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

  As he pressed his hands along so much elephant hide, Williams had no idea what he was meant to be groping for, but it didn’t matter. Inch by inch, he was learning elephant.

  At dinner Harding was as stony as before. During the soup course, he produced a homemade condiment—a shaker-topped bottle of sherry in which lethally hot Asian chili peppers had been fermenting for more than a month. Since it looked like ordinary Tabasco sauce, Williams hammered out several mean doses into his bowl. Harding kept a poker face as Williams raised the spoon to his mouth. The first swallow scorched a path from his mouth all the way down his throat. Even his stomach seemed set afire.

  But Williams refused to give his tormentor the satisfaction of seeing him surrender. He ladled the blistering soup, spoonful after spoonful, into his mouth. His eyes watered, beads of sweat formed on his brow, and, still, he kept eating. Deflated, Harding upped the ante, prodding Williams to speak by asking a simple question: Was he homesick? Williams patiently finished his bowl, wiped the water from his eyes, and finally answered “No.”

  It was his turn to surprise the old man. Far from being afraid to leave the nest, he told him he wanted to launch his first tour far sooner than Harding had decreed. In fact, he said, “I’d like to start off on my jungle trip tomorrow.” Harding struggled but failed to conceal his surprise.

  “That remark got inside his guard,” Williams later noted with pleasure.

  From the start, Harding had been deliberately trying to break Williams. But his effort, Williams would come to believe, was a kindness. If a recruit could be broken, Harding felt, it was better to uncover it in the safety of camp rather than out in the forest. It was said of Williams that his Cornish and Welsh heritage made him “self-reliant and tough in many ways, and yet gave him his sensitive and sometimes almost psychic qualities.” This combination of traits found expression in the odd friendship that he was developing with Harding: Williams craved Harding’s respect, but he was also brassy enough to want to fight, and even triumph over him in the process.

  When Harding rose from his chair at the end of the night, he was “a bit staggery,” Williams noticed. Harding took his empty bottle of whiskey, corked it, flipped it upside down, and steadied it on its head. “By dawn that bottle will have drained its last [jigger] into the neck, and will lace my morning tea,” he said.

  Williams said good night to Harding’s back as the old man lurched toward his tent.

  The next morning when Williams emerged, Harding, already scrubbed and dressed, glared at him from the breakfast table. “Good Lord!” he cried out. “You still here?”

  The boss soon gave him his orders: Williams was to hike into the Myittha valley, a lush forested area between the Chindwin and a string of hills close to the Indian border. Here a village leader named U Tha Yauk (“U,” or uncle, is a polite form of address for a mature male) would begin his training in forest life. Harding would give Williams those four elephants to serve as pack or baggage animals, known as travelers.

  Before dawn on the day he was to depart, Williams silently rose and peeked out at the darkened camp. The flaps to Harding’s tent were down. The old man was still asleep. Hallelujah. At least he could embark on his first expedition without ridicule. He conveyed to the uzis that he wanted to pack up quietly. They, too, were eager to leave without waking Harding, and had already silenced the knockers on the elephant bells by tying them tight. After Williams watched his last bit of gear handed up and placed in the kah, on the back of an elephant, they started off: four elephants, four uzis riding them, a cook, two bearers, and two messengers; a good-sized entourage for a twenty-three-year-old rookie.

  Williams was heading into the forests of Upper Burma with enthusiasm, despite the fact that so many experienced outdoorsmen had lost their lives in the field there, including, just the year before, the forty-year-old famed botanist Reginald Farrer, who had died of diphtheria. For Williams, the jungle was already restoring some of the wonder of his boyhood.

  He was outfitted for a good hike—wool socks, well-made boots, khaki shorts and shirt. Sunbeams burst through the branches of the tall trees. Exotic birds called out. Ahead of him was the unknown. The war, Billy had thought, had drained him of the kind of innocence required to appreciate all this. He had feared he was “past the age of adventures.” But now he gratefully realized he was wrong.

