Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II

by Croke, Vicki Constantine

  “You better spend the rest of the week fitting yourself out from the Company stores,” the manager said. “They’ll tell you all you’ll need. And catch Monday’s boat. All right, Williams, I hope the jungle life will suit you.”

  “Thank you, sir, so do I.”

  The manager rang a buzzer, and one of the company’s Chinese office workers silently appeared in the doorway. The clerks had the packing down to a science. Steamer trunks were stuffed with everything a recruit would eat, read, wear, sleep in, get drunk on, and shoot with for the next six months in the jungle: portable typewriter, canteen, mosquito netting, canned goods, tea, chocolate, and even hops to bake bread. Every calorie Williams was expected to consume (including the village chickens it was assumed he would purchase for the pot) had been accounted for. There was a shotgun, a rifle, and whiskey. Packed in a teak box were magazines and reference books crucial to his education.

  Williams’s days were spent preparing for departure, but at night he squeezed in some socializing. Rangoon was full of British architecture, French wine, English beef, and exclusive clubs, such as the Rangoon Sailing Club, “one of the stickiest Europeans Only clubs in Burma,” as Williams recalled.

  As much fun as was available to Williams, Burma did not hold the social cachet of other colonies. In fact, government workers who lived there were given an extra allowance, since by some accounts young British officers in country had a tendency to suffer nervous collapse.

  That wouldn’t be Williams’s problem—especially not with other recruits to knock around with in the exotic city. Over beers with two pals, he discovered they had a few things in common: They had given up traditional opportunities to go to Burma, and family and friends did not understand their impulse. Maybe they didn’t, either. None of the three could articulate why he had made the choice, but together they could laugh about it. “Just crackers, the whole lot of us,” one of them said. Though he took the responsibility seriously, Billy Williams acted the cool adventurer, saying, “What the hell! A year’s probation, passage home guaranteed. We’re on a marvelous wicket. And if we make the grade—which I should say is most unlikely—we might as well forget all the dames we’ve ever known, because I must remind you gentlemen that working for this outfit marriage is out for ten years.”

  On nighttime escapades in Rangoon, Williams was a shy flirt. Genuinely interested in women, he would often ask them about themselves rather than dominate the conversation with stories of his own exploits. And he would rarely sit out a dance. Good-natured and good-humored, he quickly met more single women than he’d expected. Many were members of what was referred to as “the Fishing Fleet.” These were eligible Englishwomen who set sail for the far corners of the British Empire, where they could improve their odds of catching a husband. The toll of war had changed the gender balance back home in England, with women outnumbering men by 1.9 million. Some found their way to Burma, where there was a concentration of young single men, desperate for the company of homegrown girls. During his few days in Rangoon, Billy Williams gathered more names and addresses, but did not fall in love.

  It wasn’t the high life but the forests that called to him. Once packed and briefed, he traveled the first leg of his journey—four hundred miles north from Rangoon—by rail. Paddy fields became thick woods, and the urban din gave way to primitive jungle sounds. He could hear the deep coo, click-hroooo of Green Imperial pigeons, and from somewhere deeper in the forest, the cries of macaque monkeys.

  When he arrived at the wide, milky-brown Chindwin River, framed by lush tropical forest, he found the Burma he had dreamed of. There he was met by the company’s stern-wheel paddle steamer, a miniature version of a Mississippi riverboat. Painted a spotless white with a trim black stack and outfitted with four comfortable cabins, two saloons, a small library, and ample decks, it was a conspicuous colonial apparition.

  Williams spent several days aboard the sturdy little vessel as it made its way up the Chindwin. Weaving and dodging among sandbanks and shallows, guided by painted bamboo channel buoys, the Indian crew took soundings with bamboo poles, singing out the depth to one another. The water was full of timber rafts making their way south, as well as native boats piloted by old Burmese men, shaded by umbrellas. Each evening at dusk, the stern-wheeler would tie up for the night, and at dawn winches would once again take in the mooring chains.

  The skipper was a drunk “who had reached the terminus of thirst, Crème de Menthe frappe,” and the engineer played the same gramophone record over and over. Both were emblematic of the eccentric characters the jungle seemed to attract. And, in his own way, Williams figured he was a member of the misfits club, too—a nonconformist, even from boyhood.

