Flight by Elephant

by Andrew Martin

  A word that comes up in connection with Gyles Mackrell, as he seemed to others in his later years, is ‘shy’ and – perhaps made reticent by the death of his father – he obviously did not put himself forward as a schoolboy. A browse through the school magazines of the time reveals that he was not in any First XV or First XI, or indeed any Second XV or Second XI. Neither his batting average nor his bowling analysis is deemed worthy of mention. He is not listed as winner of the Carr Divinity Prize, the Sherry Divinity Prize, the Engledue Latin Verse Prize, or even the Wilson Prize for Carpentry … or any prize at all – ‘And there were a lot of prizes at the school,’ says Alan Scadding. ‘They were an attempt to encourage the boys after the mutiny.’ Fittingly enough, given the amount of time he would spend in the jungle, Mackrell did join the Natural History Society, but even here he was low-key.

  He did not participate in what appears to have been the main activity of the Natural History Society: measuring the amount of rain falling on Epsom. He did not log the number of times he saw or heard a song thrush. Mackrell may or may not have been one of the boys sitting close to the camera when a photograph was taken of the Society on a picnic on the Downs. More likely, his would be one of the indistinct faces at the far end of the long tablecloth stretched over the grass, on which a few bits of cake are sparsely dotted.

  But in July 1901, he did briefly approach centre stage. A report of the recent doings of the Natural History Society states, ‘On a field trip to Oakshott, Mackrell took Acidalia trigeminata, an insect new to our lists.’ It is otherwise known as the Treble Brown Spot Moth, and in his beautiful book of 1869, Illustrated Natural History of British Moths, Edward Newman writes, ‘The moth appears on the wing in July, and has occurred in Devonshire, Hampshire, Sussex, Berkshire, Suffolk, Gloucestershire, and Worcestershire.’ It was pretty rare. Most natural history societies – and there were a lot in Edwardian Britain – would have thought it worth recording.

  Epsom College was a cockpit of empire builders; most English public schools of the time could be so described. This was the heyday of the New Imperialism, a systematic promotion of empire in the face of international competition; the magnanimous shouldering of ‘the white man’s burden’. The Boys’ Empire League, founded in 1900, set out its stall as follows: ‘Every member promises to treat all foreigners with Christian Courtesy and, in the spirit of noblesse oblige, to try to do nothing that would lower his country in their eyes.’

  A photograph of the school library at Epsom College shows a chilly looking room, rather sparsely furnished with books themselves, but with crossed rifles on the wall along with what look like African tribal shields. In 1899, Lord Rosebery, that great Imperial advocate, became President of the School. On Wednesday 22 November of that year, the Debating Society held a literary evening: ‘Before a poor audience, the following read selections from Rudyard Kipling’s works: A. H. Platt: Gunga Din, from Barrack Room Ballads; G. Neligan: Fuzzy-Wuzzy, from Barrack Room Ballads.’ The latter begins, ‘We’ve fought with many men acrost the seas,/An’ some of ’em was brave and some was not:/The Paythan an’ the Zulu an’ Burmese;/But the Fuzzy was the finest o’ the lot.’

  Gyles Mackrell was ‘on the classical side’, which is perhaps why his war diary of the monsoon season of 1942 is so casually elegant. His rankings show him in the middle of the forms in his early years, but sinking. In the lower fourth, he was fifth from bottom out of twenty-two. In the lower fifth, he ended by striking, for once, a resounding note: plum bottom out of twenty. By now, he would have been considering his future. What with being bottom of the class, university was out. He would have been reading in the school magazine of the choices made by Old Boys. Many trained as doctors, mainly at London University, but there was another persistent theme: ‘The Reverend Canon F. E. Carter, of Canterbury, has been appointed to the Deanery of Grahamstown.’ ‘Captain C. S. Spong, Royal Army Medical Corps, and G. D. Hunter, have been awarded the Distinguished Service Order’ in recognition of their services during the Sudan Expedition. ‘R. M. Carter has passed into the Indian Medical Service.’ And then there was his own brother, who, being perhaps even more unacademic than Gyles (Scadding suspects so, having trawled the records of both), was listed in 1901 as follows: ‘A. Mackrell has been appointed to the Indian Staff Corps and has left England for his station in India.’

