But first some other letters.
A Delivery of Mail
Rossiter put down the biscuit he was eating and fished a chit out of his shirt pocket. It was a missive from deep in the blue, written by fifty-six-year-old Edward Lovell Manley, formerly the Chief Engineer of the Eastern Bengal Railway, house guest of Sir John, and his number two in the jungle. It was addressed to Pearce, the Refugee Administrator for North Assam based at Margherita, and the man who had put Mackrell in charge at Dapha. (Manley knew of the existence of Pearce because he had sent a note to the Tilung Hka party in the last of the food drops, asking them to stay put.)
Manley put Rossiter’s departure from the Tilung Hka camp down to ‘Mrs Rossiter’s pregnancy and the milk shortage’; the Gurkhas and Rossiter’s clerks had followed and Manley had been ‘unable to prevent them in spite of your order to stay put’. Manley then wrote of himself in the third person, viz:
There remain here Manley, Burgess-Barnett and Whitehouse with 4 servants. Whitehouse is suffering from Peripheral Neuritis affecting his legs, and has been very ill. He will have to be carried most of the way. Our food situation … is very serious [and] it is more so now that we have had to give up much of it to the Rossiter party … Do please do your utmost to deliver us from a situation which is becoming desperate.
Was Manley angry at the departure of the Rossiters? It would be hard for any reasonable middle-aged man to quibble about the imperatives of a pregnant woman. He might have advised the couple for their own safety to stay, and it is a mark of their desperation that they did not. Perhaps they had been banking on meeting Mackrell. We do not know their precise plan.
But Mackrell’s new project was clear: go and get Manley, Burgess-Barnett, Whitehouse and the four Indian servants, the last of the Chaukan refugees. He had made a promise to the wife and daughter of Dr Burgess-Barnett. He was not to know that at about this time a telegram was being drafted in the quiet, sunlit study of a house in Sudbury, Suffolk. It would be dispatched to the nebulous sounding address, ‘Railway Board New Delhi’: ‘PLEASE INFORM ME WHERE AND HOW IS MY SON CAPTAIN A O WHITEHOUSE BURMA CHINA RAILWAY LAST NEWS BURMA APRIL’. It was signed ‘Whitehouse’ and it is difficult to imagine the father as looking very different from the imperilled son: a slight, wizened, inoffensive-looking man in tortoiseshell glasses.
Minutes after Mackrell read the letter from Manley, two mahouts on elephants came into the camp. These were men whom Mackrell had sent back to Dapha on the morning the elephant had gone missing. One was his personal, and most trusted, mahout, Gohain. The two had been ordered to collect supplies and bring them back. It turned out they had also brought two letters. The first was from G. D. Walker, the man who had taken over from Eric Lambert as Political Officer at Margherita, and it had been dropped by plane on the Dapha camp soon after Mackrell’s departure. Mackrell read the letter once, then he read it again. The letter was calling off his mission. Mackrell was to return immediately to base, closing the camps at Dapha, Miao and Simon on his way back, and he was to send all his elephants to the Political Officer at Sadiya, who apparently had need of them.
Mackrell then opened the second letter. It, too, had been dropped on the Dapha camp, but a week after the first. It was from Mr Justice Braund, late of the Rangoon High Court, and now Refugee Administrator for the whole of Assam. He was Pearce’s boss, and the top civilian in evacuee management. It said the same thing as the first letter, but more tersely. It ‘confirmed’ the earlier letter (the one Mackrell had just opened, and which Braund obviously thought Mackrell had ignored). Mackrell was to ‘come out’ immediately.