  Right away, there was a commotion among the elephants. Back at camp, a female named Me Tway was trumpeting, and Williams’s elephants stopped the procession to respond, cocking their ears forward to listen. After some back-and-forth, the most vocal and strong-willed among them, Chit Ma, broke away, rampaging back to camp with her rider on board. Williams’s men and those back at camp had to sort it out. The elephants won: When Chit Ma returned to the expedition, her friend Me Tway came with her, which meant one of the other travelers had to be returned to camp.

  Already Williams was seeing how strong the bonds among the elephants were. When Harding had split the group in two, it had taken an emotional toll. Captive elephants did not form the mother-daughter-sister dynasties that wild ones built over generations. Circumstances didn’t allow it. But they did cleave to one another just the same. Among the logging elephants, blood kinship wasn’t necessary—they had figured out how to sustain ties just as enduring among themselves. Often the uzis would witness a kind of shared parenting, in which females bonded with one another so closely that they reared their calves together. The men used the term twai sin in reference to these inseparable female elephants: aunties. When a calf bellowed in distress, not only his mother, but his auntie would come running. Separating such bonded elephants was wrong, “indeed cruel,” Williams thought as soon as he saw the consequences.

  With peace restored, Williams was off on his first elephant journey. What would become the musical score to his life—the warm, resonant tolling of the elephant bells, soon began. Carved from teak by each uzi, with two clappers on the outside, every bell delivered a slightly different note, allowing one to distinguish his own elephant even when he couldn’t see her. As the animals stepped in natural unison, the four bells layered into song.

  Williams’s boots became wet with the morning dew, and he breathed in the pungent scent of the vegetation, which in the deep shade still carried its nighttime perfume. He marched his group nine miles, stopping just short of the clearing where they would pitch camp. Following protocol, the elephants were halted outside the compound while they relieved themselves. Four big bladders noisily emptied about three gallons each (over the course of a day, the small group would expel enough urine to fill a rain barrel). Plus, there were the unmistakable thuds of defecation. Asian elephants produce about eight boluses twelve to twenty-four times a day, which for some individuals could total more than two hundred pounds. It was best to keep their output away from the camp perimeter. When they were finished, the animals came into the clearing to have the packs unloaded. Then, after all the saddlery, harnesses, and straps were removed from the elephants’ backs, the animals headed into the forest, snatching and stuffing bushels of vegetation into their mouths as they walked. Williams’s tent was then set up and a cooking fire started, and the uzis began constructing a rough bamboo platform about a foot up off the ground, with a baggage tarpaulin as a roof. It would serve as their communal bunk. An uzi, Williams noted, had “a pretty hard life.” He worked to exhaustion, put up with meager accommodations, ate what was available, faced danger not only from the elephants, but from the game he might meet in the forest, and often lived a hundred miles or more from his native village.

  In camp that night, Williams had some time and privacy to reflect and record his thoughts. He lit a cigarette, took a long drag, and stared into the roaring campfire. He wrote simply, “My jungle life, to be spent with elephants as my breadwinners had started.”

  The following four mornings, he moved camp quickly at dawn so as to be safely out of Harding’s reach. Then, he could afford to slow down and take in his surroundings. November in the for
ests of Upper Burma, he discovered, is a time when “every day was like a perfect English summer’s day.” Clear air, mild sunshine, no humidity. Each evening he relaxed by a log fire. When he could, he indulged in his great passion: recording the life around him in small watercolor scenes. Most of his compositions would be mailed off in weekly dispatches to his mother. Perhaps a few would go to the girls he had met on the way to Burma. He certainly wrote letters to them.

  A page from Williams’s photo album showing his typed caption. Each day, the elephants were eager for this moment, which marked the end of their work shift and the beginning of their night life in the forest.

  Away from Harding, Williams could be himself. That meant getting to know elephants, and there was so much to learn. As he did with all animals, he opened himself to them. “I have never studied them as a naturalist,” he said, “but I have tried to establish an understanding with them, to find some common ground, some way of seeing the world through their eyes rather than through my own.”

