Flight by Elephant

by Andrew Martin

  When the leech has fallen off, the wound bleeds, perhaps for more than a day, because of the anti-coagulant. If the wound is quickly cleaned with soap and water – or if the jungle walker is lucky – the bite will leave nothing more than a sore that lasts a couple of weeks. Mackrell’s remedy for those that landed on him or on his butler, Apana, was to snip them in half with his nail scissors. The two stopped to perform this ritual every fifteen minutes, in which time each man had acquired forty or fifty.

  Mackrell, like all the British jungle wallahs, did not dress properly for the war on leeches. There was some merit in wearing few clothes, like his mahouts. You could then see exactly where the leeches had attached themselves, and they could be scraped off with a razor-sharp kukri, or you could spit the juice from the betel nut you might be chewing onto it – that would make it release its hold. Or you could wear puttees, with trousers tucked in, as the Japanese did. But Mackrell wore a long-sleeved bush shirt, shorts, socks and boots. The Burmese called the British ‘the trousered ones’ because they did not wear the skirt-like Burmese longyi, but the British were only half trousered, either as civilians or soldiers, and many veterans of the Burma fighting would never wear shorts again after the war, their legs being covered in sores that never healed.

  At 8 p.m. Mackrell and his men were still progressing in the dark, on foot or elephant, every man holding either a torch or a hurricane lamp. All around, the jungle seethed with the rain, the warm wind and the leeches.

  At 11 p.m. Mackrell sensed that the mahouts were on the verge of mutiny ‘and small blame to them’. He called a halt in a clearing near a small stream that was clattering its way towards the Noa Dehing. They did not bother with the tents, but rigged up some tarpaulins; a fire was lit. They were near a great, dark rock – a salt lick, but no animals came to lick the salt. The mahouts cooked a meal for themselves; being Hindus they had strict dietary rules, and would always eat separately from non-Hindus. Mackrell must have eaten something, too. Tinned sausages and rice, perhaps. But all he mentions in his diary is tea – ‘hot tea with rum in it’.

  The Mishmi smoked his blob of opium, which would have been greyish, about the size of a cherry, and soft but slightly gritty, like marzipan. He smoked it through a bamboo pipe, with a clay bowl inset for the burning of the opium. Before lighting up, he would have cleaned out this bowl with a knife, building up the anticipation, and so the pleasure.

  It is likely that Mackrell was smoking his own pipe of tobacco, as he observed the Mishmi. And what would the Mishmi have observed as he took the first of the dozen or so inhalations? The rain would still have been crashing down; the jungle would still have been fizzing with leeches, many of which would still have been crawling inexorably towards him, but all this would have seemed … rather mildly amusing, or simply irrelevant compared to the overall benignity of the world.

  The next morning, Mackrell and his men woke early. Their campsite was so exceedingly uncomfortable that it was easy to persuade everyone to an early start. The first job – after the brewing of tea – was to round up the elephants, and it turned out one was missing – an elderly female who’d been made particularly restive by the nearness of the wild herd. So they were now down to fifteen elephants, and the loads had to be redistributed again. It was – as usual – raining heavily; they wanted to get on, and the job was perhaps done hurriedly.

  They set off along a track that came to border the cliff of the Noa Dehing. There was steep jungle to the left of this narrow path and a drop of ‘several hundred feet’ to the river below on the right. At this point, one of the haulage pads strapped to one of the elephants slipped, so that it was beneath the elephant rather than on top of it. All the elephants were stopped on the cliff edge, and Mackrell and the men tried to refix the load. It was imperative that all the elephants remained absolutely still; the least slip would have sent them down the gorge, and the path was becoming more viscous with every minute, such was the force of the pelting rain. To refix the pad was a tricky job. The straps had to be cut away, and new ones tied on. But the job got done, and they continued on their way.

  After a whole further day’s hike, they began to hear another roar rising above the roar of the rain, and the roar of the Noa Dehing. It was the big one: the roar of the Dapha river.

