Flight by Elephant

by Andrew Martin

  Burma offered a more leisurely life than India. Its branch of the Indian Civil Service was less competitive, and so attracted the more easy-going sahib. In The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj, David Gilmour writes that some members of the Indian Civil Service regarded Burma as ‘a place of banishment … The climate was unhealthy and debilitating, especially in Upper Burma … and the mosquitoes were so bad in some areas that even the cattle were put under nets at night.’ A vivid, if jaundiced, account of the life is given by George Orwell in his novel of 1934, Burmese Days, which is based on his experiences as a police officer in Upper Burma. The central character, Flory, works in the Forestry Department. In view of what would happen to the British in Burma, it is interesting that he seems half menaced by nature, half enraptured by it. He spends the cooler months in the jungle, the rest of the time in a bungalow on the edge of an Upper Burmese town. He describes Burma as ‘mostly jungle – a green, unpleasant land’. In the garden of the town club, where the back numbers of The Field and the Edgar Wallace novels are mildewed by the humidity, some English flowers grow: phlox and larkspur, hollyhock and petunia. They will soon be ‘slain by the sun’. Meanwhile, they ‘rioted in vast size and richness’. There is no English lawn, ‘but instead a shrubbery of native trees and bushes … mohur trees like vast umbrellas of blood-red bloom … purple bougainvillea, scarlet hibiscus … bilious green crotons … The clash of colours hurt one’s eyes in the glare’. Vultures hover in a dazzling sky; in early morning temperatures of 110 degrees Fahrenheit, the Englishmen of the club greet each other: ‘Bloody awful morning, what?’

  The country grips him like a fever, and sometimes the effect is euphoric. When Flory meets Elizabeth Lackersteen, the love interest of the book (Flory’s native mistress, Ma Hla May, cannot be so described), they bond over flowers. ‘Those zinnias are fine aren’t they? – like painted flowers, with their wonderful dead colours. These are African marigolds. They’re coarse things, weeds almost, but you can’t help liking them … But I wish you’d come into the veranda and see the orchids.’

  Flory works some of the time ‘in the field’, but even he gets lost on a short walk through the jungle with his own spaniel bitch, Flo. The box wallahs (office workers) of the British Secretariat would tend the flowers in the gardens of their bungalows at Maymyo, the hill station to which they repaired to escape the oven that was Rangoon in summer, just as their counterparts in Calcutta went to Darjeeling. They rode horses through the margins of the jungle, but they would not penetrate deeper, to encounter, say, the giant banana plants that might for all they knew be quite literally the biggest aspidistras in the world. The evening breeze might bring the sound of a tiger’s roar intermingled with the tinkling of the temple bells, but that tiger was safely confined in the Maymyo Zoo. The British were protected from the jungle by their punka-wallahs, their chowkeydars (nightwatchmen) on the veranda, by the elevation of their houses above the malarial ground, their quinine pills and the revolver in the study drawer.

  The Governor of Burma, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith (Harrow, Cambridge, Sandhurst), was a fitting leader for this decorous and unreal society. A very good-looking man – almost too good looking – with a fondness for fragrant pipe tobacco, Dorman-Smith had seen action briefly in the Great War, but his former tenure as Minister of Agriculture under Neville Chamberlain hinted at a bovine temperament. He was not the sort of man to notice that he sat atop a very rickety edifice.

  Burma has been called an ‘anthropologist’s paradise’; it might also have been called a colonialist’s nightmare. Aside from a couple of battalions of British soldiers in Burma, the main defensive force was called the Burma Rifles, which had British officers and supposedly Burmese other ranks … except that the soldiery of the Burma Rifles largely comprised ethnic minorities – the Shans of the east, Chins of the west, Kachins of the north, Karens of the south – because the loyalty of the indigenous Burmese could not be taken for granted.

