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

  Harding addressed Williams first: “Didn’t this headman tell you the animal was dangerous?”

  Williams said no. Harding said it was in the book, and if Williams’s Burmese were better he’d know that. “It’s a wonder the animal didn’t knock your block off,” he said.

  Williams was perplexed. He may have been on his knees, but now he was full of fight. “Well, why didn’t one of you stop me operating?”

  Harding’s answer was opaque. “For precisely the same reason that the animal didn’t knock your block off,” he said. The boss and the tusker were acknowledging that Williams could get away with liberties around elephants that no other man could.

  Then Harding lit into Po Toke, and every one of his words “seemed to go home like a body blow.” Po Toke was shaken when he was dismissed.

  Harding turned back to Williams, saying that he didn’t trust Po Toke. Any Burman suspected of nationalist leanings was a threat to the old guard colonialists. Aware of Williams’s loyalty to Po Toke, Harding issued a pointed warning: “Watch him as you go.”

  Williams and his big-hearted village dog, Jabo, entertain a visitor.

  Williams returned to his regular rounds. But the rainy season brought three serious attacks of malaria. As he had during the war, he would tough them out, but the cumulative effect was telling. He was helped through them by the companionship of a young red-and-white village dog he had picked up named Jabo, who showed him sympathy.

  When Harding summoned Williams out of the forest for a trip to headquarters in Rangoon, they hadn’t seen each other in three months. Williams looked so haggard that Harding went easy on him his first night in camp and for the several days of travel down to the capital.

  The first thing Williams did when leaving the jungle was catch up on the news from the outside world. He was hungry for it. Aboard the company paddleboat, during the periods of wakefulness, Williams could stay curled up in his bunk reading the newspapers. Back in England, that summer of 1921, unemployment soared, the coal miners ended their strike, and in September, Ernest Shackleton was making his way to Antarctica on what no one knew would be his last voyage.

  Harding provided more important news closer to home: He was about to go on leave, so Williams would be temporarily reporting to a different forest manager, a man named Millie. In addition, in a few months’ time, Williams would be overseeing a large district as the replacement for a forest officer going on leave—another move up the ladder for the ambitious young recruit.

  Williams and Harding were finally enjoying each other’s company as they cruised down the Chindwin. It felt good to have the boss confiding in him as a colleague. Over drinks one night, Harding went further, becoming nearly paternal: “You may think that I’ve been an absolute devil this last year,” he said. “You’re quite right, I have deliberately. You’ll find Millie a much nicer man than I am, but I trust you to serve him just as loyally all the same.”

  Despite the effects of malaria, Williams was happy. “I found myself at last accepted, and the acceptance was all the dearer because it had been so hard to win.” That night, he tried to shrug off how sick he was. But after one marathon card game, he was spent. He was awakened at six in the morning by a cool palm on his forehead. He opened his eyes and saw Harding with a glass in his hand. “Drink that!” he said. “Champagne and stout. Do you a world of good.” Williams drained the glass and went back to sleep. Although Harding would return after his leave, “It was the last order he gave me as my No. 1.”

  CHAPTER 9

  SCHOOL FOR MEN AND ELEPHANTS

  IT HAD BEEN ONE YEAR. AMONG THE THINGS WILLIAMS LEARNED was that time in Burma was more cyclical than straightforward, measured by seasons rather than years. And the rhythms of forest life were becoming the patterns of his own.

  There was the oppressively hot spring, starting in mid-February or early March, when the forest assistants did some of the toughest, most uncomfortable and arduous work—counting the hundreds of logs that were marooned in dry streambeds throughout their territory. The sand would get so hot that it was like walking through fire. In camp, Williams often shed his clothes entirely. The leaves fell off the trees, and any trickle of water was coated in green scum. Without cold, clear water running, all drinking water had to be boiled. For the elephants, it was just as sweltering, but the middle of March would bring their vacation—six weeks off to spend in rest camps, deep in the darkest, shadiest parts of the jungle where rivers still flowed. “All nature seems at a standstill, waiting for the life-giving monsoon to break,” Williams wrote.

