Flight by Elephant (16 page)

Reg Wilson was born in York in 1902; his father kept a big stationery shop in the middle of the town. He attended a private school where he excelled at all sports. According to a surviving relative, ‘He loved sport, and he loved action.’ After leaving school, he began training to be a tenant farmer at a village just inland of Scarborough. He also joined the Green Howards regiment as a territorial – that is, part-time – soldier. Even so, rural Yorkshire did not offer a sufficiently dynamic life, and in 1927 he went out to India, probably having seen an advertisement in a paper seeking trainee tea planters. In Assam, he became the manager of a tea garden, working for the firm of Duncan Brothers, and Reg Wilson was the ideal tea planter. He was good-looking, with swept-back, pomaded hair, and as popular with his Indian staff as his fellow planters. He more than held his own at polo, tennis and golf. He was also – a further mark of amiability – a chain-smoker. All in all, according to the same surviving relative, Reg Wilson was ‘something of a playboy’, but he was also a major jungle wallah, and in early 1942 he had volunteered to work as a civilian on the ITA relief effort in the Hukawng Valley. In mid-1942, he was made a captain in ‘V’ Force, a unit created in anticipation of a Japanese invasion of Assam. It would engage in guerrilla attacks on the enemy, in cooperation with the Gurkha soldiery of the Assam Rifles.

Late on that Saturday, Reg Wilson was taken to the government bungalow at Margherita, where Lambert gave him a chit to the effect that he, and not the freelance Mackrell, was in charge of the Chaukan rescue. British Assam, like British Burma, was a small world (except physically) but Reg Wilson had somehow avoided meeting Gyles Mackrell, and he refers to him in the early stages of the diary he kept as ‘Giles’ Mackrell.

An indication of the urgency of his mission lies in the fact that Reg Wilson began packing to follow Mackrell at 3.45 a.m. on Sunday 7 June. He did so at the golf course in the pouring rain. He was not given any elephants. None could be mustered in time. Instead, he would have, besides his two detachments of Assam Rifles, forty porters, but these, unlike the Abors retained by Mackrell, were from the political porters, raised by the British from among the tribes of Assam –
professional
porters. They were known for their rigid working practices. They would walk a fixed number of miles for a fixed amount of money, and they tended to win any arguments about those terms of engagement by sitting down and refusing to move. Wilson also had his own Medical Officer, an Indian called Dr Bardoloi.

Besides such basics as rice and tea, here are some of the things Wilson asked the porters to carry:

Thirty-six umbrellas.

Eight bottles of rum.

One case of tinned sausages.

One case of Heinz Baked Beans.

One case of Bonax. (Wilson describes it as being ‘like Bovril’.)

A hundred and sixty blankets.

He was told he would be able to collect mosquito nets from the village of Miao.

As all these plans were being made to supplement Mackrell’s mission, the man himself was being his customary, purposeful self.

In their jungle encampment, Mackrell and his mahouts woke early on the morning of Monday 8 June and struck out towards the Dapha river behind their newly recruited Mishmi guide. Mackrell led the men and their elephants over what he called ‘a wonderful road’, which in that territory meant something about six feet wide with more rocks than red mud and with enough clearance above the elephants for the mahouts to sit up top without having to swing their axes at the oncoming branches. The party was ascending, and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Hugh Stockley wrote in his book
The Elephant in Kenya
, ‘The nautical roll of a big bull [elephant] going away slightly uphill is most pronounced, almost inducing one to break into a chanty.’

It was raining heavily, of course, but Mackrell was noting with admiration ‘the really huge timber’ – trees of 150 feet or more – and the great cliffs that bounded the Noa Dehing. But by 2 p.m. the Mishmi guide was tired. He wanted to veer off the route and go to Tinguan, his home village along the Debang river, for a rest and a smoke of opium. And the mahouts made it clear that they quite fancied doing the same. Mackrell reminded everyone, in case they had forgotten, that ‘we were trying to save the lives of some starving people and that every hour might count’. But he didn’t just rely on windy exhortation. Mackrell doubled the Mishmi’s fee to twenty rupees, and said he could ride on an elephant. As for the mahouts, he knew that they were keener on going to the village for a rest rather than a smoke. After all, they had their opium
on them
. He promised them a rest shortly, and he persuaded them – again, bribery may have been involved – to have a ‘whip round’ of their opium. It came to about a quarter of a pound, and some was given to the Mishmi, so he had the prospect of a smoke when they came to their resting point. This satisfied the Mishmi who, as Mackrell acknowledged, ‘really was giving up a lot’ in going so far out of his way to help them. He was giving up more than he knew.