  Mackrell Reaches the Dapha River and His Work Begins

  Elephants generally like water. They have been recorded as swimming along rivers for six hours or more at a time. In Elephants, Richard Carrington writes,

  Elephants will sometimes go swimming, or wallow in muddy pools for the sheer joy of being in the water. An elephant bathing party is a most entertaining sight. The animals splash and trumpet, squirt water over themselves, or lie at full length with the contented expressions of elderly gentlemen surf bathing at the edge of the sea. The calves dash about on the shore in playful pursuit of one another, squeaking with excitement and pushing each other into the water. The cheekier among them butt their recumbent mothers playfully in the ribs or squirt water from their trunks in the general direction of some dignified old bull.

  But this was different.

  A full hour after first hearing the roar of the Dapha through the trees, the Mackrell party was still cutting through steeply descending jungle. At the foot of the incline, they arrived at the top of a cliff. In the gorge below was the Dapha. The cliffs bordering the river varied from sheer drops of 250 feet to 50-foot slopes. They found one of the latter, and took the elephants down. The margins of the river within the gorge were ambiguous: there were low plateaux or marshy tracts on which grew lemon trees and ten-foot-high grasses, and there were strips of rocky beach. This ambiguity made the river additionally dangerous. You’d think you were beyond the edge of it, then with a sudden surge it would reach out and pull you in.

  Here the wild elephant track they had been following veered away from the water – which was very sensible of the wild elephants. Mackrell, his men and their own elephants stood next to the sagging shelter in which Millar and Leyden had spent the night after their own crossing and they contemplated the river. They did so in silence, because its noise made speech inaudible. They stood in a vast, right-angled valley. The Dapha thundered madly south, where it crashed into the Noa Dehing, immediately and crazily – like one drunk meeting another on a wild Saturday night – falling in with its plan of thundering west. The two rivers met in a great steaming cauldron hundreds of yards wide. As with Millar and Leyden, Mackrell sensed that he was intruding upon the private trauma of Mother Nature, and he would write in awed terms, ‘Few if any had ever seen the Dapha in the Monsoon before.’

  Mighty tree trunks were bobbing around in the water, looking about as significant as human hairs being whirled down a plughole. These logs were ‘a terror to the elephants’, and some would not approach the river even after Mackrell and the mahouts had cut a pathway through the scrub to the water’s edge. Mackrell climbed up behind his personal mahout, Gohain, on the big tusker called Phuldot – the one that had taken the lead crossing the Noa Dehing at Miao – and they walked the elephant to the river’s edge. From here, ten feet up, Mackrell had a better view, and he saw amid the rainy mist a small grass-covered island in the middle of the river.

  There were men on it.

  None of them was Sir John Rowland, who at that moment was marching through the rain about 120 miles to the west These were small men, in ragged remnants of army uniforms, some wearing wide-brimmed felt hats: Gurkhas – sixty-eight of them. Mackrell did not know this, but they were the bulk of the party that had stayed a single night at Sir John’s camp, having arrived in the wake of those escapees from Japanese capture, Fraser and Pratt.

  It was unusual for Gurkhas to need rescuing. As a rule, they were the ones doing the rescuing. They had, of course, put up some heroic military performances on the retreat from Burma, sometimes near water – and they had a great reputation as bridge builders. Dorman-Smith described one episode from the walkout in his Evacuation Report, with no location or da
te given:

  … the Gurkha units maintained at all times their customary standards: at a difficult river crossing there was no bridge and the river was swift and deep … Hundreds waited on the bank. They had to cross or starve. A party of Gurkhas volunteered to take a rope across. They were not all skilful swimmers. A round dozen went. Only seven reached the other side alive, but the rope spanned the breach and many lives were saved. The names of those who died are not known, but – Thappa or Guring or Rai – the Indian Army and Nepal may be proud of them.

  If there was a chink in the resilience of the Gurkhas it was indeed that they generally could not swim, which is perfectly understandable. Their homeland, Nepal, is landlocked and its rivers are torrential and freezing cold. A notorious incident of the fall of Rangoon had occurred when the British prematurely blew up the bridge over the Sittang river. Allied soldiers were trapped on the wrong side of it, and attempted to escape the Japanese by swimming. Hundreds of Gurkhas drowned, and thereafter swimming lessons were included in their training.

  … Not that anyone could have swum the Dapha in the monsoon, and the island on which the sixty-eight Gurkhas were stranded was being rapidly eroded. They were also starving: their emaciated state made that clear enough, and they underlined the point to Mackrell by repeatedly gesturing to their mouths.