  Next, around the end of May, the storms would come. “There is a violent clap of thunder,” Williams noted, “and then, like a curtain dropping, down comes the rain. In a few seconds it is impossible to see across the clearing. Elephants, under the trees stand like statues as the rain splashes off their backs. In a few seconds they shine like ebony carvings.” The rivers rose instantly, roiling “yellow and thick,” as one forester said, “bringing down all the debris of nine months of dry weather.” Within hours, what had been a trickle would become a raging, impassable torrent. The sleeping logs would come alive and “by their hundred go shooting past, twisting and turning in ever varying patterns.” This was also the season of mosquitoes, sand flies, leeches, and every kind of biting thing. And Williams would find he was in for a punishing spell of malaria following any monsoon tour.

  “I came to see the things to be afraid of were not wild beasts,” Williams wrote, “but the climate during the monsoon season and the repulsive creatures that flourished in the rains: the black silent anopheline mosquito which carried malaria, the hookworm burrowing through the ankles and passing through the bloodstream to make its home in the upper intestines, the leeches on the dripping leaves and the tinea [a maddeningly itchy and pernicious fungal infection] lurking in the mud.”

  A watercolor scene Williams painted of a bungalow in the forest.

  Late fall was the best time of year: Cool Novembers brought chilly mornings and days of good, hard work. Williams always had a bungalow of his own and a string of elephant camps to visit. Mornings were brisk when Aung Net would gently waken him with a cup of hot tea.

  At night, after a curry supper, Williams carved little animals out of wood, sketched, and painted. He learned how to make jungle scrimshaw, etching animal images into small pieces of tusk and darkening them with India ink. When he put down his pencils and brushes and extinguished the lamps, he could sit with a last whiskey, listening to the sounds of the forest and the voices of the men. Looking at the light of the campfire dancing on the wall of trees around him, he saw the forest in the mystical way his uzis did. Perhaps it was the vastness of it, the way light and dark played tricks on the eyes, the eerie sounds of the night creatures, or the need to believe matters of life and death weren’t so random. From the men, there was regular talk of ghost tigers and tree and water spirits. Williams himself often sensed that certain areas in the jungle felt hallowed, and usually he would discover that they were, in fact, holy places to the local people. To walk these forests, he noted, one had to accept phenomena that were beyond logic.

  Williams loved to hear the men talk about ghost tigers and forest sprites. He believed in them, too.

  And much of the mystery came directly from the nats. Though the uzis were Buddhist, they had no qualms about believing in these spirits. Nats had been worshipped for thousands of years, and when Buddhism became the country’s state religion in the eleventh century, these beings and their animist cosmology were simply folded in. The nats, hybrids of humans and spirits, can be angelic or demonic. Most are ghosts of humans who died in some tragic way. Like Catholic saints, each one governs a distinct spiritual field. With their evocative names—Lord of the Great Mountain, Lady Golden Sides, The Lord of Five White Elephants, the Little Lady with the Flute, The Brown Lord of Due South—specific nats are propitiated at births, weddings, and deaths; for the prevention or relief of illness; planting or harvesting crops; and just about any as
pect of life. In the jungle and in village homes, little wooden cabinets were crafted into simple altars where offerings of food (nats were said to be especially fond of coconuts) or even cheroots could be left.

  Harding had warned Williams about giving credence to what the uzis said about the nats. “Let their superstitions get under your skin and you’re sunk.” But Williams was clearly receptive to the jungle creed, as proved by a visit by what was thought to be a ghost tiger. Once, during the rainy season, an uzi who was an atheist and did not respect the nat shrines was silently taken by a tiger in the middle of the night. Snatched right out from the middle of the row of sleeping uzis, who had not heard a sound. In the morning, huge paw prints in the mud revealed that the man had been dragged down to the creek. But there the prints disappeared. Not another mark on the other side or anywhere along either bank was seen for miles. It was as though the cat and the body he was carrying turned into mist. Everyone, including Williams, agreed it had been the work of a nat kyar, or spirit tiger.

