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

  One morning before sunup, he was woken by the uzis. It was sad news—“tragedy overtook me,” Williams wrote. Pin Wa was dead. The men led him through the forest to her body. It looked as though she had died in her sleep. As peaceful as she was lying there in the silence of the forest, to see the huge animal down was still a terrible sight for Williams.

  He didn’t have the luxury of sustained mourning. First, he thought about Harding—“God help you if you can’t look after them”—and the rebuke he would receive. Next he saw an opportunity to learn what his elephant textbooks couldn’t teach him. He decided to hold an amateur postmortem. This was no easy task on an eight-thousand-pound animal. Without special equipment or training, he’d just have to make do. Here in the forest, men like Williams were called upon to act as mechanics, architects, veterinarians, doctors, engineers, undertakers, and even priests—whatever was needed.

  He gathered the sharpest knives and machetes available and began. “Her body was scarcely cold before I was literally inside,” he wrote, “the ribs of the flank being a canopy over my head from the sun, and I ‘learnt’ about elephants from her.”

  The first cuts released foul-smelling methane gas into the air. Sawing open her torso, he needed help pulling away the skin, which felt as heavy and unwieldy as a waterlogged carpet. Next there were three tough layers of muscle. And then the huge, protective omentum, an opaque apron of connective tissue laced with branching blood vessels. It supports the blood vessels for the intestines, making a kind of girdle or scaffolding for the great loops of the gut. He hacked at the tissue that kept the viscera in place. When the digestive organs slid out, they seemed to expand as they exited, and the escaping gas was noxious. Though she, like all elephants, looked portly, there was actually little fatty tissue. Her great barrel of a body was filled with the vast workings of digestion. Elephants can eat 8 percent of their own weight in vegetation every day, and they need a very big gut to process it all.

  He began to excavate the organs, pulling them out and placing them with care into a straight line to study. Laid out, the intestines and stomach alone looked bigger than the elephant herself. It seemed impossible they had come from inside her. There was her heart, the size of a well-fed bulldog, with two apexes instead of the one a human heart had. This feature led another novice forest assistant to conclude that one of his elephants had died of a broken heart.

  Williams had to work to slice Pin Wa’s lungs free from her chest wall. This was another puzzle, for almost all other mammals have a space around the lungs—the pleural cavity. But the elephant’s lungs are anchored right to the rib cage. No other mammal breathes this way. Elephants don’t inflate and deflate their lungs as humans do, but instead depend on chest muscles to do the work. That’s why they have trouble breathing if their chest is restricted—for instance, if they lie down too long.

  He spent all day on what he called his “Jonah’s journey,” quitting at sundown covered in blood and gore. It was a sign of his determination that he had gotten so far alone, using only the knives on hand. A meticulous man who regularly pumiced tobacco stains from his fingers, he scrubbed himself clean before returning to his tent to transcribe his report. Sitting at a makeshift desk in front of the typewriter, he struggled. Though he had learned a great deal, he could not see any obvious reason for Pin Wa’s demise. That night as he pecked out his observations, it dawned on him that Harding had saddled him with an old animal unfit for work. Under cause of death, he simply reported “Found dead.”

  Because Pin Wa’s pack had been so light, it was easy to redistribute her load among the remaining three elephants to continue their march. But the quiet old elephant remained much on Williams’s mind.

  ALONG A DRY STREAMBED, almost always the most unobstructed travel lane available through the thick Burmese forest, Williams made his way forward, often leaping from rock to rock. He was well ahead of the animals when he spotted U Tha Yauk, the man he had come to meet, sitting high on a boulder. Striding toward him, he uttered the few Burmese words he had committed to memory. Unsure of his usage and pronunciation, Williams laughed at himself—and U Tha Yauk responded with a kindly laugh of his own. After the experience with Harding, Billy Williams reveled in the warmth of the moment.

