Flight by Elephant (21 page)

Wilson met the village headman, Mat Ley, who told him that Mackrell had left with sixteen elephants, but he couldn’t say exactly what supplies he’d been carrying on them. Mat Ley offered to cross Wilson by boat, just as he had offered Mackrell. Wilson, not having any elephants, accepted, and Mat Ley supplied some long canoes and oarsmen, for which Wilson paid him a hundred rupees. But the river was raging, and they could not cross. Wilson killed some of the intervening time by dismantling – with Mat Ley’s authorization – a couple of semi-derelict bamboo houses in Miao. He then loaded the pieces onto one of the boats. The houses could be reassembled later at any jungle camp.

On 13 June, a fine day, they crossed the Noa Dehing. They then had what Wilson called ‘a dirty march’ towards the Debang river, which, in the absence of elephants, they crossed by making a bridge of tree trunks. This was ‘rather difficult’. One of the Gurkhas of the Assam Rifles ‘fell off the tree and was dragged under by the stream; one man just got him, but it took five to ten minutes to get him out and keep his head above water’. On 15 June, Captain Wilson saw, coming the other way through the jungle, the sixty-odd Gurkhas whom Mackrell had rescued and the ten elephants he had sent with them. The Gurkhas told Wilson that Mackrell was encamped at the Dapha, that he had saved their lives; they also told him they were extremely hungry, so Wilson ‘gave out a feed to all’. This took some time, which delayed the ten elephants whose progress Mackrell had been wondering about. Wilson then decided to keep four of the elephants for his own party, so many of his political porters having defected, which delayed the other six Miao-bound ones still further as the loads were rearranged. Having quizzed the Gurkhas about the state of the Dapha camp, Wilson then set out a list of additional kit – above and beyond just sacks of rice – that ought to be collected at Miao and brought back to the Dapha. The rounding up of these additional stores would mean the elephants would have to spend longer at Miao, increasing Mackrell’s perplexity.

Having absorbed all this, Mackrell asked about the condition of the Gurkhas, and Wilson mentioned that one of the men had been carrying a rifle, and that he had taken the rifle off the man since it was against regulations for refugees to be armed. Mackrell explained that he had made a point of letting the man keep the rifle.

Exhaling smoke from his cigarette, Wilson said, ‘I did what I thought was right’, and he could easily have pulled rank in a much more forthright manner. The awkward fact was that Reg Wilson represented officialdom, albeit in an easy-going Yorkshire guise. Furthermore, Wilson was an army captain, and, while Mackrell had been a squadron leader, he was counted merely a civilian in 1942. Yes, he was designated an ITA Liaison Officer, but so too was almost any man who acted in any capacity for the ITA. As well as being the senior man, Wilson was also thirteen years younger than Mackrell, which can’t have helped.

Mackrell was never pompous or officious. For a start, he did not move in a world that allowed him to be. He was no box wallah, insisting on bureaucratic precedence, and there was no room for pomposity in the jungle, or in dealing with elephants and mahouts. You would soon be found out. But he did like to be in charge. He liked to be his own man; that’s why he spent half his life in the jungle. He had been a tea planter, and the planter might be socially constricted even if he did live miles from his neighbours; but, then, Mackrell had taken care to become an area supervisor in the tea industry, a man with a roving brief. On the hunting expeditions he organized, he was in charge, and therefore free, and he had spent much of the First World War in the skies over Baluchistan, which is about as far from being a box wallah as you can imagine. It may be that school and marriage had restricted his freedom, and now Captain Wilson seemed likely to do the same.

Wilson began a tour of the camp. Meanwhile, Chaochali, still standing by his tent and eyeing the Assam Rifles whom Wilson had brought with him, called Mackrell over and asked how long they would be staying. After walking around the Dapha camp with a somewhat proprietorial air, Captain Wilson ordered an armed guard on the rations. Mackrell wrote, ‘I am not sure I like that in a volunteer camp like mine where all has gone so smoothly under most difficult conditions.’

As Wilson carried out his inspection, his political porters were having a good sit-down. Mackrell wrote, ‘I have asked Captain Wilson to put some of his porters to build shelters [many of his rescued Indians were sleeping under crudely rigged tarpaulins, and were too ill to build their own] and as soon as they are rested, this will be done. I wish I could rest my people!’ Mackrell would conclude that these political porters ‘apparently have to rest as soon as they arrive anywhere’, which is just about his only criticism of any Indian in his entire diary, because Gyles Mackrell was a Home Counties public school man who had to some extent gone native.

