Flight by Elephant Read online

  But Millar and Leyden didn’t have any elephants with them. Instead, they had an elephant tracker, a young Assamese man called Goal Miri (Miri denotes his tribe) who was skilled at finding and following the tracks that wild elephants made through the jungles, and was retained by Millar as his personal servant. They also had a dozen porters recruited from the Kachin, one of the Upper Burmese tribes more sympathetic to the British, and Leyden’s spaniel bitch, Misa, who was pregnant.

  Millar and Leyden had set off from Upper Burma on 17 May with enough rice, potatoes, onions, sugar, condensed milk and – being British – tea for fourteen days. They had to reach India before their supplies ran out because the jungle could not be guaranteed to yield up any food, and the country along their route was uninhabited. They were aiming for the Dapha river. Only when they reached it would they know they were on target for the plain of Assam, but they also knew that when they did reach the Dapha they would have to cross it. This wasn’t going to be easy. In 1892, Errol Gray had pronounced the Dapha ‘not fordable after early March’ on account of the meltwaters of the Himalayas. On top of that, Millar and Leyden were approaching the Dapha in the monsoon season, the rains having started about a week before they entered the pass. All previous expeditions through the Chaukan had taken place in the cold weather season – in December and January – when the many rivers are singing but not roaring.

  On the morning of that first day, 19 May, Millar and Leyden crossed a relatively small but meandering river called the Nam Yak. They then crossed it a further seventeen times, each encounter preceded by the depressing sound of its rising roar coming from beyond the trees. They would half wade, half swim over the river. The water was chest-high for Millar and Leyden, but higher for the Kachins, most of whom were about five feet tall – one of the pygmy tribes, as the early British settlers in Burma would have referred to them.

  After three days, Millar and Leyden emerged from the Chaukan Pass, but the mountainous jungle continued. In fact, as Millar noted in his diary, ‘the going became still more difficult’. They were descending only slowly from a height of about 8000 feet. They proceeded, slashing with their kukris (or large, curved knives) along the elephant tracks Goal Miri had identified, which at first, or even second, glance didn’t look like tracks at all. Or they would follow the banks of the rivers. Hitherto, these had tended to go across their direction of travel, but when they came out of the pass, Millar and Leyden struck a river that was going their way – that is, west. It was called the Noa Dehing.

  They couldn’t cross the Noa Dehing, which was about 400 yards wide, and sunk in a deep, jungly gorge. They couldn’t even see across it, steaming rain having reduced the visibility to almost nil. They were therefore stuck on the right-hand bank – and this confirmed their appointment with the Dapha, which was a tributary of the Noa Dehing shortly to come thundering in from the right. Meanwhile, it was usually better to follow the bank of the Noa Dehing than hack away at the jungle.

  So Millar and Leyden walked along the stones at the water’s edge – when there was an edge to the water – as opposed to a vertical wall of red mud. Some of these stones, Millar wrote, were about the size and shape of a cricket ball, and threatened to twist your ankle. Others were about the size and shape of a small house, so Millar and Leyden would climb up, across and down, often descending into deep pools, so that the leather of their boots began to rot. When the vertical mud wall was the only option, they proceeded monkey-like, holding onto the roots of trees or stout bamboos. It is unlikely that they talked much as they climbed. Their voices would have been drowned out by the crashing past of the river; and a malnourished man finds it hard to talk. It becomes a labour to formulate the thoughts and pronounce the words.

  The rain made it hard to light the fires they needed at night to boil up their rice. They had to search the undergrowth for dry bamboo, which they cut into slivers to make kindling. This they then tried to ignite, but the Lion Safety Matches of India and Burma were considered by many of their users all too safe: the sulphur tended to drop off the end when they were struck, or they would break in half.

  When bamboo does burn, it makes a mellow bubbling, popping sound. Every night after they’d eaten their rice, Millar and Leyden made tea: Assam leaves swirling in a brew tin full of river water. G. D. L. Millar was a tea planter from Assam – manager of the Kacharigaon Tea Company – and never let it be said of the British tea planters of India that they did not consume their own product.