  U Tha Yauk led him to the village clearing, which consisted of about ten bamboo huts set high on stilts, topped with peaked thatched grass roofs. Williams, the European company man, was given the royal treatment. A beautiful young Burmese woman wearing her best htamein, or sarong, a traditional white muslin jacket, and a flower in her hair, rushed out with a cane stool for him to sit on. Others brought a little hand-forged copper cup and green coconuts to pour juice for him. Biting bugs were fanned away by a little boy as Williams gulped down the drink, his cup refilled each time he emptied it. Taking out one of his handkerchiefs from home, which was embroidered with a foxhunting scene, Williams made a hat for the boy as a gift. Everyone was so solicitous, he felt struck by the “wonderful gentleness in these jungle people.”

  That night, when Williams was treated to a colonialist’s dream, he had anything but a colonialist’s response. An immaculate hut had been prepared for him, lighted by little oil lamps and decorated by pretty woven dhurries covering the floor. His bed, encircled by mosquito netting, was dressed in spotless linens. Clean flannel trousers and a white shirt were laid out. His revolver was placed, for nighttime emergencies, by his pillow. His camp furniture, which traveled with him—table and chair—were unpacked and arranged, with framed photographs from home set out.

  He took a steaming hot bath in the tin tub placed in the middle of the room. And then a parade of village men served his roast chicken dinner in several courses, handing them up to his designated “valet.” After finishing the feast, as he drank his coffee, one villager quietly prepared the mosquito netting, tucking the bottom hem in securely for him, and then vanishing.

  On his own in the quiet, Williams heard the faint tinkling of the many delicate village pagoda bells, like the music of fairies. He felt humbled by the care these strangers lavished on him. “Left alone, I was overcome by a great homesickness,” Williams would recall years later. “The overpowering kindness of the Burmans was too much for me, and I asked myself what I had done to deserve it.” The people in the village, he said, “wanted to show their sympathy with me in my loneliness and my ignorance of their language and all the difficulties that lay ahead.” He would never take them for granted.

  The next morning, Williams was pulled gently awake by dozens of distinctive kalouks, sounding like a babbling brook. He rose to see the clearing now alive with elephants. While he had been introduced to the traveling elephants, these were the real working elephants of Burma, the ones who wrestled the giant teak logs. The sight was thrilling. It was a sea of gray, and yet he saw anything but uniformity with variations in hue and markings and in the amount and placement of pink freckling. Some even had the spotted pigmentation inside their trunks. Here were big tuskers, tuskless males, and the much smaller females, a few with babies by their side. There were so many patterns of tusk sets and physiques that there were categories to sort them. Tusks that curved up and inward, looking like a monk carrying a begging bowl, were called, appropriately enough, thabeik-pike, or bowl-carrying type. Short, fat tusks that resembled small bananas were called just that—hnet-pyaw-bu. Tusk girth, not length, helped indicate age.

  The shape of the back fell into five categories, including wet-kone, which most resembled a pig’s back; kyaw-dan, which was straight and flat; and then the one considered best for logging work, a back that would slope gently down toward the tail, like the bough of a banana tree—hnyet-pyaw-gaing. For a new elephant lover such as Williams, this was an embarrassment of riches.

  He quickly washed up and shaved so he could sit outside with his traditional English breakfast and watch the scene unfold. The uzis sat squatting in small groups, silently eating their own morning meal of steamed rice served on a “plate” of wild banana leaf. One by one, as
each man finished, he would rinse his mouth with water from a coconut shell cup and then quietly mount his harnessed elephant to begin the day’s work. They headed up to the work site where the elephants would spend the day moving felled teak trees into a dry streambed ready for the monsoon.

  U Tha Yauk came to him, carrying a map. Spreading it out before Williams, he traced his finger over five parallel creeks, all flowing west into the Myittha River. Williams understood that over and around these watersheds and hills of three or four thousand feet, they would make their journey to the ten elephant camps of his division. It encompassed an area of about four hundred square miles. Without a better command of the language, he could ask no significant questions. But he deduced from the map that the distance between camps was about seven miles.