  Williams was a talented artist and loved sketching and painting scenes from the jungle.

  Dogs, camels, rabbits, horses. And now, the most magnificent creatures he had ever been near. During working hours, they were at the disposal of their handlers—marching, carrying kit, and obeying orders. But there was a change—in attitude, behavior, and movement—as soon as their packs were removed, and they were set free from the afternoon until the next morning to forage and socialize. These captive elephants, he realized, were creatures of two worlds. They lived by one code during the day and quite another at night, transforming themselves with ease from disciplined workers to free jungle animals. He saw that they could go back to free living when on occasion they eluded capture. Over the years, foresters found they lost dozens in this way. Williams thought they were closer to their wild state than any other working animal he had seen. In fact, he wrote, these elephants could be considered “domesticated for only eight [hours] out of the twenty-four.”

  Because elephants need little sleep, only two or three hours a day, their nightly immersion into the wild world was leisurely and lengthy. The bulk of their time was spent foraging for food. Elephants need a lot of it—they’re big and their digestive efficiency is low. Asian elephants consume anywhere between two hundred and seven hundred pounds a day in forage. The working elephants in particular burn up calories, so they might spend as much as twelve hours feeding.

  While their uzis slept, the animals would wander the forests and stands of fifteen-foot-tall kaing grass. They rarely went far, usually less than eight miles, because they didn’t have to. Camp was almost always set up in an area with their needs in mind: plenty of fodder and a close water source. While they were roaming, they might interact with wild bulls who liked to mate captive females and challenge captive tuskers. Over time, young working males learned to stand their ground with a glare, a shove, or even a fight.

  At sunup, the wild animals became working stiffs again. They weren’t eager to return, and the forest was so thick that they couldn’t be seen from a high perch, but the bells around their necks, called “kalouks,” revealed their location to the searching uzis. The elephants appeared to know that the kalouks betrayed them: Almost all of them had a technique for evading their uzis in the morning. It was a trick they played when they didn’t want to be interrupted from an especially pleasurable activity, such as feasting in a cultivated banana grove, where they could eat not just bunches of bananas, but sometimes a whole tree.

  Williams was amazed to learn the elephants’ tactic. “Many young animals develop the trick,” he reported, of muffling the effect of the exterior clappers by stuffing the inside of “the wooden bell which they have suspended around their neck, with good stodgy mud.” In darkness and complete silence, they could stealthily clean out even a guarded field. It was almost like a well-executed bank heist.

  The more Williams saw of elephants, the more he wanted to know. So he investigated them as he had the wrens and rabbits on the moors back home, recording his observations with a fountain pen in his two-penny notebook.

  The elephants of the night, the free elephants, especially drew Williams in. “It is impossible to understand much about tame elephants unless one knows a great deal about the habits of the wild ones,” Williams wrote. Right away, he established a routine unlike that of any other recruit. Like the elephants, he became two different characters by day and night. During working hours, he was the boss of men, a kindly one, who wanted to learn from the uzis. But starting in the afternoon, when the elephants were discharged, he would follow quietly on foot, turning into a field biologist.

  Me Tway and Chit Ma, of course, stuck together. They left camp in each other’s company and returned together in the morning. Lovable, the male with short, blunted tusks, went off on his own, and poor Pin Wa ambled slowly and, it appeared, painfully into the forest.

  But even following old Pin Wa wasn’t easy for Williams. He occasionally had to climb or descend fifteen-hundred-foot hillsides, and his progress was slowed by thick undergrowth and all kinds of jungle tortures: reedy canes whose long tendrils were dotted with hidden barbs as sharp as “trout hooks.” Prickly canes, “edged with teeth as sharp as the finest saw,” that tore his clothes and cut his body. A bamboo that would shower anyone disturbing it with a fiery dust that would have its victim clawing his skin. A stinging nettle called petya, which caused painful welts. And one frightening and common plant that provoked intense skin irritation, and could, on contact with the cornea, cause permanent blindness. Harding would have been enraged if he knew of Williams’s pursuits. Any forester would have said following dangerous, loose elephants in the dark was insane. But he kept at it.