  He had been born on November 15, 1897, and grew up on the coast of Cornwall in the little town of St. Just in Penwith. From his bedroom window at night, in the little cottage set high on a hill, he’d watch the slowly turning beams of seven lighthouses. He was the middle of three brothers who rambled the moors, “as wild as March hares.” And though they sometimes banded together as the Three Musketeers, more often, young Jim spent whole days in solo expeditions into caves, over cliffs, and across fields.

  He was a daredevil, exploring abandoned shipwrecks or the nearby copper and tin mines. He secreted art supplies in a remote grotto, where he would go to paint for hours. But mostly, he followed animals. He loved every creature he came across, and, with very rare exception, they seemed to like him, too. It meant, he wrote, that he was never lonely.

  He spent so much time observing animals that he felt he could anticipate their impulses and movements. He developed a knack for framing the world as they did. “I never looked for a wren’s nest, I merely walked to some spot where I thought one would build, stopped, then with sure hands parted the ferns, and in some mossy overhanging bank inserted two fingers into one of a dozen holes and felt ten warm eggs—mother wren might have shown it to me,” he wrote.

  His formal education was at Queen’s College, a boarding school in Taunton, for senior school, or high school, where he was a good student and popular friend. From there, in 1915, he was off to war. He was brave and able wherever he was assigned, but found the best of himself in the Camel Corps.

  On the river trip, Williams’s thoughts were dominated by the hope that he had the talent to become a true elephant man. In the teak box filled with books and articles, he discovered treasures: instructions on elephant management. The standard texts of the time included “Notes on Elephants and Their Care,” written by William Hepburn, a young veterinary surgeon who had died in Burma of some tropical malady just a few years before, and “Elephants and Their Diseases,” by Griffith H. Evans, published in Rangoon in 1910.

  The state of elephant medicine at the time might have been primitive, but Williams savored every detail. He chain-smoked cigarettes, enjoyed cold beers from the saloon, and read hungrily. Evans’s book was exhaustive in its tables of illnesses and treatments. Copious soap and warm-water enemas were considered a good purgative. Allspice could cure elephantine flatulence. For “inflamed and indolent boils,” there was nothing like a poultice of roasted onions. And eight to twelve ounces of diluted brandy was recommended for large cases of stomach upset.

  The text, a humane treatise by a veterinarian who had spent decades with elephants, made clear to Williams that he would be interacting with one of the most enchanting species known to man. Elephants “have few vices, are gentle, obedient, and patient,” Evans wrote. But despite their formidable size, he cautioned, their health could be rather fragile. In fact, “if neglected they rapidly go to pieces.”

  The elephants in Burma were Asian elephants. They usually weighed well under eleven thousand pounds and stood about seven to nine feet tall at the shoulder, as opposed to African elephants, who could weigh as much as fifteen thousand pounds and reach thirteen feet in height. Both male and female African elephants have tusks, while only some Asian males have tusks, and none of the females do. Their body shapes differ, too: Asians
are more compact; Africans lankier, with a more concave back. The Africans’ ears are enormous and wide (like maps of Africa, it’s said)—the biggest mammal ears in the world—while those of the Asian elephant are smaller and closer to square.

  In fact, the African and Asian elephants are not only separate species but separate genera—a whole other level of taxonomic rank, as distinct in genetic heritage as a cheetah is from a lion. And some say it shows in their temperaments—the Africans active and more highstrung; the Asians more serene.

  Physically, all elephants are astonishing. They are the largest animals walking on land. And their appetites are commensurate. Hardworking logging elephants in Burma can eat six hundred pounds of fodder a day, gathering their food with those incredible trunks. Longer and heavier than a man, and much, much stronger, the trunks provide elephants with a sense of smell that may be five times more acute than that of a bloodhound. And by narrowing or widening their nostrils like musical instruments, they can modulate the sound of their voices.

