‘They’re still warm!’
Robert was an expert at lighting and reviving fires in adverse conditions. He slowly gathered a few dead but still wet leaves and gently laid them on the warm ash, waiting a moment. He then began to blow gently upon the base of the ash. It was a painstaking task, especially since he had hardly any energy left, but at last some smoke rose. Before long the leaves on the ash caught alight and he added small twigs until a reasonable fire was burning. My spirits rose and I mustered enough strength to stand up again.
‘I’ll look for some wood to keep it stoked.’
The rains persisted, but thankfully there were no strong winds.
I wandered off and returned with some dead branches to see my brother constructing a tepee of green leaves over the fire. The crude structure served its purpose and gave the fireplace some shelter from the heavy rain.
The only light we had by this time was the glow of the fire. It was too dark to forage for more fuel, so I took it upon myself to ration the wood and use just enough to keep the fire alive. We huddled close to the embers and at least one side of our bodies reaped some benefit. The insects, too, kept away. In the darkness I tried to scrape off some of the leeches that had been sucking on my body for days. For the first time in a long while I fell asleep.
In the morning, with the rain still pelting down, Robert and I set out to find more fuel.
‘You go that way, Colin, and I’ll go over here.’
My mother and sister had found an empty tin and heated some water gathered from puddles. We had learned that a drink of warm water, even without additives, gave us a boost. My shoulder was giving me hell. The wound was spreading right up to the shoulder bone and I began to fear I might lose my right arm, which was already quite useless. We had to keep moving. Something told me we were approaching the border. The track did not appear as steep as on the earlier mountains.
My mind went back to my school days. We had had a keen geography teacher who was also an artist. He had delighted in drawing various countries on the blackboard. He would then instruct the class to note the features that he had shaded in. He then proceeded to erase his drawing and tell the class to replicate his work by memory, to the extent of naming the main rivers and the mountain ranges. It was the recollection of his lessons that led me to believe that our party had negotiated the highest mountains of the region, the Patkoi Range, and was now heading down on to the plains of Assam.
Robert was of the same mind.
‘There are still some highlands to be climbed, but I think we’re getting near the end of the trail.’
We moved on, and the constant resting whenever the fever took hold of me made progress slow. Time and distance meant nothing to me, but I guess that the ground we covered, as we dragged ourselves along, did not exceed three or four miles. Like Robert, I was skin and bone. My hip bones jutted out from my frame and I can vividly recall looking down at my legs whenever I was forced to scrape the leeches off and thinking how thin I was. My mother and sister too were thin but were always bulkier than we boys were.
The track became less stony, but more difficult to negotiate. We sank further into the ooze with every step. My wound got worse and I became easy prey to the flies. Very soon maggots appeared in the wound. I was alarmed by the infestation and had visions of being eaten away by the crawling creatures. I remembered viewing human bodies earlier in the trek being devoured by maggots. However, my mother reassured me.
‘Don’t worry, Colin. It’s nature’s way of cleaning a putrid wound.’
I could hear the roaring sound of the raging stream below and once again our spirits plummeted. All I could think of was how many river crossings there still were between the two countries.
In normal circumstances I would have been delighted to come across a river or stream. There is something that draws young adventurous boys to moving water. But in my present condition the sound of running water dampened my spirit. I dreaded every moment of every water crossing. The trail we had chosen to save our lives cuts through the wettest region on earth. The Hukawng Valley is a unique area; it makes its own climate and nothing about it is right.
As the rain continued to fall the leeches seemed to multiply. People may exaggerate when they tell stories of leeches sucking humans to death, but I have no doubt that the many thousands of the dead along the trek had these blood-sucking creatures, along with other sicknesses, contribute to their deaths. Corpses appeared in increasing numbers. Hundreds lay sprawled in the oozing mud. At the foot of every ascent there were bodies of people who had just lain down and given up rather than take on the next climb.
A year later, when American and Chinese troops began to retrace the refugee trail, the horrible tragedy of the refugee hordes was revealed.
The famous Burma surgeon, Gordon Seagrave, was one of those who retraced the trail with General Stilwell. He wrote in his powerful book Burma Surgeon Returns:
Still standing along the road were some extremely crude shacks, each with its 10–20 skeletons of those who couldn’t get up when a new day came. In one shallow stream, we were horrified to find that the Chinese had placed a long row of skulls to be used as stepping stones. Sex and age and even race could be noted, not by such elusive clues as surgeons use, but by the rotting clothes.
Thinking of his own family, he went on.
When I saw a skeleton clothed in a delicate English dress, I was thankful for Tiny’s departure a year before. Looking at the skeletons of the little boys in khaki shorts I realised they might have been John or Sterling. There were men, women and children of every race and age, their hair white, grey, brown and black still lying beside the whitened skulls; there were English, Anglo– Burmese and Indians – civilian and military…
And yet in spite of the hundreds and hundreds of skeletons we saw, we didn’t see half of those who had died on the refugee trail, for English and Indian and Chinese burial and cremating squads had been at work.