  The British in Burma were buttressed in their eminence by a million Indians. In Rangoon, they operated the infrastructure: drove the trams and trains, manned the docks, and they were hated by the Burmese, either for taking the jobs they themselves might have aspired to, or for abetting the imperial power. The Indians needed the social order to remain stable, otherwise they would be preyed upon by the Burmese dacoits, or criminal gangs, and the incidence of dacoity in Burma was high. The Burmese had rioted against the Indians in 1937, hence the granting of a measure of self-government, a reform that did not negate Burmese nationalism. In 1940, it had been necessary to arrest the first Burmese Premier to serve under the new dispensation, Baw Ma, on a charge of sedition. And with the coming of war, a Burmese Independence Army would at first fight alongside the Japanese invader before switching sides. Rising nationalism on the eve of the war had been manifested in an increasing intolerance of Europeans keeping their shoes on when visiting the pagodas. The ubiquitous sign ‘Footwearings not permitted’ was ceasing to be a joke. But no alarm had been raised.

  The Dapha River

  May the twenty-sixth 1942, and it was still raining heavily in the jungle. With at best five days’ food left, Millar and Leyden continued to follow the Noa Dehing, but had now moved to lower terrain. They were covered in sores, and their boots had fallen apart. At first, they had tried walking without boots, as the Kachin porters did, but that lacerated their feet. So they wound canes around their feet like bandages, and wore belts of reserve canes around their waists.

  As they walked beneath the trees near the roaring river, they saw a tiger walking ahead on the same path. Even to ‘jungly’ Englishmen – and Millar was more one of those than Leyden – the sight of a tiger would prompt an instinctive glance around for the cage from which it had escaped. The tiger walked on, and so did they ‘for some distance’, not trying to catch it up, but not particularly lagging behind either. Millar was carrying his favourite single-action revolver; Leyden was carrying a rifle. In 1885, Major MacGregor had reported to the Royal Geographical Society: ‘A few tigers had also taken up their abode in the valley, a fact which came unpleasantly home to our coolies, two of whom, poor fellows, were carried out of camp at night by a man eater, who was, I am glad to say, eventually shot.’

  Millar and Leyden’s tiger having veered off the path and jumped into the river, they came to a clearing where they saw a herd of sambhur, which are hairy deer. Sambhur don’t look as if they belong in a jungle, or even a jungle clearing. They look as though they belong on a Highland moor in Scotland. The teeming rain added to the effect, even if the suffocating air detracted from it.

  There were twenty-six sambhur. They had probably never seen a man before, and they continued to graze even as Goal Miri – who had requested the first shot – took Leyden’s rifle and aimed. The porters ate their meat while it was still warm, and Millar and Leyden built a fire to cook theirs. The twenty-five surviving sambhur ‘just stood around in an interested sort of way, some lying down on the stones only sixty yards off’.

  When the tribes who live in the jungle clearings enter the jungle proper to hunt, they make obeisance to the spirits of the jungle, the nats. If something then goes wrong – say, a man is bitten by a snake – that shows permission had not been asked in the right way, or had been withheld or withdrawn, and the hunters leave the jungle. Of course, Millar and Leyden had not consulted the spirits before killing the sambhur, and they did not have the option of leaving.

  They set off again reinvigorated. But an hour later, Leyden’s spaniel was no longer behind them. Misa, at least, liked the jungle, and would frequently charge off into the undergrowth, but they called, and waited and … nothing. After a long search – reckless in the circumstances – they concluded that she must have fallen into the Noa Dehing gorge. Later still, when they were crossing a small river, Leyden was swirled off his feet, and cracked his head against a big rock. He said he was all right, but Millar kept a close eye on him from then on.

  And the day still wasn’t o
ver.

  When they lit the fire that night, Millar and Leyden discovered they had two days’ less rice than they had thought. So they now only had enough to last them until 29 May. Then again, they calculated from the only two-inch map they possessed that had not been turned to pulp that the confluence of the Noa Dehing and the Dapha couldn’t be more than six miles away. They ought to be there by the next day, the 27th.

  That was, as Millar put it, ‘a dismal mistake’.

  On the 27th, it finally stopped raining, but their eternal companion, the Noa Dehing, chose that morning to present its steepest gorge yet, requiring from Millar and Leyden ‘the skills of trained climbers … Our fears for porters carrying loads were not without cause,’ Millar adds, without going into detail. The Dapha river did not appear that day, or the next; or the next.

