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

  The seven huge gray animals remained in motion even when parked. They rocked, shuffled their feet, and cocked their heads so they could stare down, focusing the nearest eye on him for a better look. Their trunks danced—touching their own bodies and those nearby. When they made contact, Williams heard a faint sound, a dry rustling or rasp, as skin scraped skin. Those long, fleshy noses became megaphones, amplifying sound.

  Williams focused on individuals. There were a few males, not all of them tuskers. Because tusks are actually the elephant’s elongated incisors, even the tuskless males and females had short, mostly hidden versions of them—tushes, or nubs of ivory. One of the females, a gaunt, dignified old dame, “looked as if she were the mother of the other 6,” Williams noticed. She was called Ma Oh, or Old Lady, though her real name, given to her a lifetime ago, was Pin Wa, meaning Mrs. Fat Bottom. She was hardly that now. Her head seemed like little more than gray skin stretched over a great craggy skull. Her movements were slow and deliberate.

  She might have been suffering from any number of old-age complaints, just like a human—including heart disease, cataracts, and arthritis. By this stage, she shouldn’t have still been in service. Over their lifetimes, elephants successively wear away big sets of molars that are replaced by new ones, not from underneath, but as if moved forward along on a slow conveyor belt. They have six sets in total; when there are no new ones to move in as replacements, the animals starve to death, no longer able to chew the tough vegetation that makes up the elephant diet. Ma Oh likely had reached this point.

  Harding called out a name—Bo Shwe—and a tusker from the middle of the line stepped forward, stopping five paces away from him. Harding walked up to him. Holding the lobe of the animal’s ear, he told the uzi, “Hmit.” And the uzi called out to the elephant, “Hmit!”

  Williams was astonished by the graceful descent of the big bull: He sank his hindquarters into a kneeling position—curiously, looking more like a churchgoer in prayer than a horse or a dog whose legs bend backward when reclining. Then came the slow folding drop of his front legs, also into a tucked position. The whole motion had a certain precise formality.

  Williams observed, or thought he observed, an expression he recognized. Though Bo Shwe obeyed every instruction, the tusker’s eyes seem to convey that he found the strict rules a little ridiculous. Williams felt an immediate connection with him.

  If Harding caught such a nuanced emotion, he showed no sign. He approached Bo Shwe, spreading his hands and placing his palms along the animal’s flank. He rubbed and kneaded the skin along the barrel of his back, inspecting by touch. Then came a close examination of eyes and feet. What he was looking for was still a mystery to Williams, though his reading of the dry text on elephant care might have come back to him. Griffith H. Evans, the veterinarian, had written that working elephants “are constantly disabled from sore backs and feet, the majority of such cases being due to want of a little care and supervision.” The portions of their skin likely to be irritated must be “regularly examined before and after work.” The color of their gums, their temperatures, and the clarity of their eyes gave clues about their general health, too.

  The Hmit, or down position, for working elephants.

  When Harding had finished, he stood back and said, “Htah.”

  The elephant rose with slow dignity, returning to his place in line. The boss repeated the examination down the line, scribbling comments into separate logbooks, one for each animal.

  Though smaller than African elephants, the tuskers in Burma could stand nine feet at the shoulder. To Williams they were every bit as magnificent as he had hoped.

  Williams could observe the features of the elephants from front to back. And every inch held a fascination. Their trunks. The single organ that most identifies an elephant as an elephant. It acts, among other things, as a hand, an arm, a nose, a snorkel, a sledgehammer, a trumpet, and a hose. It possesses more than sixty thousand muscles. Without containing a single bone, it is strong enough to lift heavy logs, and sufficiently nimble to pick up a coin. It is both nose and upper lip. In Asian elephants there is a single “finger” at the tip while African elephants have two. The tissue of the tip, the nerve endings, and the short hairs all help elephants sense vibration, lift chemical signals, and dexterously manipulate objects.

  Relaxed, their lower lips hang down like fleshy pendants behind the trunk. The skulls of Asian elephants are double-domed on top and full of ridges and hollow places below. There is a very large brain inside.

