Flight by Elephant

by Andrew Martin

  But what happened on the banks of the Tilung Hka suggested that no one was listening.

  That river had checked the progress of the Commandos, and in the late afternoon of 12 June they were joined on the riverbank – as they prowled the long, man-high marshy grass looking for a place to cross – by the previous day’s breakaways from Sir John, namely Lindsay, Cumming, Kendall, Eadon and their accompanying Gurkhas. It was hot, and it was raining. The water level was rising fast, so a quick decision was required. The first idea was to ask the Gurkhas if they wouldn’t mind chopping down a couple of big trees to make a bridge. But halfway through the chopping, the plan was abandoned.

  The men spread out again, looking for a crossing place. Young Bill Howe found what might be a good bet: two fallen trees, one on either bank. They remained attached by their roots to the banks, and the ends where the branches were had become partly wedged in river rocks; parts of both logs were under the water and other parts above it. The trouble was the gap of churning water in the middle. Howe walked along the river, calling out to summon the others, who were widely dispersed. The first to arrive at the crossing point were Lindsay’s Men plus the enigmatic Dutch surveyor, Moses, but minus the radio operator, Corporal Sawyer. It seems that while Howe was trying to round up the others, Lindsay’s Men and Moses crossed the river, because they were nowhere to be seen when Howe returned to the fallen trees with the Commandos. So the second breakaway party from Sir John had overtaken the first, acquiring Moses in the process, but leaving behind Corporal Sawyer. Lindsay’s Men were always going to be the quicker party, with their Gurkha porters, and it seemed they were on their way.

  The level of the river was rising fast, which is why Lindsay’s Men hadn’t waited for the others. Captain Boyt went first over the logs, and he had no trouble. That was to be expected: he was the true commando of all the Commandos. Howe, Gardiner and McCrindle also crossed. Sergeant Pratt was next. At the end of the first log, there was a gap of about ten feet to the second, but this second one was slightly downstream of the first, so it was a matter of going with the flow of the water, and trying to veer right towards the second log. Halfway across the gap, Pratt went under. But he came up holding onto the second log. ‘Old Man’ Jardine was next and despite a too sedate looking breaststroke, he managed to get from the first to the second log.

  Then it was Captain John Fraser’s turn. He’d been the slowest of the walkers, possibly because of the ankle swellings caused by the Japanese ropes, and as he inched along the first trunk he kept stopping to push his prescription sunglasses up towards the bridge of his nose. This was not promising. At the end of the first trunk, he took his sunglasses off, and put them into the top pocket of his bush shirt. He came to the point where the first log was almost completely submerged, and the force of the water on his legs sent him cartwheeling over, and into the water, where he immediately grabbed hold of a smaller passing log, which carried him crashing into a boulder. Fraser remained pinned against this boulder by the force of the water, with only his head above the water. Ritchie Gardiner, who had already crossed over, now sacrificed his position of safety; he dropped into the freezing water, and allowed himself to be swirled towards where Fraser was trapped. Fraser’s pack had become entangled with the log that trapped him, and Gardiner freed Fraser by cutting it away with his kukri. The pack rolled away in the water. It had contained six packets of biscuits, a tin of cheese, a tin of butter, a jar of Marmite. Now Corporal Sawyer, radio operator of the Oriental Mission, was astride the first tree trunk. He had hesitated before beginning to cross, thinking he had better go to the aid of Fraser and Gardiner, but from the water Gardiner signalled him to start.

