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:
Moses name will occur from time to time in this Diary and it is perhaps as well to say a little about him. Of Dutch nationality, I had met him about two years previously whilst he was on a hiking-cum-conjuring tour in the Shan states. He was apparently an International Boy Scout amongst other things, and stated that he had been in Tibet, and I think Northern Siam. At the period we are dealing with he was employed by the Burma China Railways as a Surveyor and apparently it was his story of having crossed [the pass] in 10 marching days … that had influenced Sir John to take this route. The various discrepancies between his description of the route and the route as ultimately found are hardly explicable but there is little doubt Sir John made a bad bargain when he was influenced by Moses’ tale.
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.
Later that same day, four of the Commandos – the four friends, Gardiner, McCrindle, Boyt and Howe – together with the lately escaped Fraser and Pratt, also left the camp. They would try to contact the elusive rescue party and send it back to the railway and Rossiter parties. The enigmatic surveyor Moses left with the Commandos, possibly to escape the reproachful stares of Sir John. Mr Jardine of Lever Brothers also went with them, in spite of being forty-five, and looking more like seventy with his white beard.
And so, after Millar and Leyden, a second advance guard was being sent on.
Sir John and Edward Wrixon Rossiter had been reconciled to staying put in the Chaukan Pass and waiting for assistance, a tricky strategy with so little food, and one that went against the grain for Sir John, a man of action. The trouble had been a lack of porters, but, on 1 June, a party of about sixty soldiers turned up outside Sir John’s tent. As with the 102 ‘other ranks’ who’d come in with the two escapees from the Japanese, Fraser and Pratt, the majority of these were Gurkhas, and more typical of the breed in that they were inclined to be helpful to a Briton in distress.
Any British history of the Raj will feature encomium to the Gurkhas, ‘our faithful allies in India since 1813’. Gurkhas are from Nepal, a state lying between India and Tibet. It is sometimes mentioned in those encomia that the British had been fighting the Gurkhas before 1813, but this was regarded by the British as a good clean war (no doubt because they won), in which the enemy showed himself a formidable fighter. A deal was struck: Nepal was allowed independence from British rule in India. In return, the rulers of Nepal allowed their martial tribes (and the word Gurkhas encompasses many tribes and castes) to fight for the British. So it might be said that the Gurkhas ensured the independence of their homeland by curtailing that of other peoples who came up against the British in India.
Much sentimentality, and some mythology, surrounds the Gurkhas. In his memoir, Bugles and a Tiger, John Masters tells the story of a Gurkha regiment whose British officers called for volunteer parachutists. It was explained that this would involve jumping out of planes at about 1000 feet. ‘The officers were surpr
ised and pained to find that only seventy men volunteered’, while others looked sceptical. It was later discovered that the volunteers had not appreciated the significance of the parachute. As far as they were concerned they were volunteering simply to jump out of a plane at 1000 feet, hence the slight reluctance. Masters also tells the story of the Gurkha who walked out of Burma after the Japanese invasion. He navigated alone from Rangoon to Assam using what turned out to be a street map of London.
The point of the story is to illustrate the mystical kinship between the Gurkha and the mother country that had adopted him. The typical Gurkha, with his direct gaze, satirical humour, intolerance of bullshit – all backed up by his trademark razor-edged kukri, or curved knife – would have done very well in the East End. Yes, he might be a Hindu, but not the picky kind. He liked a gamble, a smoke and a drink, and he was certainly not a vegetarian. (It is said that, in the First World War, Gurkha officers would even, in extremis, permit their men to eat bully beef, albeit with the labels removed from the tins, and on condition it was presented to the men as corned mutton.) And like many an East End hard man the Gurkha was only five foot tall and wore a wide-brimmed felt hat.
On 1 June, Sir John struck a deal with his Gurkhas, who had some food of their own: in exchange for payment, they would act as porters to the railway party and the Rossiters, and on 2 June they all set off: ‘The track was an exceedingly difficult one up and down hills and mountain sides. Some of the gradients were as steep as 1 in 1 …’ On 4 June, Sir John noted, it ‘Poured with rain from mid-night and continued all day … The weather and road were vile.’ 5 June: ‘Another vile pathway.’ 6 June: ‘Another vile pathway.’