  On 31 May, their food had run out, ‘not a crumb of anything remained’, and there was still no sign of the Dapha. To save strength, Millar and Leyden had jettisoned everything that was not essential: cooking utensils, binoculars, cameras. On 31 May, Leyden stopped and sadly pitched his rifle into the gorge of the Noa Dehing river, then Millar did likewise with his ‘favourite single trigger gun’. A gun is the most prized asset in the jungle, second only to a decent stash of opium and a few grains of quinine. But Millar did retain a rifle, a decision that would prove of the greatest importance.

  The Noa Dehing still showed very heavy water, and remained uncrossable. They remained stuck on the right-hand side of it, with the Dapha surely looming. That river was like a prima donna, putting off its appearance to maximize the final effect. ‘I felt inwardly certain,’ wrote Millar, ‘that we could not ford it at this date.’

  At 2 p.m. on 31 May, Millar and Leyden began to hear a louder river sound; it was the sound of two rivers, almost like the sound of a rough sea. At 3 p.m., they came to what Millar described as ‘a delta’ – the vast and foamy confluence of the Dapha and the Noa Dehing, and here was the moment of truth. Both rivers were hundreds of yards wide. Both carried leaping jungle debris in the form of whole 100-foot trees, complete with all branches and roots, to the intersection where they rotated in a giant, misty whirlpool. Looking at the confluence, Guy Millar felt sick.

  The Red-Hot Buddhas

  The bombing of Burma started on 11 December. The first raid on Rangoon itself came on 23 December at which point the residents would have recalled some elementary geography.

  Rangoon was towards the south of a country bounded by sea and mountains to the west, and mountains and Japanese-occupied China to the east. If the docks and airstrip were taken out of commission, the only escape from an army entering Rangoon from the south would lie directly north, along the valleys of the Chindwin and Irrawaddy rivers, and towards India, that supposedly more secure bastion of the colonizing power. But India was 2000 miles from Rangoon, and protected by a barrier of the highest mountains and the densest jungles of all. Nevertheless, that first raid on Rangoon – which killed 2000 people – marked the start of what would come to be called ‘the walkout’. Millar and Leyden were two of a million. The entire non-indigenous population of Burma would leave the country.

  George Rodger, a thirty-four-year-old British photographer and correspondent with the American magazine Life, arrived in Rangoon in the third week of January 1942, a time when most sensible people were leaving. A practitioner of foreign correspondent sang-froid, Rodger touched down on the Irrawaddy in a BOAC flying boat as a Japanese air raid screamed overhead. It was impossible to get ashore, ‘so we sat in wicker chairs on a BOAC barge out in the river, drinking lemonade and waiting for the bombs to fall in the harbour’. Rodger was – not very surprisingly – ‘the only passenger disembarking at Rangoon’, and after the all-clear had sounded, he checked into the one hotel still open, the Minto Mansions. In his memoir, Red Moon Rising (1943), he writes, ‘There in the dingy hallway, trunks and packing cases were piled high. They were addressed in bold white paint to destinations in India and were the property of those who had decided to leave Rangoon before the raids became too heavy.’ As he sat down to dinner that evening, the air raid siren sounded again. ‘Immediately all lights were extinguished.’ Rodger wasn’t going to be put off his soup by mere bombs. He determined to continue eating, albeit now in the dark, but after a few minutes he found himself completely alone in the restaurant, so he abandoned his dinner and wandered outside ‘with a few British officers to watch the progress of the raid from the garden’. Rodger was intrigued to see most of the other guests lying down in slit trenches that had been dug in the garden between tall trees. Even here, botany obtrudes: ‘I noticed the smell of magnolia and sweet jasmine in the hot night air and huge bats were flying silently in silhouette against the light of the full moon.’ From one of the slit trenches someone insisted that Burmese fifth columnists were signalling to the enemy by means of red lights, assisting the raid. Rodger did not believe it, ‘but this is how rumours are born’.

  In mid-December 1941, the Japanese 15th Army entered south Burma from Thailand (which they had entered from Malaya) and began fighting their way towards Rangoon. Columns of Indian refugees were filing into the city from the south, and leaving again from the north, either for the town of Prome, 120 miles north, or for the Burmese second city, Mandalay, 250 miles north. Among them were the Indians essential to the running of Rangoon.

