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 runner had arrived, the police had already been notified, and all was well. The groom gave up his mount, and Jim climbed up onto Little Me. When he got home, he fell into a deep sleep. By evening he was down with fever. Attempted murder could not be proved, but the police suspected that Po Lone wanted to get rid of Susan. The servant feared that his services might become unnecessary now that there was a woman running the household, so he had picked up some so-called magic pills from a questionable village priest. He was fired immediately.

  As sick as he was, Williams sent word for Po Toke to bring Bandoola to headquarters. Po Toke had been demoted a few years back, and now, in gratitude for his help with getting to Susan, Jim restored Po Toke to his previous position. He would once again be singuang, the man in charge of the camp. Further, Williams would make sure that the old man would never again be assigned to a different camp from Bandoola.

  When all the dust had settled, Jim discovered that not only was everything good, it was grand: Susan was pregnant. The larger world began to intrude immediately, though. The ripples of the Great Depression took their staggering toll on the teak market. Forest revenue for Burma, which was nearly 22 million rupees for 1926–27, plummeted to only 8 million for 1933–34. And the government went so far as to slash its forest administration staff. Williams didn’t have to worry about losing his job, but Bombine was making other changes to save money. After a little more than a year in Mawlaik, in November 1933, Jim and Susan received orders to relocate to a new district. Shwebo, northwest of Mandalay, on the eastern side of the Chindwin, was a dry forest, about a hundred miles away. Not very far, but it wouldn’t be a quick transfer. They had to move themselves, and Jim was required to check in on several camps along the way. It would be a five-month journey on foot, part of it during the hot season: impossible for most pregnant women, but not for Susan. She was in love with forest life and as fit as an athlete. She insisted on hiking with her husband, not traveling by boat and train on her own. “As long as we were sharing life together,” she wrote, “it seemed good wherever it was. For me [Jim] was the perfect companion.”

  The transfer meant that Jim would be separated once again from Bandoola. He didn’t know then if fate or the nats would bring them together again, just as they had once before.

  By the end of the month, Jim and Susan began their journey on the east side of the Chindwin. Their first bit of excitement was running into a python—seventeen feet long and as big and muscular as a man’s thigh—as they hiked through a gorge. Jim shot it, fearing it had swallowed a village dog, but when they cut it open, they discovered the folded body of a little barking deer. He sent the snakeskin away to India to be cured, and Susan would keep it rolled up in her cupboard throughout her life.

  They soon hit their first roadblock, arriving at a section of forest in which the flow of a river had altered, leaving what Williams estimated to be ten thousand logs stranded in deep mud, tall grass, and pools of stagnant water. Sidelined logs were the teak man’s constant nightmare. Colleagues had been injured and even killed in the effort to free them. His good friend Colin Kayem had nearly died swimming for hours through a pitch-black cave, which had trapped thousands of logs beneath a curtain of overhanging rock. Seven men would eventually be killed using explosives to open that jam up.

  Williams wasn’t about to take chances. “When I contemplated my rough survey map,” Williams wrote, “I realised that a herd of a hundred elephants would not be enough to drag every log to the channel.” He didn’t have one hundred elephants at his disposal anyway. What he could do was conscript a group of forty heavy elephants, mostly tuskers. This meant that a reunion with his favorite elephant was coming sooner than expected. Bandoola would be at the top of the list. He was, by now, a colossal bull in his thirties, nearing nine feet in height at the shoulder and weighing more than four tons. Williams would have the elephants drag as much as possible downhill. Hopefully, their work would create grooves in the muck, and when the monsoon rains came they would wash what was left down to the river.

  The operation turned a lonely corner of forest into a crowded workplace. Rough workers, or coolies, were hired from nearby villages to hack lanes through elephant grass. Pairs of timber-dragging buffalo were drafted. It went on for a full month.

