Flight by Elephant

by Andrew Martin

  There is an account of one group of refugees on the Hukawng route spending four hours trying to ignite damp bamboo in order to make tea. It was calculated that at Shamlung, a camp midway along the route, tea was consumed at a rate of five pounds per hundred people per day, in other words almost an ounce each, which is enough for ten cups; but then Shamlung was the camp that came before the highest part of the route, the 4000-foot Pangsau Pass, and the refugees needed fortifying for that. At the same camp, incidentally, the refugees consumed the same weight of Marmite as of tea.

  After being given the once over at the Tea Pot Pub, the refugees left for the nearby railhead of Tipong. From there, they were taken by narrow-gauge train – built to serve the local collieries – to a reception camp at Margherita. This was in the heart of planter territory, as betokened by the rangy railway station, the telegraph poles, the bases of the roadside trees painted white with lime, giving the effect of the trees wearing bobby socks (it is done to deter ants), the dark green tea gardens rising gently on all sides, and the pretty nine-hole golf course on which the camp had been created. Here, finally, nature had been tamed. Bougainvillea flowered by the tees. The tents were on the fairways, and the camp HQ was the musty, wood-panelled interior of the clubhouse hall where tea and biscuits were always on the go, where many a dinner dance had been held, and where the names of past champions and club captains were proudly listed. From here, most began the 500-mile onward journey to Calcutta. The Margherita camp was overseen by a tea planter called Ronald MacGregor Thomson, a friend of Mackrell’s who was equally keen on shikar, and known to all his many friends as Tom-Tom.

  Some vignettes from the Hukawng route …

  Late evening at a camp … two unshaven planters lighting cigarettes under broken brollies before setting off towards the Burmese side to look for stragglers. (These were called ‘back reconnaissances’.)

  The ITA camp at Nampong, on the Assamese side of the Pangsau Pass: half a dozen bamboo and palm-leaf huts – shaggy, lopsided bungalows with the rain falling on them and nobody about; the jungle rearing up vertically behind. (This was the destination for the elephants Gyles Mackrell had been dispatching from Namgoi Mukh.)

  Another camp … a sea of black mud, with some rough lean-tos, a thoughtful looking soldier holding a rifle, rain falling and smoke rising from untended fires; a line of kerosene cans. It might be Passchendaele, except for the trees in the background.

  Two teenage English boys in a zayat, one sitting on the bench watching the rain, the other reclining on the ground in front of him; but the one reclining is dead.

  From late June, military purposes reasserted themselves on the Hukawng route. Back reconnaissances were sent out to pick up stragglers. In late July, the RAF flew the ITA Chief Liaison Officer, a man called Dudley Hodson, over the route. At Shamlung, he thought he saw a lone European man waving at him from among the abandoned huts. As far as the authorities were concerned, the principal evacuation routes were now closed.

  But the drama was still unfolding on the other route to the north, another Valley of Death. In his book of 1946, Forgotten Frontier, Geoffrey Tyson speaks of ‘a more exclusive, clubbable route’, as if a garden party were taking place in the jungles of the Chaukan Pass.

  Captain Wilson Sets Out

  On Saturday 6 June, when Mackrell encountered the Buddhist funeral at the village of Miao, our original pair, Millar and Leyden, finally arrived at the Indian Tea Association base camp on the golf course at Margherita. We might picture the flags that were left on the greens rippling in the hot monsoon wind as Millar and Leyden enter the clubhouse. They were received like heroes, or like ghosts. ‘Our arrival from the Chaukan,’ Millar wrote, ‘caused considerable surprise and stir.’ It would do. In late May an RAF plane had spotted a small party in the Chaukan; it had not been envisaged that it would ever come out. It is likely that Millar and Leyden were offered a very large number of cups of tea indeed.

