Flight by Elephant (14 page)

As with the Surma Valley Light Horse, the original purpose of No. 31 Squadron was the intimidation of tribesmen, in this case those of the North-Western rather than the North-Eastern Frontier. The official history of the squadron recounts, somewhat implausibly: ‘At a Durbar held at Peshawar in February, 1916, two B.E.2’s were demonstrated before all the chiefs of the trans-border tribes. The tribesmen said at the time that “the machines were only large birds and no one could possibly be inside them.” However, when the machines landed and the Chief Commissioner was taken for a flight they remarked that “the days of robbery and murder are at an end. Now the Raj can see all our doings.”’

In 1917, No. 31 Squadron was engaged in operations against Muslim Mashud tribesmen in the volatile territory of Waziristan, between Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier Province of India. British Political Officers attempted to control the territory by forming alliances with some of the tribesmen, and paid with their lives when the balancing act went wrong. The most rebellious tribe were the Mashuds. There had been skirmishes throughout the war, and, in early 1918, the Mashuds and their allies were emboldened in their campaign by the British entanglement in the Middle East, and the anti-British incitements of Turkish agents in Afghanistan. An official report called
Operations in Waziristan
contains sketchy maps that suddenly give way to a ‘vertical photograph’ of the territory: this shows a rocky ravine resembling the surface of the moon. The photograph might have been taken from a plane flown by Mackrell himself. The pilots of No. 31 Squadron were involved in aerial reconnaissance, and bombing raids against the villages of the rebellious tribesmen. The tribesmen’s houses were half underground and made of mud – very hard mud – and, because they were practically impervious to the 20lb Cooper bombs dropped on them, the pilots might aim instead for the adjacent flocks of sheep. (Cooper bombs looked like bombs in cartoons: teardrop-shaped with a fin at the rear end. Early in the war, they had simply been hurled down by the pilot, but by now they were retained under the wings and released by the pull of a lever in the cockpit.)

It was said the tribesmen would attempt to counter the planes by casting spells on them, and that they would use the unexploded bombs (initially, Cooper bombs often failed to explode) to reinforce their houses. On the other hand, the tribesmen were excellent shots, and often had the opportunity to shoot
down
on British planes from the peaks of their mountains.

Most of the pilots operated from Lahore, capital of the Punjab. A note in the squadron records from summer of 1918 reads, ‘The climate conditions at Lahore, in the hot weather always the most unhealthy of Indian stations, have been unusually severe and work is almost at a standstill. Seventy per cent of the personnel at aircraft park are sick.’
Operations in Waziristan
describes Waziristan itself as ‘the most unhealthy of the trans-frontier provinces … dysentery, diarrhoea, malaria and sandfly are rife’. Summer temperatures hovered at around 125 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. The planes could only operate in the early morning, otherwise the engines overheated and lost power. As it was, it might take a quarter of an hour to climb 1000 feet. The planes suffered a persistent – and one would have thought pretty fundamental – problem of supply, a shortage of tyres, so the pilots would sometimes take off and land on their wheel rims.

A history of No. 31 Squadron states, ‘Forced landings were fraught with great danger, capture resulting in mutilation and death by various very unpleasant methods.’ In his memoir,
First in the Indian Skies
, N. L. R. Franks gives more detail. ‘I should mention that on the Frontier we carried revolvers to destroy ourselves in the event of a forced landing in tribal territory, as it was said that the tribal women would remove one’s genitals while still alive.’ To guard against this, Mackrell, like all pilots, would have flown with a chit written in Pashto in his tunic pocket. It promised a lot of money for his return safe and
intact
should he crash, and, because of the nature of the depredation to be guarded against, it was called a ‘goolie chit’.

