The entire crew worked as hard as they could—sawing steps into the stone or clearing jungle growth from the inner wall where there already was footing. Williams was struck by their good humor.
Just before sundown, the workers stopped and looked at the continuous, rough staircase zigzagging up the cliff face. There was no better test subject than Williams himself, so, tired but game, he headed up. He had to crawl on all fours occasionally, but not as often as before. And he appreciated that wherever possible, brush was piled on the outer edges to obscure the terrifying view of the drop to the floor below. He made notes and calculations about necessary adjustments.
He scrabbled down. No doubt it was better. But was it good enough? He couldn’t say for sure. “One thing we knew,” he wrote. “There was no turning back.”
At camp that night, they focused on food and rest. And in the morning, they returned to the work site for one more full day of building the elephant staircase. Hours of backbreaking work continued, and before sunset, they all stood assessing the remarkable sight before them.
There was no denying that there were still two hellish points where the track was squeezed and precarious. At one, a series of steps no wider than an elephant’s foot had been carved out. At the second, it was questionable whether a narrow rim would have the structural strength to withstand the weight of the elephants.
But after forty-eight hours of grueling work, it was done. Both Po Toke and another senior elephant man felt the rock had been modified to the full extent possible and they agreed, as Williams put it, that “if we could not do it now we never would.” Williams was anxious—all these lives were in his hands. Over the years, his colleagues had teased him about how much he believed in the elephants. Maybe this time he had overestimated them.
He could only head back to their Spartan little camp and pray that everyone rested, that sleep would come to the minds racing with anticipation. Final instructions were solidified: Williams would head up first, then Po Toke would walk just ahead of Bandoola with his rider; the big bull would lead, and then the other elephants would start. The animals would carry their normal packs, as well as their riders to guide them, but no refugees. The women and children would go next; those who could not climb would be carried by the men. There was to be no talking.
That night the group ate by the campfire. The elephants, who could not wander freely in this salad bowl of vegetation, were tethered nearby and served large piles of forage gathered by their riders. The animals were always a little restless when confined, but they had plenty to eat and seemed content.
Everyone bedded down, the fire dwindled, and the sounds of the night descended. There were small noises from the big elephants—the sandpaper scrape of an ear, the snaps of stems as they fed, and the soft, moist grate of their chewing. There were rumbles, also—to those who loved the elephants, they were as soothing as a cat’s purr. From the humans came snores, murmurings, and restless shifts in position. Even extravagant dreams could not match what might happen the next day.
Dawn came quickly.
Camp was broken quietly and solemnly. Williams wore the same jungle uniform he had for years—khaki shorts and shirt, canvas high-tops—and made a solitary walk through the wet green forest to the escarpment while everyone was still in camp. He had intentionally isolated himself, perhaps because he didn’t want his own anxiety to affect the elephants. Confidence, or the lack of it, he always said, was something they picked up on with acute sensitivity. This was one of his ten commandments of elephant life.
When Williams reached the landslip, there was just enough light brimming on the horizon for him to begin his climb. Dizzy, he crawled upward on all fours. He made it over the worst patch—the stairway—climbed another two hundred yards, then forced himself to crouch down to wait. High above the jungle, he sat stone still, listening. There was the sound of rushing water from the creek below, and, as if to reinforce how much was riding on this risky endeavor, the “distant thuds of gunfire” from the Silchar-Bishenpur Track to the south. The fighting was catching up to them; Williams could hear that. What he couldn’t know was that the Japanese were taking a hammering.
He would have two hours alone. “Many were my thoughts,” he wrote. Among other worries, he thought about Susan. By now she would be hearing about the great battlefield Imphal had become, and she’d be sick with concern. It was enough to set off the pain in his stomach, which had grown only more acute during the trip.
