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

  In India, Gandhi promoted civil disobedience, but in Burma, Saya San wanted action. By combining elements of Buddhism, astrology, and magic, he had created a popular movement and was on his way to counting three thousand soldiers in his army. By December 1930, Saya San had abandoned any pretense of simple religious activity. He wanted to rule the country. Six forest department employees were killed during this time, though it was unclear whether they were murdered by Saya San’s followers.

  In response, the British amassed eight thousand soldiers, most of them Indian, to fight off the rebellion. Williams and his traveling elephants were among the forest men conscripted when armed posses of British citizens were formed to scout the forest.

  During these tense tours, the traveling elephants were kept chained along the perimeter of camp at night instead of being released. The men could not go out searching for the animals in the morning, as was the custom, because they would be vulnerable to capture.

  As it turned out, Williams’s party didn’t run into any rebels, but they were harassed by a different kind of nighttime prowler. A free bull from the forest was slipping into camp in order to visit the tethered elephants. It happened several times and didn’t let up even when they had moved camp ten miles during the day. The men were the first to tell Williams about the stalker, then the agitated elephants did, by making that distinctive metallic banging sound with their trunks during the night. When the sun came up, Williams could see large elephant footprints around the border of the clearing. A bull had not only visited them; he was actually trailing them.

  The next day, the group assembled and went out on their rounds, hiking single file into a sort of jungle tunnel—a track worn through the wall of dense forest vegetation by men and animals. As they neared the Palway Creek, the entire column came to a halt as the riders called out: “Taw Sin! Taw Sin!” Wild elephant. Williams, who had been marching toward the rear of the train, squeezed his way to the front to assess the situation. It could be dicey to deal with an animal like this in close quarters. The reaction of the working elephants to a wild stranger was unpredictable. When Williams reached the intruder, he saw a massive male in peak condition. The bull had beautiful gray skin freckled with pink, and tusks that curved like dancing girls.

  It was Bandoola. Hundreds of miles from his work camp.

  The tusker had recognized the pack elephants, his old mates, and when Williams called his name, he certainly knew him. Bandoola had been on his own for about a year. And as much as he liked Williams, he preferred his freedom. He trumpeted, turned, and hurried off, exposing the brand on his backside.

  He didn’t go far. Instead, he played a game of hide-and-seek with the line of familiar men and elephants. Throughout the day as they marched on along the track, they caught glimpses of him. He was tagging along.

  Williams figured he could use Po Toke in this situation, but Po Toke was missing, too. He was supposed to have reported back to duty at the old camp up on the Chindwin, but had not—curious, especially since he had last been seen in an area where rebel activity was strong. Williams gathered his riders. From what they had seen, they all felt that Bandoola had become wary of humans during his year of wildness. Would anyone volunteer to try to catch him?

  It was suggested that they use a traditional method for capturing a wild elephant—mela shikar—a strategy in which two “full-grown female elephants of a steady temperament” are ridden right up to the wild elephant and positioned on either side of him. Each elephant carries two riders so that once in position, one of the men can shift onto the back of the wild elephant.

  Two solid females—Shan Ma and Yinzin Ma—were selected. They were ridden straight into a wall of elephant grass higher than their backs where Bandoola had last been sighted. Williams scrambled up a tree to watch, tracking Bandoola only by the swaying of the tops of the grasses that parted as he moved below. The camp elephants were easy to spot because the heads and shoulders of the men who stood on their backs, acting as lookouts, were visible above the tall grass. These scouts whispered their directions to the riders who sat below, blinded by the wall of vegetation even as the elephants pushed their way through. The operation was carried out nearly silently and in slow motion. True to their natures and unafraid of Bandoola, Shan Ma and Yinzin Ma calmly munched everything in their path, pulling up and eating the succulent grasses as they moved, while slowly being guided to approach the hidden male.

