by John Sweeney
‘Don’t shoot. We’re British!’ The elephant grass waved this way and that, still holding the secret of who was running towards the edge of the ravine.
‘It’s a Jap jitter party,’ shouted Eddie Gregory, reloading.
A very tall British officer emerged from the grass, hands high in the air: ‘Don’t shoot.’
‘Hold fire!’ repeated Sam.
‘It’s a dirty trick,’ roared Gregory, and with his rifle sight on the stranger’s heart, he squeezed the trigger.
‘Hold fire!’
Something kicked hard against Gregory’s gun-arm and the bullet went zinging high into the jungle canopy.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing? Don’t kick me, you silly bitch!’ yelled Gregory, outraged.
‘It’s no trick.’ Grace was not for repenting. ‘I know that man. I’m sure you’ll enjoy meeting him, Sergeant. He’s a magistrate,’ and gave him another kick, no more gentle than the first.
‘Grace, it’s you!’ Hard to pack boyish delight and unbearable longing in a shout that could be heard from the far side of a ravine, but the tall soldier somehow managed it.
‘Mr Peach!’ Grace shouted back and began racing downhill to narrow the gap between them.
Absurd as it was, she found herself giggling, delight and happiness bubbling up inside her. That time they had first met, in the meeting room at Government House, she’d thought he was odd, almost freakish and not a little bit melancholic. No hint then of what she felt for him now. That ghastly time when he was drunk, lobbing billiard balls at the portraits of British Burma’s great and good on the walls – ‘no, Mr Peach, I think you’re a damned fool.’
But it was Mr Peach who had warned her to evacuate the children to India, Mr Peach who had halted the demolition of the great bridge across the Irrawaddy so that they could pass, and here he was, still a damned fool, but alive.
Alive? She winced. And the Jemadar? Was she so shallow a flibbertigibbet that she’d forgotten the one man she had truly loved so quickly? The Jemadar was dead, yes, but that was nothing to do with Mr Peach. As he staggered out of the elephant grass, she could see that he was grinning from ear to ear. A good man. No, better – rarer than that – a good man in a dark time, and his survival, through all the hardships of Burma at war, was worth smiling about.
Seven more wraiths followed Peach out of the elephant grass, pitifully thin, sun-blasted, trapped on the wrong side of the ravine, exhaustion written on their faces, the only clue that they were soldiers the rifles slung over their shoulders.
‘Oh, Christ!’ yelled Sam. ‘We thought… we thought… you were the Japs.’
‘Oh, no.’
Grace stopped in her tracks and swung around and stared and became horribly aware that a second awful mistake might be about to happen.
Sam ascended the slope to where Gregory was standing. ‘Are you deaf?’
‘I thought they were the Japs. So did you.’
‘I told you to hold fire. Twice, three times.’
‘Better safe than sorry.’ Gregory gave Sam a cold eye.
‘No, better obey orders than kill our chaps. From the state of some of those men they could be dead within a day or two. If they do die, that’s because you were too bloody trigger-happy and opened fire before we could work out who the bloody hell they were. Give me that rifle.’
Truculently, Gregory gave Sam the weapon.
‘Nobody opens fire unless I say so. When I say “hold fire” I mean it. Do you understand?’
Nothing from Gregory.
‘Do you understand?’ repeated Sam.
‘Yes,’ said Gregory, turning his back on Sam as he brushed himself down.
‘I don’t want to see you with a gun in your hands again.’ He walked away from Gregory, down towards where Grace was stood across the ravine from Peach.
‘Stop! Stop the elephants!’ screamed Grace.
The oozies urging the big tuskers on to push the great tree over the cliff were higher up the valley and did not heed her shouts. Over the roar from the falling water below they could not possibly hear her. Gregory, closer to the oozies than Grace or Sam or the Havildar, waved them encouragement, to keep on with what they were doing.
‘Stop! Stop the elephants!’ Her shout ended in a sobbing whimper. ‘Stop! For God’s sake, stop!’