With Williams sitting midway up the elephant stairs, lost in thought, the uzis broke camp, took their positions, and led the elephants single file to the cliff face. Elephant Bill felt their arrival more than he heard it. But given his problem with heights, he couldn’t peer over the edge to watch. What he didn’t see was Bandoola, rider atop his head, and Po Toke behind him, striding right up to the base of the escarpment. When he got there, Po Toke commanded with quiet confidence: “Thwar.” “Climb.” It was an order Bandoola understood from negotiating piles of teak logs.
The elephant placed his two front feet on the first narrow step. Then, with incalculable strength and balance, he drew his hindquarters up and stood with all four feet on the tiny ledge.
He stayed motionless for a minute, then two, then three. For nine full minutes, the elephant seemed to ponder his next move. And then he decided. It was exactly like those moments at river crossings, when a young female became the leader with a resolved plunge. And it came just when those watching thought he was going to tumble backward. Bandoola drew up his front feet—again, slowly and carefully—and placed them on the next step. And so it went. Silent, deliberate, precise. Upward.
About an hour later, Williams, waiting anxiously and still unable to even glance downward, was startled. Bandoola’s great head and tusks materialized before him like a god’s, filling the sky. Man and elephant were eye to eye. Williams peered into that big, dark eye fringed with enormous lashes that he knew so well. There was confidence.
Far from precarious, Bandoola seemed as secure as the mountain itself. The elephant was standing nearly erect, like a person, and in slow motion he heaved himself entirely to the next step. The uzi atop his head kept peering down as Bandoola expertly, delicately, precisely stepped into position, his cushioned feet nearly swallowing up each stone rundle.
Williams’s depiction of one of the most incredible moments of his life: Bandoola climbing the elephant stairway.
Williams moved upward and, daring to look down, he could see through the elephant’s legs. And then there appeared a figure: Po Toke was following closely behind.
Williams turned, without uttering a sound, and clambered the rest of the way up. Success was far from certain, but he “prayed for good luck.”
He would wait at the top two more hours to see Bandoola again, knowing there were no rest breaks for the animal; each step was a test of strength, balance, and trust.
Altogether, it would take the elephant more than three hours from base to summit, where Williams now waited. When Bandoola appeared at the crest, Williams noted, “My relief and excitement cannot be expressed in words.” The eleven-thousand-pound animal had done what was asked of him, and it took him to the very limit of his endurance. It was plain to see the toll the extraordinary climb had taken—for an hour after Bandoola reached the top, his legs continued to quiver with involuntary contractions.
What a relief it was to be able to place a palm against the animal’s side and know he was safe. Williams could feel the familiar bristle brush sensation of the elephant’s hide that always left his hand tingling. He might not have wanted Bandoola to discern his trepidation at the beginning of the mountain climb, but he surely wanted Bandoola to read his emotion now. A silent knowledge passed between them. To Williams, Po Toke, though outwardly solemn, seemed to be suppressing a giddy sense of accomplishment as well.
One by one then, all fifty-two of the other animals completed the ascent. Not one fell or refused to climb. Williams, the man who thought elephants were capable of
anything, was humbled by their achievement. It was a wonder.
“I learned more in that one day about what elephants could be got to do than I had in twenty-four years,” he would write. “It was a moment of greatness, a heroic moment in which Po Toke had his full share.”
The British adventurer who had spent his life in the company of elephants felt, high up on the mountainside, that he had witnessed the ultimate in the bond of trust: “the climax of animal-man relationship.” Everything he had learned from elephants and about elephants was put to use in one stroke: All those lessons about trust, confidence, the meaning of leadership. The way they had always intuited his intentions. The fact that they could assess situations. That they were loyal. That their courage surpassed even their physical strength. That they knew, just as Ma Chaw had, that Billy Williams was their good friend. Here was nothing less, he wrote, than the validation of his “life’s work.”
Years later, General Slim, speaking of this climb, would say, “This is the story of how a man, over the years, by character, patience, sympathy and courage, gained the confidence of men and animals, so when the time of testing came that mutual trust held.”
Elephant Bill felt the enormity of it.
