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

  The deal made with the convicts was a good one: They would have a year shaved off their sentences for good behavior, they would receive payment in cash at the end, plus, at Williams’s insistence, they would be issued new shorts and vests—or light button-neck undershirts—and a blanket. Burmese knives, or “dahs,” used during workdays, would be returned each night.

  MOSTLY, THE JOURNEY WAS what Williams had hoped it would be. There were natural marvels awaiting him: emerald green islands, white breakers, and thousands of varieties of coral, including fire and staghorn. The archipelago was home to massive saltwater crocodiles, sharks, cobras, geckos, deer, and robber crabs—the largest crabs in the world, big and strong enough to crack open and consume coconuts. He even came close to a dugong, a marine animal that is a near twin of the manatee, and may be the inspiration for mermaid tales.

  The work in this “richly timbered, but very difficult country” was punishing, and the crew members felt they were hacking their way through an inch at a time. When Singapore-based RAF Supermarine Southampton flying boats arrived to take aerial photos for the expedition, Williams scrambled into one of them. From high above, without the slow work of cutting paths, he was even more amazed at the beauty: seas “in every shade of blue,” dotted with pinks from coral beds below or “blotches of dark seaweed” waving like cornfields, and mangrove swamps patterned like “dark green oriental carpets.”

  The planes not only rendered a heavenly vision of the islands, they would, before they left, provide his one chance to correspond with Susan. He had been eager to stay in touch, but now, quite suddenly, he felt seized with doubt—not about his own feelings, but hers. Back down on the ground, he wondered if during his exile he had exaggerated the depth of the connection between them. “I did not know how to write to Susan what was in my heart. Perhaps the sympathy which I thought existed between us, unspoken, was all my fancy. My letter might arrive between one date with He Man and the next. I had not the trust in my own love. I was afraid of making a fool of myself.”

  Perhaps it would be best to write nothing, “preferring the certainty of not being hurt to the possible joy that a letter might give.” But he had a book by John Still, Jungle Tide, lying open on his camp bed. And he copied out longhand one of the poems that had resonated with him. It seemed a safe way to take a chance. The verse was an ode to nature, all the things that Williams cherished—mountains, jungles, the sea, and “wild things that wander there.” But it kept coming back to the refrain “All these I love with a love that possesseth me / But more than all of these I worship thee.” He placed it into an envelope unsigned, sealed it, and gave it to the pilots returning to Singapore. He wouldn’t know her response for weeks.

  In the meantime, the islands provided a moment of tenderness. While exploring a wooded area with one of the men, he saw a spotted deer stag leading a small group of females. The male strolled directly toward Williams, his movements “full of grace and quite without fear.” He waggled his tail and cautiously approached to within inches. “His long neck stretched out and the twitching nostrils of his velvet muzzle were close enough for me to touch.” The buck extended his neck another inch and gently licked the salty sweat from his hand. “It was an extraordinary sensation,” Williams said.

  Throughout the expedition, Williams saw ample evidence that the islands could support elephants. In fact, he was excited to discover proof that one single male elephant, shipped down here decades before, was still on the loose, island hopping. But by this time, Williams already knew that Geoff’s report would not be favorable and would kill the project’s prospects. There was plenty of timber—a variety of species including highly prized padauk, marblewood, and soft woods used by the match industry in India—but Geoff believed there were too many potential hazards in extracting it from the remote islands, which had no infrastructure in place.

  Everything the party had done, Williams felt, had been useless. The worst of it was the fate of the prisoners, who had been so hardworking and conscientious. Williams had hoped to hire them as free men when a logging operation started up. “Never were my heartstrings so torn,” he wrote, as on seeing the men loaded aboard the boat to return to prison, where he knew they would sink back into their “sheep-like lethargy.” They had turned out to be “good and honest and reliable.”

