Flight by Elephant

by Andrew Martin

  On 18 June, the Commandos went up and down a series of gorges – valleys that ought to have held Dapha tributaries but didn’t. Then they came to one that did. They managed to cross it, but they were exhausted that night, and both Boyt’s and Gardiner’s boots were completely shot. They camped on the bank of the Noa Dehing, on a beach two feet above the water. They counted the rations: eleven cigarette tins of mouldy rice, nine packets of mouldy cream crackers; one tin of cheese, one jar of Marmite. Young Howe, a good-looking chap, carried a mirror. He risked a glance into it and was appalled at his sunken cheeks. In the night the roar of the river became louder as the water rose towards the hut. They all lay awake, looking at the roof. Rainwater was coming in from there, but the bigger problem was whether the river would come in from below. By dawn, the river had subsided, but none of them had slept.

  The next day they brewed their tea in the dawn light, in the rising mist. Boyt tried to put on his boots, but gave up. There were no boots to put on, just fragments of leather and string. He and Gardiner would find it very hard to complete another day’s march. Jardine, the Catholic, was kneeling down and facing away from the others. In the words of Howe, he was looking at ‘a bright star shining through the mist that gave the impression of a large cross in the sky’. They all saw it. Ritchie Gardiner wrote of ‘a clear sky in the east, and a single large star shining’.

  They set off, climbing up – in Howe’s words – one ‘awful’ hill, then coming down an ‘appalling’ one. They saw a large monkey in a tree, and Ritchie Gardiner shot at it, but his gun misfired. Damp cartridges again. Later, the same thing happened with a partridge.

  At midday, as they looked down at the river from a cliff, they saw some rough rafts on the rocky beach below. Why not ride them down the river towards the Dapha tributary? You’d be going with the current, and you’d be going fast, as Gardiner and McCrindle enthusiastically pointed out. But everyone else pointed out that you’d be going far too fast. The idea was a symptom of their desperation. At one o’clock, they set off again, and they’d gone only a hundred yards or so when they saw seven Mishmi tribesmen standing in their way. They were the Mishmis who’d been crossed over the Dapha and sent forward by Mackrell on 14 June, and they carried a chit from Mackrell saying that food, shelter and medical assistance awaited. Gardiner wrote: ‘Never was there a more welcome sight.’

  The Commandos all shook the Mishmis’ hands, which bemused the Mishmis. Communication was difficult, but the Commandos tried to explain about Eadon and Moses, stranded in their bamboo shelters. To show that elephants would be required for their rescue, they attempted to imitate elephants by lurching about waving their arms in front of their noses. The Mishmis had no ‘stores’ as such with them but what Howe describes as a ‘little’ rice, which was a lot by the standards he’d become used to. At camp that night the Mishmi headman caught two masheer (large game fish) and Ritchie Gardiner wrote, ‘Every mouthful was appreciated in a way that would make a Firpo dinner look second rate.’ (Firpo’s was the Italian restaurant in Calcutta regarded as a culinary peak of India by more than one person in this story.) The Mishmis then handed round some of the black tobacco they carried, and every man rolled himself a cigarette.

  There was still twenty-five miles to go before the Dapha was reached, and, while the Mishmis would carry the Commandos’ packs, they did not have elephants, so everyone would have to walk. Boyt, whose feet were the worst, would be supported between two Mishmis. On the face of it, Gardiner, McCrindle, Howe, Boyt, Fraser and Pratt were now saved, but what about Lindsay’s Men, who, supposedly, had gone on ahead together with their Gurkhas? We know that Eadon and Moses had fallen away from that party, but what of its other members?

  The Mishmis would not have known what had been happening back at the Dapha camp since their departure. But, as already noted, Mackrell landed parties of Indian soldiers, mainly Gurkhas, on the 16th, 17th and 18th, and these were the ones who had been portering for Lindsay’s Men. It appears they had gone on ahead in the closing stages.

  On 20 June, as the Mishmis were escorting the Commandos towards the Dapha river, Major Lindsay, Captain Cumming and Kendall, the surveyor, were spotted across the Dapha by Mackrell, and brought over by elephant. (In other words, they had reached the Dapha without encountering the Mishmis.) Mackrell himself went over to arrange the transfer, carrying a flask of hot Bovril and a packet of cream crackers for his first European guests. Major Lindsay, he noted, had a huge abscess on his leg, Cumming was not too good, while Kendall looked ‘desperately ill’. Once they’d crossed over, Dr Bardoloi opened the abscess on Lindsay’s leg. Cumming was given morphine, Kendall quinine.