  Sawyer wore his pack on his back, and over the top of it his rain cape, since he’d decided this was not a superfluous luxury in a monsoon. He inched along the first trunk, went into the river, fought the freezing water for a minute then grabbed hold of the second trunk and hauled himself onto it. Young Bill Howe was sitting astride the second trunk, waiting to grab onto Sawyer, and he had actually got hold of Sawyer’s arm when Sawyer spilled off the tree trunk. He was instantly out of reach, owing to the force of the water on his rain cape, and within a few seconds he’d disappeared around a bend in the river. Meanwhile, Gardiner, half wading and half swimming, dragged Fraser back to the first bank. So for Gardiner it was back to square one: he had returned to the wrong side of the river. Both he and Fraser were exhausted, and they walked – ‘like drunken men’, Gardiner wrote – through the tall grass of the riverbank back to a fire the Commandos had made the night before. ‘We were lucky to find the fire still in and wood to build it up, so stripped nude and got half dry and warm which served to bring us round.’ Corporal Sawyer was never seen again (early the next morning, Ritchie Gardiner would find one of his socks further along the river), and nor was his pack, which had contained a tin of cheese, some butter, Marmite and all of the Commandos’ salt.

  That night, as we have seen, Captain Fraser, half dried out, walked back alone to Sir John’s camp, where he spent the night. It did not rain during the night. At dawn the next morning, Fraser returned to the river where his comrades the Commandos were waiting for him. They got him over, and they pressed on through the jungle again, aiming for the Dapha river, with Lindsay’s Men and their Gurkhas a few miles ahead. The Commandos had roughly seven days’ food left, allowing half a cigarette tin of mouldy rice with a little Marmite, one biscuit and about half an ounce of cheese per man per day. They also had very little tea left. At their present rate of progress – they were averaging about six miles a day – that food would carry them twenty miles. But it was sixty miles to the Dapha river and Gyles Mackrell.

  Mackrell Consolidates at the Dapha River

  Mackrell had now decided to stay put on his riverbank just as Sir John had on his. It seemed that others would soon need his assistance in crossing the river.

  Mackrell’s servant, Apana, had become ill, which was put down – perhaps not very logically – to his having brewed the tea in the rain. Apana had also been sleeping in wet clothes, as had Mackrell and the other men. He had a high temperature and a pain in his chest. He sat under the big tarpaulin and Mackrell gave him Sloan’s Liniment to inhale. This made Apana cough, and at one point Mackrell thought he’d choked him.

  That day, Mackrell did the cooking. He also supervised the creation of a proper camp in the lee between two river cliffs. Bashas were built, tents erected. The wide tarpaulin became the focal point, and the sacks of rice were stored here. A bamboo fire was kept constantly burning. Mackrell unrolled the two white oilcloths he’d brought, and made a big letter ‘T’ on a flat patch of ground, the crossbar of the ‘T’ being placed in the direction of the prevailing wind. This was a guide for aeroplanes, and a target for any food drops.

  The rain drummed down on the white ‘T’ and on the wide tarpaulin. Mackrell sat under the tarpaulin, and watched the river.

  Mackrell’s diary is silent about Friday the 12th, the day on which the Commandos were doing battle with the Tilung Hka, but the entry for Saturday the 13th begins with a sigh of relief expressed in the single word: ‘Sun.’ Bed rolls were opened out and dried; clothes were washed, and Apana came out from under the tarpaulin. The Sloan’s Liniment had ‘put him right’ after all. Towards evening, Mackrell noted, ‘Saw three large buffaloes.’ Here was the young naturalist of Epsom College speaking, the boy who had taken Acidalia trigeminata. He seems pleased to have seen the buffaloes – which were in the tall grass near the river – but most people would not have been. Wild buffaloes were considered by the tea planters of Assam (who called them ‘buffs’) to be the second biggest menace after tigers. Like tigers, they might attack without provocation. They would come up and stare at you, and it was fatal to turn away and run. You had to outstare them; then they would usually shamble away. By the same token, a buffalo was the second most prized ‘bag’ for an Indian white hunter after a tiger, as Mackrell well knew.

  We saw earlier that he fear
ed he might have to shoot a wild elephant. The problem was not that he couldn’t shoot a wild elephant; it was that he didn’t want to. In one of his most famous essays, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, George Orwell describes his own shooting of a rogue elephant while a policeman in Lower Burma. After his first bullet, the elephant went down, but it got up again after the second. Orwell expended five bullets from one rifle and ‘bullet after bullet’ from a second one but ‘The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.’ It took half an hour for the elephant to die. Even a Burmese policeman doesn’t come across rogue elephants very often, and Orwell had never shot one before, and would never do so again, whereas if the shooting of rogue elephants ever did come up in conversation, Gyles Mackrell could mention that he had shot twenty of them.

