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 THE EVENINGS, AUNG Net set the table with linens that he kept spotless. Cocktails were poured. Joseph prepared fresh bread, pickled pork, or roast chicken. How different this was, Susan thought, from “the very austere and comfortless touring” she had done with Hopwood, where all the meals were “dry as dust.”

  At sundown, the jungle came alive. Williams often kept a large reflector lamp burning all night to discourage wildlife, particularly leopards, who were known to snatch dogs right out of tents, away from sleeping owners. One of Williams’s colleagues lost a large Labrador retriever that way.

  In the morning, Susan was up first because “the boys” could not enter the tent until she was dressed. During the day, while Susan oversaw domestic tasks, including pressing clothes with a heavy charcoal-heated iron, Jim caught up on paperwork and met with contractors and logging camp workers. People in the vicinity, curious to meet Jim’s new wife, would come by to pay their respects and bring offerings—“half a dozen eggs on a plate, a pineapple, bananas, sweet limes, oranges. No one ever came empty handed,” Susan wrote. She was overwhelmed by the warmth she was shown. The people embraced her, and she found their culture and customs to be reassuringly kind and family oriented. In the bigger villages, she loved the sounds of Buddhist ritual: the children chanting, the gongs summoning monks to prayer, and later, the chiming of pagoda bells in the night air.

  At all of these places, Jim pulled out his big medicine kit, for he was not only an elephant doctor; he had become a bit of an MD, too. With his company-issued medicine box full of quinine for fevers, suture silk, needles, ointments, pills, and bandages, he was on call with the villagers. Life was too harsh in the forest for him to be reticent about treating the most horrifying diseases and wounds: the woodsman whose run-in with a sun bear had left his eye dangling and his scalp torn from his skull; women with breast abscesses, which were treated with maggots to clear away dead tissue; and many others suffering from malaria, dysentery, smallpox, goiters, and nutritional deficiencies such as beriberi. Williams knew he might kill a patient with his amateur doctoring, but to refuse care would be a sure death sentence. Susan watched Jim during his field clinics, and started to pitch in, eventually acting as nurse.

  Soon they would pack up and be back on the trail. Jim brought Susan to the area that had been his headquarters when he started in 1920. The great joy of the reassignment in Mawlaik was that Jim was once again in Bandoola’s backyard. In just a couple of weeks, he’d be able to introduce his wife to the tusker who had saved his life.

  For the Williamses this wasn’t just a jungle tour, it was a honeymoon, and they made love often. Or often enough to be noticed. Settling in to a campsite, Susan came to Jim asking him to investigate a strange odor radiating from her bed. Williams stripped it down and discovered that the leather strapping that tightened the canvas had been coated with fat from a roasted wild pig. When he confronted the servant in charge about what was going on, the man grinned and said it helped stop the creaking.

  Susan took to the life with remarkable ease and eagerness, and Jim felt profoundly happy at having found someone who loved the forest as much as he did. “I had previously enjoyed my loneliness in the jungle despite all the longings for companionship which at times assailed me. I enjoyed it because it brought me private joys which I could not believe that anyone would ever share with me. The discovery that Susan could not only share my pleasures but also enlarge them was the perfection of my happiness,” he wrote. He also reveled in the fact that even though Susan had toured the forests of Burma with Hopwood, she had never really seen them, not the way she could with him. Hopwood was a hunter; he wanted to kill creatures. Now with her husband, Jim said, “she came to enjoy all the living things of the jungle: the birds, the beasts and the flowers.” It was their Eden.

  “The wonderful beauty of the Burma jungle at dawn is something never to be forgotten,” Susan wrote. “The deep green faintly tinted with pink as the sun was coming up, the mists in the river beds. The spirals and faint smell of wood smoke from the newly stirred camp fire. The call of the doves or the longer cry of the Burmese imperial pigeon. A pleasant nip in the air, the occasional squeal of an elephant being harnessed. Sitting down muffled up in a warm woolly sweater and scarf, sipping one’s first cup of tea, smoking the first cigarette. The wonderful beauty and sensation of it all was only fleeting, but in those moments life was good.”

