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

  Williams did not oversee the felling of trees as part of his regular duties, but he occasionally joined the men to observe the awesome sight of trees over a hundred feet tall crashing to earth and then being prepared for transport.

  Williams sometimes headed up into the forest with the logging crews. The men, using only axes and simple saws, with blades two inches across, would dispatch teak trees that were often well over a hundred feet tall and nine feet in girth. It was remarkable to witness the huge trunks falling toward earth, pulling down neighboring saplings and vines and landing with a ground-shaking bang that could be heard for miles. Unlike other kinds of harvested wood, teak trunks would not be crosscut into eighteen-foot lengths. Instead, the branches would be trimmed, and the trunk, about twenty-nine feet long, would be left intact. Drag holes, to accommodate heavy chains, would be bored into each end.

  Another captioned photo from Williams’s own album. This shows a pair of well-trained, mature elephants working in tandem.

  The big, experienced elephants would then transport the massive two-ton logs from stump to stream. The drag chains were attached to the elephants’ nine-inch-wide plaited breast bands, and then run up and over a wooden saddle on their backs. The saddle was padded underneath with thick layers of woven bark. Logs twenty to thirty feet in length and about seven feet in girth could be hauled by a single elephant, with the bigger logs requiring teams of two or even three. The elephants would use their heads and trunks to position the wood. The uzis and their helpers would attach the elephants’ harness chains to the logs, and the animals would tow them to the closest feeder stream, where they would be placed in orderly lines. The trip could be harrowing, though the elephants knew how to manipulate the load when descending steep hillsides so that the log didn’t end up dragging them. The men were fearless, too, darting in between the legs of the tuskers to free snagged chains.

  The elephants drag teak logs down to creeks to await the monsoon. The heavy rains would then move the logs along to larger waterways.

  These elephant crews had other jobs, too. They showed Williams how to use logs four to six feet in girth to construct a staple of the forest, “an elephant bridge,” a simple but sturdy span over a creek. And they taught him the importance of pulling debris out of dry streambeds. When the rains hit, one jammed log could cause a pileup of hundreds behind it. By observing everything and becoming familiar with the men, Williams began to form his own forest family. The first, and most beloved, member was a funny-looking little village urchin named Aung Net.

  The fourteen-year-old in ragged clothes had noticed during one of Williams’s visits that a spaniel had kept hunting with Williams, even as she dropped newborn puppies in a section of dense reeds. When the shooting was over, Aung Net appeared, “grinning from ear to ear,” and carrying a bundle of five puppies to Williams. Struck by the boy’s “humor and kindliness,” Williams instantly offered him a coveted job as jungle follower traveling with him from camp to camp. Immediately, Aung Net became indispensable. He first learned how Williams liked his tea, then worked his way up to attending to Williams’s clothing and setting his table. The boy wasn’t sophisticated—indeed, the others teased him for his earnestness—but he was exceedingly capable in all his tasks. And he proved able to read people and animals alike. When all the men went tearing off in pursuit of a green three-foot-long reptile called a “water dragon” (whose eggs were a delicacy), it was always Aung Net, Williams noted, who would emerge from the brook holding the prized lizard in his hand.

  Despite the thrill of new friends and adventures for Williams, when the December holidays arrived, there was inevitably melancholy and homesickness for the family and the life he had left behind in England. His mother sent a traditional Christmas hamper, or gift basket, from the famed British provisioner Fortnum and Mason. Filled with astonishing delicacies such as tins of quail in foie gras, pots of Stilton cheese, ham, biscuits, cakes, chocolates, Christmas pudding, cognac, and Montebello 1915 champagne, they were especially joyfully received by men like Williams—colonialists in the far corners of the world. Alone in his tent, he binged on the contents. In no time, he was delirious with fat, sugar, and booze.