  He had climbed aboard the Rangoon-bound ship looking like a bearded “pirate,” wondering what lay ahead for himself, his elephants, dog, and girlfriend. Clean-shaven and upbeat by the time of arrival, Williams eagerly scanned the waiting faces on the docks. Susan wasn’t there, but the last person he wanted to see—He Man—was. In fact, the cheeky bastard had already spotted him and was grinning and waving madly. He didn’t even wait for the gangway. Always a show-off, he sprang from the dock and heaved himself over the railing, bouncing in front of Williams with an exhalation of breath. Did this mean he was engaged to Susan and breathless with the news?

  As it turned out, Williams had nothing to worry about. He Man told Williams that Susan had been delayed in Mandalay but would be back in Rangoon the next day. He carried a cable from her. Williams ripped it open and read. She had booked herself on the ship back to England that she thought Williams would take when he went on leave in a couple of months, the Staffordshire. Her intention was clear, but he would cable her back immediately: “You’re on the wrong ship. If you are coming home with me it’s the Shropshire you should be on.”

  Along with the joyful news came a terrible report. In Williams’s published writing, he maintained that the note read, in part: “Molly Mia sends apologies not meeting you, but we are delayed a day in Mandalay.” Susan Williams’s own memoirs concur. But the truth was more painful. In his private papers Williams wrote of a terrible “heartache” on learning that Molly Mia had “died as a result of an accident whilst I was away.” He didn’t say what exactly had happened; it was his habit to bury the most painful events of his life in silence.

  In a cable from Mandalay, Susan Rowland made her feelings clear to Williams, whom by now she was calling “Jim,” as his family did. She was in love with him.

  The next day Susan arrived, and even in grief, Jim found “there was an understanding between us.” There wasn’t much time for romance; Williams had a detailed report to write in the week before he was to head up-country. But it helped keep his mind off Molly. “Like most heartaches I have had in life,” he wrote, “it was good for me, for only by keeping going full out can such things be lived down.” Something else would comfort him, too: elephants. As luck would have it, he was about to be immersed in them. Before taking leave, he was scheduled to head north for the satisfying task of inducting fifty newly purchased elephants from Thailand into the Bombine ranks.

  The animals and their riders had been making their way to Upper Burma for the past year. The elephants would stay, and the men would be returning to their homeland, handing their charges over to a set of new riders.

  Out of Rangoon and returned to the forest, Williams was back in his element, marching for miles every day in the corner of the world he knew best. Williams’s new recruit, “Edward,” had been up-country all this time—in charge of hiring the new men and coordinating the rendezvous. The camp he had chosen was a fine clearing framed by massive tamarind trees that provided desperately needed shade in the hot season, and a wide creek bed offering the only trickle of water available for miles.

  IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE Williams, so starved for the company of elephants over the past months, heard the symphony: the sound of fifty teak kalouks approaching. Then, the hot, hushed forest came alive with the unmistakable presence of giants. Williams was on his feet. Out from the wall of vegetation and into the clearing walked an incredible sight—the first regal tusker. The massive bull was clearly in musth—his temples darkened in streaks with the flow of his glands. He was ridden by a mahout and flanked by two spearmen. After him, one after another after another, came the colossal convoy. One out of every four was a tusker. Atop each squatted a rider,
bare-chested and wearing loose black trousers as if they were in regiment uniform.

  “Never in my service had I seen such a parade of magnificent animals,” Williams thought. They were stockier than his own Burmese animals. And despite a year of marching, “their condition was superb.”

  Williams, with Edward and his lead elephant man, walked the towering line, taking the animals in one by one. Feeling nostalgic for his own start in Burma, Williams turned to Edward and echoed his old taskmaster Harding, who had entrusted him with his first four elephants twelve years before: “There are fifty of the finest elephants in Burma. They’re yours, and God help you if you can’t look after them.”

  Williams now raced to his up-country headquarters in Mawlaik, where he had been transferred once again, for some quick tying up of loose ends. This was where he had spent most of his service as a young man, and further, it was Bandoola country. He was about to head off on home leave and would instruct the man who would fill in for him there. Edward had his work cut out for him: settling the fifty elephants and riders into several new camps with about seven animals per camp. They would not actually start work just yet, since this was the beginning of their hot weather season rest.

