ELEPHANT MOON

by John Sweeney

  Then as if someone had pulled a switch, the rain stopped. In muffled sunlight, they walked on, the jungle dripping, a brown-green stew of wet leaves, flies, heat, leeches. Abruptly, the trees thinned out. Ahead, Grace glimpsed blue sky above, Sam standing on the edge of a ravine and beyond him, a yawning gap, more than a hundred feet wide, and far below a furious stream tumbling through rocks.

  Precious little space was to be had on the narrow mossy edge overlooking the drop as the elephant party backed up, a traffic jam with trunks. Sam hurried past Mother, moving uphill, away from the ravine, Winston, the Havildar and a dozen oozies in tow, carrying ropes and long doubled-ended saws. Grace called out to him from the basket: ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Bloody map. The ravine wasn’t marked. Officially, it’s not there. Not good.’

  ‘What are you doing to do?’

  ‘Write a letter to the Daily Telegraph,’ and he vanished into the jungle, pursued by a posse of elephant men.

  Po Net gave a command and Mother buckled underneath them. The children piled out, as accustomed to exiting the pannier as they had been to leaving the school bus, and the whole group followed the path Sam’s party had made through the jungle. At the base of an enormously tall teak tree, two teams of oozies were sawing through a top and bottom bite of the trunk furiously, their arm muscles pumping, sweat dripping off their faces. But the trunk was so fat that Grace feared it would take them all day to chop it down. After ten minutes, their places were taken by four fresh oozies, who carried on the work in a sweet rhythm. By now Grace could see a stain of sap where the saws were eating into the teak. The bite in the trunk had become a dark grin.

  Behind them, they heard chains being dragged along the jungle floor. The jungle parted and Henry VIII, ridden by one oozie, with two Burmese holding spikes on either side of his head, marched up, in harness, pulling a long ribbon of chains. The elephant grunted, bent his head and concentrated on feasting on a clump of bamboo.

  The saw’s bite had become yet deeper, another two feet into the trunk. Two new teams took over, losing barely a second, the teeth of the saws hissing against the trunk, the cut almost a third of the way across.

  Grace’s ears pricked. Over the hiss and clatter of the jungle, she could hear a metallic barking. The chatter of a sub-machine gun, never to be mistaken, echoed around the hills. It was hard to tell the distance, but she guessed, the noise came from less than five miles away. The elephant party only carried rifles. A machine-gun meant the Japanese, attacking someone. The rearguard? No idea. All she had to do was look at Sam’s face to realise that the shooting was far too close.

  ‘Havildar! Get these bloody children out of the way.’

  The Sikh led Bishop Strachan’s to the far side of the teak, away from the ravine. They stumbled through the undergrowth, climbing onto a slight hillock which provided a ring-side seat of the great tree and beyond it, the fearful drop and the gap it had to bridge.

  ‘What are they chopping the tree down for, Miss? We’re not going to walk across on the tree, are we?’ asked Ruby, her voice hushed with awe.

  Grace said nothing.

  ‘We’re not, are we?’

  ‘Sssh, Ruby. I don’t want to frighten the little ones,’ whispered Grace. ‘Or me.’

  Guns pock-pocked, more sporadic, not a machine-gun, but closer, much closer.

  The elephants, too, were led to the safety of the far side of the teak, Oomy squashing underneath Mother’s belly. The mother elephant raised her trunk into the air, as if tasting the wind. Having seen the elephants easy and relaxed, there was no doubting their anxiety: a communal twitching of tails, ear flaps wide, trunks swishing agitatedly, this way and that. They might not know exactly what the threat was, thought Grace, but the idea that they were just dumb beasts was ignorant indeed.

  The children started eating lunch, but the sense of foreboding dimmed appetites, and Grace had to cluck at the children for offering their scanty rations to the elephant calves.

  Yells in Burmese, and then Sam’s voice called out: ‘Timber!’ A slow splintering of wood built through a crescendo of ripping and snapping to a Niagara of sound, a great thundering roar as the teak shivered and fell across the ravine. Through the soles of their feet they felt a great shudder; overhead, monkeys, birds and insects screeched out against this new affront to the natural order of things.