  Major Lindsay briefed Mackrell about the Commandos following on, and Eadon and Moses languishing in their huts. Mackrell sent an elephant back over the river with a chit for the Mishmis, explaining what Lindsay had said, but by now the Mishmis already knew about Eadon and Moses, having been told by the Commandos.

  Major Lindsay wanted to leave Dapha immediately in order to speak to RAF top brass in Delhi, with a view to getting a food drop started for Rowland and Rossiter. Mackrell agreed, and that night he gave his own tent to Lindsay, so that he would be rested for his onward journey. He also prepared a special elephant pad, in order that Lindsay could ride with his bad leg stretched out. Early on the morning of the 21st, Major Lindsay and Captain Cumming left by elephant for Miao, but Dr Bardoloi had told Mackrell that Kendall the surveyor was far too ill to be moved. The doctor was very worried about Kendall.

  Later on that Sunday, a few miles west of the Dapha camp, Sergeant Pratt and Captain Boyt of the Commandos were walking with their Mishmi rescuers with the other Commandos in the rear when they saw two elephants standing in their path. Pratt and Boyt tried to scare them away until dissuaded by the Mishmis. They were tame elephants, sent forward by Mackrell, and their mahouts were smoking nearby. It was a case of: ‘Your carriage awaits.’ In mid-afternoon, the Commandos were put on the elephants to cross the Dapha. Ritchie Gardiner observed ‘a strong and deep current which we could never have made without their assistance’. Even so, his elephant ‘nearly fell over, fifty yards from goal’.

  On the other side Mackrell and Wilson – ‘Both charming and so kind and helpful’, wrote Howe – greeted them with Bovril, chapattis, and very hot, very sweet, tea. The canvas bath was unfolded and water boiled. Gardiner ‘Had a HOT bath and borrowed a CLEAN vest from Mackrell’. Dr Bardoloi attended to Gardiner’s feet while he ‘lay back with a pipe of real tobacco – it would have to be Barney’s of course …’

  Wilson kept making tea all day. Gardiner ‘had six mugs, with plenty of milk and sugar and sweet biscuits’. Later, the Commandos were served the full welcome dinner – tinned sausages, tinned cheese, the works – and more ‘lovely hot, sweet tea’. Howe noted with delight that, after his ‘wonderful dinner’, he ‘felt quite ill from too much food’. They were told that a runner would be leaving for Miao the next day, so they drafted messages for telegrams.

  Grand Tiffins and the Squits: The Commandos Recuperate at the Dapha, but Mackrell Falls Sick

  In the last week of June, the Commandos stayed at the Dapha camp. They had to wait for elephants to come back from delivering earlier refugees to Miao. This shuttle service worked far too slowly for everyone’s liking, and it still wasn’t bringing in enough food. Gardiner, rapidly turning into a belletrist, used the time to elaborate his diary, adding not only a prologue but also an epilogue on fancy writing paper that had been brought to the Dapha by Captain Wilson (who was, after all, the son of a stationer).

  Young Bill Howe was up and down over those few days. On 22 June, the day after his rescue, he wrote, ‘Porridge for breakfast with lots of milk and sugar followed by fried fish. I have still got a hankering for sweet stuff, but have already lost the awful ache just for food.’

  On 23 June, the Commandos bathed on the safe margins of the river, shaved and ‘spruced up’ for a photograph, taken in the rain. The picture survives and they lo
ok terrible. ‘Old Man’ Jardine looks like a white-bearded skeleton. Fraser gazes myopically from behind his prescription sunglasses (which look alarming like the heavily shaded spectacles worn by the blind). Howe and Boyt, with pipes in mouths, manage to look wryly amused (as well as ill); Pratt, with folded arms, still looks determined. Gardiner, Kendall and McCrindle look too thin, and waterlogged, Kendall especially: he hangs back, and seems to glow with pallor. Somewhere along the line, he had been bitten by the mosquito called Plasmodium fulciparum, the one that carries the most dangerous form of malaria: cerebral malaria. Three Indian servants, unfortunately unnamed, crouch in the foreground. It seems they came through with Lindsay’s Men. Behind the party, a mahout sits on an elephant under an umbrella; he is not posing, he just happens to be there, much as a double-decker bus might find its way into a group scene in London.