  WAITING FOR WILLIAMS IN one of those ten camps was an elephant man named Po Toke. He was a leader among the workers, and an independent thinker. Po Toke was not Bandoola’s uzi nor his owner. He was the master mahout who had trained him and oversaw his care. Handsome and slight, with his graying hair kept in a neat braid, and intricate tattoo patterns decorating his torso and legs, Po Toke looked “Siamese,” meaning his family was ethnically Shan, the Burmese word for Thai. Married and childless, Po Toke was an authority to the men. But he wasn’t entirely popular with his British bosses, who suspected him of harboring nationalist leanings.

  Still, he had managed years ago to wrangle an agreement with Bombay Burmah that he would always work with the magnificent Bandoola. After all, he had helped raise the animal from infancy. Now nearly forty, Po Toke was only fifteen when he took on the elephant’s care. His entire adult life had centered around Bandoola. Their relationship was like that of father and son.

  The most strenuous logging work went to the biggest, most mature bulls. At twenty-three, Bandoola wasn’t ready to compete at their level.

  Po Toke had something to prove to the world, and Bandoola would be his masterstroke. But, at twenty-three, Bandoola was still a tender, immature bull. He wasn’t ready for the most strenuous logging work. The tusker was in the midst of a growth spurt that would last a decade. In fact, it might not be until Bandoola’s forties that they would see the full extent of his magnificence. So there was danger in the coming transition of management. This raw recruit, a man named Williams, who as yet knew nothing about elephants, was about to be Po Toke’s boss. His word would be law. Out of inexperience or cruelty, the young Englishman could undo a lifetime of Po Toke’s work in a matter of weeks. Sent into the heavy logging area, Bandoola could be permanently injured. The master mahout had a lot to protect. As he waited, he did what he could: He appealed to the spirits and plotted with the men.

  WILLIAMS KNEW WHAT TO expect. Assistants like himself were generally given a territory “larger than an English county,” where they would be in charge of about three hundred men and one hundred elephants. He would be required to monitor the health of the elephants at each camp, oversee the logging, and take care of all administrative duties: paying the men; settling disputes; hiring, firing, and communicating with headquarters. “By continual touring during all seasons of the year,” the forest assistant “saw each camp about once every 6 weeks, so that it was a matter of time before he knew his charges, not only by name, but by temperament, and capabilities of work.” By luck, Williams had fewer elephants in a smaller area than most, which meant he could see each elephant twice a month. It was perfect for a man who wanted to really know them, not just canvass them.

  This would be his life: a nomad in the forests, making the rounds of the widely distributed teak camps in his district. The people he would be interacting with included, as he wrote, “the elephant oozies and their camp followers; … jungle villagers such as firewatchers, fellers, rice traders and bazaar vendors; … elephant contractors, who might equally well be Indian, Karen, or Siamese as Burman; and dacoits—men who, for one reason or another, had put themselves beyond the law and who existed by robbery, and, on occasion, murder.” And then there would also be occasional visits with other forest men, Europeans like himself.

  Each camp had its own personality, but physically they tended to look alike. Generally there were two or more bamboo-floored long huts in a clearing, raised about six feet off the ground. Some camps housed the families of the riders. These villages were often set in clearings and surrounded by rough fences. There were usually about a dozen tidy houses, all with thatched roofs and walls made of woven bamboo, set up on stilts, with ladders to climb up to the front doors. There would be a pagoda, and one bungalow would be retained for the visiting forest assistant. Palm trees provided shade. Chickens, pigs, and skinny little pariah dogs wandered around under the houses. Always, the villagers were welcoming with smiles and little gifts of food. The women, he noticed, seemed to care for each other’s children—even to the point of breast-feeding one another’s babies. It wasn’t just the human children who benefited from this nurturing attitude. More than once Williams found a village mother suckling an orphaned forest animal, such as a baby bear, kept for a time as a pet.

