Flight by Elephant

by Andrew Martin

  The next morning, Sunday 7 June, Mackrell and his men took their twenty elephants down to the sandy banks of the river. They were accompanied by some of the villagers, including the headman, Mat Ley. It had stopped raining, but the clouds were mustering for another downpour and the water still raced. While grateful for Mat Ley’s offer of boats, Mackrell was determined to cross with the elephants. It would be no harder for them to cross with their loads than without, and the elephants were needed on the other side – for marching up to, and then crossing, the notorious Dapha. The mahouts roved up and down the white stones of the riverbank, looking for crossing places. Some of the elephants seemed keener on finding them than others. A few had wandered over to graze on bamboo leaves in a thicket some distance from the bank, as if to say, ‘River? What river?’

  Mackrell had his eye on a particular mahout. He was called Gohain, and he was Mackrell’s personal mahout, his chauffeur you might say, and he was aboard a male elephant called Phuldot. (All captive elephants are given names, but this is in order that they can be talked about rather than because they answer to their names. If you stand a few feet away from an elephant and call out its name, it will slowly fix you with a rather disparaging stare with its tiny white and bleary eyes, and that’s about it.) Phuldot was a good elephant, and Gohain was a good mahout.

  Phuldot was already knee-deep in the water, and Gohain was talking to him. He called Phuldot ‘samboyt’, meaning ‘sir’. The word ‘agad’ would have featured, meaning ‘forward’. Phuldot began walking through the seething water, Gohain bantering with him all the time – ‘We’re in rather a hurry, sir, if you don’t mind’. He was lightly tapping Phuldot with the side of the sword-like stick called an ankus; he did not prod Phuldot with the sharp point – that was only used for a reproof. Midway over, Phuldot disdainfully lifted his trunk, a small accommodation to the seething river. He wavered slightly in the middle, but at no point did Phuldot lose his footing on the shifting rocks of the river bed. When Phuldot emerged on the north bank the tide mark only came two-thirds of the way up his body, and all the luggage he carried was dry.

  By now, some of the others – elephants being herding animals – had begun to follow, but not all of them. One began to signal distress, waving its trunk and trumpeting when only a few yards in. Unprompted by its mahout, the elephant suddenly collapsed into the second amphibious mode: starting to swim with trunk upraised. But the tide was too strong, and it scrambled up onto the same bank further down. At this, three others began trumpeting, and turning away from the water. Their loads were removed, and the mahouts began trying to get them to swim across …

  By the middle of the afternoon, Mackrell had got sixteen of his twenty elephants across the Noa Dehing. The other four remained on the north bank, in the care of the villagers of Miao. Their loads had been distributed among the bolder sixteen, minus a certain number of rice sacks, which Mackrell left at Miao in the care of some men of the Second Battalion of the Assam Rifles, who would begin to create a support camp there – another staging post for refugees.

  Over the next few hours, Goal Miri led the way through the thickening jungle, earning his 200 rupees, but Mackrell decided that the track he was using was not the most direct. For now, he pressed on and, with the light fading, the party came to that ‘small’ tributary of the Dapha, namely the Debang river. After crossing the river, Mackrell noted, ‘We saw some Mishmis fishing.’ Now it will be becoming apparent that if you were going to meet anyone at all thereabouts, it was going to be Mishmi tribesmen fishing. These were not the same ones who had assisted Millar and Leyden, but they were equally accommodating. Mackrell explained in Assamese what he was doing, and the leader of the Mishmis (‘a really splendid man’) agreed, for a remarkably low fee of ten silver rupees, to guide his party towards the Dapha along wild elephant tracks – a shortcut, in effect, even if the mahouts did have to chop away at the trees as they progressed. On the evening of the 7th, Mackrell made camp in a clearing. During the night, it started to rain again, and we might picture the rain falling onto the mush of tea leaves left in the billy that stands near the smoking fire.

  War And Tea (Part One)

  In 1834, the free trade movement in Britain led to the East India Company losing its monopoly on the China tea trade. The Company’s focus turned to India, where what seemed like a viable tea plant had been discovered in Assam. In the early 1830s, its viability was confirmed by research carried out at the Botanical Gardens just outside Calcutta, which was fitting since Calcutta would become a staging post for aspirant British tea planters in their journeys to the jungles of the north-east, and a visit to the Botanical Gardens would provide a foretaste of those jungles, a patch of which they would have to clear before settling down to their new lives.