  Most of the tea planters hunted, usually informally. After a hard day’s work they would plod down to the nearest watering hole and blast some duck. But for a longer break, they might go on a proper hunting expedition, a shikar, thus themselves becoming shikari.

  Mackrell ran a shikari business as a sideline, which is why he took up cinematography: to provide mementos for his customers. Certainly, the film archive he left behind shows many white men and women in sola topees standing behind dead tigers or dead elephants, or sometimes live elephants with dead tigers strapped to their backs, and always with a penumbra of Indian servants. The Europeans don’t quite know how to act. Every so often, one will go forward and change the position of the tiger.

  Mackrell only shot elephants if they were rogue, and by the 1930s the British in India were becoming slightly embarrassed by the proliferation of tiger skins in their bungalows, and it was becoming necessary to have a reasonable pretext for shooting tigers as well. So Mackrell would keep an ear out for Assamese villages where tigers were attacking livestock or people. He would then arrange an expedition to that place, and we have an account of one of these written in 1934 by a woman called Elswithe Williams, the wife of a man who was being shown the ropes by Mackrell. The letter is headed, ‘In camp, near Kokrajar’ (a town in northern Assam), and addressed ‘Dearest Family’. It begins, ‘We really are having the most marvellous time, this place is literally alive with tiger …’

  Not for long, it wouldn’t be.

  Besides her husband, Fred, Elswithe was also accompanying a man who was probably her brother. He was called Oliver, and he had been set up for a shoot by Mackrell. A tame buffalo had been tied to a tree. A machin, or small house, had then been built in the branches of a nearby tree, and Oliver had been installed in this for the night with his rifle poised, and an electric torch on the end of the barrel, which Elswithe describes as ‘a very creepy business but awfully interesting’.

  Oliver killed the tiger when it came for the buffalo and, hearing the shot, the villagers came out and escorted him in a celebratory procession back to the village with flaming torches held aloft to deter other tigers, all of which Elswithe also thought ‘a very creepy business, I should think’, although it saved Oliver having to wait for the elephant that Mackrell planned to have sent out to collect him at dawn.

  Oliver had only killed the tiger after it had killed the buff, and this did bother Elswithe – a bit. ‘It sounds rather cruel to tie up a live beast, but actually it doesn’t seem to worry them, you see they are tied up somewhere anyhow, and the tiger kills them immediately, they hardly make a sound, spring on them and break their neck.’

  Another nearby village was being terrorized by another tiger, and one of Mackrell’s guests, referred to by Elswithe as ‘The General’, had been assigned to this tiger; he had ‘various shots at him and made a complete mess of things, just letting buffalo after buffalo get killed’. The villagers had got ‘pretty fed up’ with The General, and so had Mackrell. He decided to do the job himself. So one of the half-eaten buffs was laid under a tree, and Mackrell went up another one. He didn’t bother with a machin or anything like that, but just strung a cane chair up in the branches, and parked himself on it, with his pipe on the go. ‘Sure enough he [the tiger] came back at about 8.30pm, and Gyles got him,’ Elswithe wrote. ‘There is no nonsense about this camp,’ she continued, ‘Gyles is excellent, and we jolly well have to do as we are told. He won’t let us women sit with them [on the tiger vigils] since it is far more difficult for two people to keep absolutely quiet than for one … but he has promised that, if the chance arises we shall sit up with him, so I do hope it does.’ She concludes that Fred, her husband, had shot a deer, ‘so he is by no means disgraced.’