  The mid-river island was only about sixty yards from the bank on which Mackrell and his men stood. Gohain rode Phuldot into the river, while behind him Mackrell, or somebody, filmed the attempt. In the film the water seems not so much to flow as fly, and the island is not visible in the rain haze. You can see the concentration that Phuldot puts into resisting the river. He progresses slowly, every so often stopping, as if calmly deciding: ‘Actually, this is impossible.’ Gohain keeps looking round, as if to say, equally mildly, to Mackrell: ‘This is not going to work’, and the elephant is eventually recalled. The trouble was that the rain, combined with the force of the water, had washed away the shingle on the river bed, leaving no binding between the boulders. Therefore Phuldot couldn’t walk across the river, and if he had tried to swim he would have been swept away.

  The Gurkhas had attempted to bridge the river. One of the passing tree trunks had been ensnared, and they’d pushed it lengthways from the island, with their end of it weighed down by stones, so that it stuck up over the racing water, but it didn’t reach more than a quarter of the way across.

  There was the possibility of a Plan B, however. Mackrell and the mahouts went a little way into the river with some of the more willing elephants. When the next suitable log came bounding past, they managed to stop it, and the elephants carried it to the bank. (Elephants move logs as dextrously as men move planks about.) This second log was extended out from the bank so as to meet the one coming out from the island. A mahout went out on an elephant with a roll of rope over his shoulder. He would try to join the projecting end of the logs together. The Gurkhas tried to push their own tree a little further towards Mackrell’s, but as soon as its anchor of rocks was disturbed, the trunk was swept away, taking the other log with it. Mackrell would write, ‘Until dark, we tried over and over again, up and down the river but failed to get an elephant anywhere near them, and the Khampti Mahouts took terrible risks of being washed away and broken to pieces in trying to get over.’

  At dark, they gave up: ‘and I shall never forget the line of dejected figures crawling and stumbling back to their meagre grass shelters. They had been so full of relief and hope when they saw us first …’

  The elephants were put to graze; the tarpaulins were strung up, and an evening meal was cooked on Mackrell’s side of the river. Mackrell and his men would have suppressed any appearance of enjoying the meal, what with the starving Gurkhas only sixty yards away. Afterwards, Mackrell lit his pipe and watched the river in the fading light. Then he had another idea. Picking up one of the hurricane lamps, he walked over to one of the pads that had been removed from an elephant. He took it out and began to assemble his fifteen-foot fishing rod. Working under a tarpaulin, with his pipe in his mouth, and the hurricane lamp by his side, he rigged up a line, ‘fishing line first to be cast [towards the Gurkhas on the island] … attached to a light rope which in turn was attached to some of the elephant tethering rope to which we intended to tie bundles of food in tarpaulin’. That’s how he described the plan in his diary, but there’s a whimsical note to the passage which sounds like something from a fairy story … Rapunzel letting down her hair. It never came to anything, and Mackrell carried on watching the river until midnight, when he put out his pipe, wrapped himself in a tarpaulin and went to sleep.

  But it was another very light sleep, and ‘at 2am a different tune in the roar of the water brought me wide awake’. Mackrell unwrapped himself from his tarpaulin and walked to the river’s edge. The level was falling; the flow was slower, the river more translucent and altogether better behaved, although still playfully flinging the occasional log about. By four in the morning the river was three feet lower than it had been the night before. The Gurkhas were stirring from their grass shelters on the island, as were Mackrell’s mahouts, who needed ‘no urging’ – and no breakfast – before beginning the rescue attempt.

  The first elephant they rounded up and prepared was not Phuldot but Mackrell’s other favourite: another male called Rungdot. Three weeks before, when he’d been setting up his refugee food distribution camp at Namgoi Mukh, Mackrell had needed to cross the Namgoi river, but the monsoon had started and the cane rope suspension bridge at that point had been washed away after a landslide, which is what tended to happen to those bridges. Rungdot was the elephant that got him over.