  Of all things, early on, there were muttered complaints about Po Toke and Bandoola not shouldering their fair share of the work. This seemed implausible to Williams. Perhaps it was a problem with the rider. The next day he hiked down to the section of forest his old friends had been assigned. He informed Po Toke of the accusations, and said it might be best if Po Toke rode Bandoola himself. But Po Toke told him the rider wasn’t the problem. It actually was Bandoola himself. The rumors were true. Bandoola could travel through mud, but he hated working in it. The master mahout reminded Williams of a story he had told him years before: As a calf, Bandoola had gotten stuck in mud, and the experience had frightened him. Williams considered: “It had happened over thirty years before. Bandoola was massive. He was full grown. He was the prime elephant of the Burmese forests. But he was shy of mud.”

  Williams thought of elephants in general and Bandoola in particular in human terms. “Very few men or women reach maturity without some scars of childhood, some secret fear or weakness. If that was true of humans, why should it be different with animals?” Bandoola was dismissed from the crew without prejudice, and the other elephants kept working. Williams was sorry to see his favorite tusker go, but he stayed put to see the project through.

  Not long afterward, while he was still bogged down in work with the logjam, there was yet another reunion with Bandoola. But this time, it was frightening. Williams received word from Po Toke that Bandoola was “down.” Elephants can and do lie down to sleep, but only for short periods. When sick elephants lie prostrate and won’t or can’t get up, it could mean they were dying.

  Williams rushed away, reaching Bandoola’s camp in daylight. Striding over to where the men had gathered, he saw the tusker on the ground. The sight was terrifying. The great elephant was lying on his side; his body looked misshapen, his parts misplaced. The worst of it was that Bandoola’s abdomen was distended and visibly increasing in size. His eyes were wide open and fixed in a stare; his trunk lay snaked out in front of him along the ground “like some prehistoric reptile.”

  The night before, he had broken into a godown, or supply shed, siphoning out an untold amount of dry rice with his trunk. When satisfied, he had strolled down to the stream to drink gallons of water. Then everything expanded in his gut.

  Williams stood close to the prostrate elephant. How could he possibly “make an elephant belch? Or vomit? Or break wind?” he wondered.

  Whatever else he might do to relieve the pressure, he knew the first concern had to be forcing the big bull up on his feet. Earlier, Po Toke had tried a common and painful incentive for raising an elephant—rubbing chili juice into Bandoola’s eyes. The animal was already in such agony he didn’t even stir.

  Williams had an idea from a story he’d heard about two wild African elephants using their bodies as supports to keep a third elephant from collapsing to the ground. Wild elephants have been observed working together to lift or steady another elephant, and they will even feed sick or injured companions when they have lost the use of their trunks. Williams needed two big bulls to pull off the job. “Send for Poo Zone and Swai Zike with dragging gear,” he said. “If we don’t get him up, he’ll be dead in half an hour.”

  When the tuskers arrived, Williams had them led up to Bandoola’s spine and ordered to use their tusks to lift him as they would a log. The animals bent down, placed their tusks like forklifts under the barrel of the prostrate body, and heaved. They got him up just a foot and couldn’t seem to raise him any higher.

  If they couldn’t get him on his feet, at least, Williams thought, they should try rolling him over to his other side. It might bring some relief. Chains were attached to the underneath front leg and the underneath back leg—t
hose that were flat on the ground—and the chains were looped up and over his body. Now Poo Zone and Swai Zike were backed up to Bandoola’s spine facing away from him. The chains were hooked to their harnesses, and they were ordered to walk forward. “Together the two tuskers took the strain, dragging breast to breast, so even and so gentle in their combined action,” Williams said, “that I felt sure they understood the delicacy of the action.” They probably did.

  As they pulled, Bandoola’s body began to roll over. Slowly, the two tuskers walked forward until Bandoola was on his back and his legs were pointing skyward. Frighteningly, his head remained down in the same position. Williams feared his neck might actually snap as the body continued to twist. But suddenly Bandoola mustered the strength to turn his huge skull. He groaned with the effort. It was a beautiful noise. Bandoola might be in pain, but he had fight still in him. His trunk waved, and his mouth opened, gulping for air.