  Susan and Jim hiked the forest together, sometimes ten miles at a stretch, starting on paths that were wide enough to drive bullock carts on, but then usually narrowed into tiny game trails made by wild animals. They would walk along, sharing their favorite pack food, such as slabs of plain chocolate or rye crackers, and point to signs of wildlife or jungle flowers in bloom. Jim might sit down on a boulder with her and blow on a blade of grass held between his thumbs to mimic the mating call of a barking deer. Occasionally, one of the small creatures would venture to poke a red head out of the vegetation.

  They visited the logging camps, where Jim greeted the elephants like the old friends they were, and Susan could see the very best of him. The first time, Susan was sitting in camp when Williams came striding up. “Come on, Sue,” he said, “the elephants have been brought over from one of the elephant camps for me to inspect; they are being bathed just below here in a pool in the creek.” He had been an elephant man for more than a decade, but this moment still filled him with excitement.

  The uzis scrubbed the elephants’ skin with a vine that lathered up like soap.

  They walked down to the banks of the creek. A dozen elephants—females, tuskers, babies—splashed in the cool water. The big ones were on their sides, their uzis atop them, crouched down and scrubbing their skin with a vine that lathered up when soaked. Many of them lazily sucked water in their trunks and noisily sprayed it into their open mouths. They would do this over and over, sometimes plunking their trunks underwater and breathing out—sending a sizzle of bubbles to the surface.

  As Jim and Susan continued their tour, they finally met up with the one elephant he had spoken so often about: Bandoola. Reunions with this tusker were always emotional, and though Jim never would have quite let on, Susan by now could read him. How could Jim not betray his excitement?

  She felt it herself. Jim had not exaggerated—here before her was the finest tusker she had seen. No matter how long he had been separated from the elephant, Williams greeted him in the same way. He spoke to Bandoola in Burmese, rubbed his cheek, and presented a sweet hidden away for him. Susan instantly grasped Bandoola was the very embodiment of determination, an animal of the highest “courage and cleverness,” just as Jim had said. In fact, all the virtues he attributed to this elephant had reminded her of Jim himself. No man could rival Jim in her mind, but maybe an elephant could measure up.

  Po Toke wanted to make a good impression, and he often liked to show off a few of Bandoola’s tricks: how he could pick up any tool asked for, tie a knot, untangle a chain, or move a boulder. Almost thinking aloud, Jim said, “He’s a wonderful animal.” Susan smiled and took his arm. “You’re quite paternal about him, aren’t you darling?”

  “Am I?” Jim said. “Yes, I suppose I am.” Susan hoped she would see more of Bandoola in the months to come. Jim would make sure of it.

  As they continued touring, Susan discovered the armies and air forces of biting and stinging insects. And everywhere leeches. Jim warned her that in deep jungle they came not by the hundreds, but by the thousands, and they were famous for embedding themselves in any orifice available. Susan had her fair share of them—“silently hummocking over the leaves” and attaching themselves to her skin, where they would bloat up on her blood till touched with a lighted cigarette. They, of course, made meals of the dogs, too, and the elephants even suffered the indignity of having them slither up their trunks.

  It didn’t happen often as they traveled these great stretches of forest, but part of Jim’s job now was checking in on his assistants. They were all lonely young men hung
ry for English-speaking company. One day, they rendezvoused with a young assistant, Gerry Carol. He was like most of the others, tough and self-reliant, friendly and obliging. He was a favorite of Jim’s.

  Gerry served Jim and Susan a meal with his best stores of food and liquor. And the next morning, he and Jim set about tending to the elephants. They made plans to travel together for a week. Gerry had been such a grand host, Susan was looking forward to reciprocating. But on their first night of travel, over dinner, Gerry wasn’t himself. Early in the evening he apologized, saying he thought he had caught a chill and needed to turn in. It was a red flag to Williams. He knew how precious this kind of companionship was to a lonely forest assistant, particularly one as gregarious as Gerry. If he went to bed early, something was very wrong. Sure enough, by morning Gerry was in the grip of fever. This alone was not a matter of concern, malaria being as common as a head cold for forest men. But throughout the day none of the usual remedies—including trebling the quinine—helped. By evening, his temperature had climbed to 105 degrees and Gerry was delirious. “I don’t like this, Sue,” Williams told his wife. “We must get this chap in to hospital.”