  When the elephants opened their mouths for Harding’s scrutiny, Williams could see their blocky, muscular, bright pink tongues. Wet and mobile, a tongue can shift shape dramatically, so that it becomes a ball, a wave, or a trough. On either side were their huge, strange yellow molars, washboard ridged and ancient looking, like giant trilobites. Williams counted four of them, two up, two down, each about nine inches long and weighing four pounds apiece. Some of the elephants invited Harding to rub their tongues, an approximate version of their trunk-to-mouth greetings with one another.

  The elephants’ ears seemed tissue thin in places, and everywhere tracked by veins. Williams would learn to look at the tops of them to help determine age. The farther they were folded down, the older the animal.

  The females displayed two mammary glands, quite similar in size to a woman’s breasts, and placed as humans’ are—on their chests, rather than in rows of four or six as is typical for mammals. On the elephants’ rumps, each had the letter “C,” marking them as company animals—not seared there with a hot iron, but painted with a caustic substance that burned into the flesh permanently. It was supposed to be more humane. Just past the brands, at the very end of their bodies, were their four-foot-long tails—small in contrast to their bulk, but Harding was careful around these appendages, and Williams would soon find out why. The tails were strong enough to pack the jolt of a baseball bat. Below those tails, in the bulls, something seemed to be missing: testicles. They had them, all right, but they were nestled high up inside the abdomen.

  The whole inspection process took about a half hour, during which Harding shared nothing with Williams—not even a glance. Williams, filled with curiosity, suppressed his impulse to ask questions, knowing “I should only be called a damn fool if I did so.”

  As Harding handed off the book for the last elephant, he looked at Williams. “Those four on the right are yours, and God help you if you can’t look after them.” He turned and walked back toward the camp table.

  Williams returned to his own tent astonished on two counts—by his first moment face-to-face with elephants, and by Harding’s order. How exactly, he wondered, does one take care of an elephant?

  CHAPTER 4

  INITIATION RITES

  AT SIX O’CLOCK THAT EVENING, THE LIGHT DRAINING FROM THE sky, Williams rejoined Harding at the table where two full bottles of black label whiskey—one at each place setting—had materialized. Exhausted from his journey, Williams would have to wait to challenge Harding in a drinking competition. Both men had changed into clean, pressed clothes and sat glumly across from each other with a campfire burning nearby. No matter where the outpost in Burma, forest managers had their dinners served properly—white tablecloths, bone china plates, and perfectly cooked English meals, starting with a soup course.

  Williams removed the lead foil from the top of his whiskey bottle and pulled out the cork. They drank. When Harding emptied his glass, Williams lifted his own bottle. “May I fill yours, sir?” With a withering look, Harding informed him, “It’s the custom to stick to our own bottles.” The silence persisted through dinner with only the hum of the jungle insects amplifying the sullen formality of it all.

  After about half an hour, Harding finally spoke up to ask Williams about his skill with firearms: Was he “safe with a shotgun”?

  “Yes, I think so.”

  More silence. While Williams seethed over this treatment, Harding refilled his glass several times then spoke again.
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br />   “I drink a bottle a night, and it does me no harm. If I never teach you anything else, I can tell you this: There are two vices in this country. Woman is one, and the other ‘the bottle’—take which one you please, but you cannot mix them. Anything to do with jungles, elephants, and your work you have to learn by experience. No one can teach you but the Burman, and you’ll draw your pay for ten years before you will ever be earning your salary.”

  As a forest assistant, Williams would labor all year round, in hot weather and monsoon, touring in succession the logging camps in his district. He would witness plenty of trees being felled, but chopping wood was not his job. Instead, he would oversee the men, the elephants, and the camps where the work was done. Forest assistants brought cash to pay the men, they doctored the elephants, and they made sure that the task of dragging logs was proceeding at the proper pace. They were constantly on the move following a circular route, often made up of nothing more than a narrow game trail that connected all the camps in their domain.