  Here they took tiffin with three officials: Tom-Tom Thomson, who ran the camp, Major General Ernest Wood, Administrator-General, Eastern Frontier Communications (a role that made him responsible for the overall Burma evacuation), and a senior police officer called Eric Lambert, who was designated Political Officer, Margherita. A Political Officer was an official administering an area of strategic or military importance, usually on the fringes of the Empire. Lambert was shortly to launch his own evacuation rescue – in his case he would locate the Chinese 5th Army, which had got lost in the Naga Hills during a monsoon. It is a testament to the Chinese reputation for unruliness that it was thought necessary to protect the head-hunting Nagas from them. Lambert had been a magistrate in the Naga Hills, and had led expeditions to try to stop head-hunting, so he knew the territory. He would find the Chinese (about 3000 men), then escort them into Assam, shielding the local Nagas from their depredations. As a reward, he would be presented by Chiang Kai-shek himself with the Chinese Army Medal (First Class) and, in spite of being Irish, he would be commissioned a general in that army. But that wouldn’t happen until July.

  Meanwhile, Lambert, like Thomson and Major General Wood, was in a slightly embarrassing position vis-à-vis Millar and Leyden: pleased to see them, but owing them an explanation as to why no ground party had been sent to look for them. Lambert explained that it was the combination of the Chaukan Pass and the monsoon that had been decisive. Nobody could survive that. Anyhow, the message from Millar and Leyden was that the party spied by the plane must have been the railway party of Sir John and the Rossiters, and that Gyles Mackrell had gone to look for them.

  Guy Millar, ever eager to do anything but go to bed for about a week (to which he would have been thoroughly entitled), proposed a plan. He would be driven at speed to the airbase at Dinjan, where he would board a plane and be flown over the Chaukan. He would try to spot Sir John, or at least try to spot Mackrell, with whom he had arranged, during their nocturnal parley, a system of communication by signals. What Millar proposed to do next, having signalled to Mackrell, is not recorded, but it doesn’t much matter, because Major General Wood scotched the plan immediately. He explained to Millar that three RAF planes had been ‘lost’ flying over the Chaukan in search of evacuees. It seems it was as dangerous to fly over the Chaukan in the monsoon as it was to walk through it. There was the ever-present danger of crashing into a mountain, what with unpredictable thermals, lightning and the likelihood of the windscreen wipers being overloaded by rain.

  On the other hand, the rescue could not be left in the hands of Mackrell who, even with his twenty elephants, was essentially undertaking a one-man mission. And so phone calls were made, telegrams were sent, runners were dispatched through the steaming rain and another, bigger, rescue party was assembled. It would comprise two units of Assam Rifles under the command of an amiable Yorkshireman called Captain John Reginald Wilson, who – very much unlike Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith – was known to all as ‘Reg’.

  Reg Wilson was born in York in 1902; his father kept a big stationery shop in the middle of the town. He attended a private school where he excelled at all sports. According to a surviving relative, ‘He loved sport, and he loved action.’ After leaving school, he began training to be a tenant farmer at a village just inland of Scarborough. He also joined the Green Howards regiment as a territorial – that is, part-time – soldier. Even so, rural Yorkshire did not offer a sufficiently dynamic life, and in 1927 he went out to India, probably having seen an advertisement in a paper seeking trainee tea planters. In Assam, he became the manager of a tea garden, working for the firm of Duncan Brothers, and Reg Wilson was the ideal tea planter. He was good-looking, with swept-back, pomaded hair, and as popular with his Indian staff as his fellow planters. He more than held his own at polo, tennis and golf. He was also – a further mark of amiability – a chain-smoker. All in all, according to the same surviving relative, Reg Wilson was ‘something of a playboy’, but he was also a major jungle wallah, and in early 1942 he had volunteered to work as a civilian on the ITA
relief effort in the Hukawng Valley. In mid-1942, he was made a captain in ‘V’ Force, a unit created in anticipation of a Japanese invasion of Assam. It would engage in guerrilla attacks on the enemy, in cooperation with the Gurkha soldiery of the Assam Rifles.

  Late on that Saturday, Reg Wilson was taken to the government bungalow at Margherita, where Lambert gave him a chit to the effect that he, and not the freelance Mackrell, was in charge of the Chaukan rescue. British Assam, like British Burma, was a small world (except physically) but Reg Wilson had somehow avoided meeting Gyles Mackrell, and he refers to him in the early stages of the diary he kept as ‘Giles’ Mackrell.