  The logging camps were well-organized villages that always contained a clean hut for visiting forest assistants such as Williams.

  Most good-sized villages also held a monastery. The monks, in their orange-gold robes, were responsible for the country’s high literacy rate, for they taught young boys to read and write.

  For now, Williams would be the student of U Tha Yauk. The men packed up once again, to begin his education.

  CHAPTER 5

  HOW TO READ AN ELEPHANT

  WHEN THE GROUP REACHED THEIR FIRST CAMP, U THA YAUK conveyed to Williams by hand signal that they would spend just one night there for the time being. During the monsoon, from about mid-May to October, it would become their home base. Chosen for its earthly and divine features, the little clearing was level, open, and said to hold no malignant spirits.

  About twenty men were erecting a set of jungle buildings, including a shrine to the good nats. Williams’s hut was raised up on stilts, topped with a thatched roof. There was a veranda in front, whose height had been calculated for loading elephants. A bamboo ladder would serve as a staircase. Inside, one large room contained an office, dining room, and bedroom. In the back was a small bathroom and a set of stairs for the servants to deliver meals.

  The sea of forest around the site was Williams’s classroom. U Tha Yauk demonstrated for him some simple forest tricks. The teacher went over to a large Shaw tree and cut a notch. He then grabbed the bark, pulling upward and out, so that an eighty-foot line of it separated from the tree all the way to the top, like a narrow strip of wallpaper. Plaited together like jute, the material made harnesses for the elephants. Cutting a stalk of bamboo at the knuckle and tipping the short length to his mouth, the Burman showed Williams the hidden drinkable water that was all around them.

  As much as he loved the elephants he knew, Williams still used his jungle stalking skills to shoot a wild elephant in the name of science. Big game hunting and “collecting” were British passions in Burma. Williams didn’t kill the animal for the tusks, though, but rather to conduct another necropsy, or animal autopsy, and to become versed in the biology of a healthy elephant. “To hunt is to learn,” he explained. Within a year he would be speaking of killing elephants in a very different way.

  Each day began at dawn to avoid the highest temperatures. Forest assistants might have as many as twenty traveling elephants and a greater number of camp men, so marching along they sounded like a gypsy caravan. The kalouks around the animals’ necks rang out, empty kerosene cans clanked, and the men chatted. Williams, craving the quiet, made it his habit to leave early on his own.

  Hiking ahead of the men, Williams knew that even as a keen observer of nature he didn’t see half the animals who saw him. Tigers were plentiful but not known as man-eaters in the area. So he walked with confidence. It would take several days to travel from logging camp to logging camp. His group would always start early and, before lunch, choose
a clearing where they would spend the night. Williams would fill out paperwork, and when they eventually arrived at a site, he would meet with ten to thirty men, examine the working elephants, and settle any matters that needed attention.

  Logging in Burma, Williams discovered, was strictly monitored by the British in the government’s forest department. In the name of progress, they had adopted a German concept of scientific forestry in the mid-1800s. In essence, the philosophy was to balance regeneration with extraction in order to prevent the kind of deforestation that had taken place in India.

  A new generation of foresters was particularly proud to be part of a novel kind of conservation and stewardship of the forests. The problem was that the actual extent of tangible conservation was questionable. Teak forests could be cash cows for the empire, and forest managers were under pressure from senior government officials to chop down ever more trees. With increasing demand came increased production, from sixty-three thousand tons of teak a year in the late 1800s to more than five hundred thousand tons annually in Williams’s early years. The industry may have been hacking at an unprecedented pace, but all the while, they promoted the perception that this was more responsible than indigenous practices would be.

  There were Burmese-owned timber companies, too, but very few. Their harvest was dwarfed by that of the European firms. At the beginning of Billy Williams’s career, the five big European outfits owned three-quarters of the teak extracted, while the Burmese share was less than 5 percent.