  Gardiner spent much of his time watching the Dapha river and thinking of ways to describe it in his diary. Gardiner, who had collected the Chaukan orchid, was of all the Commandos the one who took the most interest in his surroundings. Mackrell explained to him that the Dapha flowed at never less than eight miles an hour, or fifteen miles an hour when the level was up. The ceaseless roar came from the shifting of the boulders on the river bed. Mackrell also pointed out the snow-capped peak of the 15,000-foot Dapha Bum mountain to the north-east. (The mountains of that part of the world are called ‘bums’ – not quite as hilarious as it looks, since the word is pronounced ‘boom’.)

  The next day, the effervescent Howe caught a chill, and that combined – as he admitted – with overeating gave him the ‘squitters’. The Commandos all agreed they were going to ask for a month’s leave when they returned to their units. ‘What I want now,’ wrote young Bill Howe, ‘is more comfort and fancy things and civilisation.’ In a footnote to the diary, he writes, ‘This seems to suggest we were starting to think of wine, women and song.’ Later, there is an advance on that: ‘My legs rather bad and feeling very lazy with no particular desire to do anything, but I shall be glad now to get moving and have these boils properly attended to and get to those desires we are still looking forward to as keenly as ever!’ which is followed by the note: ‘Looks as if sex is rearing its ugly head!’

  There was one item of reading matter in the Dapha camp: a back number of Men Only. Who brought it to the camp? We can probably rule out the elephant men: Mackrell, the Kampti Raja, the tracker Goal Miri. The Mishmis couldn’t have brought it. Men Only is not available in the Assamese jungle, and they wouldn’t have understood it anyway, although they’d have got the gist. The reader was vouchsafed one photograph of a naked woman per issue, coyly posed so as to reveal only the breasts, or perhaps the buttocks and the side of one breast (it being morally as well as anatomically impossible to display both breasts and both buttocks at the same time), and coyly captioned something like ‘Firelight study’, or, if outdoors, ‘Wood nymph’. Otherwise it was wordy, sub-Wodehouseian humour: ‘RC. Robertson-Glasgow on why he prefers his male friends to be fat … Perhaps this almost morbid love of adiposity comes to most of us as we reach that age and port when comparative strangers tap us on the fourth waistcoat button and say, “O-ho.”’, or quite funny cartoons (posh fat man to waiter in restaurant: ‘May I enquire WHY there is no more Château Lafite?’) The adverts must have had an odd resonance in the jungle: ‘You wanted Schweppes, of course, sir?’ ‘How to eke out your Brylcreem. With so much less Brylcreem in the shops we all need to make the most economical use of what we’ve got.’ (The secret? Add water.) ‘Dri-Ped shoe leather, always completely waterproof.’ ‘Wetherdair waterproofs are in short supply … You may have to go out of your district to get one.’ ‘Headache and neuralgia quickly banished by Cephos.’ ‘Specify Redi-Bilts, the interlinings that keep your suit in shape.’

  It is not impossible that clubbable and handsome Captain Wilson had packed this publication at Margherita, along with the thirty-six umbrellas.

  On the other side of the river, the Mishmis, political porters and Assam Rifles were making probes forward, looking for Eadon and Moses. And Havildar Iman Sing was marching in the presumed direction of Sir John. Sometimes Mackrell went over, sometimes Wilson, but communication between the two sides was impeded by the fact that the river would become uncrossable for twenty-four hours at a time. Wilson spent a lot of time in or outside the house he had built at the point, looking through field glasses to see any sign of new arrivals on the other bank, but he couldn’t look for long because the steam from the rain would make everything go blurred.

  The shortage of elephants persisted; many of the porters had absconded; many of the Indians in the camp were ill. The Mishmi headman – the guide Mackrell had recruited at the Debang river – had dysentery. Late on 23 June, it was necessary to move the camp away from the rising waters of the Dapha. Mackrell and Wilson went upriver on elephants in pouring rain … and they had to keep going, along jungly ledges, looking for a plateau that would be safe. They eventually found a site more than an hour’s elephant ride from the original camp. The new one was established in relays, but journeying along the route between the camps became difficult, and on the night of 25 June the logistics broke down and Mackrell was left alone at the new site with food but no bedding and no tent. It rained all night, and Mackrell, sleeping under trees in his rain cape, woke with a high temperature and a ‘racking head’. He could not concentrate properly, and had to stop writing his diary. He took to his tent, which disturbed everyone, like an enormous tree being felled. (In spite of the rain, the tent would become suffocating during the middle of the day, so that Wilson would urge Mackrell to come out and sit under the main tarpaulin for some of the time.)

