Flight by Elephant

by Andrew Martin

  When the meal got formally underway, the rice was flavoured with Marmite, and a lucky few of the Gurkhas got tinned sausages with it. Mackrell then began dressing the sores and wounds. Having left in a hurry, he had only the small wooden medical box that had been his constant companion on his hunting trips. It was capable of dealing with ‘a normal camp’, but not sixty-eight Gurkhas, especially since many of its contents had been used on his own men. (Mostly septic leech bites.) But he did what he could with diluted Dettol and a pot of Iodex (an ointment containing iodine, available in India since 1919, under the slogan ‘Pain Should Not Come in the Way of Your Life’). For bandages, one of Mackrell’s spare bush shirts was torn up and used.

  Once the Gurkhas were fixed up and fed, Mackrell broke the bad news to them: he had not enough food to keep them in the Dapha camp; they had another ninety miles to go to the golf club base at Margherita, and only about twenty of them would be able to get a lift on an elephant. He would be sending ten elephants back with them, together with mahouts, and as much food as he could spare. Not having settled down, so to speak, in the camp, the Gurkhas took the news well, and so, in the late afternoon, the ones who could walk trailed slowly away into the jungle behind the elephants carrying the Gurkhas who could not walk.

  The mahouts on the elephants had instructions to pick up rice from the dump Mackrell had initiated at the crossing point at Miao, then return to the Dapha.

  Sir John Encounters His Principal Enemy: The Tilung Hka River

  The Gurkhas rescued by Mackrell had not known whether Sir John Rowland and his party were staying put or pushing on. In fact, they were pushing on. We last saw Sir John and the Rossiters – with their own sixty Gurkhas in attendance as porters – on 6 June, when he had been traversing yet another ‘vile pathway’. On that day, they had travelled about four miles. The seventh of June was ‘another terribly wet day’ (you really do want to shake Sir John by the shoulders, and say, ‘It’s a monsoon, man!’), much of it spent trying to climb ‘a 1000 foot high hill which was very difficult to negotiate due to its steepness and the slippery surface caused by continuous rains’. On 8 June the going was good and bad, and they travelled five miles, striking camp on the cliffs of the Noa Dehing, which was in full flood below. On 9 June, Sir John Rowland was trudging on, and he still couldn’t get over the rain: ‘Another perfectly damnable day. It rained heaven’s hardest most of the morning, all the afternoon and evening.’ Sir John spent much of that day wading waist-deep through the outer edge of the Noa Dehing, no other pathways being available. On 10 June, the day on which Mackrell performed his first rescue at the Dapha river, Sir John wrote, ‘Another truly vile day’s march in pouring rain.’ He had invested all his hopes in the two parties he had sent on ahead: firstly Millar and Leyden, secondly the young Commandos.

  On 11 June, Sir John’s railway party, the Rossiters and the Gurkha porters cut their way through to a clearing at the intersection of the Noa Dehing and one of its many tributaries, the Tilung Hka.

  The Tilung Hka was relatively small by the Lost World standards of the Chaukan route but it was now in flood. In the course of looking for a crossing place, one of Sir John’s party, the Indian railway store clerk who was not so young any more, C. V. Venkataraman, missed his footing on the muddy bank and slid into the river. He was immediately swept out of sight. Some of the Gurkhas ran along the bank, following his shouts. Venkataraman travelled 200 yards in about two minutes, before arriving with a bang at a large rock, which was close enough to the bank for him to be pulled out. The river could not be crossed.

  The light was now fading; it was time to strike camp, which they did about a half-mile away – on the banks of the larger river, the Noa Dehing. The fires were lit, a bed sheet was hoisted on a bamboo pole to attract passing planes, rice soup was cooked up. At this point Sir John’s number two, Manley, who himself had been ill, was lagging several miles behind in order to keep pace with his elderly servant, Appalswamy, who was not well.