  They have extraordinary brains built for memory and insight, and they use them to negotiate one of the most advanced and complex societies of all mammals. To those who have spent time with them, elephants often seem philosophical and perceptive, and appear to have deep feelings. They can cooperate with one another and have been known to break tusks trying to hoist injured relatives back on their feet. Further, their behavior suggests they have an understanding of death, something believed to be rare among nonhuman animals.

  And then there’s their secret language. Using infrasound, which is too low-frequency for human hearing, elephants communicate with one another not just in close range, but also over long distances—as great as five miles. They can reach others far away, and decide to meet. Identifying this sound in the 1980s explained a lot of the mysteriously coordinated movements of widely separated elephants, which to some researchers, witnessing it from the air, resembled some kind of elephant ESP.

  So much about elephants—their seeming awareness of death, their ability to cooperate, their empathy, and the extent of their intelligence—were yet to be revealed to science. But Williams, who saw more in animals than most anyway, had an inkling.

  AT THE FOOT OF THE CHIN HILLS, in the far western shoulder of Burma, the exact territory where Billy Williams was headed, a magnificent tusker fitted with a braided harness and thick dragging chains began his day’s work towing teak logs toward a jungle creek.

  Huge and healthy, the animal carried himself differently from the other elephants around him. There was a majesty, if not yet complete maturity, to him and an ease in the company of both elephants and men. Twenty-three years old, he already stood over eight feet at the shoulder, taller than many of his elders. And because he would continue to grow throughout his life, adding perhaps half an inch a year for the next twenty years, it meant that he would likely join the tallest bulls, who measured over nine feet. He wasn’t just big; he was beautiful. He had the kind of tusks, angled up and outward, that the men, likening them to the arms of a Burmese dancing girl, called Swai Gah. Those tusks gave him a wicked, roguish appearance that was accentuated when he cocked his ears. In the company’s ledger book for him, it was noted that his feet were “perfect,” with five nails each in the front, and four on each back foot. His back was shaped like a banana bough—the most suitable for logging. His skin appeared loose and heavily corrugated; his ears were fine, “heavy-haired in orifice.” He certainly possessed a physical refinement that elephant connoisseurs admired. Burmese tradition held that “an elephant of good quality has a skin that is wrinkled like the rind of a custard apple, and darkish grey in colour.” The elephant named Bandoola unmistakably had that. The drapes of his baggy skin arranged themselves in the shape and form considered auspicious. Right under his tail, thick folds resembling a frog’s head would provide some protection from the tusks of another bull during a fight. Bandoola also had a dewlap under his chin, and a bag of pendulous skin—what the elephant men called Pyia Swai, or honeycomb—that ran all along his underbelly.

  The lavender shade of his skin was exquisite, and splashed across his trunk and high cheekbones were pale pink freckles, as delicate as a field of flowers. Yet, he was as tough as any wild elephant. So superb a specimen was he that every forest assistant—no matter where in Burma he was based—would claim to have managed him at one point in his career.

  It was said that he did things that no other elephant could. He had a vast understanding of human language, and while most elephants could distinguish among a few of the camp tools, Bandoola knew them all. When asked to choose a hammer from items laid out before him, the big tusker would reach with his trunk and pull it out. Though he appeared to enjoy the work, no one would call him obedient; Bandoola had a mind of his own. But from birth it proved to be a wise and generous one.

  He even seemed to have a sense of humor. Occasionally, after he hefted a large log to the very edge of a cliff or the bank of a river, he would pretend he could push it no farther. He would pantomime the effort of a shove again and again, and behave as if the wood were suddenly unmovable. Only after his uzi would beg him to stop clowning would he suddenly flick the log over the precipice with no effort at all. Then, as all the people who knew him would attest, the elephant would rumble at his own joke.

  CHAPTER 3

  MEETING THE BOSS—AND THE ELEPHANTS

  AFTER SEVERAL DAYS ON THE CHINDWIN, WILLIAMS, STANDING on deck dressed in new khaki shorts, shirt, and stockings, reached his destination: a clearing along the bank, where he saw a man in his fifties sitting in the portico of a large cottage tent. The man who would show him the ropes. The boss. Williams had no idea what to expect, but plenty of others like him had found strong, paternalistic forest managers who nurtured them. He hoped for the best. After all, this would likely be the sole Englishman he would see or speak to for the next six months.