  The next day he was back to work. As he sat eating a curry lunch in one of the logging camps, he looked out from the covered veranda of his hut. About a hundred yards below, where the fast-flowing brook opened into a large pool, he saw five elephants bearing uzis. They walked into the stream and lay down in about three feet of water. The uzis slipped off the elephants and knotted their long tubelike longyis into loincloths, exposing some of their traditional tattoos that resembled “skin-tight underwear” from knees to waist. The intricate patterns of dark blue tracery were hypnotic and chimerical: tigers, ghost tigers, cats, monkeys, spirits, and elephants, each bordered by scalloped lines and the circular letters of the Burmese alphabet.

  The elephants loved their spa—it not only felt good but signaled the end of the working day—and their joy was infectious. The uzis were using special tree bark and loofah-like creepers from the acacia family, which lathered up thickly like soap, to wash the animals. Every inch from trunk to tail was scoured. Williams found the scene irresistible. He wiped his mouth with his linen napkin, stood, and abandoned his warm, spicy meal to stroll down to the bank for a closer look.

  Bath time for the elephants was always a draw for Williams, who was unfailingly moved by their joy.

  It was the same, and was never the same. This time, fuzzy-headed babies rolled over and over in the water, chasing one another with their tails sticking straight up in excitement. They still had so much hair it often looked in need of brushing. They planted themselves in the mud, or slid down the banks into the water, bulldozing each other and running with abandon despite the presence of two big bulls. The males, who had worked out any dominance issues between them long ago, were lying placidly having their teeth brushed. The uzis took handfuls of the gritty silver sand and used it like tooth paste to scale their gleaming white tusks.

  The baby elephants in particular reveled in the fun of a good soak.

  Out of the pool, the animals headed for sand, using their trunks to either suck or scoop it up—depending on the texture—and then blanket themselves with it. The process helped keep them cool and served as a barrier to various swarms of bloodsucking parasites. They also might grab sticks with their trunks to use as back scratchers, and if they didn’t quite reach, they’d drop them and pull longer ones off a tree: what scientists would later identify as tool use.

  Once they had dried off and the uzis had changed into clean clothes, everyone lined up for inspection. By now, Williams understood the formality of the process. He wanted to respond with equal respect as U Tha Yauk bowed before him, handing him a stack of ragged books, each one with the name of an elephant printed on the cover.

  Williams called each animal in turn. The first male marched forward, halting just in front of him. He was “a splendid beast, with his head up, his skin newly scrubbed but already dry in the sun, a black skin with a faint tinge of blue showing through it,” Williams wrote. The bull’s “white tusks, freshly polished, gleamed in the evening sunlight.” The tusker’s uzi sat on his neck, one leg bent at the knee, the other hanging down behind the elephant’s ear ready to signal movement and direction.

  Williams opened the top book and read the Burmese entries about the mature male standing before him. His language skills had improved enough to recognize the frequently used designations: F for female; CAH for calf at heel, if the baby was under five and not yet weaned; T for tusker; Tai, a male with only one long tusk; Tan, for one short tusk; Han, a male with a pair of short tusks; Haing, a male with no tusks at all. Height, as well as a description of the eyes, tail, ears, and skin, and any identifying scars were noted, as were the mother and date of birth if known.

  Though written in shorthand Burmese, the book painted a detailed portrait; a whole life could be conjured up from the scribbles that grew with nearly every inspection. Bor
n in Siam (Thailand), this bull had been purchased by Bombay Burmah at the age of twenty and was once placed on medical leave for a whole year after having been badly gored by a wild tusker.

  Williams felt along the elephant’s body as he had watched Harding do, and he himself had done months ago upon arrival in the jungle. But now it wasn’t just a pantomime. His hands were developing knowledge of their own. The men were even teaching him how to doctor the galls he had read about: slice them open and apply disinfectant. He added his notes into each book.

  The histories were recorded not only in these books, but also on the elephants’ skin. Their bodies were maps of their experience. Females who had fended off tigers in order to protect their young sported long scars from the claws that had raked them. Mischievous young animals might have notches in their ears from scrapes with other elephants, and bulls who had been belligerent toward people might have had their tusks “tipped” (shortened) for safety.