Where did a man like Mackrell stand on the opium question? To have distributed the stuff, and encouraged men to smoke it, would have been not only frowned on in Britain, but was also illegal. It was illegal in Assam as well, but the illegality was only technical. The British did not want to alienate thousands of peasant farmers in Bengal by stopping the production of opium. And the British had been using opium to bribe Indians ever since the days of the East India Company. This was widely known back home, and objected to by some evangelical Christians, who in the early twentieth century would endeavour to wean Indians off opium by sending out a then-legal opium derivative sold in bottles that proudly proclaimed it to be ‘non-addictive’ – namely heroin.

It was 2.30 p.m. by the time all this had been sorted out and they got going again. The Mishmi guide warned Mackrell that there was no prospect of reaching the Dapha river that day, but they pressed on, into the sort of scenario that would have given most people a nervous breakdown, but that Mackrell tended to describe simply as ‘not very satisfactory’.

‘At 4pm,’ he wrote, ‘we ran into the middle of a very large herd of wild elephant, quite sixty of them.’ Soon, the wild elephants were on all sides amid the trees, and amid the rain, in the gathering darkness. Now, if you are surrounded by wild elephants, the one thing you must not do is come between a cow and her calf. That is one circumstance guaranteed to bring on a charge. The overriding purpose of a herd of elephants is to protect the calves. At any sign of danger the proper place for the calf is either immediately to the side of, or below, the mother. The main danger in the jungles of Assam in 1942 was tiger – a quarter of all elephant calves were killed by tigers at the time. Men are normally safe from wild elephants, but not if the calf seems threatened, and the calf has two particular bodyguards, neither of which is the father who, by the time the calf has been born, has become rather detached from the mother. But she has by then enlisted another female, a sort of ‘auntie’ figure, to help with the childcare, and this elephant becomes as protective of the calf as its mother, so doubling the danger to any humans who might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And Mackrell and his men had ‘unfortunately’ interposed themselves in just this way. So Mackrell walked warily, rifle in hand; he was afraid he might have to shoot, not that a loaded rifle is any guarantee against an angry elephant.

Then an aeroplane flew over; Mackrell didn’t know what kind because it was hidden by the canopy of trees. Most likely it was one of the transport planes carrying supplies to Kunming – one of the ‘Chungking Taxis’.

Whatever it was, it flew low and loud and elephants do not like noise. It is one of their endearingly middle-aged characteristics, along with their usually docile nature, and their appearance of wearing a pair of baggy corduroy trousers. Mackrell’s own elephants didn’t mind so much, but the wild herd began trumpeting, that is, screaming with rage. On top of this, the rain had increased, and Mackrell’s own herd had come to a precipitous ascent with rivers of red mud flowing down between the trees, causing the animals to skid and slither, and in some cases topple over while others proceeded cautiously, on their knees, but even
their
loads would slide to the side, all of them being
over
loaded, the four elephants having been left behind at Miao. In addition, Mackrell and his men were beginning to be attacked by hundreds of leeches.

By 8 p.m. it was pitch dark and they needed to camp; the mahouts were hungry, and the Mishmi wanted to smoke his opium. But there was no level place, no water for the elephants, and when Mackrell lit his hurricane lamp and swung it before his face, he saw – through the hissing rain – that the ground was absolutely
swarming
with leeches.

