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

  All along the route they passed the other elephants who had made the crossing that day. The little clearings in which each group of elephants stood were in contrast to the scene of Bandoola’s incarceration. For the rest of the elephants, there was hardly anything left of the evening meal and plenty of evidence of digestion: piles of droppings where the elephants stood.

  U San Din, who had led the river crossing, was waiting at the headman’s house. When Williams confided what he thought, U San Din looked relieved. He had not wanted to be the informer. Now he didn’t have to be; Williams had solved the mystery. U San Din filled in a few details. Yes, Bandoola had gone without food, and not just on this evening. For at least three days he had been given nothing, and restricted from foraging on his own. Unlike most other nights when the elephants were released into the jungle, the days before and after a big swim, they were secured in order to keep them close. Bandoola’s rider, the “opium eater,” had been too high to care properly for the tusker. He should have been reprimanded by Po Toke, but Po Toke had also neglected Bandoola. Po Toke’s own emerging domestic drama had distracted him. He had taken on a second wife, a teenager. The unhappiness of his first wife and the demands of the second kept Po Toke too busy to look after Bandoola.

  Days without a real meal and then the extreme physical exertion of a wide river crossing had exacted their toll on the tusker. He was famished and exhausted, and yet still compliant when his uzi ordered him to stand near a tree for shackling. After that, however, he had grown impatient. Standing there alone, with no food, he had protested by stamping his feet and heaving himself side to side. His chains tangled and knotted. When Aung Bala approached him, it was to straighten the fetters, not to give him food. “Then the captive elephant saw red” and killed the man, Williams wrote.

  Po Toke had attempted to conceal his culpability by quickly stacking heaps of vegetation around the hungry animal. There was plenty of blame to go around, and Williams shared some of it. Yes, Po Toke and Aung Bala had abused Bandoola. But Williams had been drinking his way through the last several days. Not one of the three men in Bandoola’s chain of command, he felt, had come through for him.

  Williams returned to the boat. Harding heard the story and told him that he would leave disciplinary decisions to him. Both men agreed that Bandoola was not a killer and that to label him as such would only turn him into one, with fearful handlers who would subject him to jabs of the spear on a regular basis. The killing would not go down in Bandoola’s official record, nor would he wear a metal bell.

  Po Toke was a trickier matter, but, ultimately, Williams could see the bigger picture. This was the first time the old elephant man had ever failed Bandoola. Williams knew he was heartbroken over it. He demoted Po Toke but did not reduce his pay.

  This did not settle the matter. Something larger was happening with Po Toke, but what exactly, Williams couldn’t say. A short time later, when Po Toke tried to quit his job, Williams was able to persuade him to take a leave of absence instead. But Williams continued to be mystified by Po Toke, and, it would turn out, he had no clue about what the master mahout was plotting.

  CHAPTER 16

  REBELS AND REUNIONS

  LATE IN 1928, WILLIAMS WAS PROMOTED AND REASSIGNED. He would be a forest officer now, with several assistants in his charge, working out of headquarters in Pyinmana, about 390 miles southeast of Mawlaik. Considered at the time to be one of the most valuable woodlands in the world, it was turning into one of the most dangerous for Europeans, an incubator for rebel activity. The men who were labeled as “rebels” were often nationalists—people who wanted their country back. Coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, it was also where Po Toke was taking his leave, the place of Bandoola’s birth, and the home village to Po Toke’s in-laws.

  Throughout the country, these years were troubling ones for the British government and its citizens. There was a clear desire among the Burmese for self-rule, and, at the very least, activists wanted more control of their country’s affairs. A point of contention was the forests themselves. They were administered by the British with the result that the big timber leases were granted to European, not Burmese, firms. A few years earlier, there had been a strategic concession. A position was created for a Burmese forests minister. Though it was a step forward, the minister had limited powers, and the authority to allocate the all-important teak leases remained in British hands. In addition, there was widespread unrest from peasants living near forest reserves who were blocked from their traditional gathering of firewood and bamboo.

  The response was a rising peasant militancy. Generally that took the form of illegal timber extraction, but it eventually went so far as the murder of a forest official. There was, in the words of the chief conservator, “an expression of general lawlessness closely connected with political agitation.” One of the biggest political agitators was Saya San, a Buddhist monk, medicine man, and politician. In the late 1920s, he began to encourage nonviolent disobedience in a campaign to grant free wood and bamboo to peasant families. Soon enough, Saya San went further, organizing armed insurrection. It was a complicated movement, fueled by elements that included legitimate nationalist desires and rejection of taxation policies, as well as resentment over the restructuring of education in the country, which had been traditionally managed by the Buddhists. Too much was in British hands—not just in terms of power, but in simple acreage. By one tally, Burmans themselves owned only about half the land in the rich rice-growing provinces.

  Williams’s new assignment was in the heart of the area where discord was growing, and he arrived just as it began to take root. Getting to know new workers amid such political turmoil was difficult. He didn’t have the lay of the land yet and hadn’t established relationships with the men. He was aware that working for a British firm made him a target. No one knew if a handful of recent crimes was connected to a larger political scheme, but there were stories of Europeans having been murdered in the jungle—a forestry worker killed by uzis in Williams’s area south of Mandalay, and a Catholic priest slashed to death down south in the delta region, among them.