  It was a whirlwind, but by May 1932, Jim Williams was aboard the Bibby liner Shropshire with Susan by his side for a six-month leave. Hopwood had given his blessing to their union. Old Uncle Pop had said, with characteristic restraint, “He really is a man, Miss Poppy.”

  Williams was, in fact, a real man now. And the realization of it as the ship cruised by the Andaman Islands prompted something surprising—what he called a “confusion of feelings.” He had survived more than a decade in the jungle and was reaping the rewards that company lore had always promised him—a promotion, a wife, a sense of destiny fulfilled. But beginnings brought endings. Molly was gone, and his dream of the Andamans, too. In addition, he was, quite clearly, leaving something significant behind. “Looking back,” he would write, “I date this as the end of my being a young man.”

  CHAPTER 19

  SUNLIGHT AND SHADOW

  “IT WAS A GLORIOUS MORNING, ONE OF THOSE DAYS WHEN THE sun chases the shadows over the hills,” Susan would remember. At 9:30 a.m., September 9, 1932, she and Jim were married at the All Saints Church in the picturesque old market town of Evesham at the edge of the northern Cotswolds. They had waited till the very end of his leave so that their honeymoon would not rob his parents of time spent with him.

  Jim had secured a shiny, powerful black AC Six sports car, with a red racing stripe and a specialized high-performance clutch. It was the beginning of what would turn out to be a lifelong lust for fast cars. The two-seater kicked up gravel as they left the church in a roar—they had no set plans as they tore vaguely toward Wales, munching fresh-picked apples from Susan’s family garden. “We purred along,” Susan remembered, “the car seemingly as happy as ourselves.” On her hand was a sapphire ring they had purchased in Ceylon.

  By the middle of October, they were back in Burma, reunited with Jim’s Eastern family. Standing on the wharf when their ship docked was Aung Net, Joseph the cook, and Po Lone, a newcomer to the group who spoke English. There was a busy week in a borrowed brick company house in Rangoon—just enough time to shop for “tinned and bottled luxuries” that would be unobtainable in the outpost villages—and then it was off to headquarters in Mawlaik, on the Upper Chindwin, close to the border of Manipur. They began at the chaotic and colorful train station in Rangoon, grabbing the Mandalay mail train and riding first class in a comfortable, breezy compartment with access to the well-stocked saloon car. (In the packed third class, hundreds of Indian and Burmese passengers would be forced to stick their feet out the windows in an effort to stay cool.)

  They had time to visit Mandalay, on the banks of the great Irrawaddy River, the country’s second largest city. And then they were off to Monywa to catch the company boat for a three-day river romp up the Chindwin. Headquarters in Mawlaik, the riverine station, would now belong to Williams. It was a large town and a big responsibility.

  The couple arrived just before sunset, their little luxury boat emitting two shrieks from the siren as it pulled up to the jetty. On the high sandy bank Susan could see the bullock cart waiting to take their luggage, and behind it, several wooden shacks.

  In their new home in Mawlaik, Susan (left) could watch Jim play polo.

  “Here, besides the firms,” Susan wrote, “were stationed military police, civil police, Forest department, etc.” A little hospital, nothing more than an insubstantial bamboo hut with matting walls, was run by an Indian doctor. The rustic social club managed to include a tennis court, polo grounds, and “a hazardous nine hole golf course.” And while there were no fancy shops with English goods, there was a sizable native market selling local produce and offering spectacular orchids for a dime a dozen.

  While their possessions rode in the wagon, Jim and Susan walked a mile to the house. By the time they arrived, they were covered in the fine red dust of the road. It was November, “the loveliest time of the year in Burma,” Susan wrote. “The beginning of the cold season when every day is like a perfect summer day.” Their new home, enclosed by a white picket fence and set high up on a hill with a view of the town and river below, was constructed entirely of teak, with white painted eaves. A breezy veranda, used as an open-air living room with some old cane chairs, rimmed the first story. The pretty yard was filled with brightly colored bushes and flowers—purple bougainvillea, imported yellow allamanda, and red and yellow cannas, which were visited by delicate hovering hummingbirds. Susan immediately made plans to add a vegetable garden in which she could grow chili peppers “to give a bite to Jim’s breakfast buttered eggs.”