Their massive skulls pressed against the cylinder of teak, the elephants shoved again, spurts of dust rising from where their heels were grinding against the earth. What happened next took place with unconscionable slowness, like scenes from a movie shown by a faltering projector. The great tree began to tip over the edge of the ravine, inch by inch. The elephants gave one last burst of power, the balance of weight teetered and the tree accelerated into the ravine, great boughs breaking against the rock walls, generating a splintering roar which echoed around the hills as it crashed down to the rocks below and landed with a giant thud.
The absurdly tall Englishman walked up to the edge of the ravine, looked down at the bridge that was a bridge no longer and fell to his knees, burying his face in his hands. The watchers on the far bank looked on, aghast, silent but for one.
‘Oh, Bertie,’ cried Grace. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Pulling himself up, he shook his head once with aching slowness, then fixed the grimmest of smiles on his face. He retrieved a book from his knapsack, tore out a blank page and wrote something on it in pencil. Turning his back on the watchers from the western side of the ravine, he did something with the paper.
He stood up and walked to the very edge of the ravine, in his hands a paper plane, and threw it towards Grace. The plane flew straight and true for some seconds, darted this way and that, and then started to fall down towards the torrent far below. But at the last moment it rose up, powered by some unseen uplift, and cleared the rock edge, landing in the grass at Grace’s feet.
She picked up the plane and opened it out. On one side were a few lines of Japanese writing, indecipherable to her. Puzzled, she looked across at him. He motioned for her to look at the other side. And there, written in English, were these words:
‘Though I go to you
ceaselessly along dream paths,
the sum of those trysts
is less than a single glimpse
of you in the waking world.
Ono no Komachi, 9th century
Holding the paper plane to her lips, she kissed it.
On the far side of the ravine, a ninth man, Sergeant-Major Barr, had caught up with the others. ‘We’d better move, sir. It’s a bit fooking exposed here. Come on, let’s hop it.’
But Peach stood stock-still, staring at Grace.
‘We’re sitting ducks here. We’ve got to fook off, sir.’
Gregory walked out of the shade. He was the best part of two hundred feet across from Peach, his features washed out by the acid brightness of the sun, but even so there was something about him that jolted Peach.
‘Sir…’ said the sergeant-major, anxiety giving an edge to his ordinarily flat tone.
A file lying open on Peach’s desk back in Rangoon. A photograph, a striking, child-demon face and blond hair – and beneath it, typewritten, double-spaced, the details.
‘Them Jap buggers are on our tails,’ Barr fretted, ‘and if we don’t move sharpish, they’ll have us.’
Peach had become pretty familiar with reports complaining about the poor quality of some of the troops sent out from Britain to this forgotten war, but even so, that particular file had offended his sense that the Empire’s military necessity should not override every consideration. What was the name? Damn his memory. He’d forget where he’d left his nose next. Name of a bishop. No, a pope…Pius? No. Constantine. No. Gregory. That was the man’s name. What had he done again? A custodial sentence, yes, but for what? It was lost, one line of detail in tens of thousands of typewritten files, blurred and fuzzy, a few months away in time, a world away, standing in this jungle, on the wrong side of hope.
‘Oh, Chris
t!’ The most beautiful woman in the whole world, separated from him by a bloody ravine, was in grave danger. So were they all.
Peach yelled: ‘That man – he’s a murderer!’ but he was drowned out by a metallic roar. Overhead, a fat bough of a banyan tree trembled and fell to the ground, shredded by a mortar. A second mortar landed with a sharp clang against an outcrop of rock, a third whizzed into the greenery, sending a troup of macaque monkeys screaming and gibbering away across the tree-tops. On the far side of the ravine, the elephant men and the orphans were vanishing into the jungle.
‘Murderer!’ screamed Peach, but a fresh hail of mortar shells crashed in, rendering his warning fatuous.
‘Stop fannying about, you idiot, you’re going to get fooking killed,’ roared the sergeant-major. ‘Move, you daft bugger.’
He physically grabbed Peach and pushed him back into the elephant grass.