  It was from a male with short, blunted tusks that the recruit learned about another practice that sickened him. As he bent down to look at the animal’s feet, Williams recoiled at the sight of ropey, discolored, raised scars that encircled the ankles. He ran his hands along the tracks of thickened and toughened hide. The uzi told him they were training scars, where heavy-gauge holding chains had bitten through flesh during the brutal, weeks-long “kheddaring,” after the elephant had been captured from a wild herd.

  Kheddaring targeted animals between the ages of fifteen and twenty. A colleague of his would later amplify, describing the process in detail: “Elephants in the wild are generally taken in traps known as keddahs, which may be several acres in extent and capable of capturing a whole herd at a time. The keddah is formed of a strong stockade of tree trunks with a bottle-necked entrance, into which the victim is either driven or wanders of his own free will. Once in the keddah, there is no escape, and trained elephants are then used for securing with ropes the animals thus caught.”

  As Kipling characterized it, elephants would tumble into the enclosure “like boulders in a landslide.” Panicked, and heaving themselves against the heavy posts, they would be taunted and jeered, with torches thrust at them. Empty cartridges would be fired off around them.

  During the day, the frightened elephants might be left in the sun with no access to water. They would be chained and beaten, and the air would fill with the shouts of men and the groaning and trumpeting of elephants, until, in exhaustion, pain, and confusion, the animals submitted to the wranglers.

  Williams would soon see these practices for himself. He found them barbaric. “When wild elephants are caught by Kheddaring,” he would write, “there is undoubted cruelty in the training and particularly in the breaking of the spirit.” The animals would often lunge at their handlers, who then would retaliate “with a spear stab to the cheek, leading to wounds which are almost impossible to treat, thus becoming fly blown and ulcerated. Finally the young animal becomes heart broken and thin,” Williams wrote; “covered in wounds it eventually puts up with a man sitting on its head, realising finally that it is for ever in captivity which it accepts after a heart breaking struggle.” It was, in short, he said, “the very essence of brutality.”

  But it was also steeped in tradition, relying on techniques dating from ancient times. The large-scale capture of elephants was left to private contractors. Williams knew this had to change, and that the big teak firms shouldn’t buy from kheddaring operations. He surmised, however, that the old-timers would not want to hear about reforms from a man who had been on the job a few months. Kheddaring kept them supplied with elephants. If he wanted to put a stop to the custom, he’d have to figure out an alternative. But if they didn’t pull elephants from the forest, where else would they come from?

  CHAPTER 6

  THE FAIREST TUSKER OF THEM ALL

  AS WILLIAMS TRAVELED TO THE NEXT LOGGING CAMP, THE MEN told him he was in for a surprise. There was a famous elephant in residence whose name was known throughout the forest: a tusker so blessed, he was like a god. The recruit was intrigued.

  On arrival, the workers unloaded the travelers, and Aung Net set about unpacking Williams’s clothes and gear. It was soon afternoon and time for the timber elephants to quit for the day. They were bathed and then presented for inspection. In the lineup of about seven, sure enough, one tusker stood out. Strapping, substantial, and confident, he was named Bandoola. Williams approached him and, as was becoming habit, spoke a little Burmese to the bull. The elephant’s deep-set dark eyes at first seemed vicious, Williams thought, “but on closer scrutiny kind, for their true colour was the equal of the pearl, with a pupil like a black bead.” There was intelligence in the animal’s gaze, too—a sense of knowing.

  Williams reached out to pat Bandoola’s trunk and felt a very odd sensation. A meeting of souls. He was certain that a current of mutual recognition had passed between him and this elephant. “It was not merely that chance or fortune brought me together with him,” he would write years later. It was destiny. Rubbing the high-up portion of the tusker’s trunk, he sensed an unbreakable bond being formed. In that instant, Williams had “a feeling of understanding him as a fellow-creature closer than many human beings.”

  That thought fit Billy Williams’s ideology. A superstitious man, he jingled the coins in his pocket at the sight of the new moon for financial luck, and was adamant that peacock feathers with their circular “evil eye” patterns did not belong inside the house. He was spiritual, too, for he felt moved by forces that weren’t necessarily visible or easily explainable. Coming to Burma had only amplified those leanings. “There are ways of knowing things quite certainly but not by reason,” he would write, “and in the East both the wise and the simple accept this.”

