Flight by Elephant (28 page)

Mackrell also began cutting new tracks along the banks of the Noa Dehing, the route used by Sir John having been obliterated by a rise in the water level and more of the landslips Mackrell had seen from the air. One particular headland – newly created by a landslip – could not be avoided. It had to be surmounted then traversed. While prospecting a route in thick jungle, Mackrell and his men saw a wild elephant. They surrounded it in a semi-circle and clapped their hands to frighten it. The elephant cantered up the hill, crashing through branches, so indicating a possible track and opening out that track at the same time.

At the top of this headland, Mackrell and his men used kukris, hoes and pickaxes to cut a path that would be wide enough for elephants, and it had to be a good one since there was a 250-foot drop to the river on the right-hand side of it.

By late evening on Sunday 30 August, Mackrell and his men and his dozen elephants had negotiated this promontory. They struck camp at a lower point, about twenty feet above the water. Too tired to built shelters or erect tents, the men wrapped themselves in tarpaulins or blankets and in some lucky cases lay down on airbeds – lilos – that Mackrell had brought along this time. When he awoke at dawn on his own lilo, Mackrell counted the elephants. One was missing. It had obviously fallen into the river while grazing. Mackrell noted, ‘Delayed some hours collecting the above elephant.’ They found it grazing once again, lower down the river, having been carried through one rapid.

Mackrell and his men kept cutting their way forward, negotiating landslips or trying to avoid them by resorting to deep jungle, but here the leeches were ‘terrific’, intolerable. On Friday 4 September, Mackrell and Dharramsing made a long forward reconnaissance on foot but could not find a good elephant track. Mackrell had now been away from the Dapha base for over a week. He had planned to return at this point, having established a route more than halfway to the Tilung Hka, just in case there should be an air-dropped message about what Rossiter was doing. But Mackrell now decided to keep going, before he could be recalled by the men at Margherita. After all, the next message might be telling him to pack up and return to base.

On Saturday 5 September, Mackrell and his men were camped on the left bank of the Noa Dehing. So far, all the action in this story has taken place on its right bank, and the Noa Dehing has been described as uncrossable. That turned out not to be the case in its upper reaches, and Mackrell and his men had first crossed it – by elephant – when looking for the missing elephant. They had discovered that there were fewer landslips on that side and that it might offer a better route. The trouble was that on the left bank they might miss Rossiter should he decide to make a move; because he and his party, having no elephants, would certainly
not
be able to cross the river.

So the plan for Saturday was that men would probe forward on both banks of the river. On that hot and rainy morning, Mackrell, on the left bank, saw one of the accompanying Assam Rifles waving to him from the right bank. He then saw a male European staggering out of the trees towards the soldier. It was Rossiter. Mackrell immediately boarded an elephant and crossed the river. He shook Rossiter’s hand. Rossiter said that his wife and baby were coming along a short way behind, together with a dozen others, a mixture of Gurkhas and Rossiter’s staff and servants from Putao – in other words, not all of the people who’d been stranded at the Tilung Hka. They had been walking through the jungle for six days, and were very weak. They had ample rice, but much of it was mouldy. Mackrell would later write in a private letter – it was not the sort of declaration he would have made publicly – that Rossiter and his party would have had no chance of reaching Dapha had it not been for running into him. They would all have died.

Rossiter explained to Mackrell that another Gurkha was coming, some way behind. He had been stung several times about both eyes by wasps, and was practically blind. Mackrell crossed Rossiter, Mrs Rossiter and baby and the dozen Indians to the camp on the left bank by elephant. There is footage of Mrs Rossiter (Nang Hmat) crossing on an elephant with three others. She looks very composed and graceful, with baby John in a sling on her back. Mackrell crossed over with the Rossiters, then dispatched them along the left bank to the camp made the night before. Mackrell himself waited at the crossing point, watching for the blinded Gurkha to come through the trees on the opposite bank. Mackrell would have liked to smoke his pipe, but he’d run out of pipe tobacco. He did not approve of Rossiter having left the man so far behind.

It was a brilliant sunny day.

The left-behind Gurkha, wrapped in a blanket, came out of the trees at three o’clock in the afternoon; Mackrell waved and called to him. He then made the international go-to-sleep sign with head on hands. This Gurkha must not have been completely blinded by the wasp stings, because he saw and understood, and after Mackrell had repeated the gesture several times, smiling but insistent, the Gurkha lay down between two rocks and slept. The elephants, or some of them, came back to Mackrell at four o’clock. He crossed the river, woke the Gurkha, made tea for him, then crossed him over the river, riding on the elephant with him, and accompanying him to the camp, where Edward Wrixon Rossiter was drinking tea and eating biscuits with jam on them. It was vegetable marrow jam, obtained by Mackrell from God-knows-where, and carried on the back of an elephant into the jungle. Rossiter’s mother had made this jam when he was a boy growing up in Dublin; it had been a particular favourite of his. We know this from a letter he wrote, and which we shall come to shortly.