A Bad Start for Mackrell
When he woke from his sleep on the floor of the basha early in the morning of 5 June, Gyles Mackrell was confronted with a familiar problem: river trouble. It was still raining and the Namphuk was flowing fast, and – as far as he was concerned – in the wrong direction. Progress upstream in the canoe was slow, and it wasn’t until late morning that he reached his camp at Namgoi Mukh, where he found that ‘all the best elephants’ of his eighty-four had been loaded up by Chaochali and sent off towards the Hukawng Valley, and its starving refugees.
Other good elephants were ‘dispersed in the jungle’. It should be explained that tame elephants at work in the jungle are kept on a ‘free-range’ principle. They are left to forage in the vicinity of the camp, perhaps lightly hobbled with ropes tied around the two front feet, but in any case trained not to wander too far. Even so, the elephant man in the jungle is resigned to spending the first hour of his day rounding up his charges. The only alternative would be to bring the jungle to them, which would involve a lot of chopping down of leafy branches and scything grass.
Mackrell did not have the time to spare, so he began loading up twenty reasonably good elephants. The first thing a tame elephant carries on its back is a soft pad to protect its spine. The luggage is secured on top of that. What did Mackrell and Chaochali load onto those elephants? Firstly, food: the rice, dall, tea and so on that had been accumulating at his camp for dispatch to the Hukawng Valley route. Besides such basics, Mackrell took tinned sausages, tinned cheese (cheese generally came tinned in Assam in 1942) and jars of Marmite, which was popular with the British in India: it was easily transportable, and it didn’t go off. Marmite also symbolized home, even though it was named after a French cooking pot (marmite), and it was a German scientist, Justus von Lieberg, who first bottled brewer’s yeast as a savoury – and very salty – food. Whether Mackrell loved or hated Marmite – and the mythology is that no intermediate position is possible – he knew that it was considered a good prophylactic against the Vitamin B deficiency that causes beriberi, and its pungency was such that a small amount of it could flavour a lot of mouldy rice. He also took Bovril, which could change the taste of boiled water should anybody be so heretical as to become bored with tea. When Mackrell himself wanted to move on from tea, he tended to drink whisky or rum, and he took bottles of those, too. With his evening peg – and at other times – he liked to smoke cigarettes or, for preference, his pipe. So he took tins of cigarettes and tobacco. (The most popular brand of pipe tobacco in India in 1942 was called Barney’s, and it was advertised in magazines with a testimonial – allegedly unsolicited – from a man who had supposedly knocked about a good deal with the Norwegian whaling fleets. In the advertisements he told of how one night, while iced in somewhere close to the Arctic, he was offered £2 for his tin of Barney’s, which normally retailed at a shilling. He turned it down.)
Mackrell also took a wooden box full of medical supplies; some bed sheets, blankets and a collapsible camp bed for himself. He took some tents (unlike Millar and Leyden, he would have the benefit of these); some tarpaulins; some tins of kerosene; his portable HMV radio (which actually wasn’t all that portable); a fishing rod (but not necessarily for fishing, as we will see), at least two fishing nets, nail scissors (but not for cutting his nails, as we will also see), a quantity of dabs (sharp swords) and kukris, some rifles or shotguns, a Bren gun (a light machine gun); a gun-like lamp (switched on with the press of a trigger) for sending Morse signals to aeroplanes, together with a battery pack for same; two lengths of white oilcloth rolled around steel poles, on which three-letter Morse codes could be written out, with stones or jungle mud, to be read by passing aeroplanes. He took a number of umbrellas; a quantity of silver rupees; rope for tethering elephants; some tobacco tins containing raw opium wrapped in silver foil; pens, paper and envelopes bundled in a leather stationery folder with an oilcloth cover (for the writing of diary and chits); a collapsible canvas bath (an article commonly employed in India, and always sold with the proviso ‘For outdoor use only; some leakage is inevitable’). And he took at least one 16mm cine camera and film in canisters, because he was a keen amateur film-maker.