The elephant men harried the children and elephants to move as fast as they could until the immediate danger of the Japanese mortars was safely behind them. Once the pace had slowed down a little, Sam walked back down the line of elephants and found Grace.
‘I’m going on ahead with ten men, no elephants, so that we don’t have any more unpleasant surprises like the ravine,’ he told hero. ‘The Havildar will be in charge of the main party. I’ve told that idiot Gregory to leave you well alone. That’s the best I can do for now. But, for your part, stop going on about him.’
Grace nodded, not trusting in her judgment to challenge him.
Sam’s scouting party climbed up and up, ascending three, four thousand feet, the jungle thinning dramatically as they entered a new world of Alpine meadow, sparsely covered with brush, often treeless. Six thousand feet high, maybe more.
No man’s-land, a void, where immense foothills higher than any mountain in Scotland ran down from the Himalayas and formed the backbone which split India from Burma. No one had ever built a road here, no one had bothered to cross it and certainly no one had ever bothered to map it. Marco Polo had crossed the Gobi Desert centuries ago and the Sahara was like Piccadilly Circus compared to this. Well, Sam conceded that he might be over-egging the pud a bit. That was the trouble with spending too much time without company of your own kind. You started chattering on to yourself. Stop that talk, Sam, stop it now.
They marched on.
Until just before sundown, a full stop. Dead ahead lay a wall of rock, tinting red in the dying light, God knows how many miles long and impossibly high. After the Great War, he’d spent a month’s leave in Rome. The Coliseum was just short of two hundred feet high. This rock was maybe two and a half times that, perhaps 500 feet. From what he could see through his binoculars, the rock was sheer. No man could climb it, certainly no animal. Making a tree-bridge across the ravine had bought them half a day – he was pretty sure that the Japanese didn’t have the professional lumberjacks amongst their men that he had – but they weren’t far behind the main party led by the Havildar. To the south, the Japanese. To the north, more Japanese, pressing on towards Imphal. They heard the artillery duels in the neighbouring valleys more clearly now they were high above them, making short, sharp bangs, more snappy than thunder. It was plain as a pikestaff to Sam that the war was catching up with them. Their only route was straight ahead, due west, but they weren’t tunnel men.
And elephants can’t fly.
He could be wrong, but it looked as though they were finished, that his dream of taking his jumbos out of Burma by a route that didn’t exist was dead. It had been a good dream while it lasted, but soon it would turn into a bloody nightmare.
A thin chimney of smoke rose above the jungle a few hundred feet away. He ordered a halt, and complete silence, and took Po Toke with him, crawling through the undergrowth to discover a few huts in a clearing by a stream, abandoned. They got up and walked towards the smoke and found a pot of stew still bubbling over an open fire.
On the edge of the clearing, something moved, a blur, vanishing into the jungle. Sam called out to whoever it was in Burmese or Urdu, but he remembered that someone had once told him that up here, the Naga people spoke something quite different, half-Thibetan, half-Stone-Age-ish.
The elephant men were on edge. They didn’t much like the idea of taking over someone else’s village. None of them had been this far north in their lives. Come to think of it, no one he knew had. They were uneasy about the Naga people, believing that they still hunted heads, despite the official line from the Governor in Rangoon – not that there was a Governor in Rangoon any more – that cannibalism was a thing of the past.
‘No shrivelled heads here,’ said Sam to Po Toke, the others listening in. The claim fell on silence. His elephant men weren’t having any of it. The power of their traditions was not to be taken lightly, and out of respect for them, he slogged upstream another quarter of a mile, pitching camp not far from the base of the rock. It loomed over them, blocking out the stars of the western sky.
Sam hadn’t shared his pessimism with Po Toke, still less the other Burmese, but it was obvious that the rock spelt trouble. His men hurried to pitch hammocks and make a camp before the light died.
As night fell, it grew shockingly cold. The chill got to the Chin and the oozies, bringing out malarial fevers in some of his chaps. Long ago they’d abandoned blankets and warm clothes, since it was ludicrously hot down in the jungle, but up here, you could almost smell the snow blowing in the wind from the north, from the Himalayas.