  Instead of being flipped over onto his other side, though, Bandoola had different plans. As the distended side of his abdomen seemed to deflate, Bandoola struggled under his own power to a standing position. The men rushed to remove the chains, and Williams ordered the other two bulls placed on either side of Bandoola, “like two friends trying to support a drunk between them.”

  It worked. Poor Bandoola was up, if just barely. He looked wobbly.

  His digestive tract was so broken that with the change of position, stringy undigested bamboo emerged from his backside and “hung from him in strands.” His gut had been stopped up to the point where it couldn’t even properly expel waste.

  Williams didn’t hesitate. He had two men hold aside Bandoola’s tail while he buried his arm deep into the animal’s rectum. He began to clear away the fecal matter, pulling out handfuls, and purging as much as he could grab. “I emptied as far as I could,” Williams wrote, “plunging in my arm a dozen times as far as the armpit.” Gas, gloriously free now, was making its way out through the cleared passage. For Williams, hearing those first rumbles of a functioning digestive system made him happy. They were signs of his recovery. Bandoola was up, and, Williams said, “My job of elephantine plumbing was over.”

  With that, and his return to camp, Jim could pick up Susan and continue the journey toward Shwebo. The travel was long and exhausting. More than that there seemed to be a dark cloud chasing them. First there was news that Jim’s father had died. Then there was Susan’s first glimpse, in early March 1934, of their new home. “A desolate compound,” she wrote. There was no garden, its only flora a few poor trees, stunted and sickly. After the riot of blossoms they had lived among in Mawlaik, her first impression here was “dirty, dry and derelict.” The place was an old military compound: The major’s bungalow would be their house, the old crumbling barracks sat empty, and the mess hall was made into both Jim’s office and bachelor quarters for his assistants in from the jungle. The servants’ accommodations were in the worst shape—shabby enough that Jim had them demolished and rebuilt. A cemetery behind the lot added to the atmosphere. It was dotted with the tombstones of youthful British soldiers who had succumbed decades before to tropical disease.

  As if to underscore the malignancy of the place, Susan would come across her first Russell’s viper—among the most deadly in the world, with venom stronger than that of a cobra, it was a snake even snake hunters fear. Marzah Khan, their night watchman, killed it with his stave.

  The couple settled in, though their surroundings would always be unsettling to Susan. By summer, their son Jeremy was born. He was a chubby, bright-eyed healthy boy. It should have been a time of sheer joy, but just then Jim became sick with fevers, chills, and aches. More important and uncharacteristic, he was also unhinged with fear. A round of dengue fever, a virus transmitted by mosquitoes, seemed to be the last straw for his embattled health. “His constant bouts of malaria and other diseases, had caught up with him,” Susan wrote. Not only was he ill, he was increasingly certain that he had contracted rabies from one of his beloved dogs whom he had to shoot. He had not been bitten, but he easily might have had contact with the sick animal’s saliva. He understood that his extreme grief at losing a dog had probably just ripened into an unfounded anxiety. But just the same, he couldn’t stop worrying—and anxiety itself can be a sign of rabies. The incubation period is extraordinarily variable: anything from weeks to years. At every turn were the sharp little pricks of fear that he was showing symptoms of hydrophobia.

  Williams always said that being surrounded by the elephants helped him get through the constant battles with malaria and even dengue fever.

  No one had ever seen him like this, and an urgent medical leave was issued in the fall of 1934. In November, he, Susan, and their nanny, Ma Kin, packed Jeremy up and by the twelfth, they made the port at Colombo, Ceylon, eagerly headed for home. As soon as they arrived on English soil, Jim was admitted to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases run by the Seamen’s Hospital Society in London. He was fed, hydrated, and treated with the most modern medications available. And yet there was no quick fix. “It was a psychiatrist in England,” Susan wrote, “who eventually cured him.”

  No sooner was he on the mend, though, when tragedy struck. Jim was still in the hospital when little Jeremy died of pneumonia. The baby seemed quite healthy but “picked up a virulent flu germ, and died quite suddenly,” Susan wrote. He was buried in the plot next to his grandfather’s in the local cemetery. Just as he had done with his memories of the war, Jim Williams never wrote about the event himself, but Susan described the loss as “a terrible blow to him.”