Take the mahouts. They shared their leader, Chaochali’s, dislike of the Rifles, and by extension the commander of those men, Captain Wilson, who’d already had a few run-ins with the mahouts of the four elephants he’d commandeered. In his diary Wilson described the mahouts as ‘a putrid crowd’, and he marvelled at Mackrell’s ability to handle them, and at Mackrell’s knowledge of their charges. ‘Mackrell,’ wrote Wilson, ‘knows what an E [an elephant] can do.’ In spite of the initial prickliness, Wilson’s diary is consistently admiring of Mackrell, and the two men would soon settle down as a team, jointly signing chits and looking out for each other’s health. Mackrell in turn was grateful for the food Wilson had brought, even if it wasn’t enough (Wilson not having known about all the unexpected Gurkhas) and he was ‘very glad Capt. Wilson had brought Dr Bardoloi’, who seemed ‘a very conscientious type’. But the doctor was also thin and frail, and Mackrell wondered whether he would stand up to conditions at the Dapha.

In mid-afternoon, a further few Sikhs and Gurkhas were crossed over the Dapha and fed. Then a plane flew over. It was RAF. The plane circled once, then dropped something on the riverbank. One of the Rifles retrieved it and handed it to Wilson: it was a tin of Klim, or a tin that had once contained Klim. Wilson prised off the lid, and there was a piece of paper inside: a chit. Wilson read it, then handed it to Mackrell. The message was from a Political Officer, not Lambert at Margherita but another man based at a bungalow in Sadiya, the most north-easterly administrator of the Indian Empire in fact, and the closest one to the Chaukan Pass.

The chit said there was a food dump at Miao. Mackrell already knew that, since he’d put it there. With surreal irrelevance, it continued to the effect that ‘your party’ should cross the Noa Dehing if possible, so proceeding towards Miao on its left bank. Realization dawned. The message had been dropped on Mackrell’s camp in the belief that it was the camp of Sir John Rowland, and it was just as well the mistake had been made, because if Sir John, or anyone else coming from the Chaukan, had acted upon the message they would have drowned in the Noa Dehing. And if they
hadn’t
drowned, they would have starved, since they would have missed the Dapha, and Mackrell’s Dapha camp and its supply of food. So Mackrell didn’t think much of
that
.

The plane flew on, a further sixty miles east above some of the densest jungle in the world, and then it flew over a clearing in the crook of two rivers, where a fire burnt, a bed sheet on a bamboo pole sagged in the rain, and Sir John Rowland, Edward Rossiter and their two parties waved frantically at it, but, as Sir John noted, it ‘ignored our signals’.

On 18 June, two days after the arrival of Captain Wilson at the Dapha ferry terminal, Mackrell crossed ‘a few more Gurkhas and Sikhs’. Later that day, the other six elephants he’d dispatched finally turned up again, together with additional food, and ‘some tarpaulins’ that Wilson had irritated Mackrell by sending for. The elephants were accompanied by more of the political porters recruited by Wilson, who immediately set about having a rest. Some of the earlier arrived political porters had already absconded. There were now about seventy refugees in the camp, which was beginning to look like a village, with a dozen or so bamboo and palm huts, and the big tarpaulin as the centre of operations, and the place where Dr Bardoloi had his surgery.

On 19 June, Wilson and some of the porters rebuilt one of the houses he had dismantled at Miao. They put it on ‘the point’, a promontory of the riverbank overlooking the crossing place. They put food and medical supplies in it, and this new house was for the benefit of any refugees who might be too ill to progress the further 500 yards through tall grass to the actual camp.

In the afternoon, Wilson and Mackrell asked one of the Gurkhas of the Assam Rifles who’d accompanied Mackrell, a man called Havildar (sergeant) Iman Sing, if he would be willing to be taken across the river together with two Gurkha sepoys and as many rations as they could carry. Iman Sing agreed.

He and his three comrades had a slightly different brief from that of the fifteen Mishmis whom Mackrell had sent over the Dapha five days before. Sing would strike out immediately towards the Chaukan Pass in an attempt to meet Sir John. He carried a chit signed by Mackrell and Wilson, ‘setting out the position’. (Whatever the ‘position’ was; it seems to have said little more than ‘We know you are there, and we are trying to get you out.’) Sing would spend the next ten days marching fast through the jungle looking for the Rossiter and Rowland parties.