  It was typhoid fever—transmitted when the feces of someone infected with it contaminates food or water—and it was outside Jim’s by-now capacious field medicine playbook.

  That night there was nothing to be done but to take turns in Gerry’s tent, sitting on a cane stool, trying to make him comfortable with cold compresses and soothing words. By the light of a hurricane lamp, Susan looked into Gerry’s blue eyes, which seemed to stare without seeing. She wrote later, “an awful feeling of helplessness came over me.” In the morning the race would be on for the railway, a good thirty miles away, over “some of the most difficult hill country in Burma.” They packed as quickly as possible and carried Gerry on a makeshift stretcher—a long camp chair supported by two poles—marching for seven hours. It was torture for the stoic assistant, who even in his wakeful periods never cried.

  By the time they reached a village, he was in a steady stupor. They rested him in the shade, ministering to him even with the knowledge that nothing was helping. The next day they had a stiff, jolting bullock cart at their disposal, which would transport them over a bruising twenty-three-mile leg of the journey. Williams tried to fabricate a makeshift suspension system under Gerry’s stretcher, but seeing that it did little good, Jim lay beside him as a human harness and cushion in one.

  It was two grueling days and nights for the sick young forester, and a huge relief for the Williamses when they reached the railway—“We felt we had won,” Susan said. They lifted Gerry aboard. “It was pathetic to see the look of relief which crossed his face when he felt the firmness of the railway carriage seat beneath his aching body,” Susan remembered.

  They traveled all day. Gerry woke just as a beautiful sunset emerged. Williams tenderly held his shoulders and eased him up to look out the window, “You must look at this, old man. It’s wonderful.” Gerry saw the warm colors shimmering across the horizon and reflected in the waters of the Irrawaddy. He managed to smile and to whisper to Williams, “Billy, you’re the best doctor a man ever had—you knew just what seeing that would do for me.”

  They got to a modern hospital where Williams handed over the patient along with a meticulously kept day-to-day log of the illness. Treatment began immediately. The Williamses were assured that “enteric” was “dangerous, but not incurable.” No antibiotics were available. Within three days Gerry was dead. “I don’t think in all our married life I have ever seen Jim so deeply moved and depressed,” Susan would say later. The spell of their magical honeymoon was broken.

  CHAPTER 20

  INTO THE CAULDRON

  AS A BOSS, WILLIAMS DID NOT HAVE TO TOUR DURING THE HEIGHT of the hot season. But the heat sought him out at home. Even after sundown, there was no relief from it. Back in their big house, Jim and Susan wandered from room to room during the night flopping down on rice-mat beds, searching for cooler spots. “It was nothing out of the ordinary,” Susan wrote, “for me to wake up in one part of the house and Jim in another.”

  There was no electricity. In the evening the pressure lamps became so hot that often darkness was preferable. Overhead “punkahs,” or wide, slow-moving fans, were powered by “punkah-wallahs,” usually the children of the servants. They would sit outside during the day with one end of a string attached to a toe, the other to the fan. By rhythmically tapping a foot, they kept the blades circling.

  As bad as the monsoons were, Susan now looked forward to them just as a reprieve from the swelter. But when the rains returned, Jim would go back out on tour, and she would stay home. It was company policy that monsoon travel was considered too dangerous for wives.

  In May, when the rains bucketed down, Williams waved good-bye to Susan from the back veranda as he left with his parade of elephants, all of them swallowed up by the lashing storm and the undulating green wall of the forest. He would be gone a month.

  In the house, Susan found an incredible transformation: Every surface was sticky with humidity, and “winged creatures came alive by the million.” She was already accustomed to the bugs and lizards that cohabitated with people in Burmese households. She remembered her introduction to them in Rangoon with Hopwood: “Dinner that first night was a nightmare. Insects fell in the soup, crawled on the fish, and ran down the back of my neck.” In Mawlaik, in addition to the winged hordes, there were ants by day and scorpions by night. The scorpions often hid under pots or tins in the kitchen, and Susan discovered that their sting “could give one fever for a week.” They were so prevalent that she welcomed the little lizards who came from nooks and crannies and from behind pictures at night to hunt them down.