  That evening, the Gurkha Jemadar (a rank designating a junior Indian officer), whose name was Rattan Singh, took Sir John aside. The progress was too slow for his men’s liking. Unless allowed to progress at their own speed they were sure they would starve. Therefore they could not agree to carry on as porters. Sir John called a meeting … and another desperate lunge was decided on. After Millar and Leyden and the four Commandos, a third breakaway would be fired off – ‘double marches’ and all – towards civilization, with a brief to explain to anyone they met on the way that Sir John’s railway party and the Rossiters were camped together and ‘desperately’ short of food. But first this latest breakaway party would have to cross the Tilung Hka. It consisted of the Oriental Mission unit: Major Lindsay, Captain Cumming, Corporal Sawyer, plus Kendall, the railway surveyor on the Burma–China construction, and Eadon, the Anglo-Indian anti-malarial inspector on that railway, plus the sixty Gurkhas under Jemadar Rattan Singh – and every man in it would be his own porter. We will call this party ‘Lindsay’s Men’.

  The remainder of Sir John’s party and the Rossiters would remain behind, on the wrong side of the Tilung Hka. They had little choice without their porters. They had only progressed about fifty miles beyond the Chaukan Pass, but the bulk of their party, being debilitated by age or, in the case of Mrs Rossiter, pregnancy, were exhausted, and they did not have enough food for the sixty miles that lay between them and the Dapha.

  Sir John’s number two, Edward Manley, walked into the camp towards midnight. His servant, Appalswamy, had died of exposure and heart attack about half a mile back.

  On the morning of the next day, 12 June, the latest hares having gone on ahead, Sir John, who liked proper ‘form’, called another meeting, which convened in a bamboo lean-to, under the rain, on the wrong side of the Tilung Hka. Sir John created a food committee, and, magnanimously forgoing the chairmanship, he appointed Manley to that position. The committee ‘checked up all available food’ and found it to be ‘exceedingly little’, the Gurkhas having been inadvertently given the rice rations meant for the Rossiter faction of the party. There could be reckoned to be six full days of food left as things stood. Therefore everyone was put on quarter rations – that is, a quarter cigarette tin of rice per day, to be taken with boiled water as a thin soup with some fern fronds and ‘wild plantation tree hearts’ floating about in it. It was pointed out by Dr Burgess-Barnett – referred to by Sir John as Principal Medical Officer – that there was no nutrition in either of the latter, but it did form bulk and might help spin the rations out to twenty-four days, ‘after which,’ as Sir John wrote, ‘if no relief party or aeroplane arrive with rations it is recognized we must die of starvation’.

  He added that, ‘Some of the party did not take kindly to this idea’, whether of being on quarter rations or dying of starvation or both he does not say.

  If Edward Wrixon Rossiter was keeping a diary, we do not have it. He is therefore upstaged in the jungle by Sir John. It is a shame we don’t know more about Rossiter’s personality, because it seems there was a lot of it. He has so far appeared to us as a man free-willed or capricious enough to have considered escaping Burma via China, and resentful at having finally been pressured into going through the Chaukan Pass. We have noted his impatience to get on (he had not thought it necessary that everyone should wait for the sick man Milne), and there is a note in the young Commando Bill Howe’s diary to the effect that Rossiter feared being ‘left in the lurch’ with his pregnant wife and child. The Commandos and Lindsay’s Men having gone on ahead, he was the youngest man left in what might have been thought a party of crocks, given the ages of Sir John, his deputy, Manley, the Indian railwaymen and Dr Burgess-Barnett. And the Royal Engineer, Captain Whitehouse, was beginning to be in a very poor state of health.

  Then again we have also seen Rossiter cooking curry and cake in the jungle, and demonstrating knowledge of arboriculture. Perhaps our native Dubliner had what is thought of as a Celtic temperament, veering between morbidity and h
igh spirits.

  Rossiter is presented as a dashing, rather dangerous figure in a book called Lords of the Sunset. It is a travelogue of Upper and eastern Burma, written by a romantically minded Irishman called Maurice Collis, and published in 1938. The ‘Lords of the Sunset’ were how the Shan peoples were referred to by the Kings of Burma, which would have been a compliment except that the Kings of Burma referred to themselves as the Lords of the Sunrise. The book details a tour through the Shan states on the Burma–China border, where the Shans – who administered themselves with the ‘assistance’ of the British Burma Frontier Service – formed a series of dynasties with no kings but many lords or princes … and many princesses.