What might be the meaning of this? There was no mystery as far as Mackrell was concerned. Just as the other evacuation routes had been wound up, so now the Chaukan Pass was being shut down, not that it had ever been officially established as an evacuation route in the first place. Taking into account the staging posts at Simon, Miao and Dapha, it was tying up too many soldiers, porters and elephants, all of which were needed for other, military purposes, particularly road building. The majority of those who had entered the pass had now either come through or died. As for the one small party left at Tilung Hka, Mackrell had no doubt that Braund genuinely believed them to be, as he said in his letter, ‘well stocked and not in immediate danger’. Braund must also have envisaged that food drops would resume, and that a rescue would be mounted in the cold weather, when the rivers were down. Of course, the officials must also have envisaged that, assuming everyone at Tilung Hka survived, there would be one extra person to rescue by then, namely the baby that would be born to Mrs Rossiter. They were not to know that, thanks to Mackrell, the Rossiters were now out, and would shortly be sent back towards Dapha by Mackrell. But Manley, Whitehouse, Burgess-Barnett and the four servants remained, and Braund was wrong. They were in immediate danger, as Manley’s letter had just confirmed.
Mackrell wanted his reply to look as official as possible, so he unpacked his typewriter – he had indeed brought one but it had got bashed about on the back of an elephant, and the letter ‘O’ came out as an inky blob. His letter was addressed to Braund, and Mackrell stated baldly that in view of Braund’s order having been written ‘in ignorance of the position … I am only complying with part of it’. He would send orders for Dapha, Miao and Simon to be cleared of personnel, leaving himself no lifeline. But he ‘must’ go on with his rescue. He then wrote a letter to ‘All my loyal helpers’, ordering them to leave the camps. ‘I will find my own way out.’
He gave both these letters to Edward Rossiter to take back with him. He also gave him six elephants, and sent him and his party on to Dapha with all necessary mahouts and porters. Before he departed, Rossiter told something about the food drops. There had been no further drops after 26 July. And the ones that had been made contained not nearly enough food, yet toys by the hundredweight for baby John. There had also been many sackloads of ‘venereal cures’. Clearly these medicaments had been misdirected; there had been enough of them, Mackrell observed, ‘to cure half the force of our gallant Allies for whom this was no doubt thought necessary’, a reference to the Americans.
As Edward Rossiter disappeared into the sun-dappled trees, Mackrell turned and faced the other way: towards the Upper Noa Dehing as it wound away through its great stone canyon.
A Long Wait
As soon as he had dispatched Rossiter, Mackrell and his men crossed the river with the remaining fourteen elephants, taking their camp with them. On the right bank they met up with Havildar Dharramsing who, while Mackrell had been reading and writing letters, had been prospecting forward with a single elephant of his own. This had been a ‘test’ elephant. If it could follow a track towards the Tilung Hka, then so could fourteen others. But there was no suitable track, the ones that might have served being blocked by landslips.
So Mackrell organized what he called a ‘Striking Party’ to go forward on foot, using the track Rossiter had taken. Mackrell did not include himself in this party. As he explained to the others, he was too old. He actually described himself, albeit in Assamese, as ‘an elderly European’. Nor was Havildar Dharramsing in the party. Mackrell would have liked him to lead it, but he was experiencing intermittent fever. Mackrell does name the men of the Striking Party. There were three Gurkhas of the Assam Rifles: Naik Gyanbahadur (Naik meaning corporal), Compounder Havildar Sanam Lama (a compounder is a medical assistant), Lance-Naik Manichand Rai; and six political porters: Gangabahadur, Tami, Santabir, Chintamani, Dilbahadur and Karnabahadur. They were all, Mackrell notes, ‘fit and confident of success’. The men were dispatched on Monday 7 August. They carried fresh onions, cigarettes, potatoes, sugar, butter, dried apple rings, Klim, Marmite, bully beef, soap, Lysol disinfectant and a lilo for Captain Whitehouse.
At a new camp on the right bank of the Noa Dehing, Mackrell commenced a period of waiting – and fishing. On Thursday 10 August he was assembling his fishing rod on the stony banks of the Noa Dehing when he glanced to the left. He saw a rousing sigh
t: men in boats, and not just that, but men in boats going against the current, fighting it, paddling hard, their three long canoes bouncing and swaying in the water. They were boatmen of the Singpho tribe, and they wore circular cane hats. Mackrell was not entirely surprised to see them. Along with the letter ordering him to return to Margherita, another had come, written by one of the Assam Rifles at Dapha. It said that Mackrell’s boats had arrived at Dapha. Later that day, Mackrell wrote of the boatmen: ‘They had been nine days getting up from Dapha. They say the river is terrible.’ One of them, a man called Chandram, said to Mackrell, ‘You asked a hard thing of us Sahib but we are here and ready to go further if you say so although the river is like no river we have ever seen.’ Mackrell wrote, ‘It is a splendid effort.’ Boats and tame elephants were unprecedented this high up the river. Mackrell made tea for all the boatmen and handed out cigarettes.