  The moment with Bandoola seemed transcendent. And yet there were earthly reasons, too, for him to feel so drawn to the tusker. They were classmates in a way: born in the same month and year, November 1897. At the time of their meeting, they had both just turned twenty-three and were beginning their adult lives in the jungle.

  From Bandoola’s ledger Williams learned a great deal and wanted to know more. In halting Burmese, he spoke to Po Toke, the curious man who handled Bandoola. Williams’s interest in Bandoola was the best thing Po Toke could have hoped for. He was eager to provide a complete picture of the great bull who was on the cusp of his most powerful decades.

  Po Toke, it turned out, had blueprinted a new kind of training for logging elephants, and Bandoola was the living embodiment of it. Over the loud sawing of jungle insects, Williams learned about a method of schooling that resonated deeply with him. Po Toke’s revolutionary strategy was built as much on love as it was on logic.

  Bandoola had been born under a full moon on November 3, 1897, in the forested area that would later be called “Pyinmana.” His mother was Ma Shwe (Miss Gold), a formidable female who was working in a logging camp. Given her temperament and bearing, there was no doubt that as a wild elephant, she would have been a matriarch, a wise leader. But she never had the chance. She had been kheddared by a Burmese contractor before she had fully matured.

  Because Ma Shwe was always released at night like the others to feed herself, it was believed that she had mated with a wild bull, a common enough occurrence among the logging elephants. What was uncommon was the mate himself, an especially wily and notorious bull, whom the locals, out of fear and awe, dubbed the “beast of the local forest” or “Bwetgi Monster.”

  Thus, from both sides of his lineage, Bandoola received size and intelligence.

  Although tigers and elephants generally avoid each other, a two-hundred-pound baby elephant can be very tempting for a five-hundred-pound predator. Soon after Bandoola was born, a big cat came for him in the night just outside the logging camp. Bandoola’s mother and her twai sin, or bonded female friend, bellowed, trumpeted, and fought the killer off. Bandoola was just a shuffling, rubbery little tub of energy with a shaggy coat of baby hair who couldn’t yet properly use his trunk
. But during the chaos of the assault, he managed to stay with his mother.

  Po Toke was among the men who raced to the scene of the attack that night. Just fifteen years old and working far from his home village, he had begun to believe that calves, raised and trained with kindness, would grow up to be better workers than grown elephants who had been beaten into submission. This calf seemed like an ideal candidate to prove his point. Then and there, years ahead of the normal naming time, Po Toke christened the fat calf Maha Bandoola (most often spelled as “Bandula” now), after a courageous Burmese military hero who had fought the British in the 1820s. It was an expression of Po Toke’s respect for the elephant and his wish for independence for his country.

  Right away, the uzi’s confidence seemed deserved. The calf showed an unusual autonomy—leaving Ma Shwe’s side to explore on his own for substantial intervals. And he did something else that seemed comical, but amazed the men even as they laughed: If his mother was given a command, Bandoola followed right along with her, so that when a rider told Ma Shwe, “Hmit!” big elephant and tiny elephant sat simultaneously. A shout of “Htah!” snapped them both to their feet. Simply by observing his mother, Bandoola had absorbed all the basic commands of working elephants without being taught. In the wild, this is precisely how these babies learn.

  Though the captive life would seem inherently safer, Bandoola faced dangers that wild calves didn’t. The elephant contractors and the British loggers thought that rearing elephant calves, who wouldn’t be strong enough to work until they were twenty-one, was a waste of money. Why squander resources for a growing animal, they reasoned, if a full-grown wild one could be caught and trained in a short time? When a baby was born, the men put the mothers right back to work. The calves tried their best to tag along, but they simply could not nurse as often as they should, nor even touch their mothers as frequently as they were meant to. Inevitably, they grew up smaller and weaker than their wild cousins. Worse, because they didn’t receive constant maternal protection, they often got lost, were attacked by tigers, and died. The system guaranteed high mortality rates; by some counts it was nearly 70 percent.