  Collis presents the Shan states as a flower-strewn arcadia, with bright green hummocky hills, peaceful lakes and waterfalls, a landscape from a children’s story, and his travels are punctuated by a series of meetings with the Shan princesses, usually when their princes are away. It’s all kept on a very courtly level, but the Shans are a subtle, sophisticated and attractive people, and Collis is clearly entranced by the princesses. One has ‘a caressing idiom’ to her speech, and a ‘lithe vitality in her movements’; another, all lyricism abandoned, is simply ‘very pretty’. Collis says of one of the princesses, ‘she knew Rossiter of course’. The book was written in the mid-1930s, when Edward Wrixon Rossiter was Assistant Superintendent of the Burma Frontier Service for the Shan district of Loilem (this was before he moved north to Putao). Rossiter escorts Collis on some of his travels. Rossiter elegantly defined his duties to Collis: ‘to advance the Sawbwas’ [the princes’] authority and their people’s interest’. He briefs Collis on the niceties of Shan etiquette and acts as an interpreter for him, translating the names of some of the princesses: Soft Tiger, for example, or Lady Magic Mirror in the Palace of the Million Umbrellas.

  Rossiter and Collis eat fifteen-course dinners with the princesses, in the dimly lit halls of their rural palaces (this being Burma, all the courses are put on the table at the same time), and smoke cigarettes with them afterwards. They swim naked in a lake in front of one of the princesses, who holds their towels and looks on amused. Afterwards, Rossiter challenges this princess to a barefoot running race; they josh about something in Shan, and she playfully throws his towel back at him. At another dinner, the mother of a princess teases Collis about when he is going to take a Shan wife. She does this via Rossiter, in his role as translator. She then asks Collis what he would require in a wife. Rossiter leans forward confidingly and answers without consulting Collis … at which he (Rossiter) is roundly, but playfully, slapped by the woman, and all the attendant servants fall about laughing.

  ‘Eddie’ Rossiter is presented as a bachelor. Certainly no wife is mentioned, and this indeed was some time before Rossiter met Nang Hmat, who would accompany him into the jungle in 1942. But things were not quite so simple, as we shall see, and it might be that carefree ‘Eddie’ alternated starkly with the more severe Edward.

  The Man in Sunglasses: Captain Fraser Falls into the Tilung Hka, and Brings News of the Commandos

  At the camp made by the Rossiters and Sir John Rowland, on the east side of the Tilung Hka river, it is still 12 June, and it is now evening.

  As the light faded, a bedraggled figure in sunglasses came staggering through the darkness into the camp: it was Captain John Fraser, the man who had escaped from the Japanese together with Sergeant Pratt, and who – with Pratt – had gone ahead with that earlier advance guard, the Commando party. He came into the camp from the wrong direction: that is, from the direction of the Tilung Hka. Sir John would have been surprised to see him, and possibly apoplectic. The Commandos were meant to be miles ahead.

  Captain Fraser was half soaked, but then so was everyone. In Fraser’s case it turned out to be river water, because he, too, had fallen into the Tilung Hka. He was given a change of clothes, and installed in the camp’s main lean-to, which now had a good fire burning at one end. Ironically in view of the food committee’s grim conclusion of a moment ago, he had come back to Sir John in order to get a meal, since his pack had been washed away in the river, and the other Commandos had almost run out of food. He was given a full cigarette tin of the rice broth with the ferns in it, which Sir John’s party would henceforth refer to – without affection – as skilly soup. Fraser consumed it rapidly, having taken off his sunglasses, because the soup made them steam up.

  When he’d finished eating, John Fraser put his sunglasses back on and told the story of his encounter with the Tilung Hka, the necessary preliminary to which was the story of what the Commandos had been doing since they’d left Sir John’s railway party on 1 June in order to make their ‘double marches’.