Mackrell had realized that for any party of sick people to be brought out of deep jungle, they would need transport; they would need to be carried, in other words, and if elephants couldn’t be taken forward, then boats would have to do the job. The boats had been ordered as a back-up, but, now that the way was barred to elephants, they would come into play. Mackrell’s plan was to take them as far upriver as possible, then send a Support Party to intersect at right angles with the track taken by the Striking Party. The Support Party would either then go along that track, catching up the Striking Party, or wait on the track for the Striking Party to come back from Tilung Hka. The two parties would then return, together with the rescued men, to the waiting boats.
On the fine morning of Friday 11 August, therefore, Mackrell left some men, and all the elephants, at the camp he had just established. He and the remainder started going upriver by boat. For much of their journey, rock walls towered 150 feet above them on either side; and the further they went, the more rapids they encountered. Seven times they had to unload all their kit and rations in order to drag the boats over shallow rapids. On the Saturday, they ‘came to a rapid we could do nothing with’, so the men built a camp. The Support Party was dispatched, and this one was led by Dharramsing. Mackrell embarked on another period of waiting – waiting and smoking cigarettes, since, as we have seen, he had no pipe tobacco left. The men in the government bungalow at Margherita had told him that 35,000 cigarettes had been dropped on the Dapha and Tilung Hka camps, and he was supposed to have been impressed by that. But most of them had been lost in the jungle or destroyed on impact.
Mackrell busied himself by improving the track leading down to the camp. As an added safety measure, he made creeper ropes where the track bordered the river. He and the boatmen collected banana leaves to improve the roofs of the bamboo huts. He also watched the river. The danger was that it would rise, and he would have to move the camp and boats to a higher level. The river was certainly capable of reaching the plateau on which he waited; he could tell that by the grey driftwood lying in the long grass. Meanwhile, the weather was sunny and dry, and the driftwood was good for burning.
Mackrell went fishing.
Saw a fish rise opposite camp and got him on the second cast, a 1½lb Boka, which made excellent fish-cakes and some stew for the boatmen. Number of big horn-bills whose tails seem longer than the plains variety keep going over. The small white flowers on the cliff opposite, resembling white primroses but with orchis stems, are fully out and among them a lot of red Nelsoms and some huge scarlet Chlenodendrons, as well as some Rhododendrons.
He was happy in other words.
We have film footage of this period spent far upriver on the Noa Dehing. The camera shows riverside stones, and you can’t tell how big they are. Then a smiling Gurkha walks into view, and you realize that each stone is actually bigger than a house. The camera casually pans past a sheer wall of stone that might be – what? – thirty times taller than a man. Mackrell was never idle, and filming was one way to pass the time. On other occasions, he would set his folding chair and his folding table on a high, flat stone near the river’s edge, and type letters to friends. He enjoyed working in this way, close to the white water; it was just a case of watching out for flying tree trunks. The letters were marked ‘Upper Noa Dehing’ and he would apologise for that broken letter ‘O’.
On the Wednesday, he spent over half an hour playing a fish he’d hooked: another boka, this one weighing 4½lb. ‘It fed the whole camp.’ But thunder clouds were mustering; the river was changing colour, becoming turbid. A rise was on the way. He had heard nothing from either the Striking Party or the Support Party, ‘So all must be well or very wrong, one cannot tell which.’ On the Thursday, he went deep into the jungle to look. He came back in the evening covered in leech bites, and with his shorts torn to shreds.