  The unhappiness of their year at home was exacerbated by the fearful news coming out of Germany. After Winston Churchill’s warnings about a potential threat, it came to light that in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany had built up a substantial air force, and Adolf Hitler announced his intention to increase the strength of the army. It seemed the führer’s lesson from the Great War had been how to win next time. And it wasn’t hard to imagine that next time might come sooner rather than later.

  In September 1935, the couple returned to Burma and their dreaded bungalow in Shwebo. Susan poured her energies into creating a garden in the desiccated compound and, as would become a lifetime habit, she memorized the Latin names of all her plants. For the next two years, Susan toured with Jim whenever possible. The house in Shwebo might not have felt like a home, but the forests always did. As long as the rains held off, she’d rather be in the field next to her husband.

  While not reliable, wireless reception was good enough for them to hear the drumbeat of news about the increasing militarism of Germany. Over the next year it grew louder, and even Japan seemed to be following suit. Italy annexed Ethiopia. And Great Britain made plans to beef up its navy. In the forests of Burma there was peace, but Jim sensed it was only temporary.

  In the meantime, there were changes for them closer to home. For Burma, there was a step up in colonial status. In April 1937, the country emerged from the umbrella of India’s administration, becoming its own stand-alone territory. It now would have an independent senate, though the senators would be handpicked by the British governor.

  An especially happy development was that Susan discovered she was expecting again. In the fall, she developed a bad case of malaria, but still on December 12, 1937, their son Treve was born. Jim and Susan were nearly silly with joy around him. They thought they could discern a real intelligence in his eyes. “We both felt inordinately proud of him,” Susan wrote. Despite the loss of Jeremy, or perhaps because of it, the couple was determined to raise a robust child. Unlike other nervous mothers in the teak trade, Susan decided to gather the whole family on tour as soon as possible. Their only concession was that they waited till Treve was fourteen months old before turning him into a full-fledged member of the touring crew. Susan heard murmurs that some of the other wives thought they were “foolish and running unnecessary risks by taking our child with us, so far away from medical help.” She dismissed them, feeling that the risk was
worth it. They kept a nanny, a pretty Karen girl named Naw Lah. On long treks, Treve, wearing a miniature pith helmet, or topee, was carried in a bamboo jungle version of a palanquin, which Jim had designed to be crib, “carry-cot, and playpen all in one.” By the age of three, Treve was trusted with a jungle knife, or dah, and rode his own prancing brown-and-white pinto pony. Aung Net taught him how to make small, hard balls from mud and fire them from a slingshot. Susan wrote, “The jungle nats were on our side and he never came to any harm.”

  Though Treve had not yet met Bandoola, the elephant was a hero to him. The tusker was so completely woven into the fabric of the Williams family life view and lore that when the little boy was faced with a challenge, he would ask his father, “Could Bandoola do it?” and Jim would respond, “Yes, he would have a good try.”

  Jim missed Bandoola dearly, but he presumed there would come a time when they worked the same forest again. It was something to hope for. And for now, his life was what he had always envisioned: loving wife, child, elephants, and the magic of the forest. Both Jim and Susan hoped this was the beginning of several years of idyllic forest life all together. But world events increasingly threatened. In the spring of 1938, Austria became a province of Germany, and Czechoslovakia was ready to fall. The Williamses received home leave and were gone from April to October 1938. With war imminent, Jim considered staying to enlist. But then, feeling certain that Japan would enter the fray, he figured he’d be of more use returning East.

  Jim Williams adored his son Treve.

  Back in Burma, his work went on as before. But in September 1939, when Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand declared war on Germany, Jim again felt conflicted and thought about sailing home to join the army. Ultimately, he decided that with the war effort, “teak would be as important as steel” and that’s how he could best serve. As it would turn out, he wouldn’t need to go find the war; it would eventually find him.