  The first thing to say is that the Commandos did not encounter the Indian rescue party promised by the radio message. That was because there wasn’t one. They had – like Sir John following behind – shadowed the right bank of the Noa Dehing, sometimes wading through its edges, sometimes climbing near-vertical wooded hills as steep as the walls of houses, with sheets of red mud flowing down on either side. It was all ‘up and down’ country, although broadly they were descending from the high point of the Chaukan Pass. The ‘forestry men’ in the party had known what to expect; the others had just been appalled. Whereas the railway party and the Rossiters had made diffuse camps, combining tents, grass huts and suspended tarpaulins, the Commandos had built a single bamboo hut every night, with a roof made of bamboo leaves. They all then lay down next to each other, and if one turned over, they all had to. The rain would always come in somewhere, and it was a lottery as to who it fell on. The thing was to stop counting the drops and go to sleep.

  The Commandos carried both army packs (rucksacks) and haversacks (shoulder bags). Young Second Lieutenant Bill Howe carried one change of clothes, a groundsheet to roll his blanket in, a kukri, ‘the old-fashioned long-barrel services revolver’, a long-sleeved pullover, a petrol lighter and an aspirin bottle full of petrol, and ‘a few personal things’. He also carried a rain cape, which he would later throw away, since it was too heavy to carry.

  Ritchie Gardiner carried two pairs of shorts (he would later decide that his chief lack was ‘a pair of long trousers’), two bush shirts, one short-sleeved pullover, one towel, two blankets, a .38 Colt automatic pistol and a .44 Winchester carbine rifle, both of which seemed to become heavier with every passing day, and he had jettisoned most of the cartridges for the rifle early in the walk. His pack weighed so heavily upon his emaciated frame that he threw away the orchids he had collected in the Chaukan Pass, all but the copper-coloured one, ‘which I am going to call the Chaukan orchid as it was my first find’.

  And he determinedly retained a sterling silver ‘Eversharp’ propelling pencil (advertised throughout India as being ‘For the Man of Action’), which he would hold onto even when he became so weak that it began to constitute a burden. The other Commandos said this was because he was Scottish. In fact, Gardiner – a man of action who usually ‘avoided the pen’ – had become addicted to keeping a diary: ‘I really suspect that it began to be a substitute for alcohol (of which of course we had none) for every evening about sundown I would feel the urge to write come over me.’ He used any old scrap of paper, ‘including some which normally is used for another purpose altogether’. Gardiner had been worried about his knees, but these were ‘behaving like bricks’, and he gradually transferred his anxieties to his feet. He wore a pair of rubberised snipe boots ‘borrowed’ from Rowes Gentleman’s Outfitters of Dalhousie Street, Rangoon, ‘during the demolition period’. Snipe boots are essentially low wellingtons, meant for splashing, gun in hand, through the marshes in which the snipe lives. Gardiner regretted that they were not better fitting leather boots, since his ankles were beginning to swell, which might be the cumulative effect of hundreds of leech and sandfly bites, or the first stages of beriberi. Gardiner did not know.

  Sergeant Pratt had done most of the cooking: such delicacies as rice and tinned cheese, or rice on its
own, or – a speciality of Pratt’s – Marmite soup. A couple of times he’d got up early and cooked porridge, and they’d all appreciated that. The Commandos generally had a lot of trouble getting fires started, and had all been very badly bitten by sandflies.

  On 2 June, they’d seen a tree cut and a knife-cut inscription to the effect that a party from the 10th Gurkha Rifles had been that way on 29 January 1942 – early evacuees, in other words. This inscription was taken to be proof that the Commandos, Sir John and the Rossiters had been in the Chaukan Pass after all. So Moses, the Dutch Jew, now accompanying the Commandos, had been right.

  Later on 2 June, Ritchie Gardiner had shot a muntjac deer that was being swept along by the Noa Dehing; they managed to get it out, and had a really good roast dinner around a big fire. That (sandflies apart) had been a red-letter day. There’d been another treat six days later on 8 June, when white-bearded soap manufacturer, Jardine, the ‘old man’ of the party, had become even older. He turned forty-five on that day, and he produced a large slab of chocolate, so that they all had one square with their usual midday lunch: a single cream cracker. They were all extremely hungry all the time, and everything they ate that was not rice tasted ‘absolutely first class’. In spite of his great age, Jardine was doing ‘damn well’, and the only reservation about him was that he turned out to be an ardent Catholic, and would alarm them all by periodically dropping to his knees to pray for deliverance for them all.