  An indication of the urgency of his mission lies in the fact that Reg Wilson began packing to follow Mackrell at 3.45 a.m. on Sunday 7 June. He did so at the golf course in the pouring rain. He was not given any elephants. None could be mustered in time. Instead, he would have, besides his two detachments of Assam Rifles, forty porters, but these, unlike the Abors retained by Mackrell, were from the political porters, raised by the British from among the tribes of Assam – professional porters. They were known for their rigid working practices. They would walk a fixed number of miles for a fixed amount of money, and they tended to win any arguments about those terms of engagement by sitting down and refusing to move. Wilson also had his own Medical Officer, an Indian called Dr Bardoloi.

  Besides such basics as rice and tea, here are some of the things Wilson asked the porters to carry:

  Thirty-six umbrellas.

  Eight bottles of rum.

  One case of tinned sausages.

  One case of Heinz Baked Beans.

  One case of Bonax. (Wilson describes it as being ‘like Bovril’.)

  A hundred and sixty blankets.

  He was told he would be able to collect mosquito nets from the village of Miao.

  Elephant Trouble for Mackrell

  As all these plans were being made to supplement Mackrell’s mission, the man himself was being his customary, purposeful self.

  In their jungle encampment, Mackrell and his mahouts woke early on the morning of Monday 8 June and struck out towards the Dapha river behind their newly recruited Mishmi guide. Mackrell led the men and their elephants over what he called ‘a wonderful road’, which in that territory meant something about six feet wide with more rocks than red mud and with enough clearance above the elephants for the mahouts to sit up top without having to swing their axes at the oncoming branches. The party was ascending, and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Hugh Stockley wrote in his book The Elephant in Kenya, ‘The nautical roll of a big bull [elephant] going away slightly uphill is most pronounced, almost inducing one to break into a chanty.’

  It was raining heavily, of course, but Mackrell was noting with admiration ‘the really huge timber’ – trees of 150 feet or more – and the great cliffs that bounded the Noa Dehing. But by 2 p.m. the Mishmi guide was tired. He wanted to veer off the route and go to Tinguan, his home village along the Debang river, for a rest and a smoke of opium. And the mahouts made it clear that they quite fancied doing the same. Mackrell reminded everyone, in case they had forgotten, that ‘we were trying to save the lives of some starving people and that every hour might count’. But he didn’t just rely on windy exhortation. Mackrell doubled the Mishmi’s fee to twenty rupees, and said he could ride on an elephant. As for the mahouts, he knew that they were keener on going to the village for a rest rather than a smoke. After all, they had their opium on them. He promised them a rest shortly, and he persuaded them – again, bribery may have been involved – to have a ‘whip round’ of their opium. It came to about a quarter of a pound, and some was given to the Mishmi, so he had the prospect of a smoke when they came to their resting point. This satisfied the Mishmi who, as Mackrell acknowledged, ‘really was giving up a lot’ in going so far out of his way to help them. He was giving up more than he knew.

  Where did a man like Mackrell stand on the opium question? To have distributed the stuff, and encouraged men to smoke it, would have been not only frowned on in Britain, but was also illegal. It was illegal in Assam as well, but the illegality was only technical. The British did not want to alienate thousands of peasant farmers in Bengal by stopping the production of opium. And the British had been using opium to bribe Indians ever since the days of the East India Company. This was widely known back home, and objected to by some evangelical Christians, who in the early twentieth century would endeavour to wean Indians off opium by sending out a then-legal opium derivative sold in bottles that proudly proclaimed it to be ‘non-addictive’ – namely heroin.

  It was 2.30 p.m. by the time all this had been sorted out and they got going again. The Mishmi guide warned Mackrell that there was no prospect of reaching the Dapha river that day, but they pressed on, into the sort of scenario that would have given most people a nervous breakdown, but that Mackrell tended to describe simply as ‘not very satisfactory’.

  ‘At 4pm,’ he wrote, ‘we ran into the middle of a very large herd of wild elephant, quite sixty of them.’ Soon, the wild elephants were on all sides amid the trees, and amid the rain, in the gathering darkness. Now, if you are surrounded by wild elephants, the one thing you must not do is come between a cow and her calf. That is one circumstance guaranteed to bring on a charge. The overriding purpose of a herd of elephants is to protect the calves. At any sign of danger the proper place for the calf is either immediately to the side of, or below, the mother. The main danger in the jungles of Assam in 1942 was tiger – a quarter of all elephant calves were killed by tigers at the time. Men are normally safe from wild elephants, but not if the calf seems threatened, and the calf has two particular bodyguards, neither of which is the father who, by the time the calf has been born, has become rather detached from the mother. But she has by then enlisted another female, a sort of ‘auntie’ figure, to help with the childcare, and this elephant becomes as protective of the calf as its mother, so doubling the danger to any humans who might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And Mackrell and his men had ‘unfortunately’ interposed themselves in just this way. So Mackrell walked warily, rifle in hand; he was afraid he might have to shoot, not that a loaded rifle is any guarantee against an angry elephant.