  At 5 a.m., in the clearing haze of dawn, the Dapha was a reformed character and, according to Mackrell, ‘singing merrily’. It had taken on a relaxed, green tinge as opposed to its rabid, foaming white of the evening before. Even so, Mackrell, Rungdot and a mahout unnamed by Mackrell walked a good way west along the riverbank before they found what looked like a safe place to enter the water: a point where the channel split into six or seven streams, with relative shallows in between. Mackrell was not aboard the elephant when it went in – only the mahout. Space on the elephant was at a premium. If the crossing was successful, it would be necessary to accommodate as many Gurkhas as possible on Rungdot’s back.

  Mackrell watched Rungdot enter the river, feeling his way with the genteel caution of any elephant on the move. The elephant lurched, steadied himself, lurched again. Suddenly, the merriment seemed to have gone out of the river, as if it resented having its good manners put to the test. The mahout was talking to Rungdot continuously as they were buffeted, paused, resumed their slow progress. Mackrell held his pipe, but did not put it into his mouth.

  By 5.30, Rungdot was climbing out of the river on the far bank, with the tide mark four-fifths of the way up his side – that mark that always looks so unfortunate, like a new suit that’s been ruined. By 7 a.m. Rungdot was back at the camp with his mahout and the first three Gurkhas on his back. Mackrell wrote out a chit, and gave it to Rungdot’s mahout. It was a promise of a hundred rupees, to be paid to him when back at the base at Margherita. (The reward was duly paid, and it is to be stressed that the mahout had not undertaken the rescue in anticipation of it.)

  By midday, all sixty-eight of the Gurkhas were back on the south side of the Dapha. As the rescue was proceeding, the biggest tarpaulin was strung between two trees to make a rain shelter for the Gurkhas. Normally, the fire would have been lit beneath this tarpaulin, but there wasn’t enough room for a fire and the men. So Mackrell’s butler, Apana, got a fire going underneath an umbrella that he had to hold to keep upright. He kept tea continually brewing in an old kerosene tin, with the aim of immediately serving tea to the rescued men – together with a very small amount of sugar, since Mackrell was low on sugar. Because the umbrella was over the fire, and not over Apana, and since he was in a clearing with no trees above, Apana was very badly soaked, with serious consequences.

  As the ele
phants came in, Mackrell, being the biggest man present, lifted the Gurkhas down. He was particularly worried about one man, who couldn’t have weighed more than five stone. The Gurkhas didn’t have any luggage as such, but one carried a rifle. Refugees were not allowed to carry weapons, but the man with the rifle said he wanted to hand it over personally to the commandant at the Margherita camp. He had carried it all the way from Burma, whereas most men had thrown their guns away, so Mackrell thought this was an achievement and he let the man keep the gun. Mackrell wrote, ‘All were so genuinely grateful and said “By the mercy of God and the help of your honour, we are alive!”’ Most of the rescued men were from the Lashio Battalion of the Burma Rifles, or the Burma Frontier Force. They had been on the Dapha island for seven days, and they would all certainly have died had Mackrell not turned up. They told Mackrell that some of their comrades were following on behind, and that there was a European party – Sir John and the Rossiters – several days back, but the Gurkhas didn’t know whether they were pushing on or staying put in the hope of rescue.

  The Gurkhas had made it through to the Dapha partly because the rivers they had encountered had not been in full spate.

  Even so, they were not yet safe.

  As Mackrell wrote, ‘our troubles began with the actual arrival of the rescued party’. He did not have enough food or cooking utensils for sixty-eight starving men. On coming down from the elephants, some of the Gurkhas spurned the shelter of the big tarpaulin and immediately ran over to where Apana had been cooking the night before. There they found, and devoured, some dried potato parings. Those under the tarpaulin were served in the first instance one cream cracker and a cigarette tin full of milk made from an American brand of powdered milk called Klim (‘Spell it backwards!’ joshed the label) that had long been a staple for jungle explorers, and would soon become one for jungle fighters. It lasted forever in its tin and for about a week after the seal was broken. Those of the mahouts who had no caste objections to cooking (that is, the less orthodox Hindus among them) began boiling rice on a fire they had managed to get going, but it wasn’t much of a fire, what with the rain and the wind. The Gurkhas said they wanted to get their own fire going, so as to cook their own food, and Mackrell made the mistake – ‘since this was my first experience of dealing with starving people’ – of believing them. In fact, on being handed the rice to cook, they immediately ate it raw. So Mackrell had ‘several cases of colic to attend to’.