  In 1838, Assamese tea was marketed in London for the first time, and it went down well. It had a strong, malty flavour, making what we know today as ‘English Breakfast Tea’, the name carrying the false implication that it is somehow of English origin. Through the production of this tea, the digging of coal mines, the establishment of brick works and railways, the laying out of cricket pitches and golf courses, the British would chip away at the exoticism of Assam.

  India was not a colony in the literal sense. Its only settlers were the tea planters. In 1884, one George M. Barker published a book called A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam, which was meant as a guide to becoming a planter but reads like one long attempt to put the aspirant off. The book begins: ‘A mens sana in corpore sano is absolutely necessary to resist this dreadful climate: the work is very hard, the sun is a terrible enemy.’ Having decided he can stand the strain, the would-be planter can look forward to the journey out: ‘The much dreaded and talked-of voyage is after all a miserably prosaic affair; uneventful, with scarcely an incident to break the monotony …’ He arrives at the gateway to his adventure, Calcutta, capital of the Raj: ‘Calcutta – giant city though it is – boasts of only one fairly good hotel, the Great Eastern …’

  After a few days in the capital, during which the traveller would be well advised to have some linen suits run up, and to recruit some servants (‘The number of servants required in India is appalling’) there comes the journey ‘up country’. Then, as in 1942, it was not possible to make the whole journey by rail; the latter part would have to be by steamer along what Barker calls the Brahmapootra (Brahmaputra) up to the town he calls Dibrooghur (Dibrugarh). Barker suggests that shooting an alligator from the deck might alleviate the sheer boredom of the trip.

  And so the planter arrives at his new home, Assam, summit of his life’s ambition. Unfortunately, ‘The impossibility of rapid communications render[s] Assam anything but a charming place of residence …’ A good road is ‘traversable by buggy’, but ‘for an average road the only means of locomotion are tats or a hatti, the latter for choice’. A tat is a pony; a hatti is an elephant, and almost the only positive passages in A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam concern elephants. The elephant is ‘the most useful brute in Assam’. In discussing them, Barker’s cynicism falls away: ‘A giant of strength, willing and docile, he goes about his work in a business-like way, dragging gigantic trunks of trees, or carrying heavy loads that would otherwise be a source of perplexity as to how they were to be moved.’ The elephant is the one animal he is against killing: ‘The indiscriminate slaughter of these splendid fellows, under the title of sport, has been rightly tabooed, and a heavy penalty attaches to anyone killing one without special permission.’

  Having cleared his bit of jungle with the aid of his elephants, and planted out his tea bushes, the planter could get into a routine of skirmishing with Nagas, arguments with the labour force (‘Coolie management is the planter’s worst trouble’) and generally being ill. ‘But with quinine, chlorodye and a bottle of brandy, a man can do a great deal towards holding in check the various illnesses that are constantly besetting him.’ It is no wonder, says Barker, that ‘when struck down by fever, solitary and sick, they take to “pegs”’. The
tea planters of Assam were reputed to take too many of them, especially as far as the cerebral types of the Indian Civil Service were concerned. In The Ruling Caste, David Gilmour writes that if one posting was more unpopular than malarial Burma, it was Assam, which was highly malarial and had tea planters: ‘Dismayed by the society of rough and heavy-drinking tea planters in Assam, the young Civilian might yearn for the panelled walls of his Oxford study.’

  A book of 1912, In Abor Jungles by Angus Hamilton, approvingly describes the tea planter as a law unto himself: ‘The tea brews in the planter much the same spirit of jovial independence and hospitality that the breeding of sheep and cattle does in the colonial run-holder.’ In the years immediately before the First World War, the planter was slightly less of a rough diamond than his Victorian predecessor, but he was still tough. The planter himself usually did not own the tea garden he cultivated. He took the heat – literally – for the owner, who stayed in London, thank you very much, and only went out to his garden in the cold season, if at all. The planter, whether employed directly by the owner of the garden or by a managing agency, was paid to be in the front line. He must withstand firstly the other planters, with their heartiness, sportiness, insistence on clubbability, which is why the planter’s wife would also be interviewed when the appointment of her husband was under consideration.