  By moonlight, he saw elephants sleep, lying down or going into a standing slumber. Sometimes, he even heard one or two of them snoring. But one aspect of their life eluded him in those early days and for long after. No matter how closely he tracked them, he was unable to observe them mating.

  The uzis, as mahouts were called in Burma, were brilliant observers of elephant biology and behavior.

  What Williams couldn’t learn directly from the animals, he could pick up from the uzis. He was fascinated by their communication with the elephants: the way they spoke to them and how much was conveyed by their body language. Leaning back rigidly meant stop. Leaning forward and down commanded an elephant to kneel. Pressure on one side was to turn left, the other to turn right. When the uzi dragged his foot up one side of the elephant, the animal would raise the foot on that side.

  Most of all, Williams was charmed by the intimate relationships he witnessed. The men seemed to have been born with an uncanny elephant proficiency, and in a way they had. They often grew up around the animals, helping their fathers who were uzis, and from the age of fourteen, they could start earning a wage as apprentices, helping with harnesses and chains. By the time they were uzis themselves, they were walking encyclopedias of the art and science of elephant life.

  Williams couldn’t yet speak their language, but he watched them closely. The astonishing skill of an uzi was displayed each morning when he set off to retrieve his elephant. First, he’d study the trampled ground at the edge of camp. “He knows the shape and size and oddities of his own elephant’s foot print with such certainty that having determined it,” Williams wrote, “off he sets following the trail.” Williams found the uzis to be infallible, never confusing their own elephant’s prints with another’s. The trail showed the uzis not only which direction the elephant had gone, but where his elephant had rested and with whom. If there had been a disagreement between males, there might be trampled vegetation, broken branches, or even blood.

  Usually, the morning report was peaceful, the trail marked by evidence of digestion, not duels. The uzi would examine droppings, kicking them open and checking the contents. A bolus revealed what the elephant had already eaten, and perhaps what she would crave next. After consuming bamboo, for instance, the elephants tended to seek out succulent kaing
or elephant grass, which grew on the banks of the creeks. So the uzi who found bamboo in his elephant’s excrement would head for the water to look for her.

  Once there, he would listen for her kalouk. Upon hearing it, he would begin his approach, first with song. Elephants have fairly poor vision, seeing the world mostly in shades of gray. So as not to startle the animal, a rider would serenade her from a distance, his voice acting like his own kalouk, alerting her to his advance. If the uzi were in the kaing grass, which grows to nine feet, he might find a safe high rock to sit on and then call to her: “Lah! Lah! Lah!” “Come on! Come on! Come on!”

  The elephants were not like dogs; they didn’t run with wagging tails to the handlers. It was a ritual. When an elephant showed herself, the patient rider would speak softly to her: “Do you think I’ve nothing else to do but wait for you?” He might rub her trunk. “You’ve been eating since noon yesterday, and I haven’t had a bite of breakfast.” Williams couldn’t translate all the words yet, but he grasped the forbearing attitude the men had toward the elephants. The uzi would then unfasten the cane or chain shackles on the elephant’s legs and order her down so he could scramble aboard and head back to camp. Once returned to the clearing, the uzi would eat his first meal and then wash his elephant to start the day’s work.

  Williams’s study of the animals became an addiction. “Everything of interest became elephants, elephants, elephants,” he wrote. In particular, he was falling in love with his four travelers. He fed them the treats they liked—sweet tamarind balls or bananas—and learned where they liked to be rubbed or scratched. Pin Wa worried him most. Their hikes each day were not strenuous, and Pin Wa carried the lightest pack, but still the old girl looked creaky. Her skin was sagging and the tops of her ears had folded far down with age. Her movements were deliberate and dignified. She worked without complaint. Williams hoped to find a way to release Pin Wa from her toils, but nature would beat him to the punch.