A few months later only a few scattered skulls were left to mark the trail of the refugees. Now we were the first of the refugees to return.
Another unfordable river, I thought. Robert’s precious possession, his rifle, finally became too burdensome and without so much as a word he cast it into the fierce running waters. I watched him as he stood there. He had carried that heavy rifle as if it were an heir-loom through some of the most difficult and arduous sections of the trail. He had treasured it as the only protection we had. My heart went out to him. I loved him, and I had a feeling that, in throwing away his rifle, he had abandoned hope.
The rains eased and heavy fog rolled in. We made the crossing, continued up a steep rise and came across a cluster of huts. It was the first real indication that we were approaching the end of the trail. They were built with roughly sawn timber and resembled a staging post.
Again we were confronted with the dead lying in and around the site. It seemed the earlier dead had been moved a short distance from the campsite, piled high and set alight. The fire had not done the job and charred bodies were visible in piles in other directions. It was a gloomy sight. I felt revolted. I don’t know why: I had seen so many of my kind dead and rotting along the trail. Perhaps it was the sight of the bodies stacked in a pile like timber. I could accept that people must die in difficult situations – in battle or during an air raid, for instance, but it was unnerving and deeply distressing to see corpses stacked up. It all seemed so pointless.
There was a ghostly feeling about the place. We searched the huts for scraps of food but found nothing save a few empty tins of bully beef and condensed milk. We spent the night in a structure that resembled a kitchen. The fireplace was covered with cold damp ash and empty tins. At daylight our little party moved on. None of us had the strength or the desire to walk the few yards down the trail to the river to gather some water. Visibility was not good, but there was nothing to see anyway, just the track ahead. We barely spoke to one another; speaking used up energy. Despite my condition I carried the faint
flicker of hope that we would all survive. Surely somebody would find us soon. As we rounded each bend, I began to have visions of running into a party of rescuers.
The track became less muddy and the climb not so steep. Nevertheless, movement was still difficult and wearisome. We had not eaten for days and yet the little water we could gather in our palms from the indents on the track seemed all we needed. I had gone beyond being hungry. All I yearned for was to be picked up and carried along. I was not blind to the fact that I was now just a bony figure of a person. The others, too, looked very pale and scrawny, especially Robert.
Our clothes were in tatters. Mother and Ethel both wore the longyi [sarong], which was normally wrapped around a woman’s body from the waist down. However, because it was their only remaining garment, they had each drawn it up to cover their chests for modesty. Robert and I were left with only the shirts on our backs, long khaki army garments we had found on the bombed-out train on the way to Myitkyina. Our shorts had long since been ripped to shreds with the constant slipping and sliding on the muddy track. I seldom wore my shirt anyway, because of the chafing of my shoulder wound.
I could see a hopelessness about Robert. It seemed he had given up on being the guardian of our group, the leader whose duty was to see his family through to India. Night followed day with little progress. We were still climbing the slope that led on and on. Without a word, we settled down one evening at another crude lean-to. Miraculously, the fireplace alongside contained warm ashes. Despite his exhaustion, Robert’s expertise came to our rescue, and before long we sat huddled beside warm flames.
Our sense of time had deserted us, but it was probably a few days before we decided to move on. In the meantime, we had all contracted a severe dose of dysentery and were all passing blood from our bowels. None of us had the strength to move very far from our resting place to go to the toilet and as a result even the campsite was turning into a latrine.
We knew we had to make an effort to move. We were driven by the desperate hope that help might be just around the next bend, over the next crossing. We felt sure we were near India now. The question was, how far was the border? How much more did we have to endure?
Chapter 12
White Butterflies
One morning Ethel, Robert and I arose to move on. But Mother, who was leaning against a tree, gestured that she could not muster the strength to get up and keep walking. She kept begging for a drink of warm water.
She whispered, ‘The pain in my stomach…’
I searched around the campsite hoping to find a utensil for heating some water. Buried under some ashes in another fireplace I found a squashed piece of metal, a flattened cigarette tin. I managed to prise it open, scooped up a little water from the muddy ground and placed it in the hot ashes.
We all sipped the warm fluid, which miraculously did ease the stomach pains. ‘We have to get going,’ Robert insisted.
‘Ta [son], I cannot get up.’
In frustration Robert pulled at her hands, but he was too weak to raise her. She said in a faint voice, ‘My children, you must leave me. Go along and seek some help and come back to get me.’
I asked, ‘But, Ama, what if we do not return? What will you do?’
‘Maybe, God permitting, I will go back to my own country and my people. When the war is over you will be able to come back and find me.’ She slipped off her rings and reached for Ethel’s hand. ‘Take these, to exchange for food or anything else in India.’
Ethel said nothing. She was beyond words and beyond tears. She just took the gemstones – sapphires, rubies and emeralds – and gazed at Mother, her face stricken.
I was shattered. My mother was my great love and I could not bear the thought of leaving her in the jungle. I could not accept that this could happen. After all, we had survived the long journey from our home in Maymyo 800 miles away, the bombings, the long trek along the plains with the threat of attacks from the air, the climb over the mountain ranges and the crossings of dangerous rivers. I could not believe that any of us would not survive. And now it seemed that one of us had reached the end of the road.