  On one those early evenings by the fire, Leyden took a photograph of Millar; it shows a tough forty-two-year-old, unshaven, standing in front of a bamboo fire. The porters crouch around him Burmese-style, like close fielders around a batsman; he wears loose fatigues and the manner in which he holds his cigarette is slightly rakish. Millar was christened Guy Daisy. In the Edwardian days of his birth, Daisy could be a boy’s name; it might be further explained in Millar’s case by the fact that he was born on a farm in Cornwall. Daisy means nothing more incriminating than ‘the day’s eye’ and you might think it would suit an outdoorsman. But Millar made that ‘D’ stand for Denny.

  He was on a three-month release from the Kacharigaon Tea Company in order to do ‘government work’ in Upper Burma (and we shall come to the question of what that had involved) in the company of Goal Miri and a cranky sixty-four-year-old botanist called Frank Kingdon-Ward.

  Before coming to Millar’s companion, Leyden, a word about that cigarette of Millar’s. How had he kept it dry when crossing all these rivers in monsoon rains? There will be a lot of cigarettes in this story, a lot of rivers and a lot of rain, so it is a question worth asking.

  The cigarettes of the day usually came in cylindrical tins about two and a half inches in diameter. The tins were sealed below the lid. A small, levered blade was set into the lid; you pressed it down and rotated the lid in order to break the seal. Until then, the tin was entirely waterproof, and it was still fairly waterproof afterwards. The tins, which contained fifty cigarettes, were too big to put in a normal pocket, so most people decanted them into a slim cigarette case – but cigarette cases were for the drawing room, and in the jungle Millar smoked his straight from the tin.

  Millar’s travelling companion, John Leyden, was a civil servant of British Burma, a colonial administrator. He could be loosely referred to as a DC, or Deputy Commissioner. More correctly, he was a sub-divisional officer of the North Burmese district of Myitkyina where, according to Thacker’s Indian Directory, the languages spoken included Burmese, Kachin, Hindustani, Lisu, Gurkhali and Chinese. Myitkyina was the last decent-sized town in Burma; the railway ended there, but a dusty mule track snaked north from the town, through a mosquito-infested jungle and scrub unfrequented by Europeans apart from the odd orchid collector. The path winds towards a small settlement of green and red houses perched on top of a treeless green hill, like a place in a fairy story. This was Sumprabum, the centre of Leyden’s particular sub-division. (And while we are in this remote vicinity, let us note an even narrower track winding down the hill and meandering still further north to an even smaller, even more malarial settlement called Putao.)

  John Lamb Leyden was born into a distinguished Scottish family, and was a descendant of another orientalist, John Leyden (1775–1811), poet, physician and antiquary, who ran the Madras General Hospital and held various official posts in Calcutta. Ominously for John Lamb Leyden, his ancestor died of fever on an expedition to Java.

  We have a photograph of John Lamb Leyden on his trek – probably taken by Millar after Leyden had taken his. It shows a cerebral looking man with swept-back, receding hair. At thirty-eight, Leyden was younger than Millar, but looked older. Next to him, a bamboo fire smoulders thickly. He and Millar would light these at every camp, hoping the smoke would attract the planes that periodically flew overhead, but as Millar wrote, ‘… on each occasion failure to observe us was apparent’. They had no tents, so every evening they spent a couple of hours building a hut of the type known locally as a basha
.

  How do you build a basha?

  In a lecture entitled ‘Keeping Fit in the Jungle’, given to the Bengal Club of Calcutta in early 1943, Captain Alastair Tainsh explained:

  The way to keep fit in the jungle is exactly the same as anywhere else. All one needs is sound sleep, clean water, a reasonable diet, and a liberal use of soap and water. But how is sound sleep to be obtained? Well, one must learn how to make oneself comfortable in the worst conditions. It is not being tough or clever to sit in the open all night … The easiest form of shelter to build is made by fixing two upright poles in the ground eight or nine feet apart. To the top of these is bound a long bamboo making a frame like goal posts. The roof is made by leaning a number of poles against the top bar forming an angle of about 45 degrees with the ground. A number of parallel bamboos are tied to the sloping poles and into this framework banana or junput leaves are thatched.