  ‘Miss, look!’ cried out Molly. From their vantage point overlooking the ravine the children watched, enthralled, as a man with a dirty bandage on his head clambered up the side of the great teak, stood on top, and then sauntered along the trunk across the ravine as if he was walking down a pavement on Oxford Street. He crossed to the far side and turned back to the watchers, bowed theatrically, and blew a kiss.

  Sam called out to the children: ‘Your turn next, ladies and gentlemen.’

  ‘But the elephants?’ asked Grace. The thought of crossing the ravine was making her feel nauseous.

  ‘No. Children first.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the children are not heavy. The elephants might be too heavy, and we can’t take any chances. Getting you across is the easy bit.’

  There was a mumble of unease from the children, which Grace determined to nip in the bud. She hated heights, but she hated the sergeant more, and she was damned if she was going to be out-braved by him.

  ‘Come along, children.’ She gathered together the school crocodile and led it towards the trunk. ‘Our turn now. Let’s sing a song. Ruby?’

  ‘Sam will be angry.’

  ‘He’s made more than enough noise already. Besides, it will be fun.’

  ‘London Bridge is falling down, falling down…’

  ‘Couldn’t you think of a more appropriate one, Ruby?’

  ‘No.’

  They walked down to the trunk in silence. By the time they had got to the edge of the ravine, the elephant men had got a rope across, a handrail. Sam walked across the tree-bridge, Winston pattering along behind him, followed by the Havildar, carrying Joseph on his shoulders and holding Michael’s hand. Most of the girls, all of them older than the boys, didn’t want to look foolish and followed on. Grace occupied herself helping them get a leg-up the smooth side of the trunk, a good few feet taller than her. When it came to Emily’s turn, the girl managed to scrabble up on her own.

  Molly refused to cross, point-blank. Grace implored her. She shook her head, her pudding bowl haircut swishing this way and that. She was such a determined child that Grace did not know what to do. The Havildar strolled back across the trunk, slipped down the side, bent down, and whispered into Molly’s ear. The little girl nodded, briefly, and soon the two of them were crossing the ravine, hand in hand.

  How on earth did he do that? Grace wondered.

  When the last of the girls were up and making the crossing, it was Grace’s turn. Po Net helped her up. Lunging for the rope hand-rail, she steadied herself and started walking. After all the hours in the dim green gloom under the forest canopy, the white glare of the wide open sky played harshly on her eyes. She dared not look down, but the distant sound of the stream bubbling furiously below gave her a chilling idea of just how far she would fall if she lost her balance.

  Gunfire, not so far away. A racket of birds of paradise, trailing bright violet tails, lifted up from the bottom of the ravine and came barrelling up towards the tree-bridge. She made to duck but a disembodied voice broke through: ‘Head up, chest out, back straight’. Her father’s advice. Where was he now? What was he doing? She’d last written to him a day before they fled from Rangoon, but she was pretty certain her letter would never have left the city. Had the Whitehall warrior any idea that his plan, that Burma would be safe for his daughter, might not have worked out quite as he had hoped? The absurdity of that thought, terrified as she was, gripping on to the rope hand-rail, 200 feet from a rocky death below, lost in the middle of the jungle in High Burma, with the Japanese Imperial Army within gunshot-sound, all but her made her skip across. Squi
nting in the sunlight, she focused on a figure in the shimmering heat helping the girls ahead of her down the side of the trunk on the far bank of the ravine: the man with the bandaged head.

  Something about the elaborateness of his gallantry sickened her, made her entirely forget where she was. She all but ran the last ten yards along the trunk, and yelled at him: ‘What the bloody hell do you think you are doing?’

  ‘Lending a hand,’ said Gregory, affecting hurt.

  ‘Leave the children alone.’ Her voice bore a querulous indignation which she didn’t like but could not help.