  Here was a route indicated to a perhaps under-confident young man. ‘Going out east’ was a standard option for ‘younger sons’, and both the Mackrells were younger sons in that they would have to earn their keep. If you proposed going to India without the top-drawer academic ability required by the Indian Civil Service, then the army was the easiest way, not least because half the British population of India was in the army. There was another option for the less bookish sort of boy: tea growing in Assam. According to Alan Scadding, ‘a number of boys at the school had done very well at that’.

  In the event, Gyles Mackrell would do both, as we shall see, and as a result he would step right into the pages of the adventure books in the school library. The reserved and undistinguished schoolboy would find in India a playground far more suited to his nature than the sports fields of Epsom College.

  Sir John Meets the Commandos

  We last saw Sir John Rowland on 17 May. He was being rained upon and besieged by insects in the jungle village he identified as Hpaungmaka. He had just dispatched Millar and Leyden. Shortly afterwards, he also sent some of the porters retained by himself and Rossiter back to Hkam Ho for more rice. The porters returned with the rice on 21 May, but while away they had decided to threaten a strike, since Sir John was keeping three days’ wages in hand. Sir John had an argument with them about this, which he lost. ‘Eventually agreed to pay them daily which is a bad arrangement – however there was no alternative.’

  On 22 May, the railway and Rossiter parties set off at a slow pace, together with about thirty porters: enough men carrying enough rice for what Sir John envisaged as a 300-mile trek. ‘During the day’s march,’ he wrote, ‘we followed the Paungma River which we had to cross thirty-six times for some extraordinary reason.’ (The reason would be that the river meandered.) All the time they were climbing towards the Chaukan Pass, and all the time it was pouring with rain. Conversation did not take the form of pleasant chit-chat: Sir John wrote: ‘True, as a leader, I almost – and indeed did – hammer some people and lashed everyone with my tongue when they were for giving up and so drove them along …’

  On 24 May, the parties had reached a river called the Nam Yak. It was raining and the river was in heavy flood. Eric Ivan Milne, the forty-three-year-old official of Burma State Railways, was running a temperature. They camped on the ‘wrong’ side of the river, the east side. They had yet to cross it. Their camp involved some tents, some strung tarpaulins and some bamboo and palm-leaf bashas. They lit a fire, and flew a bed sheet from a tall bamboo, in the hope of attracting aeroplanes.

  Here, at noon on the 24th, the railway and Rossiter parties were joined by a third lot: seven amiable jungle wallahs-cum-soldiers who had been rapidly co-opted into the effort against the Japanese.

  At the time of the invasion, any young British male in Burma became an army officer more or less overnight, the default options being either the above-mentioned Burma Rifles or in the paramilitary Burma Frontier Force. This body (British officers, largely Gurkha soldiery) had been created to do for Burma what the Assam Rifles did for Assam – keep the minorities in line – but it became a more generalized defensive force on the eve of the invasion, before disintegrating under the pressure of events. All of the following four men were in either of these two forces, and their de facto leader was the oldest of their number, a thirty-nine-year-old Scotsman called Ritchie Gardiner.

  Ritchie Gardiner – and you don’t end up being called Ritchie unless you’re a likeable man – had taken a degree in mining at the Royal Technical College in Glasgow. A requirement of the course was that students spend a year working in a coal mine, and the experience helped
develop in Gardiner a social conscience and an interest in politics. In Burma, he rose to become a ‘senior forest man’ with the timber merchants MacGregor’s. As such, he was based in Rangoon, but spent eight months of the year ‘on tour’ in the jungles, which he somehow managed to combine with having a seat on Rangoon City Council. As a responsible and respected citizen of Rangoon, Gardiner had been one of those entrusted with the task of wrecking the city in the face of the Japanese advance – the ‘last ditchers’. Job done, he escaped Burma in a boat from Rangoon, but he then came back ‘to see if he could be any use’ against the Japanese. He would keep a diary of his second attempt to escape the country.