In early 1918, Gyles Mackrell was given command of ‘B’ Flight of a sub-division of 31 Squadron, namely No. 114 Squadron, whose badge was a cobra’s head and the motto ‘With Speed I Strike’. From late 1917 to July 1918, this squadron was operating over Baluchistan, which lay south of the North-West Frontier Province, and was then defined, by the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
of 1910, as ‘a country within the borders of British India’, although some of its ethnic groups would have had something to say about
that
. Britain attempted to govern Baluchistan from Quetta, where No. 114 Squadron was based. From here it conducted operations in the summer of 1918 against the Marri, a hill tribe located in eastern Baluchistan that had a track record of raiding into Sind and the Punjab.
Britannica
says of this region, ‘Its climate debars it from European occupation. It is a land of dust-storms and poisonous winds; a land where the thermometer never sinks below 100 degrees Fahrenheit in summer, and drops below freezing point in winter; where there is a deadly monotony of dust-coloured scenery for the greater part of the year, with the minimum of rain and the maximum of heat.’ As before, the tribesmen were elusive. A note of April 1918 reads, ‘fifteen flocks of sheep were observed. Five bombs were dropped on them with effect.’ The pilot is not named. Nor was any pilot named in the following: ‘Nothing further of note occurred until November 1918, when the Distinguished Flying Cross was awarded to two of the Squadron’s officers.’ One of those two men was Gyles Mackrell. His DFC was given without citation; that is, no particular reason was given in public for the award of the medal, which may mean it was for general valour.

In 1917, our young flier had married a Mary Pullen at Newbury in Berkshire. If Mary Pullen seems a fairly common name, Gyles Mackrell does not. Various English telephone directories from the mid-1930s (when telephones became wide-spread) to the mid-1970s contain the name of a Mrs Gyles Mackrell, and this looks somehow like a defiant evocation of a marriage that had ended childless and in divorce, because Gyles Mackrell was in India throughout the inter-war period. Whatever emotional pain is subtly suggested by that directory entry, it must remain private, and if we are looking for a third party in any divorce, then India itself – a country that Mackrell clearly loved – might be put forward as a candidate.

By 1919, he had returned to civilian life as an area supervisor for Octavius Steel and Company, a managing agency for tea garden owners, and not to be confused with the above-mentioned Steel Brothers. Company head office was in Calcutta, but most of the gardens it managed were in Assam, in whose capital, Shillong, Mackrell bought a house. By the time of the Second World War, Gyles Mackrell would be glancingly referred to in
The History of the Indian Tea Industry
, by Sir Percival Griffiths, as ‘a well known tea man’.

Mackrell and all his colleagues were members of the Indian Tea Association, the trade association for the tea planters of India. It was created in 1888, the original purpose being to stop the planters poaching each other’s coolies. Unlike Mackrell,
most
of these people had a quiet First World War. In
Green Gold: The Empire of Tea
, Alan and Iris Macfarlane write, ‘The Great War of 1914–18 produced the largest crop and the highest profits yet achieved. The troops in the trenches needed tea and they were not too bothered about quality … Few planters “joined up” and the War did not touch India generally …’

In the inter-war years, profits rose, the result of mechanisation and growth of the tea habit in Britain, which by the time of the Second World War was the highest consumer of tea per capita. The planter was insulated by prosperity from many of the hardships inflicted by Mother Nature in Assam. His Indian labourers, the coolies, were not so protected, and the rise of Indian nationalism began to make them feel aggrieved at low pay and high mortality rates. In 1927 a delegation from the British Trades Union Council surveyed the conditions of Indian labour. It was highly critical of the conditions in which the tea industry coolies of Assam lived and worked, which it described as ‘the nearest approach to slavery’. The ITA issued furious denials in the British press, and conditions did vary from garden to garden. The labourers, the planters argued, had good ‘perks’. They were given homes (they lived in rows of huts called ‘labour lines’); the gardens had resident doctors, usually Indian, and schools on site.

The Second World War
did
touch the planters, and gave them a chance to restore their dented reputation. Tea was Britain’s first ally in the war effort. About 10 per cent of photographs in any book devoted to the Home Front show people drinking tea, whether served to troops in a NAAFI canteen, or by the Salvation Army in bombed-out streets, or dispensed from watering cans to shelterers in Tube stations. Furthermore, a third of the planters joined up and left their gardens. (There was never any conscription in India.)