My whole life had revolved around my mother. I had a special bond with her and had frequently been reminded that I was the most Burmese of all the children.
I remembered my father, on one of his visits to Maymyo, asking my mother, ‘Why does Colin persist in speaking only in Burmese?’
I think it was the Burmese in me that created that special bond with my Burmese mother.
The whole of my young life came flooding back. The reality that I could lose my mother overwhelmed me. Suddenly all I could think about was the fun I had experienced as a child growing up in the care of a person who had showered me with love and affection. There had been hardly a moment in my younger days, until I was forced into boarding school by my father, when I was not near my mother. She was always there like a guardian angel. I could not accept that all those good times were soon to end.
Mother kept drifting in and out of consciousness, awakening to tell us to move on. She repeatedly whispered, ‘Your father is waiting for you, he is expecting you.’
Robert and Ethel were utterly broken. Full of grief, Ethel took my arm.
‘Colin, nothing more can be done for Ama,’ she whispered gently, but I would not budge.
The two of them had somehow accepted the situation, and they began to move off together. They were too weak even to cry. I watched them dragging themselves up a slight incline into the mist that had descended. I tried again to get my mother up, but it seemed that her spirit to continue had gone. She looked at me and I sat down and hugged her, and that special smell of a mother, the scent that bonds a mother and her child, flooded back.
It was the scent of her body I had experienced so often during the days in Maymyo, the days when we all gathered around her on the verandah of our home at night to listen to the sounds of insects and animals as they foraged around in the bushes that surrounded our home.
Despite having witnessed the death of thousands along the way, I did not ever foresee this situation. Day after day along the trek, even during the most difficult times, I had never contemplated our death. Certainly there were times when, utterly exhausted, I felt like lying down and drifting into a long sleep, but death, never! But now I had reached the point in the trek when I would willingly have stayed with my mother and died with her.
I looked up the track. Ethel and Robert had disappeared from view. My mother touched me.
‘Ta [son], it is your duty to leave me and join your brother and sister.’
‘No, no, Ama, I can’t. I can’t leave you.’
‘Son, if you love me, you will go and seek help. Go … I will wait until you return … if anything is altered, I will try to go back to a village … you may find me when the war ends.’
‘What will happen if I can’t find you, who will look after me?’ She whispered, with words that have remained embedded in my mind, ‘The world is full of good people … I know you will find them and be well cared for, for the rest of your life. Son, you must walk on … don’t look back.’
I promised myself that I would one day return to seek her out, and sit at the spot where I had parted from a mother who had displayed such love and devotion to me.
I hugged her for the last time and walked away. I never looked back.
I LIVED WITH THAT MEMORY FOR YEARS, never prepared to accept that my mother had indeed passed away on that hillside in the jungles of Burma. I willed in my heart that, miraculously, she may have been rescued by some Naga tribe and carried back to a friendly village to see her days out.
Year after year, decade after decade, I sought the means to return to Burma and the northern regions to seek my mother. At every step an obstacle was placed in my path. I sought the assistance of the government of Burma, but because of the internal security problems that prevailed in that country after independence, I was refused an entry permit time and time again. When the country was finally opened, and se
ven-day visas were granted to selected persons, I, with the help of the Reverend Roger Bush, sought assistance from the top man in Burma, General Ne Win.
To my surprise, I was granted a 21-day visa and support from the military authorities to travel in the country. However, the area I wished to go to was out of bounds. Nevertheless, with my eldest son and his wife, I finally returned to the country. It was 1982, 40 years since the trek. We travelled to my birthplace and after some enquiries contacted a long-time family friend who had connections with tribal chiefs in the Hukawng Valley.
He was able to tell me, ‘Your mother indeed did die during the trek.’ I was sad, but profoundly relieved. The uncertainty was finally over.
Many years later, while catching up with friends from Burma in Western Australia, I met a Captain Minus, now retired, from the Burma Army. He had known my family during peacetime and had often visited our home. By strange coincidence, he had later married one of my mother’s relatives. In the lounge room of his Perth home he, rather reluctantly, told me of his trek out along the same route after losing his platoon. He had broken through Japanese lines and followed the refugee trail a few days behind our group.
Bit by bit, his story unfolded.
‘I stopped by the tree under which your mother sat, and talked with her. She was very near death and I was sad that I could not be of any assistance.’
He had offered her some water and, in a state of delirium, she had replied, ‘Thank you, but my servants have just left to get me some water from the well.’
TIME MEANT NOTHING TO ME. I had completely shut off and do not recall the next stage of the trek. When I found my brother and sister sitting, resting, some way down the track, they were tremendously pleased and relieved to see me.
Robert said, ‘I was convinced that we wouldn’t see you again.’ I said, ‘We’ve got to keep walking. We must get help for Ama.’ The desire to save my mother was the only thing that was keeping me going.
White Butterflies Page 11