  Harding told him that the next day he’d be given maps to study, in preparation for being sent off for three months on his own. Williams’s mood brightened at this news. Harding said, “You can do anything you like, including suicide if you feel lonely, but don’t come back to me until you speak some Burmese.”

  Despite the bottle of liquor in him, the old man managed to stand and stagger off to his tent without saying good night. Williams swiveled his chair toward the fire and stared into the flames.

  Harding was right about speaking Burmese, and Williams knew it. One fellow recruit said that he began to have an insight into the work only when he had mastered some of the language. “A knowledge of Burmese is a necessity for every jungle man and it entails many months of hard and serious work,” A. W. Smith wrote in National Geographic magazine. “It is a difficult language in itself, a language that depends on an infinite variety of vowel sounds that, written in English character all have the same appearance.” Williams also felt strongly that in order to connect with the men, he needed to be able to joke with them, and Burmese would be “the gate to local humour.”

  Harding had not said much, yet he had left his recruit with a lot to think about. When Williams turned in, he found his tent glowing with the warm, dancing light of an oil lamp. His cot was dressed with soldierly precision, his trunks were neatly stacked next to it, and there was a lovely six-by-four dhurrie rug set out. There was only a thin canvas wall between him and Harding’s own tent, but he was happy for the refuge. He slipped out of his clothes and sat down. Surrounded by the dark jungle, Williams was alert to every sound and sensation, the repetitive chounk-chounk-chounk of a large-tailed nightjar or the mournful kwo-oo of a collared scops owl. A few elephants scrounging near camp snapped branches as they passed. The teak box with his traveling library was within easy reach. His reading materials underscored his heated and hallucinatory nighttime impression of the place. “This is Burma,” Rudyard Kipling had written, “and it will be quite unlike any land you know about.”

  Company maps showed Williams that the country was about the size of Texas, shaped like a kite—including the long tail—and was carpeted in diverse forests, with everything from mangrove swamps to thickets of pine, evergreen, and deciduous trees across tropical, subtropical, and temperate forest types. Much of it was still unknown to travelers, and whole swaths of it remained largely unmapped. Over its thousand-mile length, it changed from steamy tropics in the south to snow-capped mountains in the north, and all of it was teeming with wild animals—three hundred kinds of mammals and a thousand bird species. An old volume on game listed many of them: elephants, tigers, leopards, bears, and an astonishing three species of rhino (Indian, Javan, and Sumatran).

  It was easy to see on these maps how Burma had retained its secrets. It was cut off from the rest of the world by natural barriers: to the north, west, and east, a horseshoe of mountains; to the south, the sea. The British framed the country as Upper and Lower Burma. Lower Burma included the capital city, Rangoon, and the plains, valleys, and deltas of the southern portion of the Irrawaddy River, shot through with hundreds of streams that found their way past mangrove forest out to the Bay of Bengal. Upper Burma, where Williams sat this night, was different country. Here was the heartland, marked by mountains and forest. This region stretched to the borders of Assam, Tibet, China, French Indochina, and Thailand. It was home to many tribes including Shans, Kachins, Chins, and the notorious head-hunting Nagas. Burma was an ethnically diverse country: Two-thirds of the population was Burmese, with several other groups and subtribes making up the rest.

  At the very crown of the country, past the northern city of Myitkyina, where the rail line ended, was some of the roughest and most remote wilderness—what was often referred to as the back-of-beyond country.

  The maps only hinted at the ruggedness of the terrain. Burma was not only tough to enter, with mountains and sea at its borders, its interior was, significantly to Williams, extremely difficult to negotiate, too. The land was corrugated: Its many mountains and rivers ran north to south, making horizontal movement—east to west—nearly impossible. No highways or railroad tracks penetrated these obstacles: the Arakan Mountains to the far west, the Pegu Range in central Burma, and the Shan Plateau to the east. In between these mountain ranges lay fertile valleys and rivers. Burma’s great rivers, including the Chindwin and the Irrawaddy, originated in the north, the “hills,” the area that according to Time magazine, was “where God lives.” These waterways all ran southward into the Gulf of Martaban and the Bay of Bengal.