  On 26 June, Ritchie Gardiner borrowed McCrindle’s razor and slashed the abscess on his foot. ‘Then the doc gave it the coup de grace with his unprofessional looking thorn.’

  He discussed the Chaukan Pass with Captain Wilson, who said the Mishmis would go fishing high up the Noa Dehing but not as far as the Chaukan Pass. Nobody went up there. Gardiner found that ‘easily understandable’.

  On the 29th, the Commandos were transferred to the new camp, when what they really wanted was to be transferred to Miao, that staging post on the way back to the golf course at Margherita and the civilization it represented.

  The new camp gave a better view of the Dapha Bum, and on the evening of the 29th there was no rain and no mist, giving Ritchie Gardiner an opportunity to use his silver pencil: ‘a piece of pure Alpine scenery: slate blue and brown rocks, jagged peaks and large scattered snowfields.’ He was fascinated that snow could be visible from the muggy banks of the Dapha. Gardiner read extracts from his diary to the Commandos, and was secretly delighted when they nodded approvingly. He noted: ‘It ought to serve.’

  The previous day, despite being ill, Mackrell had tried to cross the Dapha on two elephants with supplies for the Mishmis on the other side. He tried for hours with two mahouts. Wilson had wanted to come along, but Mackrell said he would not be required. To Wilson, the mahouts were ‘not trustworthy’ and he thought a below par Mackrell would need help to keep them in line. The whole relationship between Mackrell, the mahouts and the elephants continued to baffle Wilson. He blamed the mahouts for the shortage of supplies coming through from Miao. ‘The elephants seem to go all over the place once they leave Mackrell’s immediate control … It’s a puzzle to me that Mackrell has managed them [the mahouts] but so far he has.’

  Mackrell failed to cross the river on that occasion, and by the 29th they were ‘down to brass tacks’ on rations both at the new Dapha camp and at the staging posts being created on the other side of the river. No concerted forward push could be mounted without a reserve of food and more elephants.

  And what of Sir John Rowland?

  Both his party and that of the Rossiters were still stuck on the wrong side of the Tilung Hka, still living, or slowly dying, on their skilly soup. Sir John’s diary for the last week of June records business as usual: terrific thunderstorms,
incessant rain, passing aeroplanes paying no attention to them, and the deterioration of everyone in the camp. People were light-headed, dizzy; they walked between the communal fires and their individual huts without saying a word. On 29 June there was another check on rations, and, as regards mouldy rice, the parties were found to be ‘slightly in hand’. Even so, Dr Burgess-Barnett advised Sir John that, if no help came within five days, they were finished.

  The Drop: Linkage is Established, By Land and Air, Between Mackrell at the Dapha and Sir John at the Tilung Hka

  On the morning of 30 June at the Dapha camp, Captain Wilson was standing next to his ‘house’ on the point with binoculars in hand, when he saw the Mishmis on the other side of the river. They had with them the anti-malarial man, Eadon, and the International Boy Scout, Moses.

  To enable them to cross the Dapha, Eadon and Moses had been put on the same elephant. Its mahout was having difficulty persuading it to step into the river, which was running fast. It did enter the water, but kept stopping, seeming to reflect, seemingly sighing at the absurdity of the feat it was being asked to perform. Mackrell, still sick, was at the house on the point with Wilson. The Commandos came to the riverbank, too. The elephant teetered; Mackrell folded his arms and muttered something that Wilson couldn’t hear over the roar of the water. The elephant stabilized itself, sighed again, closed its eyes and with an air of distaste lowered itself into the water and began to swim … and so Eadon and Moses were brought over.

  Howe wrote that the pair were ‘literally back from the grave’, which was very nearly true. ‘It made my relief and happiness considerably more to know they too were safe.’ Gardiner wrote, ‘They looked if possible dirtier and more disreputable than we did on arrival.’ They had been saved in the first place by the Gurkha Havildar, Iman Sing, who had been dispatched from the Dapha on 19 June, and had found Eadon and Moses dying in their huts as he attempted to reach the Rowland and Rossiter parties. He had then fed them and handed them over to the Mishmis.