  Then you had to build a chung, or sleeping platform, to keep the leeches off, and sometimes Millar and Leyden couldn’t be bothered to do any of this, so they’d sleep in the crooks of trees. They always kept a fire burning in case a tiger should turn up, although as Millar wrote, about a week into their trek: ‘… this stretch of country is uninhabited for over a hundred miles. Not only is there not a trace of man, but mammal and even bird life is conspicuous by its absence; truly a forgotten world, where solitude reigns supreme.’

  Here, too, we can invoke the voice of reason himself, Captain Tainsh:

  Nearly everyone is a little frightened when they hear they must work and live in the jungle. The word ‘jungle’ conjures up in their minds a place literally swarming with lions, tigers, elephants and snakes. Nothing could be further from the truth, because wild animals and even snakes need food, and such wild animals as there are, live on the edge of cultivation, and are seldom seen in the thicker parts of the forest.

  The larger animals are particularly scarce in the monsoon, when they retreat to the margins of the jungle, to avoid the leeches and mosquitoes that proliferate in the rains. Against these torments, Millar and Leyden slept with their heads wrapped in blankets but still Millar wrote, ‘Of the leeches, blister flies and sandflies I cannot give adequate description, sufficient it is to say that we were getting into a mess.’ For most of the nights, they didn’t sleep at all, but just listened to the sound of rain drumming on palms or bamboo. In the morning, the rising heat of the day made clouds of steam rise up from the muddy jungle floor like smoke from a bonfire.

  By 26 May, with nine of their fourteen days of food gone, there was no sign of the Dapha river, and Millar and Leyden were down to one cigarette tin of rice per man per day.

  Why had these men entered the Chaukan Pass?

  To escape something worse coming from behind.

  The Languorous Dream

  On the morning of 7 December 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and entered the Second World War. They wanted ‘Asia for the Asiatics’, and for the Japanese especially. During the ensuing offensives – which have been called ‘the biggest land grab in history’ – some Japanese soldiers carried a postcard to be filled out and sent home at a moment of leisure. It showed a cartoon of a Japanese soldier with a blank space where the face ought to have been. The sender inserted a photograph of himself, thus becoming the depicted soldier, who held two grinning children in his arms while a further two clung onto his knee-high puttees. The children – who waved the Japanese flag with their free hands – represented Malaya, the Pacific islands, China and the Dutch East Indies. Japan had appropriated eastern and central China in 1938. They would ‘liberate’, as they liked to put it, the British colony of Malaya in March 1942. By the end of that month, New Guinea, largest of the Pacific islands, had been taken, and the Dutch East Indies had surrendered. No child represented the British colony of Burma, but that, too, was taken by the Japanese in early 1943.

  That Burma did not have a child of its own shouldn’t surprise us. It tended to be slighted in this way. Whereas Queen Victoria was, from 1877, the Empress of India, Burma was merely given to her as a ‘New Year’s Gift’ in 1886. She never went to Burma, but then she never went to India either. She didn’t like ‘trips’. The British had annexed Burma in 1886, following the third Anglo-Burmese War. There had been territorial disputes on the Burma–Assam border, and the British were concerned at French ‘interference’ in the country. The British occupied Burma from the south and the west. They did not enter Burma from Assam, simply because there were no roads into Burma from Assam.

  Prior to 1937 – when Burma was given a measure of self-government – Burma was by far the largest of the ten provinces of British India, but only two of those provinces had a smaller population. On the eve of the Second World War, seventeen million people inhabited a country as big as France and Belgium combined. To the British, it was like the field a householder buys to stop anyone building too near his own property, the property in this case being India.