  To Westerners, Burma was an icon of the exotic East and all its mysteries. During his boat trip up, Williams had caught glimpses of village life along the banks of the river. The country was almost entirely Buddhist. Williams constantly noticed the golden spires of pagodas rising above the green forest. Monasteries were ubiquitous, and at sunrise, the saffron-robed priests would emerge to tend to nearby villages.

  It was late. The new recruit extinguished the light, and, as he did every night, said a silent prayer and got into bed. He hoped for a fresh start with Harding in the morning.

  SUNUP THIS TIME OF year was chilly. Williams rose from wool blankets shivering and discovered that attendants had warmed his clothes by the fire. Logging camps throughout the country were coming to life in just the same way—clearings were quiet, shrouded in a thick mist. Sunlight would begin to filter in hazy shafts through the surrounding trees, and birds would be singing. A hearty English breakfast, including bacon, awaited him.

  Even in the most remote outposts, Williams would find lovely pagodas.

  After the morning meal, Williams continued to tiptoe at the fringes of camp life until he was suddenly in the heated center. Without telling Williams, Harding had ordered the camp workers to speak only Burmese to him. When Harding overheard Williams speaking some broken Urdu, which he had picked up in India, to the cook, the poor man was fired, no appeals allowed. Williams was stunned by the swiftness and cruelty of Harding’s command, eaten up by the fact that he had caused the man’s unemployment and that he was helpless to intercede. Harding’s decisions were final.

  That evening, the elephants were once again paraded into camp. This time, Harding told the novice to inspect his own four elephants. Williams decided the wise course was to mime what he had seen his boss do the night before. This would be his first intimate moment with an elephant. He walked up as Harding had done and ordered an elephant down. This was Chit Sa Yar, or Lovable, a calm male who could stand stoically even when his rider fired a rifle from his back. Williams would later choose him as his personal elephant to carry only his belongings. When the animal lowered himself, Williams approached. Strangers always inspire curiosity in elephants. As Williams looked Lovable over, the animal’s trunk naturally followed.

  Up close, Williams was astonished by the size of the great head. It was longer, wider, and heavier than he was himself. Lovable swiveled his trunk around and oriented his wet nostrils toward th
e new man, likely targeting the richly aromatic regions on Williams’s body—his mouth, armpits, and crotch. Lovable was taking in the lanky white youth before him. Williams was trying to do the same thing, but with his arsenal of human tools. He didn’t have the analytical olfaction of an elephant, but he appreciated Lovable’s wholesome smell. Reaching up, he made contact. That trunk was remarkable: the weight of it, the obvious strength, the tough tire-tread ridges on the underside that could leave a friction burn on his arm. The elephant’s exhalation could blow his hair back with a great whoosh, or gently tickle his skin.

  Williams ran his palms along the male’s spine: rough, wrinkled skin punctuated all over by harsh, wiry hairs. Sand and dirt, which had lodged in the folds of the tusker’s hide when he had dusted himself, loosened and rained down on Williams’s head and arms. It was an elephant baptism.

  As the elephant was commanded to stand, he rose, as solid as a tree, but still yielding, breathing, warm. Williams felt a strong connection, even as his hands throbbed from the rasping coarseness of the contact. He moved on to the next animal.

  There were two healthy females, including Chit Ma, who was in the prime of her life. But then came Pin Wa, whose tough old hide hung gaunt from her bones. There were more hollows than heft to her. And the filminess of her eyes gave her a mystical aspect.

  Each elephant seemed to enjoy engaging with him. Just as they had the day before, they rumbled audibly and also inaudibly, as Williams could feel but not hear. In fact, there were maybe three times as many of the silent kind, which caused a rippling of the skin on a small patch of the elephants’ foreheads—the highest area of the trunk, where the nasal passage enters the skull.