A leech is a shiny, slug-like worm – a living ooze – with suckers at each end. Not all feed on blood; some feed on small invertebrates, eaten whole. Leeches progress like the proverbial inchworm, back end coming up to the forward end, making an arch, before the forward end moves on again. They breed in the monsoon, and wait on the ground, on tree trunks, on leaves, for their prey, which they detect by sound or vibration. As the walker approaches, the leeches begin moving hurriedly towards him, the ones on the leaves making the leaves shake. The walker feels he is the victim of an evil conspiracy. It is like being ambushed by a street gang: one attacker steps out from a doorway, another is already in your way, a third drops down from a window ledge (because a classic leech move is to drop into your hair, or down the back of your neck), and they close in from all directions. The anterior and posterior suckers engage, and the leech bites as the former is applied. An anaesthetic is secreted, so that the bite is painless, and an anti-coagulant. The leech drinks until it is full, and an engorged leech can be as big as a banana. It then drops off, perhaps bouncing as it lands. To remove a leech before that point, you can scrape away the suckers with a finger nail, but you have to be careful not to rip the teeth away: this will tear the wound and could cause it to go septic.

It was odd, Mackrell reflected. He had plenty of jungle experience, but not so much of jungle at night, and he had always been told that leeches were not active after dark. A man who knew leeches was Frank Kingdon-Ward, the great plant hunter. In a book about some of his wanderings of 1914,
In Farthest Burma
, he devoted a whole chapter to ‘Infinite Torment of Leeches’:

Kingdon-Ward knew a good method of dealing with them. ‘The easiest way to get rid of a leech is to drop salt on it; the pressure set up through its porous skin soon sucks it inside out practically.’ The trouble was that ‘… one does not as a rule carry a salt cellar in one’s pocket’. Another method – and one favoured by your typical heavy-smoking British soldier – was to touch the leech with the burning end of a cigarette. This causes the leech to release its bite, and it is satisfying to imagine the foul thing screaming in agony, but the defence mechanism that causes it to widen its jaws might also prompt the leech to vomit its stomach contents into the wound, increasing the risk of infection.

When the leech has fallen off, the wound bleeds, perhaps for more than a day, because of the anti-coagulant. If the wound is quickly cleaned with soap and water – or if the jungle walker is lucky – the bite will leave nothing more than a sore that lasts a couple of weeks. Mackrell’s remedy for those that landed on him or on his butler, Apana, was to snip them in half with his nail scissors. The two stopped to perform this ritual every fifteen minutes, in which time each man had acquired forty or fifty.

Mackrell, like all the British jungle wallahs, did not dress properly for the war on leeches. There was some merit in wearing few clothes, like his mahouts. You could then see exactly where the leeches had attached themselves, and they could be scraped off with a razor-sharp kukri, or you could spit the juice from the betel nut you might be chewing onto it – that would make it release its hold. Or you could wear puttees, with trousers tucked in, as the Japanese did. But Mackrell wore a long-sleeved bush shirt, shorts, socks and boots. The Burmese called the British ‘the trousered ones’ because they did not wear the skirt-like Burmese longyi, but the British were only half trousered, either as civilians or soldiers, and many veterans of the Burma fighting would never wear shorts again after the war, their legs being covered in sores that never healed.

At 8 p.m. Mackrell and his men were still progressing in the dark, on foot or elephant, every man holding either a torch or a hurricane lamp. All around, the jungle seethed with the rain, the warm wind and the leeches.

At 11 p.m. Mackrell sensed that the mahouts were on the verge of mutiny ‘and small blame to them’. He called a halt in a clearing near a small stream that was clattering its way towards the Noa Dehing. They did not bother with the tents, but rigged up some tarpaulins; a fire was lit. They were near a great, dark rock – a salt lick, but no animals came to lick the salt. The mahouts cooked a meal for themselves; being Hindus they had strict dietary rules, and would always eat separately from non-Hindus. Mackrell must have eaten something, too. Tinned sausages and rice, perhaps. But all he mentions in his diary is tea – ‘hot tea with rum in it’.

The Mishmi smoked his blob of opium, which would have been greyish, about the size of a cherry, and soft but slightly gritty, like marzipan. He smoked it through a bamboo pipe, with a clay bowl inset for the burning of the opium. Before lighting up, he would have cleaned out this bowl with a knife, building up the anticipation, and so the pleasure.