Soon after the departure of Sing, Chaochali recovered from his fever and dysentery and, taking Mackrell aside, he said he wanted to return to Namgoi Mukh, a jungle encampment he vastly preferred to the one he was now in. Mackrell wrote that his friend ‘obviously hates Dapha and wants to get away from the Rifles etc’. Chaochali did leave, together with the ten elephants and ‘a big batch’ of the rescued soldiers.

The Commandos had finally crossed over to the west side of the Tilung Hka on 13 June, having lost Corporal Sawyer and having nearly lost the bespectacled Captain Fraser the day before. The 13th was a fine day, and they made good progress until, at 1 p.m., they came upon a small hut built by Lindsay’s Men, who had gone on ahead after their faster crossing of the Tilung Hka. The Commandos decided to stop there for the remainder of the day, washing and drying clothes, getting ‘lots of odd jobs done’ and resting after their river trauma.

The next day they spent in that staple activity of Chaukan refugees: clambering over the rocks on the edge of the Noa Dehing. It took them three hours to do the first two miles. At 2 p.m. they came to another tributary of the Noa Dehing. It was wider than any British river, but they had no name for it, even so. It turned out to be fast but shallow and they crossed it by means of a complex of stepping stones and driftwood, as laid out, they presumed, by Lindsay’s Men. In the afternoon, the Commandos made speedy progress, having found a track at a higher level, and in the evening – which was fine – they built a shelter at a place they called ‘Python Camp’. Why? Because young Bill Howe saw a python hanging from a tree. He took out his revolver and finally shot it after a fusillade of misfires (damp cartridges) that caused the barrel to burst. The Commandos chopped up the snake with their kukris and ate it over a big fire: a feast of python soup, python cutlets, rice-in-Marmite and tea. They decided it tasted like tough chicken and was ‘quite good’, but then they
were
half starved. Of his busted revolver, the irrepressible Howe noted, ‘One less thing to carry!’ That night, Ritchie Gardiner baited two fishing lines with python liver. Nothing bit.

The next day was much worse. Most of it was spent on or in the margins of the Noa Dehing river, and even Howe was starting to get ‘browned off’ with it. The water was making everybody’s boots disintegrate. Actually, Captain Boyt’s had split apart some time since, and he was now lagging behind with swollen and septic feet. There was little conversation between the Commandos. According to Howe’s widow, ‘They just thought about food all the time.’

On 16 June, the day of Captain Wilson’s arrival at the Dapha, the Commandos came to another hut built by Lindsay’s Men. They looked inside and saw a figure lying on a bed of ferns: it was the Anglo-India railwayman, Eadon, who had gone forward with Lindsay’s Men. The anti-malarial inspector had succumbed to malaria and couldn’t continue. Lindsay’s Men – all on the point of starvation – had promised to send help back to him, as now did the Commandos, but they knew this might be a hollow promise. They were making for the Dapha, but they didn’t know that anybody would be there. All they knew for certain was that they would have to cross the river. They had no firm idea how far away the Dapha might be, because they couldn’t fix their position on any of their maps. Eadon had some food with him, but was not up to eating. The Commandos couldn’t carry Eadon; they could hardly walk themselves. They made him a drink of tea; they did not think he could last very long.

They pressed on, and passed by the corpses of three Indians.

Towards the end of the next day, 17 June, the Commandos came to another hut with another man dying inside: this was Moses, the controversial surveyor and International Boy Scout. In his diary, Ritchie Gardiner wrote that he was ‘alone in a hut by the river. Apparently he fell in trying to cross a trib [a tributary]. He had been swept along, minus his pack, to this hut. He had lain for five or six days without food.’ Moses was ‘Quite compos mentis but very weak’. His many open wounds were crawling with maggots. The Commandos could do nothing but promise to come back for him. Ritchie Gardiner gave Moses his spare sleeveless jumper, because Moses said the nights were cold.

On 18 June, the Commandos went up and down a series of gorges – valleys that ought to have held Dapha tributaries but didn’t. Then they came to one that did. They managed to cross it, but they were exhausted that night, and both Boyt’s and Gardiner’s boots were completely shot. They camped on the bank of the Noa Dehing, on a beach two feet above the water. They counted the rations: eleven cigarette tins of mouldy rice, nine packets of mouldy cream crackers; one tin of cheese, one jar of Marmite. Young Howe, a good-looking chap, carried a mirror. He risked a glance into it and was appalled at his sunken cheeks. In the night the roar of the river became louder as the water rose towards the hut. They all lay awake, looking at the roof. Rainwater was coming in from there, but the bigger problem was whether the river would come in from
below
. By dawn, the river had subsided, but none of them had slept.