  Williams relied on the camp staff and traveling elephants he brought with him, and he felt optimistic about the workers he would meet. He completely trusted his own men, yet he understood that even with them a divide must exist. “Though I had learnt Burmese and took some trouble to understand the men who worked for me, I knew that I only understood a small fraction of what was going on in their minds,” he wrote. He was aware of what colonialism meant to the Burmese: “I though the employee of a private company, was the Government, they were the governed.”

  Williams completely trusted his own men, yet he understood that in this colonial world, a divide existed.

  This was particularly true since he worked for Bombay Burmah. The corporation had had a hand in establishing British rule in the country in the first place, in the third of what historians describe as three distinct chapters in the British takeover of Burma.

  The First Anglo-Burmese War was precipitated in the 1820s by the great Burmese general Bandula’s acquisition of Assam—too close to British-held India for comfort. That war resulted in Burma’s ceding land in the Arakan, or southwest region, to the British. At midcentury, the arrest of some British nationals on suspicion of murder offered pretext enough for the Second Anglo-Burmese War. This time all of the coastal provinces, including Rangoon, came under British rule. Finally, in the late 1800s, a number of factors converged. The country’s monarch, King Thibaw, was perceived as unfriendly to British business—right at a time when France was solidifying its grip on the neighboring territory that would be French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). So when Thibaw’s government fined Bombay Burmah for tax evasion, the British had their excuse for the Third Anglo-Burmese War, which ended with Britain abolishing the Burmese monarchy and taking over the rest of the country. The royal couple—Thibaw and Queen Supayalat—were exiled to India, their palace in Mandalay converted int
o the military compound of Fort Dufferin. Denied the respect of being a separate colony, Burma was administered for many years as a province of India. The British took control of timber exports, among other lucrative businesses, and Indians were recruited to fill most of the civil service jobs. The colonialists considered the Burmese lazy, and thousands of Indian workers were welcomed. During Williams’s time, 53 percent of the population of Rangoon was Indian. Millions would immigrate to the country over the decades, where they would be bitterly resented by the native population.

  Still, at the start of his new job, Williams’s strategy was to simply do the work and become acquainted with the men by visiting the logging camps in his jurisdiction. He got on with it, traveling from camp to camp, paying the men, examining the elephants, and mediating any problems.

  This was a brand-new population of elephants, each with his or her idiosyncrasies. Williams quickly grew to understand them. In quick order he memorized their names. He treated their illnesses, galls, and tummy upsets with assurance. He had learned by now that swelling in limbs could be reduced by standing the animals in cold streams. If an elephant became hard to manage, Williams knew to swap out an inexperienced uzi for a more sophisticated one. Pregnant cows were given reduced loads and hours. They were fed better.

  Williams even inoculated his elephants with a new, experimental anthrax vaccine. The infectious disease, caused by a type of bacterium, was a terrible scourge, weakening and killing scores of animals.

  In Pyinmana, he had a chance to do something about it. But he had to accomplish it using a large-bore needle that the elephants didn’t like. Even with elephants he knew well, this would be a dangerous undertaking, and in this new place, the animals were unfamiliar to him. He found, however, that he was experienced enough to take it on.

  Still, life with elephants was risky. That was alarmingly clear one day when Williams was hiking in the forest far ahead of the travelers with one of his camp workers. In the checkerboard patches of dark shade and blinding sunlight, something seemingly impossible happened: An elephant had become invisible by doing nothing more than standing still. Unaware of her presence, Williams practically bumped right into her. When he was within feet of the elephant, she roared to life, stretching her ears out horizontally in alarm, bellowing in fury. It was swift and volcanic. She charged without a second’s hesitation. Instinct pulled Williams and his worker in opposite directions. As he bolted, Williams turned his head to see where the worker was. The man was safe, as the angry elephant had naturally beaded in on only one of them, and that one was Williams.

  Williams eagerly inoculated his elephants with a new, experimental anthrax vaccine. The infectious disease had killed scores of animals in his care.

  He ran in the direction of a nearby village, able to distinguish as he did so the sound of the clanking of metal—two different pitches, in fact, which brought both good news and bad. The elephant was clearly fettered with chains around her ankles, which fortunately would slow her progress—important since these creatures can reach short bursts of eighteen miles an hour, easily overtaking most men. But the other clanging was unmistakable: Instead of the usual teak bell around her neck, she wore a metal one. The cold, insistent sound made him shiver. It meant only one thing: The elephant on his heels was a killer.

  In that instant, he knew not only what she was, but because he had worked hard to learn the names of all the elephants in his new territory, he also knew who she was. Taw Sin Ma. So mean-tempered that even as a youngster she had earned her name, which meant “Miss Wild Elephant.” She was the most dangerous animal in his territory.

  Williams weaved and dodged around trees and finally made it into the camp. By then, Taw Sin Ma had given up her chase, probably because she didn’t want to be caught by her uzi, who lived nearby. Without fanfare, her rider headed into the forest to catch her.