The next day, he and the boatmen took a walk upriver along the rocks, just in case they could see any sign of anybody or anything. They could not. They made a fire from driftwood, had a cup of tea and one cigarette each and came back to the riverside camp, where they saw Dharramsing and his Support Party. They had seen no sign of the Striking Party, so they had simply left food along what they thought was the right track. Mackrell issued a rum ration to the Support Party, and dressed their sores. It was now twelve days since the Striking Party had left; they were late, and a storm was brewing.
On Sunday the 20th, Dharramsing volunteered to go back into the jungle for another look. Mackrell agreed.
As Mackrell waited, it began to rain heavily. He built a new fire on the margins of the camp, under tree cover. In late morning, he was standing by this fire when a porter from the Support Party returned to the camp. He silently handed Mackrell a chit.
It was written by Manley, and it was the confirmation of success.
They were proceeding slowly because Captain Whitehouse was being carried, but Manley expected to be with Mackrell by about 3.30 p.m. Mackrell walked over to his personal kitbag and unwrapped the plum cake. Thanks to the cellophane, it was still good as new. Mackrell then unfolded and erected the canvas bath, and made sure the bed rolls were all laid out in the bamboo hut waiting to receive the refugees.
It was more like 6 p.m. when the Striking Party and the Support Party came into the camp together. Captain Whitehouse, still wearing trilby and tortoiseshell glasses, was strung over the shoulders of the political porter called Taja Tami, like a scarf. Tami was not a big man, but nor was Whitehouse – not by now at any rate. Dr Burgess-Barnett … Manley … the four servants … all were filthy, exhausted and ill to varying degrees, but not so ill that they couldn’t eat dinner after their hot baths: dall soup, tinned lamb, tinned peas, boiled onions and fresh potatoes. For pudding, tinned peaches and plum cake – and sweet tea, of course, all taken under a wide tarpaulin with the rain sloshing off the edge.
At 7.30 p.m., the refugees filed into their bamboo hut. One hour later, Mackrell went over and had a look in. They were all asleep.
Mackrell returned to the fire and broke out the rum. The porters of the Striking Party told Mackrell how, when they came to a precipitous landslip-headland, a place where it was impossible for a man to walk if he happened to be carrying another man on his shoulders, they had simply dropped Whitehouse into the river, and then run around the headland to catch him on the other side.
The next morning, Mackrell took Whitehouse breakfast in bed, since he couldn’t stand up: tinned sausages and chipped potatoes. It would be a day of eating. Rabbit curry for tiffin. For dinner, steak and kidney pudding, tinned parsnips, beans and potatoes; apple rings and rice-in-Klim for pudding. Mackrell noted that the rescued men were ‘all improving visibly’, all except Dr Burgess-Barnett, who had a high fever. Also, it was still raining so that Mackrell could not dry the rescued men’s clothes, which he had washed.
On the night of Wednesday the 23rd, the Noa Dehing river came to pay a call. Whitehouse and Burgess-Barnett had to be carried to higher ground; and then the boats had to be manhandled up a cliff and out of the way of a whirlpool that had already flung a few tree trunks into the camp,
one of them flattening the custom-built refugee hut. Mackrell erected his personal tent on the higher ground, and put Dr Burgess-Barnett into it. He wrapped himself in a bath towel and rain cape, and lay down between two rocks. In the morning, he was pleasantly surprised that his ‘old enemy’, sciatica, had not returned despite such a generous invitation to do so. It had stopped raining. Mackrell noted, ‘Dr Burgess-Barnett fitter today and Whitehouse looks a little stronger. Manley very weak but looks better. Saw a school of otters in a rapid and some blue sky. Looks hopeful. Took stock of all rations. Not too bad but must be careful. One tea-spoonful of sugar each three times a day is all we must use of that … Decided to have a try at getting down.’
By a combination of elephants and boats, and with – in the case of the latter – some capsizes, Gyles Mackrell reached the Dapha camp once again on 1 October. He stayed there two days, during which he took white stones from the river so as better to define the grave of Captain Street: ‘I am afraid it will go out of sight though very quickly.’
Flight by Elephant Page 22