the chit from Iman Sing saying help was at hand, but that help seemed to be a long time coming, and Sir John had rather lost faith in rescue parties. By the 17th, two weeks had passed since he and Rossiter had dispatched their reply to Mackrell and Wilson, and for all they knew that reply had never got through.

The two parties had enough food for a few more weeks, but much of it was mouldy and illness was rife. Most of those encamped on the Tilung Hka had the first signs of the condition called wet beriberi, the vitamin deficiency disease that would have been avoided if they’d been eating brown rather than white rice. The symptoms were swollen ankles or fingers and a loss of mobility, and the condition could cause heart failure if left to develop. But it would be rectified by the early restoration of a proper, balanced diet and Sir John – who had swelling of the fingertips – wanted to move while he still could. He was also suffering intermittent bouts of malaria.

In spite of the hopeful chit he had received, he suspected the decision would be made to postpone any rescue until after the rains, in which case Mrs Rossiter would have to give birth in the jungle and some older members of the party would die. Sir John would take as many as possible away with him, and he would demand that a rescue party came back for the rest. Certainly, the weather was propitious. For the two weeks after 6 July, Sir John records, ‘Another fine and sunny day … Another fine day … the fourth fine day in succession … Still another fine day … Another fine sun-shining day …’ With each successive fine day the level of the Tilung Hka had been falling, as Sir John verified by a series of increasingly satisfactory evening strolls to the river and back.

The trouble was the old one: a lack of porters. But on the morning of 18 July forty more soldiers, mainly Gurkhas, arrived at Sir John’s camp from Burma. On the morning of the 19th a further twenty arrived. The need to accommodate these new men – who were mainly from the Burma Frontier Force – made the newly replenished larder seem a rather less formidable bulwark against future disaster. On the other hand, Sir John had been wishing for sixty men – he had said as much in the chit he had written to Mackrell – and here
were
sixty men. It was uncanny, when you thought about it.

Of course, Sir John had wished for sixty
fit
men …

Sir John ordered the PMO, Dr Burgess-Barnett, to hold a sick parade and found three of the new arrivals seriously ill with malaria; others were suffering from septic sores and swollen feet and ankles from leech bites. Sir John ordered Burgess-Barnett to ‘doctor them up’, and he himself fed them up.

Sir John’s mind was made up. Despite being sixty years old, and ill, he would lead a party through to the Dapha. He knew that not everyone in the camp would be fit enough to accompany him. For a start, the pregnant Mrs Rossiter and baby John could be counted out, and of course her husband would have to stay with her. Sir John did not regret the fact that Edward Rossiter would not be accompanying him, and we will soon see more evidence to that effect.

On 22 July, Sir John held a roll call of the men in the camp and offered the fittest ones the chance to accompany him. He put together a party of about seventy-five, the majority of whom were the newly arrived Gurkhas. Mackrell’s messenger, Iman Sing – blissfully ignorant that a tough Naga porter had wanted to chop him into pieces – would also undertake the journey back with Sir John. Of his own original railway party, Sir John took the forty-three-year-old District Traffic Superintendent, Eric Ivan Milne, and the Indians, namely Naidu, the divisional accountant, Venkatachalam, the office superintendent, and Venkataraman, the store clerk, even though each man was well into middle age. The other railwayman, fifty-six-year-old Edward Lovell Manley, his senior colleague on the Burma–China construction, would finally have to separate from Sir John. He was not fit enough to walk sixty miles through thick jungle.

Although perhaps fit enough himself to make the trek (but he wasn’t completely well) Dr Burgess-Barnett would stay with the twenty-five or so remaining, who also included the less fit Gurkhas, some Indian servants and the bespectacled Captain Whitehouse of the Royal Engineers, who was beginning to have difficulty in walking.

On the afternoon of 23 July the rain had stopped and the sun was out; Sir John was ready to lead his seventy-five away towards the Dapha. But Gyles Mackrell had left the Dapha six days earlier, so who would be there to cross him over the river?

On 17 July, Mackrell and his men and his elephants trailed back the way they had come, through the lower jungles towards the camp at Miao. At the Debang river, he diverted to the village of Tinguan to see the Mishmi headman who had shown him the shortcuts to the Dapha. The man’s condition had not improved. He lay in his hut under a suspended hurricane lamp, looking ‘desperately ill’. Mackrell paid what he owed him, plus a bonus of a hundred rupees. He also gave him rum, Klim and the small quantity of opium that he had about him. He gave chits to the other Mishmis who had helped him at Dapha – invoices for the wages owed.

That night, Mackrell slept in a spare hut in the village. He set up his camp bed and mosquito net well away from two holes in the roof, and, as the rain thundered down, the water ran in a sluice under his bed, so it was quite a satisfactory arrangement in that he himself was not wet. He was about to go to sleep when he heard a scrabbling on the side of his bed. Then he felt something climb effortfully onto his chest. He sat up, and a giant wet rat, squeaking with fright, leapt onto the mosquito netting, from where it fell onto Mackrell’s head. He seems to have seen the funny side: ‘I had much difficulty getting out without getting bitten!’

On Saturday 18 July, Mackrell and his party crossed the Noa Dehing at Miao ‘with all elephants’, although both rivers were rising. On the afternoon of the next day, in the bungalow on a cliff above the river, Mackrell had a meeting with Black, the senior ITA man, who introduced him to two new men who had been co-opted to the rescue effort: Captain Street of the 2nd Rajputan Rifles, and a man called Webster, a police officer. The two had arrived at Miao with a detachment of Assam Rifles and some political porters. After introductions had been made and tea had been poured, Webster explained to Mackrell that he, Street and Black would be going to Dapha to organize a fresh rescue expedition. We might imagine Mackrell moving his pipe about in his hands, but not lighting it. This would have been another tense encounter. Mackrell had been removed from the scene of the action, and these three men – all a good deal younger than him – would be taking his place. It seemed he was being pensioned off; and yet he had made a promise to Millar and Leyden that he would rescue the Rowland and Rossiter parties. It would be churlish to quibble about who rescued them; the main thing was that they should be rescued. It was therefore difficult to know what to say.

It became less difficult when police officer Webster continued to the effect that the aim of the new expedition would be to meet the Rowland and Rossiter parties, which had set off from their camp on the wrong side of the Tilung Hka and were moving west. Now Webster was imparting this information to Mackrell on the afternoon of Sunday 19 July. On 12 July, the Gurkha brothers working under the Havildar Iman Sing had handed Mackrell the chit from Sir John to say that he and the Rossiters were staying put because of a lack of porters. Soon after writing that, Sir John had, as we have seen, been miraculously supplied with porters and decided to leave for Dapha. But he would not set off until 23 July, and all the evidence as of that Sunday 19 July suggested he was indeed staying put. Mackrell put this to Black, Street and Webster … who begged to differ.