  WILLIAMS’S SECOND NOVEMBER IN Burma brought two pieces of good news: He had passed his formal probationary period, and elephant school was granted a trial run. Harding was still on leave when the verdict came in, but Williams knew the old man deserved thanks. And the best way to show gratitude to the great taskmaster would be to succeed.

  The faculty for the school was already chosen. Po Toke would be general trainer. Although this meant that for at least a while he wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on Bandoola, the position was a triumph for him—an official acceptance of his theories and practices. Assisting Po Toke was a wonderful headmaster nicknamed U Chit Phoe, Mr. Old Lovable: a Burman with infinite patience, Williams noted. There would be two elephant handlers per calf, plus three twelve-year-old boys who wanted to be uzis. In traditional circumstances, these boys would have been trained by uzis using adult elephants, but now they could actually grow up with their elephant partners. The calves and boys would become experts together.

  In Williams’s new elephant school, young uzis and calves would learn together.

  Along with the human headmaster came an elephant version, too: a patient, mature bull to keep the young ones in line. The designated “Koonkie” was a forty-five-year-old tuskless male who proved just how tolerant and even loving bulls can be.

  The elephant students were selected from the company’s ledgers, which listed females in possession of five-year-old calves. With only three students enrolled and a campus consisting of a clearing in the forest, it was a modest beginning.

  Three triangular shaped corrals were constructed, each just big enough to wedge in an agitated calf. Despite the cruel-sounding term, “crushes” were designed to be strong but also forgiving. Huge logs were used, denuded of rough bark. Pig fat greased the interior, and wooden pegs, not nails, fastened the sides together to prevent any scrape or injury to the young elephant’s skin. The camp was well stocked with everyday forage and favorite elephant treats, too: tamarind, sugarcane, sweet lime, and bananas.

  That first session was filled with trial and error. Yet, right away, the baby elephants learned. They accepted training, bonded with their boy-uzis, and showed that they had the potential to be a great investment.

  The bosses thought so, too. Bombine administrators approved the continuation of elephant school as long is it was kept on a small scale, though, eventually, the training system would become an established part of the company’s structure. More and more calves were signed up each term, reaching a high of twenty-nine. The kinks were worked out, and elephant school quickly established its routine.

  The company’s regional camps held around five hundred elephants, and it was their calves who would become students. Scanning the roster, Williams would select all the five-year-olds, whom he called “my babies.” The exact date was a matter for the nats to decide. Part of launching each new semester was lighting candles to divine the proper time to begin. A small thatched shrine was constructed to honor the jungle nats, and offerings of fruit or flowers were placed in it.

  Then the mothers and their young would be summoned. “On arrival,” Williams reported, “there was chaos, for although strangers, [the calves] were pulling each other’s tails and romping within an hour.” For several days, while the mothers were fed, the babies were free to do as they pleased.

  The mothers were gentle disciplinarians. Williams observed what happened when one little male wandered a good quarter of a mile away on his own. The baby was gorging himself on some lush bamboo shoots as his mother began calling. The calf “listened with one ear cocked, stopped chewing, held the tip of his trunk in his lips as if sucking his thumb, and then satisfied that she was still about, he started stuffing his mouth again.” The calling and ignoring went on for twenty minutes. But when the “tone of the mother’s call changed to one of sternness,” the calf turned tail, crashing through the jungle back to her, Williams said, like a clumsy fat boy. Upon reaching her, he was met by a thump from her trunk hard enough to knock the wind out of him. He kept close by her heels for the rest of the day.

  The curriculum began with the young uzis getting acquainted with the babies. They flirted with them, Williams said, giving them “a tit bit in the form of some fruit or a handful of rice.” One at a time, the calves were removed from their mothers. In the wild, separation would not come this early or suddenly. Males would spend more and more time away until between the ages of ten and fourteen they would be on their own.