  He was accompanied by his colleague at MacGregor’s timber merchants, a Lieutenant Eric McCrindle. There was also Captain Noel Ernest Boyt. He, too, was a forestry man, but in his case with the firm of Steel Brothers. Boyt was wiry, capable, pipe-smoking. In his diary, Gardiner presents him as amusingly gung-ho. Uniquely among the Chaukan refugees, he had no reservations about the pass, and was willing to march into it ‘with just biscuits and cheese’.

  Then there was Second Lieutenant William Arthur ‘Bill’ Howe, at thirty the youngest of the four. He had been an employee ‘up country’ (in north Burma) of the Anglo-Burma Rice Company. He was not therefore a forestry man; he was, as Ritchie Gardiner noted, without any disparagement, a ‘non-jungle wallah’.

  Like Gardiner, Bill Howe kept a diary, a very ebullient one in the circumstances. (On the apocalyptic Sumprabum road, he had found on the back seat of one of the abandoned cars a manual called Sexual Improvement by Exercise; it had flicker pages at the back to show what might happen if you followed the book’s advice. ‘Odd situation,’ he wrote, ‘everything burning, the Japs presumably coming up the road, and us having a giggle.’)

  Whatever their regiments, it seems that Gardiner, McCrindle, Boyt and Howe were also attached to something called the Oriental Mission. It sounds like one of the American evangelical churches that brought Christianity to Upper Burma, but was in fact something rather more glamorous: a network of small Special Operations units whose job was to foment resistance to the Japanese. But so far it hadn’t done much fomenting, just ‘a lot of marching about in the jungle’, according to young Howe. Along with Gardiner, McCrindle, Boyt and Howe at this early stage, but forming a separate team or bond of friendship, there was also a Major Lindsay, a Captain Steve Cumming and Corporal Sawyer, a radio operator. These three had actually been functioning as a unit of the Oriental Mission, as opposed to just training, but there were no diarists among them, so they are doomed to a shadowy role in this story. We will call all these seven ‘the Commandos’, and Sir John called them ‘a dashed stout crowd’.

  The Commandos had set off from Sumprabum on 13 May in good heart. They were carrying two wireless sets, and they had just made contact with ‘Calcutta’, who replied that arrangements would be made to meet them coming through the Chaukan Pass, together with essential rations, medical stores and guides. The Commandos were accompanied by their own thirty Kachin porters, with whom they were on good terms. They paid them in silver rupees – ‘at a rate,’ Ritchie Gardiner wrote, ‘which would be considered fantastic in normal times’ – and opium. (‘No opium,’ wrote Gardiner, ‘no coolies. It is perhaps a shock to those unacquainted with local customs to learn of this.’) After their first two days’ march, Gardiner wrote, ‘My only fears now are malaria and knees’. (He had weak knees.) He was ‘Taking ten grains of quinine every other day for former and trusting God for the latter!’

  But soon the word ‘heavy’ begins to recur in the diary: ‘very heavy going’, ‘heavy mud’, ‘heavy evergreen jungle … and LEECHES, in numbers I have never seen before.’ Each Commando would at some point find a leech up his urethra, and Ritchie Gardiner woke up one night after dreaming of eating a succulent bit of steak, to find a leech attached to the roof of his mouth.

  When, on that 24 May, the Commandos met up with Sir John, they told him of the expected relief party, which he pronounced ‘very cheering news’. He now had two irons in the fire, the first being Millar and Leyden.