  ‘For God’s sake, Grace, he’s only helping.’ It was Sam. ‘There’s no law against that.’

  ‘No, I’m not putting up with this. I’ve asked you to keep this man,’ only now did Grace become aware that almost the whole school was staring at her, unkindly, as if she was some kind of madwoman barking out at dangers no else saw, ‘under control.’

  ‘As I said, he was only helping. I’d ask you to keep a civil tongue in your head for everybody in this party, and that includes Sergeant Gregory.’ The rebuke was all the more telling because of the unusual gentleness, the pity in Sam’s voice, as if he was becoming concerned whether Grace was losing her grip.

  She had to suffer her rebuke in silence as the men worked to prepare for the elephants crossing. It was one thing to get a party of orphans across a tree-bridge. Quite different, to get fifty-three elephants across.

  Po Toke climbed onto the teak trunk and withdrew from his rucksack a length of sugar beet. Henry VIII’s trunk wafted the airwaves, picked up the scent of the sugar, stood on a side branch and was atop the trunk with all the agility of a circus elephant. Po Toke had to skip across the tree-bridge as nimbly as he could because Henry VIII almost trotted along, heedless of the drop below. Once the lord of the elephants had made the crossing, the oozies seemed more relaxed. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John trundled across, unconcerned. Ragamuffin seemed to dance, Clive crossed dully and Nebuchadnezzar took an age. Each elephant was different. Some would cross with no fuss. Others had to be cajoled, encouraged with commands or bribed with sugar beet or a handful of salt. They were working as fast as they could, but getting fifty-three across, one at a time, was going to take them the best part of an hour. The work occupied the oozies led by Po Toke. Sam and the Havildar could only watch and fret.

  ‘Havildar!’ squeaked Molly. ‘You promised you would tell me. If I walked across.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’

  ‘What did he promise?’ asked Grace.

  ‘That if I walked across the tree-trunk,’ said Molly, ‘he’d tell me the story of how he lost his fingers.’

  The children, sitting in the shade on the far, western side of the ravine, listened, ears agog.

  He caressed his moustache with the back of his fist, and started: ‘I was born in the Punjab – this means The Land of Five Rivers – to a family that had fought with the British since the mutiny, back in 1857. I was a boy soldier at sixteen. In the summer of 1917 we sailed from India all the way to Italy. The ship wobbled and I was sick.’

  The children laughed, enraptured.

  He’d loathed every second of the voyage, staring at the rocking deep blue, fearing torpedo strike or shipwreck at the sight of white caps as the wind freshened to a breeze. The docks at Naples – not normally associated with goodliness – were, to him, nirvana. The moment he crossed the gang-plank, he fell to his knees, kissed the earth and prayed, thanking God for a safe passage. Once the floor beneath his feet didn’t rock, he became his own man again, enchanting his friends in the regiment, the 13th Baluchi Rifles, with a selection of Hindi love songs, sung in a rich piping voice, as the troop train clickerty-clacked up Italy on their way to the Great War.

  ‘Winter was coming and I was a boy from the plains of the Punjab. I had never seen such snow, so deep, icicles hanging from the little wooden eaves of the railway halts, almost burying the houses as we pulled north. One morning the Havildar of our regiment, an ancient Baluchi, banged open the doors to our carriages and we looked up to see crags, black silhouettes against the rising sun, the Dolomites.

  ‘It was so cold we slept with the horses. At day break, when the silver-grey night mists still hung in the valleys beneath, we would uncap our big guns, point the muzzles at the mountain tops on the other side of the valley and blast away at the Austrians. They would fire back, sending up plumes of snow into the air, occasionally killing my friends. But this was not the worst thing for us.