  Then an aeroplane flew over; Mackrell didn’t know what kind because it was hidden by the canopy of trees. Most likely it was one of the transport planes carrying supplies to Kunming – one of the ‘Chungking Taxis’.

  Whatever it was, it flew low and loud and elephants do not like noise. It is one of their endearingly middle-aged characteristics, along with their usually docile nature, and their appearance of wearing a pair of baggy corduroy trousers. Mackrell’s own elephants didn’t mind so much, but the wild herd began trumpeting, that is, screaming with rage. On top of this, the rain had increased, and Mackrell’s own herd had come to a precipitous ascent with rivers of red mud flowing down between the trees, causing the animals to skid and slither, and in some cases topple over while others proceeded cautiously, on their knees, but even their loads would slide to the side, all of them being overloaded, the four elephants having been left behind at Miao. In addition, Mackrell and his men were beginning to be attacked by hundreds of leeches.

  By 8 p.m. it was pitch dark and they needed to camp; the mahouts were hungry, and the Mishmi wanted to smoke his opium. But there was no level place, no water for the elephants, and when Mackrell lit his hurricane lamp and swung it before his face, he saw – through the hissing rain – that the ground was absolutely swarming with leeches.

  A leech is a shiny, slug-like worm – a living ooze – with suckers at each end. Not all feed on blood; some feed on small invertebrates, eaten whole. Leeches progress like the proverbial inchworm, back end coming up to the forward end, making an arch, before the forward end moves on again. They breed in the monsoon, and wait on the ground, on tree trunks, on leaves, for their prey, which they detect by sound or vibration. As the walker approaches, the leeches begin moving hurriedly towards him, the ones on th
e leaves making the leaves shake. The walker feels he is the victim of an evil conspiracy. It is like being ambushed by a street gang: one attacker steps out from a doorway, another is already in your way, a third drops down from a window ledge (because a classic leech move is to drop into your hair, or down the back of your neck), and they close in from all directions. The anterior and posterior suckers engage, and the leech bites as the former is applied. An anaesthetic is secreted, so that the bite is painless, and an anti-coagulant. The leech drinks until it is full, and an engorged leech can be as big as a banana. It then drops off, perhaps bouncing as it lands. To remove a leech before that point, you can scrape away the suckers with a finger nail, but you have to be careful not to rip the teeth away: this will tear the wound and could cause it to go septic.

  It was odd, Mackrell reflected. He had plenty of jungle experience, but not so much of jungle at night, and he had always been told that leeches were not active after dark. A man who knew leeches was Frank Kingdon-Ward, the great plant hunter. In a book about some of his wanderings of 1914, In Farthest Burma, he devoted a whole chapter to ‘Infinite Torment of Leeches’:

  There is nothing more horribly fascinating than to see the leaves of the jungle undergrowth, during the rains, literally shaking under the motions of these slender, bloodthirsty, finger-like creatures, as they sway and swing, then start looping inevitably towards you … Leeches entered literally every orifice except my mouth, and I became so accustomed to the little cutting bite, like the caress of a razor, that I scarcely noticed it at the time. On two occasions leeches obtained such strategic positions that I only noticed them just in time to prevent very serious, if not fatal, consequences.

  Kingdon-Ward knew a good method of dealing with them. ‘The easiest way to get rid of a leech is to drop salt on it; the pressure set up through its porous skin soon sucks it inside out practically.’ The trouble was that ‘… one does not as a rule carry a salt cellar in one’s pocket’. Another method – and one favoured by your typical heavy-smoking British soldier – was to touch the leech with the burning end of a cigarette. This causes the leech to release its bite, and it is satisfying to imagine the foul thing screaming in agony, but the defence mechanism that causes it to widen its jaws might also prompt the leech to vomit its stomach contents into the wound, increasing the risk of infection.