  The interior was spacious and handsome. Just inside the entrance, there was a large dining room (where the table legs were set in tin lids filled with kerosene to discourage ants) and a sitting room. An elegant, twisting teak staircase dominated the center. The furniture, chosen by the company, was solid and formal. The stuffiness could be relieved, however, by floor-to-ceiling hinged shutters, which opened the rooms to the outdoors.

  The bedrooms were ample, and each contained two baths. Despite the presence of faucets, the big zinc tubs were filled not by modern plumbing but by servants hefting jugs of hot water. A glazed earthenware “Pegu jar” containing cold water was always within easy reach. The toilets were emptied by a lowly Indian worker who had his own sweeper’s staircase from which he could silently and invisibly remove what would be flushed in a modern bathroom.

  As eager as Susan was to settle in, it would have to wait. There wasn’t time to unpack boxes from England, as the couple were about to embark on their first jungle tour together. This is what Jim had been dreaming of for a decade: his life among elephants shared with his true love.

  He wanted Susan to have everything he did, including his clothes. He designed a feminine version of his own field wardrobe for her, starting with an Australian bush shirt, customized with four big pockets, tailored for a woman, and hemmed at knee length. Beneath this, Susan would wear fine smooth-cotton lisle stockings, woolen ankle socks, and canvas hiking boots. She loved it.

  Their journey began that first cool morning just after dawn. Jim’s rank and marital status now entitled him to a large entourage. Twenty traveler elephants—tuskers unsuitable for logging work, adult females, and even a teenager—appeared from out of the ring of forest that surrounded the house. The animals were led to the rear veranda from which servants loaded them up with luggage, lightweight Burmese baskets, and gear. It was expertly organized—tents and poles on one elephant, and beds, suitcases, tables, chairs, and radio set distributed in a systematic fashion on the others. Po Sin, Joseph the cook’s kitchen elephant, carried not only all the pots and pans, but in cane plaited baskets, the live chickens and ducks who would ultimately end up in them. (Susan eventually insisted on pardoning two ducks; the two birds were carried all the way home where they lived out their natural lives as pe
ts.) They also brought Rhoda, a little buff-colored cocker spaniel; Gipsy, a wirehaired fox terrier; and one cat, a Siamese named Tigger. When everything was in place, they set off.

  After four hours of steady marching, they reached their campsite, which had been cleared by some of the logging staff. A large open dining room with woven bamboo walls and thatched roof of jungle grass had been built that very day. Most of these camp dining rooms contained a bamboo table for the radio and a tray for drinks. Wherever foresters went, little buildings were put together fresh, and rarely used for more than two days. The jungle quickly reclaimed everything before it could ever be occupied again.

  Soon after, Susan heard the sound of the kalouks and looked forward to watching the elephants as they were unburdened. Within a half hour the tents were up. Installing the “wireless” set involved a lengthy process, because the battery had to be secured in a basket of hay for travel to avoid spilling the acid. Once the antenna had been fixed high in a tree, if the conditions were right in the hilly terrain, Susan could listen to the chimes of Big Ben from London over the calls of jungle birds. Though they were far from Westminster, “This made us feel nearer home,” she wrote. The connection was so deeply felt that on the occasions that “God Save The King” was played on air, both Jim and Susan would rise from their canvas camp chairs and stand at attention.

  In the couple’s tent there was one large area in the center for the raised beds, theirs as well as those for the dogs. Mosquito netting was draped over all of them. There was even a bathroom inside, partitioned off by canvas and containing a tub. Discarded kerosene tins were filled with water from the nearest stream and heated over the massive campfire. Susan would enjoy a hot soak nightly before dinner. For fun, she sometimes played fortune-teller and read Jim’s future in the leaves at the bottom of his teacup. They would then go off to sleep, cocooned in wool blankets.