After the animals had ascended, the refugees materialized, the last of them arriving at dusk. “No day ever seemed longer,” Williams wrote. Everyone had summited, but they were not yet safe. The top of the ridge was an uncomfortably vulnerable berth to sleep—after all, they had been listening for hours to close gunfire. But with sundown, they had no choice. There could be no more movement in the dark. Williams hoped his luck would hold out one more night, for in the morning, they would cross into territory that was beyond the reach of the Japanese. It was the last time they had to post sentries.
Staying on the ridge was better for the elephants, anyway—all of them had experienced even greater trembling in their legs than Bandoola. Everyone rested.
The next morning, they began their descent down to the Barak River, a waterway that eventually becomes part of the Ganges Delta at the Bay of Bengal. The slope was steep and punishing in its own way, but the footing was good and there was no sheer rock.
Once they reached the water, Williams decreed an extra day of rest and recovery for the elephants. There would be the luxury of a good scrub down for them, including time to soak and to drink as much of their bathwater as they could take in. Good forage along the banks of the river provided hours of relaxed eating. And without threat of Japanese patrols, they could be given a little more freedom. What a relief to know that any loud sound—a cry from a child, a trumpet from an elephant—wouldn’t reveal their position to the enemy.
Of course, even without assassins at their backs, there was still a week of arduous travel ahead. And by now, some of the children had come down with fever. The group would follow the river, which was a sure route to Silchar, but one marked by quicksand, mud, swamp, and stands of bamboo and cane so dense they were nearly impenetrable. It was a wonder the gear wasn’t stripped off the elephants’ backs as they squeezed through.
They were nearly two weeks out and fast approaching the end of the rations, which had been calculated to last them fifteen days. The map was not always reliable, but Williams figured that all told, they might have to march more than twenty days before reaching help. The only consolation was that the last portion would be through easier country.
Every day, they hiked nearly to the breaking point and always on empty stomachs—in the final stretch, rations for the officers were down to half a cigarette tin of rice a day each, supplemented by whatever the jungle could provide for the pot. There were still enough supplies for the women to make chapatis, the traditional flatbread that the men had with jam.
Fortunately, they came to a village where they purchased a pig for roasting. After an escape by the animal and an argument with the seller, two free-roaming pigs (the villagers always let them out to forage) were shot and cooked. When someone else in the village tried to extort money from Williams over damaged banana trees, he felt it was a sure sign they were reentering civilization.
Yet they still had much wild ground to cover.
Out of the mountains, they struggled through swamp. At one point, they hiked for eight miles in a riverbed with knee-deep water and a bottom so muddy it pulled like quicksand, Williams wrote. Adding to the misery, the jungle crept not only right down into the water, but sometimes the bamboos grew straight across, so the travelers couldn’t even hug the banks. Slashing at stands of bamboo protruding through the surface of the water often left sharp stems that could cut the feet of those following. The children and some of the women hopped aboard the slow-moving elephants. Others who walked on their own found their clothes to be an impediment and stripped them off. “It was no time or place for modesty,” Williams noted, and “they were quite beyond caring.”
It took them twelve hours—from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m.—to cover only ten miles that day. At night, when everyone was “just dead beat,” they were grateful to find one “open patch” of land. Williams, wet, exhausted, and nearly skeletal, sat down and spread the map out once more. Unless the vague cartography was misleading him, it looked as though they had just one more march before they reached the tea plantation.
In the morning, everyone geared up. But it was decided that, as they drew near to the location where they expected to find the plantation, only Williams, nine elephants, and the sickest of the refugee children would proceed. Since they would be arriving unannounced, a small party would be the gentlest introduction. The remaining group would simply wait and rest up till word was sent back.
At the front, Williams led Bandoola—the only elephant who, throughout the ordeal, had remained in good condition. On the big elephant’s back was a pannier loaded with eight Gurkha children, all in such high fever that their little heads drooped over the edge. “I don’t think there was ever an elephant so powerful but with such a fragile cargo,” Williams recalled.