  The Encyclopaedia of the British Empire: The First Encyclopaedic Record of the Greatest Empire in the History of the World, Volume 2 (1924), is very pleased with the utility of Burma. The country

  … forms the frontier with China, French Indo-China and Siam on the east, and the province of Assam in the north. Strategically, this province [Burma], which is often termed ‘Further India’ is of considerable importance. It forms the east and north east coasts of the Bay of Bengal, and completes the semi-circle of British territory which encloses this great ocean highway to India. It was not conquered and annexed because of any premeditated plan of Imperial extension, but rather as a safeguard to India proper.

  The passage continues to the effect that, with Burma up its sleeve, British India has no need to maintain a large fleet in the Bay of Bengal, or to keep large garrisons on the India–Burma border. The generals were thus able to concentrate on that more likely weak link of Indian defence, the North-West Frontier, while keeping Burma itself lightly garrisoned with just 6000 British and 3000 native troops. Tim Carew, author of The Longest Retreat, has a different perspective. The defence of Burma on the eve of the Second World War was, he writes, ‘ludicrously inadequate’.

  … Not least because Japan also wanted Burma as a buffer state: a 2000-mile-long protective wall to the west of its native islands. But Britain was insufficiently wary of the Japanese, who had been her allies (against Russia, the common bugbear) until 1921. To the British, the Japanese were small, dapper, decorous people, usually amusingly short-sighted, hence bespectacled. Emperor Hirohito seemed to fit the bill perfectly, as did the Japanese consul in Rangoon (who, myopic or not, turned out to be running a network of spies drawn from the Japanese population of the city). For years after 1921, the Japanese enjoyed a good press, and they did not figure in the demonology set out by George Orwell in his famous essay of 1940 on boys’ weekly comics. This ran:

  Frenchman: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly.

  Spaniard, Mexican etc: Sinister, treacherous.

  Arab, Afghan, etc: Sinister, treacherous.

  Chinese: Sinister, treacherous. Wears pigtail.

  Italian: Excitable. Grinds barrel-organ or carries stiletto.

  The Japanese invasion of China in 1938 did cause a twinge of anxiety on Burma’s behalf, and not only to Britain. In the first half of 1942, Burma was nominally defended by three Allied nations, but only half-heartedly in each case. To the British, Burma was a blind spot, as we have seen. Then there were the Chinese and the Americans, who defended Burma not for its own sake but because it was strategically significant in the battle of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese forces against the Japanese invader, which the Americans sought to assist. Both China and America saw Burma as a road: the Burma Road. That sounds like a major highway, but to European eyes it would have looked like not so much a minor road as a farm track. This lifeline for the Nationalist Chinese – since the eastern seaboard was under Japanese occupation – had been opened in 1938: 600 miles o
f hairpin bends running through mountainous territory from Lashio, 500 miles north of Rangoon, into Kunming, China. America also added to the firepower within the Burmese borders, in the shape of the Flying Tigers, or the 1st American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force. Its sixty or so planes – not enough – were decorated with the faces of sharks, and the flyers (paid such high wages by the Chinese that they have been characterized as mercenaries) were equally decorative, swaggering around Rangoon in their leather jackets.

  But as far as the British were concerned, the role of the Flying Tigers was precautionary. After all, a Japanese invasion of Burma had been officially ruled out by Far Eastern Intelligence Bureau (an organization credited by Tim Carew with being ‘a mine of misinformation’). The Japanese couldn’t possibly invade Burma. Proudly neutral Thailand was in the way … unless Japan reached an accommodation with Thailand (which is just what happened, in October 1940).

  It was as though the British in Burma, enervated by the climate, were sunk in a languorous dream: a world of white-turbaned servants bowing low in the clubs; of palms and jacaranda trees in the wide, white avenues of the city, with green parakeets skimming through the pale blue skies above; of pretty, pert Burmese women – unconfined by veil or purdah – sporting orchids in their piled-up hair, with golden bangles on their slender wrists. They would twirl their paper parasols while puffing coquettishly on outsize cheroots and generally presenting very good wife or (more likely) mistress material. Outside Rangoon, the flower-bedecked houses and shops … the smiling villagers trundling by on slumberous bullock carts, through a shimmering countryside dotted with Christmas treelike pagodas.