  For the planter’s wife it wasn’t a matter of finding a spider in the bath in the morning … One wife, who was in Assam during the 1950s, found a six-foot-long monitor lizard behind the sofa on her first day. A couple of years later (after her first bout of malaria, this was) the same woman suspected there might be rats in the attic of her bungalow, because she could hear scratching as she lay in bed. In fact, the rats had moved on. They had nested in the hessian that lay between the roof beams, and their urine had made the hessian soft, which in turn attracted snakes: a colony of very venomous banded kraits. One day, the ceiling dissolved, and a banded krait fell on her bed. She wasn’t in it at the time, and she was by now acclimatized to Assam. (For example, she had christened the six-foot monitor, which turned out to reside in the drain of the swimming pool, Rodney.) ‘I just called in the bearer, and he bashed it [the banded krait] with a stick.’ She had ‘about a dozen household servants, but I’d rather not have had any – or maybe just one. They just sat around and stared at you. It was really irritating.’

  This was the rugged world that Gyles Mackrell entered when, on the eve of the First World War, he became an assistant manager with a company that ran a tea plantation at Lungla, Assam. This was 5500 acres in the Surma Valley, the second valley of Assam by its borders of the time after the Brahmaputra Valley. He was also a part-time soldier, having enlisted in the Surma Valley Light Horse directly upon his arrival in India. This small, decorative regiment of 300 or so men – one of about forty volunteer regiments in late Edwardian British India – had a training ground at Lungla. Mackrell must have been doing quite well, because the Surma Valley Light Horseman was not only not paid, but he had to buy his own uniform, which was pricey, what with the knee-high leather boots, the braided tunic and helmet with brass spike and chain; then there were the mess bills and he might opt to buy his own horse. For this, a ‘charger fund’ had been set up by a group of tea agency houses in Calcutta – a clue to the day jobs of the regiment’s members. In 1890, a Major Nicolay, who had examined the Sylhet Squadron, observed, ‘The majority of gentlemen forming this Corps are Tea Planters in the District, generally speaking, good riders and very fair shots, well acquainted with the roads and paths about the country, and … would render excellent service in time of need to Government.’

  The regiment’s founding purpose had been to intimidate the surrounding hill tribes which were always liable to give trouble, and in this sense it was like an elaborate neighbourhood watch scheme for tea planters. But it was also recreational. There were polo tournaments, tennis days, mess dinners and lunches. The members of the regiment prided themselves on their resilience; on the other hand, they did not drill during the rains. A book called Through Fifty Years: A History of the Surma Valley Light Horse, by the Reverend W. H. S. Wood, contains photographs of beautifully dressed men posing in formation in arid fields. One shows a unit of men standing like a football team, while the commanding officer lounges in front like a glamour model. As with the Epsom College magazines, the book records no prizes for Gyles Mackrell, whether for musketry, horsemanship or sport, but there is an appendix headed ‘Decorations and Awards Gained by Members of the Corps’, and here he is mentioned, although it would for something he would do shortly after leaving the regiment.

  When war came, the Surma Valley Light Horse could not stand alone as a fighting force (too small), so it became a unit of the Indian Defence Force, which was a sort of part-time but conscripted home guard for India that lasted until 1919. Payment was introduced, together with route marches and drilling in the rains – all very regrettable to the old hands. But Gyles Mackrell had moved on.

  In early 1916, after a period in North Africa with an Indian Army cavalry regiment, he joined the No. 11 Squadron of that predecessor of the RAF, the Royal Flying Corps. One thing we can say with certainty about any First World War pilot is that he was brave. The plane that recurs most often in the squadrons Mackrell flew with was the BE2, whose initials stand – rather discouragingly – for Blériot Experimental.

  Mackrell trained in France before embarking on the most dangerous job possible: flying planes over enemy trenches in order to protect slower moving artillery observation aircraft. The pilots of No. 11 Squadron were the first ‘fighter pilots’ in that they engaged enemy aircraft in aerial combat. But there were many other ways for them to be killed: by being shot by the enemy from the ground, or accidentally by their own side, or by the malfunctioning of their flimsy aircraft.