  Deposited on the shore by dugout canoe, Williams took several moments to survey his new world where “range upon range of mountainous country lay away to the east.” By the time he looked back over the water, the big white boat was disappearing behind a bend. The sight triggered a pang of abandonment, which Williams described as “almost a yearning.” He lifted his hat to wave good-bye but no one was looking in his direction. He pivoted and walked the short distance to the camp.

  His new boss, a man he referred to in later writing by the pseudonym Willie Harding, and occasionally as Freddie, was sitting in a camp chair, sun weathered, balding, and wearing a short-sleeved gray shirt and pressed gray flannel trousers. His light blue eyes were focused far away. From his war experience, Williams could tell the boss was “down with fever.” On the table before him lay papers, a survey map, a bottle of good-quality black label whiskey, and a soda siphon. Drinking, most forest men found, helped mitigate loneliness. British companies allowed the habit for their employees working in distant outposts, and some, such as the East India Company, encouraged and underwrote it. It was just noon, but Harding was already knocking back hard liquor. He held in his hand a Burmese cigarette, or cheroot, which gave off a slight scent of incense. Though it was a simple, homespun smoke, he held it with care, as if it were an expensive cigar.

  Po Pyan, the head servant, or lukalay, waited on the boss with formality, calling him “Thakin,” or “Master,” the customary address for all Englishmen. After working for the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation his whole adult life, Harding was the picture of the colonial British “jungle salt”: reserved, taciturn, and, above all, capable. His only acknowledgment of Williams’s arrival was the deepening of his sour expression.

  Striding up to the table, his right hand outstretched, Williams offered a cheery greeting. “Good afternoon, sir.”

  “There’s no ‘sir’ business in the jungle,” Harding replied without looking up.

  Williams dropped his hand and after a few awkward moments, went about raising his own brand-new tent next to Harding’s. One thing he knew: This was “quite certainly one of t
he most obvious ways of how not to receive a young recruit.”

  Billy Williams was stung but not rattled by the reception. He was good at winning people over, and by four, he was ready to emerge for another try.

  He sat down at the table, and when a camp attendant asked to take his order, Williams requested a cup of tea. Harding snorted. To him, anything short of a whiskey and soda was unmanly. Humiliated, Williams silently vowed to drink Harding under the table later. Since conversation did not seem welcome, he sat mute. Talking to Harding, it became clear, was a hazard that everyone in camp avoided. At about five, a worker came by and wordlessly placed seven hidebound notebooks on the table. Simultaneously, seven elephants materialized at the edge of the clearing.

  They were paraded into camp, a driver sitting on each animal’s neck. Huge as they were, they made a hushed advance on broad, cushioned feet. It was just as Kipling had described—elephants walking “as silently as a cloud rolls out of the mouth of a valley.” The only noise Williams heard was the warm symphony of the teak bells under the elephants’ chins, and the crackling of bamboo as they pushed their way into the clearing. Two tuskers carried in their trunks the ends of the tying chains fastened to their back legs; this, Williams would learn later, was to ensure that the next elephant in line would not step on them.

  Without a word, Harding rose from his camp chair and headed for the assembly. This was the moment Williams had been waiting for. The reason he had traveled halfway around the world. Elephants.

  They were a magnificent sight, lining themselves up and then standing in perfect, swaying formation—a hypnotic movement that, Williams would come to learn, actually aids the circulation from their legs to their hearts. If he looked down, he would see that, as they shifted pressure from one foot to another, the circumference of each foot would increase or decrease nearly 10 percent.

  The elephants commanded attention. And their immensity was only part of it. Their “fragrant” scent, a clean barnyard smell that Williams could almost taste, filled the clearing. They flapped their ears, some silently, some producing a sound like hands clapping. Even the air itself throbbed with their presence. It wasn’t a fanciful notion, but a physical fact, as their low vocal tones were felt as a vibration in his chest. Their chatter—everything from incongruous little shrieks to low rumbles, like a lion’s growl—seemed full of meaning.