  They were close. “Then suddenly,” Williams wrote, “when they were within a stone’s throw of one another, the silence was broken by a chirp, a chirp I somehow associated with this lovable great animal Bandoola.… It is a signal of contentment and joy.” The girls chirped back and then all three rumbled, not a deep chest rattler, but a reassuring one “like the noise of a Rolls-Bentley,” Williams noted. The animals might not see each other, but they were conversing. All was well.

  A rider delicately transferred to the big male, stepping carefully with bare feet onto his back. Soon Williams saw a happy little column of three—“First came Shan Ma with one rider only, then Bandoola, whose rider had merely stepped off Shan Ma’s back on to his new mount, and finally Yinzin Ma with her two riders.” Williams was touched by these men whose “friendship with animals had not been broken by civilization.”

  Here, so far from the Chindwin in the middle of rebel territory, Williams was surrounded by the elephants he loved most. He was in no hurry to transfer Bandoola back. The tusker remained touring with him until the rebellion was put down. Although working as a traveler was a demotion for Bandoola, Williams made a point of never dressing him up as one. It would have wounded his own pride as well as Bandoola’s to see him again in the pack saddlery of the transportation elephants rather than the dragging gear that marked the big, powerful working bulls.

  In the meantime, he inquired once more about Po Toke. The great elephant man apparently had been placed under suspicion by the police and restricted from leaving his village. Eventually released, Po Toke made his way to Williams. He looked awful. Williams would never know for sure, but his instinct was that Po Toke had, indeed, joined the rebels. More than that, he suspected that the elephant trainer had arranged Bandoola’s great escape.

  As enlightened as Williams was generally about basic human dignity and freedom, he would not support the nationalist movement over his own country. He assured himself that the empire was helping the Burmese. But he also chided himself “for taking [Po Toke] to be a simpler character than he actually was.” The man who had taught him so much was complicated. He had a life that he would never share with any Englishman, including Williams. Ultimately there was a breach. “The trust which had once existed between us was shaken.” Williams wasn’t single-minded enough to write his mentor off, though. “I couldn’t deny that Bandoola could not be in better hands than Po Toke’s,” he wrote.

  He kept the elephant and his trainer together, but sent them packing back up to the Chindwin forests far from where Po Toke might have connections to any insurgency. The rebellion would be eliminated fairly quickly anyway. Saya San had been hiding out in a monastery north of Mandalay. When he fled east toward the Shan Hills, he was captured, tried, and hanged.

  In the meantime, in Pyinmana, Williams had been able to prove something to himself. Far from his Burmese home base in the west, with little contact from his mentors, he had taken on a novel assignment, a new population of elephants, and he had succeeded. Reaching a level of expertise that he had dreamed of for a decade, Billy Williams was finally, unmistakably, an elephant wallah.

  CHAPTER 17

  TIGER HOUR

  BY 1931, AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-THREE, WILLIAMS WAS READY to give up on love. Resigned to his fate, he headed back to his regular rounds in the forest with his latest dog, a smart, loyal Alsatian named Molly Mia.

  During one of his marches, he bumped into the chief conservator of forests, Stephen Hopwood, in the Bwetgyi drainage where he was fishing in a stream. Williams was eager for the chance to talk to the jungle
salt. In his early fifties, Hopwood was taciturn as all hell, but a decent man. He had been in Burma his whole adult life except for a stint in the army during World War I, when he served as a field gunner in France. Wounded in action, he was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry. He was said to know more about the Burmese forests and their inhabitants than any other living soul.

  Hopwood had not always been so gruff. It was the tragic death of his wife, Helen, that had turned him. She was with her husband on forest rounds when a fever turned deadly. Hopwood had made a heroic effort to transport her to the hospital in Mandalay, but it was too late. When she died, he disappeared into the forest and cut off contact with friends. Search parties eventually located him, but the old jovial Hopwood was gone forever. He would never even be able to bring himself to say Helen’s name again.

  Hopwood told Williams to go on ahead to the site, but to be sure his elephants, the “travelers,” were released downriver since his own were loose upriver. It would be easier for everyone if they stayed separate.

  Dogs, including Molly Mia and Karl, were among Williams’s closest companions.