And now they had to climb a bloody mountain of rock and that looked impossible. Just before the light died to the west, he studied the rock with his binoculars, once again.
No way out.
Twenty-two years he’d spent in the jungle in Upper Burma, and it had taught him one thing above all: never take the jungle for granted. During the Great War he had served in the Camel Corps in the Transjordan, doing his utmost to keep the ill-tempered ships of the desert healthy in the service of the British as the Ottoman Empire crumbled to dust. Sam was a natural when dealing with animals. He’d find foot-rot in one camel missed by the vet, soothe a red-eyed beast famous for being obnoxious, dangerous even to any European master, disappear for days and then reappear with a score more semi-trained beasts he’d tracked down in the desert. Back at their base in East Jerusalem, he had spent hours with the Bedouin and a translator, soaking in their knowledge of how a thirsty camel can taste water on the wind, how many days a camel could go without food and water, what were their tolerances before they gave up the ghost. Soon, word got out that if you needed a camel train for a journey into the desert, there was no point in leaving until Sam Metcalf had checked out the beasts, adjusted their saddles, talked to the Bedouin, planned the route from well to well. But, best of all, you’d better take Sam with you.
At the end of the war, just as they were winding down the Camel Corps, news of a job came up in Upper Burma, handling elephants. Sam knew nothing about them, apart from the fact they had bigger ears, were occasionally more dangerous but on the whole wiser and more intelligent than camels. At least, they didn’t spit. He got the job on the strength of his references from the Camel Corps and he sailed for Rangoon, and then took a stern-wheeler up the Irrawaddy into the jungle. At that time in the early twenties the Burma Teak Corporation pretty much owned all the teak in the country, as of right. All they had to do was to get it down to the sawmills of Mandalay and Rangoon, though that wasn’t quite as easy as it sounded.
High up in the forests, the loggers would bring the teak crashing down, great monsters of trees. Using hand saws seven feet long, they would hack off branches, reducing the tree to a series of roughly smooth sections, twenty or thirty feet long. Enter the elephants. They would push, shove or drag the logs tumbling into dry riverbeds, pointing sweetly downstream, not blocking the flow. Come the monsoon, the rains would turn a sandy riverbed into a raging torrent in a few hours, violent with energy, lifting the great logs as if they were as light as lily-pads, and sending them floating down a series of bigge
r and bigger tributaries. Once they entered the larger rivers, the Corporation’s flotilla of barges would capture the logs, lash them to each other to make enormous floating rafts, then nudge them downstream to the sawmills. From the moment a tree was felled to its floating to the sawmill in Rangoon could take a year. Or four. When you had the timber rights for the whole country, time didn’t matter that much.
None of this could happen in the road-less wastes of jungle were it not for the elephants and their extraordinary relationship with man. Immense strength, tamed by guile and goodness. Sam had got to know his animals so well that a famous man-killer like Rungdot – Henry VIII was how the kids called him – in musht, trusted him enough to allow him to pierce an abscess the size of a football with a hammer and a knife. One powerful strike and the boil was burst, then wiped clean with disinfectant, all the while the elephant eyeing him attentively. Had Sam dithered or faltered, the beast could have knocked him over and stamped on his head in a flash of time. But Rungdot had trusted him. Soon the great tusker was back at work, nuzzling 20 ton monster logs of teak into line as if they were matchsticks.
Twenty-two years, the prime of his life. He’d married, had children – they were safe and sound in India, God bless them – but still he kept on going back, when a chap of his years could easily have got a desk job, running an inkwell and a typewriter in Simla or some damnfool place. But now his hubris had come to haunt him. How was he going to explain to the others, especially the children, that they were road-blocked by a lump of rock? That it was now very likely that they would never make it out to India.
He reflected on what High Burma had taught him.
That fear of a nat – a jungle spirit – could kill a man, as surely as a shot to the heart.
That elephants had real intelligence.
And that men were stupid and cruel to one another, and to creatures too. Which was why he’d spent so much of his time alone, apart from his dog and the Burmese oozies and the elephants, which wasn’t alone at all, really.