  ‘We did not have proper winter clothing for the cold we faced. One night I felt a pain in my little toe, as if it was on fire. In the morning, coal-black, it snapped off in my fingers like a twig. The following night, the middle finger of my right hand started to burn. Our colonel, an Englishman from Todmorden in Lancashire called Malone, telephoned the Adjutant-General at staff headquarters thirty miles back from the front and demanded proper winter clothes for us. Nothing happened. Our colonel sent telegram after telegram. Still nothing. Then he went down to staff headquarters, saw the Adjutant-General, and asked him to visit the front line. Again, nothing happened. Our colonel returned to staff headquarters, found the Adjutant-General in a restaurant drinking prosecco with two women. He drew his revolver, kidnapped him, drove him back to the foot of the mountains, tied him to a mule, backwards, facing its tail, and brought him all the way up to the snows, the ice-line. In front of all of us, at gun-point, the colonel forced the Adjutant-General to strip off his warm British officer winter clothes until he was all but naked and then the colonel gave them to me, as I was the youngest of them all. The Adjutant-General put on my clothes. He started to shiver, uncontrollably. Then he asked to make a telephone call. We heard him order two hundred British winter uniforms, wool-lined boots, leather gauntlets up from the stores to the ice-line that very day. By this time I had one thumb and two fingers on this left hand and a thumb and half a finger on my right. So that’s how I lost my fingers.’

  ‘What happened to your colonel?’ asked Emily.

  ‘The next day the Military Police, the Red Caps, came to take him away. He was to be court-martialled. We all stood up, and we saluted him. The Austrians sent a whizz-bang…’

  ‘What’s a whizz-bang?’ asked Molly.

  ‘A shell, like a bomb but from an artillery piece. They go whizz, and then bang. We could tell from the whizz that this one would fly harmlessly over our heads but the Red Caps didn’t know that, and they all ducked. We Indian sepoys remained standing, saluting our brave colonel. He, too, was standing. He told us in Urdu: “There are a lot of idiots in the British Army, but sooner or later, someone stands up and does the proper thing. Remember that. Thank you, carry on.” And then, in English: “Perhaps you might tell these chaps that they can get up now. They’ll catch their death.” Without this man, I would have no fingers at all, so I bless God because I am lucky.’

  Grace had never seen the children so silent, so still, so enthralled.

  He got up and started organising the elephant train, while Po Toke and the oozies set about getting the last of the calves and their mothers across. The calves’ skittishness made it quite possible that they could tumble from the trunk. Their mothers lined up on the far side of the ravine, babies behind them, trunk hanging on to mother’s tail, and all crossed sweetly, the last two being Mrs Griffiths leading Dopey and Mother leading her baby. As Oomy crossed over to the safety of the west side of the ravine, he appeared to give the watching children a bow.

  Sam gave orders for Henry VIII and Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to be led up to the trunk and they hunkered head-down, to shove the great tree over the edge of the ravine. The elephant men were not going to give the Japanese the luxury of their home-made short cut. The hind legs of the five great beasts quivered with strain. It moved barely an inch, if that.

  ‘What about the rearguard? The Chin?’ Grace asked the Havildar but it was Sam who answered.

  ‘Got to leave them on the other side. No choice. They know the jungle. They can disappe
ar into it and the Japanese won’t find them. Hopefully, they will find their way round the ravine and catch up with us. Or go home, and wait for us to return to Burma. But we can’t wait, and we can’t leave this bloody tree bridge here. That last burst of gunfire sounded too damn close. I hope these jumbos get a move on.’

  A heavy branch, snagging the ground, was ripped free and the trunk began to shift more easily, testament to the immense power of the elephants.

  On the far side of the ravine, about two hundred feet downhill from where they had just crossed, there was a rippling through the long elephant grass, higher than a man’s head. A voice – panting, exhausted - shouted: ‘Wait! Wait!’

  ‘It’s a trick,’ yelled Sergeant Gregory. ‘Everybody get down.’ Grabbing a rifle from an oozie, he ducked prone on to the ground and aimed across the abyss, firing twice.

  ‘Hold fire! Take cover,’ yelled Sam. Children and adults scrambled to hide behind boulders and stout tree trunks, while the oozies working Henry and the Gospel elephants urged them to push harder, so that the trunk would be over the edge before the Japanese could get to the trunk.