Mackrell packed in a hurry. Not only was he trying to save starving people, but if he delayed his departure he might be ordered not to go. He knew the Chaukan route was considered by military and civilian authorities alike to be unsurvivable in the monsoon; a rescue mission would be deemed too dangerous, a waste of manpower and elephants. Millar and Leyden had survived it, but only just, and they were relatively young and fit and had the good luck of meeting the Mishmis. Also, the route was becoming more difficult with each successive day’s rain.
Mackrell set off at dawn on Saturday 6 June. He had left instructions for Chaochali to muster another team of elephants, and to follow him into the Chaukan as soon as he could hand over the original relief operation from Namgoi Mukh – serving the Hukawng Valley – to others.
At 4 p.m. on the 6th, Mackrell and his elephants arrived at Miao, the village on the south bank of the Noa Dehing that Millar and Leyden had come to about thirty miles after crossing the Dapha. Miao is pronounced – by the British – like the noise a cat makes. It was, and still is, a pretty spot: a tight cluster of tin-roofed shops and bamboo houses overlooking the wide river, fields of grazing cattle and the soaring blue hills beyond.
Mackrell would have to cross to the north side of the Noa Dehing because any Chaukan refugees would be progressing along this side. Millar and Leyden had probably been rowed across it by a Miao ferryman, but it was higher and faster now, and Mackrell wanted to get his elephants over. Besides, the ferrymen of that Buddhist village – and every other resident – were attending a funeral. Life in Assamese villages is communal. If a house is built, everyone chips in with a material or physical contribution. Similarly, everyone attends a funeral: the sacrifice, the prayers, the interment, the feasting. The headman of the village, a man called Mat Ley, told Mackrell he would have to put off the crossing until the next day. So Mackrell and his mahouts stayed in a dak bungalow – or government guest house – on a cliff above the river. The packs were taken off the elephants and they were put to graze.
Dinner was cooked by Mackrell’s personal servant of the past thirty years, an Assamese called Apana. He and Mackrell ate wit
h the mahouts. Mackrell basically liked the mahouts, and when they were behaving well he called them his ‘boys’, as in ‘made tea for all the boys’, a frequent diary entry. He admired their skill, their closeness to the elephants. A mahout does not necessarily work with the same elephant but ideally he would do, and that’s a lifetime relationship, since an elephant lives for between fifty and seventy years. The story is told of the Assamese mahout who was keen on drink – by no means a unique case. One afternoon, he came back from a lunchtime session and keeled over in a jungle clearing. Seeing that the sun was beating down on the small prostrate figure, the mahout’s elephant stood over him for an hour while he slept, making shade. Elephants are as endearingly loyal to a single master in that way as dogs, which, by the way, elephants hate. There may have been extra fellow feeling between that elephant and his mahout because elephants, too, have a taste for alcohol. In his book Elephants, Richard Carrington writes, ‘Nearly every elephant worth his salt will knock back a gallon of beer with the enthusiasm of a cricket team after a thirsty match’, and in The Ivory King Charles Holder mentions an elephant that could ‘draw a cork from a bottle of claret and drink the contents without spilling a drop’. It was the habit of tea garden labourers of Assam – who lived in huts with mud walls – to keep rice wine in buckets or cooking pots. The elephants which also laboured in the tea gardens would sometimes use their trunks to punch a hole through the walls in order to suck up the wine. Having become drunk, they might then knock down the entire hut.
After dinner, Mackrell unpacked his portable HMV radio and sat on the veranda. All was dark below; a light rain was falling. He lit his pipe. If he had tuned into Radio Tokyo, he would have heard the announcer with the almost perfect English accent boasting that Japanese Imperial Forces had completed the liberation of the Burmese people. Or, if he wanted to take his mind off the war and the foaming river below, he might have tuned the dial until he picked up some light jazz, of the kind played in his favourite restaurant in Calcutta, Firpo’s on Park Street. Either way he would have been sipping a whisky, while the mahouts smoked a little opium.
Flight by Elephant Page 9