  Williams went back to rounds. But there were more surprises.

  In the middle of a terrible hot spell, his elephants did something remarkable. It was a day with no wind, and the men had been complaining “It’s hot,” or “Ike thee.” Williams was wandering among the elephants as each was set free to forage in the jungle for the night. It wasn’t an official inspection, but he passed his hands along their bodies for a quick check and a dose of that kind of serenity that is passed wordlessly from an elephant to a man who loves them. Then one by one, with a kind of dignified exhilaration, the elephants entered the wall of vegetation surrounding the compound, their hind ends disappearing behind the curtain of green.

  A meal was quickly prepared. As Williams sat down to eat, suddenly all six elephants marched back into camp. It was unheard of. They never returned during their time off. Not only that; they were rejecting the shade to stand “right out in the open under the blazing sun.” Normally a mass of motion, they were strangely still, “as if lost in thought.” It was eerie.

  Things became more curious. A hot wind tumbled the dry litter of the forest floor, and when it stalled out, the world hushed. The heat intensified.

  “I stood up as a most peculiar sensation came over me,” Williams wrote, “as if I was not wholly land-borne and yet not wholly airborne. From very far away—perhaps from India it seemed or from Tibet—came a low rumbling.”

  Suddenly everything was swaying—the treetops, the house, even the elephants. The forest seemed to groan and creak. Branches snapped. He felt the sensation of being on a boat “coming into a swell.”

  “Then the earth shook like a wet spaniel shaking its coat,” Williams wrote. Dead tree limbs and a ticker-tape parade of leaves fell to the ground.

  After the earthquake, when the footing was solid again, the riders shouted with relief. “The elephants,” Williams noted, “as though they had finished attending some solemn ceremony, left the clearing and re-entered the jungle to make up for lost time.”

  Williams wondered if another shudder or aftershock was possible, but the men assured him the elephants said no, and they were never wrong. So he calmly went back to his table.

  AT ONE OF HIS logging sites, Po Toke surprised Williams with a visit. He was taking his leave of absence nearby and was worried, he said, about a rumor that Bandoola was missing from the old camp on the Upper Chindwin. Williams’s antenna went up. Harding’s words “Watch him as you go” came back to him. He felt sure the old elephant rider, who hated to be apart from his prized elephant, had had a hand in Bandoola’s “disappearance.” But it would have taken some doing since there were hundreds of miles and the great Irrawaddy River in between the two locations.

  Despite his concern, Williams could not drop everything to track Bandoola—after all, if Po Toke had not engineered the escape, it was unlikely he was anywhere near the region—so he continued his regular rounds in the forests.

  With so much talk of rebellion brewing in Burma, Williams for the first time felt vulnerable when traveling in isolated pockets of forest. He even received a threatening anonymous letter written in Burmese warning him not to work in the area. Though he might have been scared, he wouldn’t be scared away. The best thing to do, he thought, would be to get a bodyguard. Currently without a dog, he soon acquired one: a cross between a bloodhound and a feral dog, with a rich chocolate-colored coat, heavy jowls, velvet ears, and “small, neat, sure-footed paws.” His tail was curled, like a chow’s. He had been chained in a barn and neglected. “He was marvelous,” Williams wrote. “He bayed at me with the voice of a hound. He twisted his tail almost out of joint, begging for another home and yet another chance.”

  Williams’s friends thought he was crazy to trust the brute. But he read something in the dog, and was glad to have such a courageous animal with him as he traveled through rebel territory, carrying a great deal of money for an elephant contractor.

  Over the next several days Williams found the dog he called Ba Sein, named for the region where this breed was common, to be one of the most extraordinary he’d ever known—protective, intuitive, and perpetually on high alert. Even at
night in the tent, he did not seem to sleep. “His eyes fascinated me: as warm and brown as his short coat, they seemed fixed on something deeper and beyond anything I could see,” Williams noted.

  All was well until they arrived in the very next camp, a forlorn, deserted village, where Ba Sein was somehow poisoned, found in the throes of a seizure, and dead within minutes. Williams suspected the anonymous letter writer had killed his beloved dog. He immediately called the men together to pack up and head out. “My camp was never broken quicker,” Williams recalled. “The elephants were loaded, the last one carrying the cold body of Ba Sein wrapped in a blanket.”

  It was rare to move camp after sunset, but this time it was necessary. At about midnight, the group reached the largest town in the area where there was a colonial presence. The civil police were out in force, one officer telling Williams, “The whole damned countryside’s in the hands of rebels.”

  It was the start of a months-long shutdown of work and an especially bad time for teak firms in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash, an event that affected finances even in Burma.

  For safety’s sake, European timber men were ordered to be quarantined and were forbidden to travel among their camps. That meant Williams would not be able to check on about a hundred elephants under his care. As hard as this was to accept, he felt that at least they would be well cared for. No matter what the political leanings of the uzis—and Williams realized he was not privy to them—they would never abandon their elephants.

  Of course his men couldn’t discuss civics with him. It would be too risky. Under British rule, political activity was banned. Activists had discovered a way around this, though. Religious organizations were sanctioned, so nationalists found they could advance their cause through Buddhist associations.