  On 15 February, Singapore – the fortified island that supposedly guaranteed the security of Malaya and Burma – fell to the Japanese. In mid-February the English newspapers of Rangoon ceased publication.

  Like Burnham Wood, the jungle was coming, and the trees themselves announced the fact. On 20 February, notices featuring the letter ‘E’ were posted on the tree trunks of Rangoon. This did not mean ‘Evacuate’, but the banks evacuated once the notices appeared nonetheless. In fact, E stood for ‘Essential’: all vehicles were to be immobilized except those deemed – and marked – ‘Essential’. On 28 February, ‘W’ notices were put on the trees, and this was slightly less ambiguous. It meant ‘Warning’, and it was the cue for all but non-essential workers to leave. Most had already done so.

  European women and children were given priority on the ships leaving Rangoon for India. Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith later offered the rationale that Europeans would be worse treated by the invaders. In The Story of Burma, F. Tennyson Jesse writes,

  We made a mess of it at the beginning, as we always seem to make a mess of everything at the beginning. When we did begin to establish road convoys and air transport, there were not enough to go round, and in issuing passes for lorry or air transport we had to fix priorities; the more important the person the higher was his priority, and important persons were largely white; but even so the whites were few, for there were very few of them in Burma, and the coloured people secured the majority of the passes though not in proportion to their overwhelming numbers.

  In her book Evacuation Burma, Felicity Goodall makes the point that this was the first time the British had been refugees, and they were not very good at it. In theory, a Defence Ordnance banned European men from fleeing the country. Indian men were not allowed to board the ships as deck passengers; that is, on cheap tickets. This was an attempt to retain the poorer Indian males who manned the docks. But thousands of Indians and Europeans continued to stream ‘up country’ by road, rail or river steamer.

  On 7 March the order was given – code ‘Red Elephant’ – for the complete evacuation of Rangoon. That evening, Royal Marines began heaving cases of whisky into the docks, having drunk as much as was reasonably possible themselves. (They knew the Japanese were partial to a glass of whisky.) The Reverend N. S. Metcalf, a chaplain with the 7th Armoured Brigade (‘The Desert Rats’), ventured towards the Zoological Gardens:

  Fortified by a report that all animals of a dangerous nature had been destroyed, we made our entry [into the Gardens] only to discover that some were very much alive and outside their cages! There was a tense moment when it was discovered that a ‘tree trunk’ was really
a crocodile, and a ‘rope’ hanging from a tree was a full-sized boa constrictor! There was also an orang-utang loose in the town itself, handing out a nice line in assault and battery to anyone who crossed its path.

  It was at about this time that George Rodger, once again going against the flow (this time he’d got hold of a jeep) and returning to Rangoon along the Prome Road after some adventures in Upper Burma, saw an armoured car with motorcycle outriders flashing past in the opposite direction. Inside sat Dorman-Smith. ‘Well, there goes the government,’ Rodger thought to himself. But, rather than fleeing the country, Dorman-Smith was hoping to re-establish his administration in Mandalay.

  The Prome Road was periodically strafed by Japanese fighter planes. A little thing like that didn’t bother George Rodger, and the Indians were as scared of the Burmese as they were of the Japanese. They were repeatedly stopped on their trek. Like the playground enemy who puts out his arm and demands ‘Password!’, the Burmese, armed with swords and axes, had erected illicit tolls on the dusty roads. A length of bamboo would be slung across the Prome Road – not difficult since it was a dusty one-track affair – and the Indians were charged a fee of one rupee before they could continue.

  George Rodger drove on, past the columns of refugees:

  There must have been 50,000 to 60,000 of them. Dock labourers, coolies, and bearers plodded side by side with clerks and government servants, their womenfolk and children trailing beside them. In endless streams they came – women tired out and hobbling along by the aid of sticks; men carrying babies slung in panniers from their shoulders, others carrying small children on their backs. Some of the women carried bundles of dry wood on their heads for, with such a large party, it was not easy to find fuel for their fires wherever they stopped for the night, and it was not safe to forage in the jungle where Burmans might be lurking.