  If Williams felt a pang for the poor little animals, he could remind himself that ultimately this averted a cruelty, for many of the babies would have died if left to struggle near their mothers in a logging camp.

  The calves didn’t see it that way. One might be lured away with treats, another “frog marched” in by the Koonkie, or lassoed around the legs by a soft buffalo-hide rope. “There is a short struggle and yelling,” Williams saw, “but provided the mother is near, the calf soon quietens down.” As soon as a young elephant was in the crush, the gate would be closed behind him. “The calf rolls and struggles, but the grease inside the pen makes him only slither and slide,” Williams wrote.

  Then the bribery would begin. The little elephant would be showered with treats and praise from the handlers. Despite that, the calf protested—often too upset to even collect a morsel. “For about 2 hours it struggles and kicks, then sulks, and eventually takes a banana out of sheer boredom and disgust—the expression on its face can only be compared to that of a child who eventually has to accept a sweet from a bag,” Williams noted.

  Once an elephant started accepting delicacies, the real lessons would begin. Po Toke showed them how it had been done with Bandoola. A young elephant handler in training—the boy who would likely guide a particular elephant for the next forty years—would be suspended over the baby in a pulley block system. The calf would bellow, clearly signaling “Damn you! Get off!” The rider apprentice would be lowered and raised repeatedly, the elephant praised and fed a nice fat banana each time she permitted the rider on her neck.

  Next, a heavy wooden block, padded with soft material, would be lowered to the point of putting pressure on the elephant’s back. The Burmans would chant, “Hmit! Hmit!” or “Sit!” until the elephant, weary of the weight, would slump—hind legs kneeling first, and then the front legs folding downward. The moment she did this, she would receive handfuls of treats. The block would be lifted, and as the elephant would reflexively stand, the men would chant, “Htah! Htah!” or “Stand!” so that she associated the command with the action. Again, she would be rewarded with sweet treats. By sundown, a young elephant would be released from the pen having been stuffed with hundreds of bananas.

  None of the mothers objected when the babies were first taken away, but over the following days, Williams heard them calling. By now he knew the cadences of elephant talk and he could distinguish between contentment or fear. These mothering calls seemed less about distress to him, and more a shouted hello to touch base. There had to be a great d
eal of unhappiness, though, and Williams knew it. The bond between an elephant and her calf is astonishing, and it lasts a lifetime. Even in camps where so many natural relationships were broken, in which calves were separated too early, elephants were resilient in their love. They never forgot one another and delighted in reunions. One of Williams’s pack elephants, an eighteen-year-old male, bumped into his mother at a logging camp on their route. “As we entered camp,” Williams wrote, “the calf passed his mother and they both chirped.” They might have been arranging a rendezvous, for the moment they were released after work they would find each other, and they continued to do so every night they were able to.

  Of course, the joyful pairings weren’t limited to mothers and their offspring. Females, such as Williams’s travelers Me Tway and Chit Ma, formed bonds with one another that were sometimes interrupted by separate assignments. When friends or relatives were back together, even briefly, they would greet each other with much emotion by vocalizing, touching, and making eye contact. They always seemed to make plans because the minute they were set free in the afternoon to forage, they would run to one another and keep together throughout the night.

  Williams saw that his elephants were a lot like people when it came to the variety of friendships they formed. And scientists later would prove the point. Some Asian elephants act like social butterflies, keeping as many as fifty friends, while others prefer a smaller circle. Among those with smaller groups of friends, the bonds are usually strongest. The detailed sorting of these friendships is yet another sign of the high level of what modern scientists would say is the cognitive capacity of elephants.

  At school, the best approach to helping the heartbroken young ones was to lavish them with love and to keep them busy. They were even taken on field trips. The Koonkie would be outfitted with a buffalo-hide brace around his neck, which was attached to another such collar on one or two young elephants. The big male would walk his students and make them heel—pulling them along or even cuffing them with his trunk if they lagged or struggled. Once the calves got the hang of it, Williams found that the Koonkie, like the nannies he had seen back home, could control the young ones with a look instead of a swat.