  Ritchie Gardiner declared Sir John’s camp on the Nam Yak in a plantation of young poplars a ‘topping site’. From it, the Chaukan Pass could be seen: a gap in the treeline disappearing into clouds. Gardiner wrote, ‘It cheered me as a timber man to see our first pines – a group of 5 trees with fine clean stems of 70–80 feet, and 7–8 foot girth at breast height.’ Edward Wrixon Rossiter appreciated them, too; he identified them as Pinus excelsa. This Trinity College Dublin intellectual then cooked everyone a curry, perhaps from a recipe taught him by his Shan wife, and he managed to serve cake and coffee afterwards. But Eric Ivan Milne, railwayman, stayed in his tent when dinner was served around the fire. Dr Burgess-Barnett confirmed that Milne’s temperature had risen to 105. He was in no state to resume the trek.

  On 25 May, Rossiter, mindful of his pregnant wife, was for pushing on. He did not think it necessary that everyone should wait for Milne. He and his party and the Commandos set off, but Sir John and the railway party remained behind with Milne, who couldn’t stand up. On 26 May, the railway party finally did set off, wading the Nam Yak and carrying Milne on a stretcher made from a ground sheet and two tree branches. That morning, an aeroplane passed overhead but ignored them. It was Sir John’s fate to be regularly ignored by passing aeroplanes. The planes in question were probably ferrying supplies from Assam to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in occupied China, flying over what the pilots – mainly Americans – called the Hump, the eastern end of the Himalayas. These flights were in default of a road link to China, the Japanese having cut the Burma Road in April. In response, a new road, the Ledo Road, would be built, work getting properly underway in December 1942, this one approaching China across Upper Burma, and beginning from Ledo in Assam.

  The railway party entered what they took to be the Chaukan Pass at 11.20 a.m. on 28 May. Here they caught up with the Rossiters and the Commandos, and Sir John wanted to know where this famous relief party might have got to, since rations were ‘dangerously low … rice and a few tins of cheese and meat and practically nothing else’. Dashed stout crowd as they might be, the Commandos didn’t know.

  The Wizard’s Domain

  What was this place they were in? They were on the border of India and Assam. They were at a height of 7000 feet above sea level. The trees had become more like the trees at home, but also less like anything on earth. There were what might have been chestnut trees, except they were improbably big, and there were rhododendron trees, not bushes. It was rather cool, raining in such a way that it was difficult to imagine it ever stopping raining, and there was no other sound. Sir John described the setting as ‘a weird, eerie forest which resembled the Wizard of Oz’s domain’. By coincidence, the Commando diarist Ritchie Gardiner said the same: the trees ‘are gnarled and look very old. They are frequently hollow at their base and the trunks and branches heavily festooned with moss, which gives them an unearthly and depressing appearance, reminiscent of the forest in “The Wizard of Oz”.’

  You can see why The Wizard of Oz (released in 1938) might have been on their minds. What does Dorothy say after the tornado? ‘I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’ And ‘People keep disappearing around here.’ The strange, rain-filled, melancholic light of her enchanted forest, the ferns of incredibly bright green, the trees of enormous girth … these all might have seemed familiar to our Chaukan wanderers. (But, in the film, you don’t see the tops of those trees.) There were poppies in Dorothy’s forest, and opium was everywhere in eastern Assam. Our evacuees were trying to follow a red-mud rather than a yellow brick road, and their destination wasn’t the Emerald City … but it was verdant enough: the vast acreage of dark green tea bushes in Assam. Like the film, our story has featured a little dog that goes missing, and it will feature a potentially malicious monkey. On a more grandiose level, we could ask who or what corresponds to the Wicked Witch of the West, and the Wicked Witch of th
e East? And as for the Munchkins … better not to speculate, perhaps.

  Gardiner thought the pass beautiful as well as frightening, and he picked five orchids that he did not think had been taken before, including an unearthly copper-coloured one. Since ‘there was nothing in their weight’ he put them in his pack.

  The forest was all around, rising steeply on both sides, and there was no clear forward path to be seen. This country was in fact suspiciously unpass-like. There might be a very simple explanation for that, said Sir John, who liked simple explanations. Perhaps they were not in the Chaukan Pass at all. On the way up, Sir John had seen another saddle on a mountain to the south, and he’d been thinking for a while that that seemed a better route. It could hardly be a worse one.