  Gyles Mackrell was lucky still to be alive in April 1917, when he returned to England, now as a member of No. 33 Home Defence Squadron, patrolling the North Sea coast. His job was to look out for enemy aircraft or Zeppelins, but there weren’t many of either, and it is likely that, as a second lieutenant flight commander, he also trained pilots.

  In February 1918, Mackrell was back where he belonged: in India, amid life-threatening weather. He was now flying with No. 31 Squadron, whose badge featured the star of India and the motto In Caelum Indicum Primus, meaning ‘First in the Indian Skies’. They were the first RFC squadron to operate in the country. There was little private aviation at the time, so it follows that when, on 8 February 1916, two 31 Squadron officers looped the loop above the squadron’s base at Risalpur (located within the North-West Frontier Province, sixty miles south of the Khyber Pass), this was the first time the feat had been performed in India. Exuberantly looping the loop over Risalpur became a routine activity for the squadron, and it suffered its first fatality in December 1917 when a pilot and mechanic were killed attempting a double loop.

  As with the Surma Valley Light Horse, the original purpose of No. 31 Squadron was the intimidation of tribesmen, in this case those of the North-Western rather than the North-Eastern Frontier. The official history of the squadron recounts, somewhat implausibly: ‘At a Durbar held at Peshawar in February, 1916, two B.E.2’s were demonstrated before all the chiefs of the trans-border tribes. The tribesmen said at the time that “the machines were only large birds and no one could possibly be inside them.” However, when the machines landed and the Chief Commissioner was taken for a flight they remarked that “the days of robbery and murder are at an end. Now the Raj can see all our doings.”’

  In 1917, No. 31 Squadron was engaged in operations against Muslim Mashud tribesmen in the volatile territory of Waziristan, between Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier Province of India. British Political Officers attempted to control the territory by forming alliances with some of the tribesmen, and paid with their lives when the balancing act went wrong. The most rebellious tribe were the Mashuds. There had been skirmishes throughout the war, and, in early 1918, the Mashuds
and their allies were emboldened in their campaign by the British entanglement in the Middle East, and the anti-British incitements of Turkish agents in Afghanistan. An official report called Operations in Waziristan contains sketchy maps that suddenly give way to a ‘vertical photograph’ of the territory: this shows a rocky ravine resembling the surface of the moon. The photograph might have been taken from a plane flown by Mackrell himself. The pilots of No. 31 Squadron were involved in aerial reconnaissance, and bombing raids against the villages of the rebellious tribesmen. The tribesmen’s houses were half underground and made of mud – very hard mud – and, because they were practically impervious to the 20lb Cooper bombs dropped on them, the pilots might aim instead for the adjacent flocks of sheep. (Cooper bombs looked like bombs in cartoons: teardrop-shaped with a fin at the rear end. Early in the war, they had simply been hurled down by the pilot, but by now they were retained under the wings and released by the pull of a lever in the cockpit.)

  It was said the tribesmen would attempt to counter the planes by casting spells on them, and that they would use the unexploded bombs (initially, Cooper bombs often failed to explode) to reinforce their houses. On the other hand, the tribesmen were excellent shots, and often had the opportunity to shoot down on British planes from the peaks of their mountains.

  Most of the pilots operated from Lahore, capital of the Punjab. A note in the squadron records from summer of 1918 reads, ‘The climate conditions at Lahore, in the hot weather always the most unhealthy of Indian stations, have been unusually severe and work is almost at a standstill. Seventy per cent of the personnel at aircraft park are sick.’ Operations in Waziristan describes Waziristan itself as ‘the most unhealthy of the trans-frontier provinces … dysentery, diarrhoea, malaria and sandfly are rife’. Summer temperatures hovered at around 125 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. The planes could only operate in the early morning, otherwise the engines overheated and lost power. As it was, it might take a quarter of an hour to climb 1000 feet. The planes suffered a persistent – and one would have thought pretty fundamental – problem of supply, a shortage of tyres, so the pilots would sometimes take off and land on their wheel rims.