  Along with Molly Mia, Williams hiked over to the area Hopwood had described. As he crossed the river, he could see the camp on the high bank—a nice open space surrounded by tall trees. Oddly, there were two tents instead of one. Williams felt a small pang of disappointment. He wanted to talk with the conservator about an upcoming project. If someone else joined them he might not have the old man’s ear. Maybe he should just skip the whole thing and keep hiking farther along the drainage.

  Just then he caught sight of “a tall, slender girl in the clearing.” She saw him, too, and waved. In greeting, Williams raised his Terai hat, the exact replica of Harding’s, modeled after the one worn by Gurkha soldiers in the British and Indian armies. He had loved that hat till this moment, when he suddenly felt insecure about it. “As I crossed the clearing, it occurred to me that it might appear slightly ridiculous. I felt, I confess, rather shy.”

  The woman had just woken from a nap in the sun and was surprised to meet anyone else in the forest, never mind an Englishman. She noticed first how tall Williams was, and, as he drew closer, his kind and good-humored expression.

  Not only was Susan Rowland pretty and unmarried, but, Jim Williams was happy to learn, she had a love for animals as he did.

  She was twenty-eight years old, five foot seven, slim, and pretty, her gray eyes setting off her dark brown hair. Her khaki safari outfit flattered her. It should have, for she had purchased so much clothing for Burma that her family had christened her “Lady Rangoon.”

  She spoke first. “I’m Susan Rowland.”

  “I’m Billy Williams of the Bombay Burma Teak Company.”

  He asked if he and his men had startled her, and he assured her they were not jungle bandits. He was charmed by the fact that she seemed as self-conscious as he was. “Perhaps she was embarrassed at an unwelcome stranger?” he wondered. And then he laughed to himself, “Or was it just my hat?”

  He told her that he had just talked to Hopwood, who had not mentioned that she was there. She thought with some amusement, “How like Uncle Pop to have forgotten my existence.” Still, she was “delighted to see someone young and so obviously lively.”

  She noticed Molly Mia at his side, and Williams introduced her. “I’m afraid I have the most unfriendly dog in the world,” he told her. “She is extremely good-natured, but like all Alsatians is very single-hearted and I can’t make her take any interest in anybody but me.” Williams realized suddenly that as he spoke, Molly, the most devoted dog he’d ever had, was no longer next to him. She was rubbing herself against Susan. Williams had never seen the dog approach anyone else before.

  Susan felt a surge of pleasure. She reached down and stroked Molly. The silences in their conversation seemed to disappear. “What a lovely dog,” she said. She’d even heard of Molly Mia; the forest assistants had spoken of the dog’s extreme devotion to Williams.

  Susan offered him a drink and they sat down together. She hadn’t told him why she was in the area and filled him in—she was in Burma to care for her uncle as a succession of other female cousins before her already had. “I don’t care who you are,” Williams said to her, nearly giddy in the moment. “It’s just the greatest fun to be sitting down here having drinks, so unexpectedly, alone with a pretty girl.”

  Williams told her a little of himself—that he was from Cornwall, working in Burma as a teak man. And they were soon lost in conversation. Eventually the sound of kalouks brought them out of their trance. Williams said his travelers must have arrived, and he would go and inform the men of what the plan was.

  Seeing the interest in Susan’s eyes, he asked, “Like to come over and have a look? I’ll tell you about them.” He had shared the bare outline of his life, but it was at this moment, she said later, when introducing her to his elephants, that he was transformed from a charming man to a remarkable one.

  The lead elephant, a bull, emerged from the forest. He was breathtaking—“a magnificent male elephant with gleaming tusks,” Susan said. Behind him were fourteen others in every shape and size.

  Williams pointed to the tusker. “The fine chap leading is normally a ‘worker,’ not a ‘traveller,’ but he’s convalescing.”