  But there were more surprises in the dankness: Furry mold grew on her shoes, laundry wouldn’t dry, and when the occasional breaks in the rain came and the sun emerged, steam would rise skyward from the earth. Kipling had seen the poetry in this, describing “the blinding warm rains, when all the hills and valleys smoked.”

  With Jim gone, she was alone in the house with Po Lone, the servant who spoke English. And she had English neighbors to visit. She was invited to dinner at friends’, and usually made her way there and back by strolling behind lantern-carrying servants who were on the lookout for snakes. At home she had the wireless to keep her company. The delivery of news could ignite a paradoxical sensation: feeling connected to the wider world by hearing of events as they occurred, but also more isolated by being so far removed from them.

  For Williams, “jungle touring was grim.” This season in particular, the monsoons were heavy. As if that wasn’t bad enough, mail was not reaching him, and several of his men were ill. He was buoyed by one event—he was able to reach the camp where Po Toke kept Bandoola. Despite the conditions—driving rain that turned game trails into quagmires of boot-stealing mud—it was wonderful to see his favorite tusker.

  In the hut one afternoon, Aung Net climbed the spindly bamboo ladder up to the doorway, announcing “Sar yauk byee.” The mail had finally arrived. The mail carrier, San Pyu, was right behind. He had brought the correspondence from home in Mawlaik. The two men left, and Williams greedily sorted through letters from Susan, home mail from England, a bundle of newspapers, and work documents. But when Aung Net returned and began nervously tidying up what didn’t need tidying—a little “jungle apology” of a dressing table, which contained a mirror, comb, brush, and framed photographs of Susan and Molly Mia—Williams asked what was the matter. Aung Net knelt before him, saying, “I fear to tell you.” But then Aung Net did tell him: San Pyu apparently believed that Po Lone, the man left behind because he spoke English, was trying to poison Susan. As proof, San Pyu when brought back in, presented a small homemade envelope. Williams unfolded the wrinkled paper and found “a grubby pill about the size of a Beecham’s,” the British laxative. One of these, he was told, was added to every drink that Po Lone served to Susan.

  With alarm, Williams asked i
f she had already become ill. San Pyu said she had not. Williams sampled a bit of the small pill. It seemed to be composed of dirt. But he had no idea what arsenic or any other poison tasted like. The first priority was to get word to Susan. While his impulse was to run to her, he knew there were young camp workers who could negotiate the night jungle faster than he could. It was decided that Bandoola would take a particularly fleet young Karen spearman, Saw Pa Soo, across the swollen, dangerous river. Then the runner could make the rest of the way quickly on foot. Jim, himself, would follow in the morning. He quickly wrote a note of warning for Susan and handed it to Saw Pa Soo. He told the spearman to put the note into Susan’s hands, and that there would be a promotion waiting for him if he traveled fast enough.

  As dusk quickly approached, Jim walked alongside Bandoola, who carried Po Toke and Saw Pa Soo. At the bank of the river, Jim stood watching in the rain as the big tusker disappeared into the deep water and the darkness. Bandoola to the rescue yet again. Po Toke would return with him when they had dropped Saw Pa Soo at a high ridge to start his journey.

  But it seemed impossible to just do nothing. When Po Toke and Bandoola returned to camp, drenched, Williams couldn’t settle himself. He had to go himself, and he had to do it now. For the trip, he had Aung Net grab a tin of biscuits and bottle an odd elixir: strong hot black tea and whiskey in equal measure. Aung Net, as always, would accompany him, along with another servant, the camp messenger, San Pyu. Miraculously, the rain abated, and the water level had fallen by the time Bandoola ferried them across the river.

  The men traveled for three days nearly nonstop, pausing only to receive a bit of rice or travel suggestions from the workers in the camps they encountered. The journey was arduous and there were many miles of track in which the mud was three feet deep. Finally, on the third morning, they reached Mawlaik. A break in the rains allowed them to travel on a real road, though by this point Williams could barely stand. Struggling along, he heard hoofbeats ahead, and around the corner came a very healthy Susan riding a polo pony. Behind her was the groom on a horse called Little Me. Jim waved them over, ecstatic.