  Mackrell had dispatched the Mishmi guide he had recruited for ten rupees back to his village, Tinguan. In return for more silver rupees, he had asked the guide to come back with some more Mishmis, and on the morning of Sunday the 14th the man returned to the Dapha camp with a further ‘fifteen splendid fellows’. Here were the makings of Mackrell’s own advance party, since they were willing to cross the Dapha and go forward with rations to look for anyone else who might be coming from the Chaukan. But before a party drawn from these men could set off, extra supplies would have to be brought up to the Dapha. Mackrell was banking on these coming from two sources: first, on the backs of the ten elephants he had dispatched with the rescued Gurkhas, and, secondly, on the backs of the elephants that Mackrell’s associate at Namgoi Mukh, the Kampti Raja called Chaochali, would bring. Chaochali, a very reliable man, was about due, according to Mackrell’s calculations. As for the ten elephants, Mackrell calculated that, since they had left on the 10th, they should be at Miao, and its store of rice, on the night of the 12th. Provided they set off back from there on the 13th, they ought to reach the Dapha camp on the 16th at the latest, then ‘all would be well’. Meanwhile, Mackrell was ‘dangerously short of food’.

  The good news was that the Dapha was down. The hot rain continued to pour, but the level of the river was determined by the weather miles away. So on the afternoon of Sunday the 14th, Mackrell and Millar’s ‘boy’, Goal Miri, crossed the Dapha by elephant carrying sacks of such food as could be spared. The aim was to create food dumps for anyone else who might turn up with the river uncrossable once again. They went into the jungle beyond the river, but could not locate the path Millar and Leyden had taken, which roughly followed what Mackrell called ‘the Chinese cut’ – that is the succession of tree cuts made by the Chinese cold weather survey of late 1941. That track had skirted the right bank of the Noa Dehing, and was now submerged beneath the seething and still rising waters of that river.

  The problem was this: if the level of the Noa Dehing dropped, and the Millar–Leyden track reappeared, anyone coming from the Chaukan would likely be on it. Therefore they would miss any food left at a higher point. Mackrell and Goal Miri found compromise trees midway between the two routes, and Goal Miri climbed them and tied the sacks out of reach of wild elephants. Mackrell then made a cut in the bark to alert any passer-by to what was above.

  While recrossing the river that morning – after leaving two sacks of food suspended from two trees – Mackrell and Goal Miri saw elephants arriving at the camp from the direction of Miao. Sitting on the first of them was the dignified figure of Chaochali, the Kampti Raja – dignified but ill. He had brought more supplies, but was feverish and ‘quite done up’. Mackrell gave him aspirin, then quinine, and put him to bed in a tent. In the afternoon, Mackrell wandered along the river towards the crossing point again, rifle in hand. Looking east through the mist, he saw a grassy plateau above the riverbank on his own side. There were deer on it, but they were no more than vague brown shapes amid the rain and the tall grass. He couldn’t ‘get at them’ with his rifle. He then looked across the river, seeing more mist, more tall grass.

  And then a turbaned head: a Sikh soldier. There were Gurkhas with him as well – about thirty men in all. No shout could carry over the river, but Mackrell signalled to the men that they should stay put. He then ran back to the camp, and returned with some elephants on which the men were brought over. They were all starving – apparently proof of the fa
ilure of Mackrell’s food drop of that very morning. In fact, the Sikhs had seen the tracks made by the elephants that Mackrell and Goal Miri had been riding on – the freshly broken branches, and the fresh elephant dung (elephants excrete turnip-sized lumps fairly frequently) – and they’d thought these must be the tracks of wild elephants in close proximity. Therefore they had avoided the tracks – and avoided the sacks of rice in the process. These men were the balance of the hundred soldiers who had come into Sir John’s camp behind Fraser and Pratt, plus – it appears – some men who’d avoided the orbit of Sir John altogether. Either way, fifteen of these men’s comrades had died of starvation before reaching the Dapha. They explained this as they sat under the tarpaulin drinking tea just brewed in the kerosene tin, and eating biscuits. Rice was on the boil some distance away – Apana had lit his cooking fire under trees this time, even if they were crawling with leeches.

  When the rescued men had finished their meal, Mackrell had no dall or salt left, and the Sikhs had had to take their tea without sugar, since there was none of that either. Mackrell had also given the last of his quinine and aspirin to Chaochali.