In March 1942 the government of India requested ITA assistance on the Burma–Assam border. The planters and their 450,000 labourers were asked, on a voluntary basis, to build motorable roads. These would be used to let the army out of, then back into, Burma; and to supply China. In addition, they were asked to provide humanitarian assistance to the refugees already flowing along the routes upon which the roads would have to be built.

There is no doubt the planters did as they were asked, but in
Green Gold
the Macfarlanes are cynical about their motives. They stress the road building for the military over the humanitarian relief effort, and the suffering of the coolies who built the roads, several thousand of whom would die on the job. The Macfarlanes assert of the ITA that ‘… right from the start it was less selfless patriotism than necessity that dictated their actions’. The ITA’s labourers were being poached by the military, and for this its members were compensated. The compensation must not be jeopardized by any foot dragging on the relief effort. Furthermore, the war boosted demand for tea. The Macfarlanes conclude that the ITA ‘must avoid the stigma of being seen to be unwilling, from selfish motives, to help the war effort’.

But surely a desire to do the right thing often co-exists with a willingness to be
seen
to do the right thing. The story of the two main northerly evacuation routes from Burma is a story of humanitarian effort as much as military logistics. In the case of the first route – Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur – a rough track would be widened to make a motorable, if hair-raising, 200-mile road. This effort co-existed with provision of succour for the refugees. In the case of the second route, along the Hukawng Valley, the humanitarian work caused the building of what would become the Ledo Road to be suspended.

There was a certain constancy to the staging posts established by the ITA volunteers along the routes. They combined eastern and British hospitality: eastern in that the essential structures resembled the zayats (bamboo shelters with palm-leaf roofs) that occur in the remotest spots of Burma, built by locals for the convenience of travellers; British in the determination with which a certain warm brown beverage was dispensed. Here is a quote from an unnamed witness in Dorman-Smith’s Evacuation Report: ‘The camps consisted of a series of bamboo barracks with well thatched roofs and floors built raised off the ground. At the entrance to each camp there was on one side a stall where tea was kept permanently brewing and on the other side was a dispensary with a doctor in attendance.’

Note that the tea comes before the doctor. The British faced, in the Japanese, a tea-drinking enemy, but the British considered tea to be on their side. The symbolic role of tea to the British is that it asserts normality. That is why it is always served after an accident. Part of the appeal of tea is that its aims are modest. Its serving involves a reassuring but simple ritual, easily mastered. Tea provides caffeine, but not as much as coffee; it is a narcotic, but not to the extent of alcohol. It tastes better then water, which has to be boiled, and therefore purified, when tea is made. This is the greatest service of tea to humanity: it necessitates the boiling of water. The British exploited Indian labour in their tea gardens, but in inflicting the tea-drinking habit on the indigenous population – which they made the second largest consumer after the home country – the British did India a favour. Furthermore, the British style of tea drinking, with milk and sugar, increases the energy and protein value. The more scientists understand tea, the more virtuous it seems to become. It contains beneficial vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. It may offer protection against strokes and cancer. Tea leaves applied externally can be used as antiseptic, as any monkey in the jungle knows.

‘On the road in-between the camps at about four mile intervals,’ the witness continued, ‘were ration dumps where coolies were sorted out and sent up the road with the supplies of rice, dhall, atta, bully beef, sausages and tea, which comprised our rations. At these ration camps tea was always ready for the wet and weary travellers.’

There is something redolent of cosier outdoor scenarios from the mother country. The zayats did resemble shaggy bus shelters. And there is an echo of the dispensation of refreshments along the track of a cross-country run or a paper chase – kindness combined with a chivvying along. Refugees were ‘patched up’, fed only a little at a time. The mantra was ‘Keep them hungry, keep them moving’. In the early days, a little rum might be mixed in with the refugees’ tea, but it was discovered that this could be fatal. Cigarettes were not withheld. The smoking of cigarettes to calm the nerves was considered just as sensible as drinking tea – which is to say very. The tea-planter heartiness, denigrated by the more refined members of the Indian Civil Service, was now an asset. Dorman-Smith quotes an observer of the ITA’s effort: