Flight by Elephant (25 page)

They explained to Mackrell that a plane flying over the Rowland/Rossiter camp a couple of days previously had seen a message: ‘PROPER TO ABANDON POST AND MARCH WEST’. Moreover, they said, Sir John had burnt his camp to underline the message. Mackrell immediately saw that the game of Chinese whispers had just taken another lurch into farce.

‘I don’t think that is correct,’ he said.

Mackrell told Black, Street and Webster that he himself had set out that very message before firing the Dapha camp. What, he enquired, were the chances of Sir John having done exactly the same?

Silence in the room. Rain falling outside.

Certainly, it was agreed by Black, Street and Webster, that would be a remarkable coincidence. But then again, the 31 Squadron boys had been very sure of what they’d seen …

And there the meeting broke up, in stalemate, or limbo, it being unclear exactly who was in charge of whom.

The next day, that matter at least was resolved. As Mackrell trailed back west through the flat, steaming jungle towards the intermediate camp of Simon he saw an elephant coming towards him. On top of it sat a Gurkha of the Assam Rifles, a new Havildar, and we have his name: Dharamsing Curung. Mackrell introduced himself, and said, ‘Were you looking for me?’ Dharamsing Curung rocked his head gently from side to side. In Assam, that means ‘yes’. He had a chit for Mackrell, written by a government official called Pearce at the Margherita bungalow. Pearce was the Refugee Administrator for North Assam. Anyhow, he was in a position to determine superiority among the Dapha men, and his chit stated that, although Mackrell was being recalled for consultations, he – Mackrell – was the senior man. This is exactly what Mackrell had hoped for; he was pleased, and slightly surprised, since he was, after all, a civilian.

Mackrell pocketed the chit, and as the party, now supplemented by Dharamsing Curung, pressed on for Simon, the rain began to come down in a deluge. It would turn out that the endorsement Mackrell had received was equivocal, but for now he had the important chit in his pocket, and he was developing a plan.

Mackrell arrived at the Margherita golf club base at 8 p.m. on Tuesday 21 July. Half an hour later, he was lighting his pipe on the clubhouse veranda, and looking out over the course, where the refugee tents were pitched, and where about twenty people were dying every day in spite of the tea planter’s ministrations. He had on his lap his stationery case wrapped in its oilcloth and a glass of whisky and water. He finished his drink, and began to write a chit. It was to Captain Street of the 2nd Rajputan Rifles, who was on his way to Dapha. Mackrell informed him of the chit placing himself (Mackrell) in charge. Mackrell also told Street that he (Street) was in charge of the police officer, Webster. He gave the chit to a runner, and it would proceed by a relay of runners to Dapha via Simon and Miao. There were then meetings at Margherita, and further chits and telegrams were sent, and telephone calls made.

On Thursday 23 July, the day Sir John set off from his camp on the Tilung Hka, Mackrell took an early tiffin at the golf club with ITA people. He was then driven to the airbase at Dinjan, home of 31 Squadron. Mackrell had been in the squadron himself, so it might have seemed to the younger fliers like a family visit, the social call of some terrifically energetic uncle. At Dinjan, he boarded a Dakota loaded with sacks of rice, atta and tea. He was carrying his 16mm film camera, and a half-full tin of Klim. First of all, the plane flew over the Hukawng Valley refugee route from Shinbiwyang to Margherita, which was close to being wound up. However, sacks were dropped onto the camps at Shinbiwyang and Nampong, and Mackrell filmed the dropping. It was a crude process, with all the finesse of feeding time at the zoo: the soldiers stand by the wide-open cabin door – through which comes a blaze of white light, the 23rd being a fine day – and kick out the sacks. Mackrell’s film doesn’t show the camps, but mainly the gaping door, the soldiers’ boots and the black and white jungle rearing about below.

He then asked the pilot to fly towards the intersection of the Tilung Hka and the Noa Dehing rivers. On the way, Mackrell studied the Noa Dehing. All along the banks were landslips, where the risen waters of the monsoon had dragged mudbanks and trees – and such riverbank tracks as existed – into the river.

They came to the site of Sir John Rowland’s camp. No drop was made, but Mackrell had wanted to test his theory that the camp was still there.

It was. If Mackrell had ill advisedly leant far out of the cabin door – which he probably
would
have done – he would have seen the circle of huts, the tents, the white bed-sheet flag. It being fine, the camp was astir, and Mackrell saw a vigorous looking, but not young, man in consultation with ‘some rifles’. This, as he later deduced, was Sir John Rowland. The point was that the camp was not burnt, and there was no signal about moving west. That Sir John was at that very moment making the arrangements to
start
moving west – that this was the whole reason the camp was astir – Mackrell could not have known from 200 feet up.

The plane then flew towards the Dapha camp. Here, too, the plane circled, and Mackrell saw a scene that would remain branded on his mind. Black, the senior tea man, Webster, the policeman, and Captain Street of the 2nd Rajputs had just arrived, together with their detachment of Assam Rifles, and forty political porters. Mackrell could tell they’d just arrived because the elephants, grazing by the river, were not yet unloaded.

Captain Street was bathing on the edge of the river and Black was standing on the bank.

Mackrell asked the pilot to keep circling while he wrote out a chit, explaining what he had apparently just verified: that Sir John was not decamping. He placed the chit into the half-full tin of Klim and dropped it towards Black, who ran to pick it up, and waved towards the plane to indicate he had received it, and understood that Sir John was in his camp, and not going anywhere.

But Sir John
was
coming.

As mentioned, Sir John and his party set off on the afternoon of 23 July, a ‘fine-sunshiny day’.

The party crossed the Tilung Hka by wading through chest-high water. They then progressed in the traditional manner: along the rocky shores and precipitous banks of the Noa Dehing. Sometimes they encountered the landslips Mackrell had seen from the air, and these required detours inland. Sir John and his party travelled six and half miles on that first day.

In light rain they built a camp near the river. By the early hours of the morning, the rain had increased in volume so that it drowned out the river. Not many in the camp slept, and those that did were woken by a fusillade of thunder at four in the morning. As dawn broke, there were repeated flashes of lightning, showing the river, the river cliffs, the landslips and the trees – like forewarnings of a difficult time to come. In mid-morning they came to a tributary of the Dapha in heavy flood. It took two hours for the Gurkhas to make a tree-trunk bridge. At three o’clock they abandoned the day’s march, and built a camp in torrential rain. They had progressed four miles.

Sir John was removing between five and six hundred leeches from his person himself every day. He ordered regular returns to the river, so that the party could bathe on its margins, using the force of the water to assist in the removal of leeches. But on 26 July, Sir John – the consummate colonialist – was noticing with interest ‘several traces of good coal occurring in soft sandstone’.

On 27 July, incidentally, there was another – and the final – food drop on the Tilung Hka camp that Sir John had left behind. A message was dropped with the food, futilely addressed to Sir John from the Margherita bungalow, and telling him to stay put. It was probably opened and read by Edward Wrixon Rossiter.

Midday on the 27th found Sir John clinging to a bamboo clump on a near vertical bank of the river. While reaching for a second bamboo bush, he lost his handhold, then lost his
foot
hold, and he slid down the red mud of the riverbank, scrambling all the way but unable to stop the slide; then he was scrambling in the water, and moving fast away from the men of his party.

He managed to get out, but he would take another ‘header’ into the river a few hours later. The twenty-seventh of July was also particularly bad for leeches: ‘The forest paths were literally teeming with millions of them, bushes, trees, everywhere was alive with them.’ But on 30 July, Sir John was noting again ‘several more traces of good coal’. The thirtieth of July was showery, and presented what Sir John called ‘6th big avalanche’.

He and Milne supported Naidu, the railway accountant, ‘whose feet and ankles are so bad that he can hardly walk’. Sir John himself was not coming through unscathed, and swollen ankles were slowing
him
down as well. On 31 July, Sir John and his party were approaching the west bank of the Dapha river, which was being its usual riotous self. They were looking for a camp staffed by men called Mackrell and Wilson, as per the chit delivered by Havildar Iman Sing, who was now returning with Sir John. But the party could see no sign of Mackrell or his camp, and they needed to contact someone – someone with elephants – otherwise they would be trapped on the wrong side of the river. So Sir John and his men built a big bonfire, making as much smoke as possibly by piling on green bamboo. After two hours, this fire elicited the sublime vision that had greeted the initial Gurkhas, Lindsay’s Men, the Commandos, Eadon and Moses: elephants – two of them – with mahouts on their backs. Some Assam Rifles next appeared, then a beaming Captain Street of the 2nd Rajput Rifles. We have a description of Street from Sir John: ‘a grand lad, full of life and quite a good looker, tall and well set up.’ The two shook hands warmly. Sir John and his party were crossed over the river by elephants, and came into the rebuilt Dapha camp, where they met Street’s colleague, ‘a young police officer’. Sir John provides no description of Webster, but then he would have more cause to recall Captain Street, as we shall see.

Over tea at the Dapha camp, Sir John asked about Mackrell, and was told he was preparing for another rescue push. Sir John was now convinced that his personal troubles were over, but he was determined that those he’d left behind at the Tilung Hka must be brought out, and he hoped Mackrell would do the job.

What of these left-behinds?

Captain Whitehouse of the Royal Engineers was suffering badly from Vitamin B deficiency, specifically Vitamin B12, which is contained in all the foods he was
not
getting: fish, liver, milk, eggs. He had acute pains in his legs. He walked about the camp less and less every day; he was losing feeling in his hands and feet and was often sick. He kept removing his tortoiseshell spectacles and rubbing his eyes. His eyeballs would move about independently of his will. His condition was known at the time as Peripheral Neuritis, and it can be fatal.

As for Mrs Rossiter, the odds were against her keeping her baby boy alive insofar as the odds would have been against
any
baby in those conditions. Dysentery, cholera, malaria – all were more likely to be contracted, and prove fatal, in the case of a baby. As a pregnant woman, the odds were against her own survival as well. Both Sir John’s deputy, Manley, and Dr Burgess-Barnett were increasingly debilitated. And a dozen of the remaining twenty Gurkhas were sick.

They had to be got out. Elephants would be required, and they would have to be taken deeper into the blue in the monsoon than any tame elephant had so far been.

On the hot evening of 25 July, when Sir John was two days into his march, Gyles Mackrell drove from Margherita west to Shillong, capital of Assam, and Mackrell’s home town. Shillong was beautiful, famous for its high pine trees, spacious colonial bungalows, and one of the highest incidences of rainfall a year, upwards of 500 inches – not as much as the Chaukan Pass, where, as Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith wrote in his Evacuation Report, the rainfall ‘might as well have been measured in yards as inches’.

Knowing he would be living in the jungle for some time, Mackrell had let out his house, but as he approached the front door there were no lights on and no signs of life. He entered the dark house and lit an oil lamp, since the electricity wasn’t working. We can be confident of strewing a couple of tiger skins about in those wide, white rooms, and we might place some buffalo horns over the fireplace, and a locked gun cabinet in the corner of the study. On the bookshelves … not much actual literature perhaps: rather, some maps, accounts of big game hunts, a history of the Royal Flying Corps. Mackrell wrote, ‘My tenant had run away, leaving no address, so servants had also bolted.’

Mackrell had only been paying a call, but he now took his kitbag out of his car and moved in for two nights only.

At lunchtime the next day, Sunday, he drove through the hot rain until another white bungalow loomed beyond the swishing of the wipers: here lived the family of Dr Burgess-Barnett, who was still stranded at Tilung Hka. On that Sunday, Mackrell didn’t know that, two days before, Sir John had left that camp with his party of seventy-five. The doctor’s wife and two daughters, with whom Mackrell now took tea, didn’t know that either. But they were quite right in assuming that their primary concern, the elderly doctor, was still out ‘in the blue’ many miles from civilization (if the Dapha camp could be called that). Mackrell assured the ladies that the party was receiving food drops, and he promised that he would bring the doctor home to them, just as he had promised to rescue Sir John. It might be objected that, while undoubtedly saving numerous lives, Mackrell had not quite been able to keep his promise in the case of Sir John – that Sir John had rescued himself. But this would be to forget the air drops that had saved the Tilung Hka party from starvation. A necessary precondition of these had been the emergence from the jungle of Major Lindsay, with his map showing the location of the Tilung Hka camp, and that wouldn’t have been possible had Mackrell not established the
Dapha
camp.