As usual, when Williams acted as scout, he traveled a good distance ahead of the elephants. Alone in the forest, he advanced through the dark shade till the world opened up to sun.
“I had the astonishing experience,” Williams wrote, “of walking right out of the wall of dense jungle into the open plain of the tea estate—an ocean of green tea, as far as the eye could see. I had come out exactly where I had planned on the map. There were doves cooing. I felt a lump in my throat, and could hardly believe my eyes.”
About a mile away, he could see “a large bungalow typical of so many planter’s bungalows in Assam.” He said a private prayer of thanks that the children burning with sickness were not far behind him and would soon reach a hospital. It was April 26, 1944—three weeks after his caravan had left the Imphal Plain with supplies for only fifteen days.
The house was built upon a tillah, as they called it in the area, a small hill just forty or fifty feet higher than the sea of green tea planted for miles around it. “As I approached,” Williams would recall, “I could see a figure in a white shirt on the verandah.… A man hailed me in a Scotch tongue”: “Faur are ye comin’ fae an’ faur are ye gaun ti? [Where are you coming from and where are you going to?] You’d better come in for a dram!”
Williams said there was nothing he’d love more. When he stepped onto the porch, he saw a lovely table set for breakfast. The planter, James Sinclair, a middle-aged bachelor, introduced himself and offered hot coffee and new-laid eggs. As Williams tucked into the meal, he explained the plight of the refugees. Sinclair had heard a rumor about the journey, but he had thought that it was the Japanese leading elephants in his direction.
When White appeared with the children atop Bandoola, Williams rushed out to tell them that Sinclair had already arranged for the estate’s doctor to attend to them. They were whisked away to receive food and immediate care.
At last, Williams could get to a telephone and call in to Silchar proper, still twenty miles away, to alert the civil authorities. He arranged for the refuge
es to be taken into a well-run camp. Knowing the women and children were safe, Williams said, “would be my greatest relief.” Before sundown, all the Gurkhas were settled in the city.
That night Williams and his men relaxed in luxury. He and White enjoyed the indoor plumbing, proper dinner, and clean sheets that Sinclair offered. Somehow, two bottles of rum remained from the case handed to Williams in Imphal. They opened one now and shared it with their host. Browne and Hann, with the other bottle in their possession, camped out with the elephants and the uzis. The air was crisp and the surroundings beautiful. Overhead, the sky was crowded with stars. To the elephants, too, tea country was a dream: a buffet of greens and plentiful water for drinking and bathing.
The next morning, with Sinclair’s help, the men established the elephants and uzis in a camp nearby. Williams planned for them to stay for a while.
To start fulfilling his administrative duties, and despite his fear of flying, Williams grabbed a military plane and traveled southeast to the city of Comilla to check in with his superiors. They were shocked he was alive. None of the RAF planes had ever spotted the red parachute.
Williams also tracked down the location of the Karen uzis’ families. They were living in a refugee camp in another part of Assam, and he sent Browne and White with two senior elephant men to visit them and bring back news to their husbands. Arrangements were made for the families to be reunited later.
Within two weeks, Williams made his way over to check on the Gurkha refugees. They had been transformed. Well-fed and scrubbed up, they were healthier looking than Williams had ever seen them and anticipating the next phase, in which they would rejoin their fathers and husbands.
When this was all taken care of, Williams made his way to Shillong to find his own family. “He looked as thin as a scarecrow,” Susan wrote. To her, Jim’s journey had been nothing more than hearsay. Now, seeing him in her own home, she could at last believe it. He wasn’t in her arms long. Almost immediately he was admitted to the hospital, the horrible burning in his abdomen diagnosed as a duodenal ulcer. The frequent pain would persist for the rest of his life, as the simple cure of using antibiotics for the condition was a long way off. After six weeks’ recuperation—in the hospital, and with Susan at East Knoll—Williams returned to his elephants.
Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II Page 27