  Williams walked up to the elephant, speaking to him in Burmese, looking into his eyes, and explaining to Susan why this was the protocol. She watched him communicating with this bull, first verbally and then in some way that seemed almost magical. Williams made physical contact—spreading his big hands across the elephant’s rough hide. Without a word passing between them, the animal lifted his trunk to allow a full view of the front of his chest. Williams examined an innocuous-looking white spot, rubbing and prodding it. He glanced at the rider, pleased. The tusker was ready to go back to dragging work soon.

  Behind the big male were three old girls in their fifties. For them, Williams said, life on the road was a kind of semiretirement. They carried light loads and would mostly be free to forage and commune with other camp elephants or wild ones.

  Susan looked beyond the old dignified cow elephants to where the action was: with all the younger elephants, ranging in age from eight to twenty-one. They could hardly keep still or silent. She saw eleven trunks snaking around in the air—catching her scent, touching one another, or grabbing leaves to stuff in their mouths. In anticipation of what was coming in minutes—their freedom for the night—they chirped and squealed, their faces puckering, their cheeks pulled in to produce amazing high-pitched sounds. Their joy, she found, was contagious.

  Williams casually mentioned that the younger ones were either in school or had just “graduated.” Susan had never heard of such a ridiculous notion—elephant academy?—and a look of skepticism crossed her face. Williams caught it. “I’m not joking,” he told her. “It’s true.” He explained the system he had worked so hard to put in place. His pure, innocent enthusiasm, his gentleness, and his compassion, all mingled with such authority, was disarming her. She realized the devotion he had for his animals. The blend of reverence and intimacy seemed the very definition of true love. What love should be, anyway.

  Just then, Hopwood marched triumphantly back into camp with supper, a ten-pound mahseer—a savory game fish that the British sometimes called “Indian salmon.” He invited Williams to stay for dinner, then disappeared into his tent to bathe and change into fresh clothes, observing, as was the custom, as much formality as could be managed.

  At least they wouldn’t be eating the usual fare. Susan had grown more than tired of the safe, bland menu that “Uncle Pop” preferred. He relied on good British canned goods from Barnett Bros. in Rangoon: “tinned soup, tinned vegetables and tinned fish, which he liked unadorned,” she wrote later in a memoir. His beloved horses back in Rangoon ate only hay and oats shipped to him from England.

  They all needed to freshen up. Susan went into her tent and Molly followed. Williams was incredulous, but he simply se
t about seeing his own tent pitched. When they emerged, it was dusk, a time, Susan wrote, when “an eerie light seems to fall over the jungle.” She had heard it called “tiger hour.”

  A large log fire was built. Hopwood’s staff served drinks. Molly settled in, wrapping her sable-colored body around “Susan’s shapely legs.” There was much to question Hopwood about: forest conservancy in Burma and the troubled global economy, which was seriously affecting the teak business. But Hopwood began with tales of his exploits. Very quickly, Williams forgot all about what he had wanted to discuss with the conservator. It wasn’t the old man’s stories of big game hunting that rattled him; it was Susan.

  At midnight, Hopwood stood, saying, “I’m off to bed, goodnight both of you,” and he was gone.

  Williams and Susan privately breathed a sigh of relief. Immediately, however, the young suitor was again stricken by shyness. He could charm most women, but there was something different about Susan. “I wanted to be with this young woman but I couldn’t think of anything to say,” he remembered. So he spoke from his heart. He told her that he had always loved animals and that since starting with the company in Burma elephants had become the center of his life.

  As she listened to him, she sized him up: “Handsome, tall and powerfully built, warm, twinkling brown eyes and fair, curly hair.” In the firelight, the tiny raised areas on his cheek—embedded buckshot from a gun accident when he was a teenager—were just visible. She also noticed his “beautiful hands.” She was amazed by his kindness, his “fund of jungle knowledge,” and his wonderful and witty storytelling.

  Williams excitedly told of his upcoming mission for Bombine: He would travel to the heavily forested Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, working with a crew of local convicts to see if there was enough edible vegetation to support a herd of working elephants. The company was investigating the possibility of timber extraction on the mysterious archipelago.