But first some other letters.

Rossiter put down the biscuit he was eating and fished a chit out of his shirt pocket. It was a missive from deep in the blue, written by fifty-six-year-old Edward Lovell Manley, formerly the Chief Engineer of the Eastern Bengal Railway, house guest of Sir John, and his number two in the jungle. It was addressed to Pearce, the Refugee Administrator for North Assam based at Margherita, and the man who had put Mackrell in charge at Dapha. (Manley knew of the existence of Pearce because he had sent a note to the Tilung Hka party in the last of the food drops, asking them to stay put.)

Manley put Rossiter’s departure from the Tilung Hka camp down to ‘Mrs Rossiter’s pregnancy and the milk shortage’; the Gurkhas and Rossiter’s clerks had followed and Manley had been ‘unable to prevent them in spite of your order to stay put’. Manley then wrote of himself in the third person, viz:

Was Manley angry at the departure of the Rossiters? It would be hard for any reasonable middle-aged man to quibble about the imperatives of a pregnant woman. He might have advised the couple for their own safety to stay, and it is a mark of their desperation that they did not. Perhaps they had been banking on meeting Mackrell. We do not know their precise plan.

But Mackrell’s new project was clear: go and get Manley, Burgess-Barnett, Whitehouse and the four Indian servants, the last of the Chaukan refugees. He had made a promise to the wife and daughter of Dr Burgess-Barnett. He was not to know that at about this time a telegram was being drafted in the quiet, sunlit study of a house in Sudbury, Suffolk. It would be dispatched to the nebulous sounding address, ‘Railway Board New Delhi’: ‘PLEASE INFORM ME WHERE AND HOW IS MY SON CAPTAIN A O WHITEHOUSE BURMA CHINA RAILWAY LAST NEWS BURMA APRIL’. It was signed ‘Whitehouse’ and it is difficult to imagine the father as looking very different from the imperilled son: a slight, wizened, inoffensive-looking man in tortoiseshell glasses.

Minutes after Mackrell read the letter from Manley, two mahouts on elephants came into the camp. These were men whom Mackrell had sent back to Dapha on the morning the elephant had gone missing. One was his personal, and most trusted, mahout, Gohain. The two had been ordered to collect supplies and bring them back. It turned out they had also brought two letters. The first was from G. D. Walker, the man who had taken over from Eric Lambert as Political Officer at Margherita, and it had been dropped by plane on the Dapha camp soon after Mackrell’s departure. Mackrell read the letter once, then he read it again. The letter was calling off his mission. Mackrell was to return immediately to base, closing the camps at Dapha, Miao and Simon on his way back, and he was to send all his elephants to the Political Officer at Sadiya, who apparently had need of them.

Mackrell then opened the second letter. It, too, had been dropped on the Dapha camp, but a week after the first. It was from Mr Justice Braund, late of the Rangoon High Court, and now Refugee Administrator for the
whole
of Assam. He was Pearce’s boss, and the top civilian in evacuee management. It said the same thing as the first letter, but more tersely. It ‘confirmed’ the earlier letter (the one Mackrell had just opened, and which Braund obviously thought Mackrell had ignored). Mackrell was to ‘come out’ immediately.

What might be the meaning of this? There was no mystery as far as Mackrell was concerned. Just as the other evacuation routes had been wound up, so now the Chaukan Pass was being shut down, not that it had ever been officially established as an evacuation route in the first place. Taking into account the staging posts at Simon, Miao and Dapha, it was tying up too many soldiers, porters and elephants, all of which were needed for other, military purposes, particularly road building. The majority of those who had entered the pass had now either come through or died. As for the one small party left at Tilung Hka, Mackrell had no doubt that Braund genuinely believed them to be, as he said in his letter, ‘well stocked and not in immediate danger’. Braund must also have envisaged that food drops would resume, and that a rescue would be mounted in the cold weather, when the rivers were down. Of course, the officials must also have envisaged that, assuming everyone at Tilung Hka survived, there would be one extra person to rescue by then, namely the baby that would be born to Mrs Rossiter. They were not to know that, thanks to Mackrell, the Rossiters were now out, and would shortly be sent back towards Dapha by Mackrell. But Manley, Whitehouse, Burgess-Barnett and the four servants remained, and Braund was wrong. They
were
in immediate danger, as Manley’s letter had just confirmed.

Mackrell wanted his reply to look as official as possible, so he unpacked his typewriter – he had indeed brought one but it had got bashed about on the back of an elephant, and the letter ‘O’ came out as an inky blob. His letter was addressed to Braund, and Mackrell stated baldly that in view of Braund’s order having been written ‘in ignorance of the position … I am only complying with part of it’. He would send orders for Dapha, Miao and Simon to be cleared of personnel, leaving himself no lifeline. But he ‘
must
’ go on with his rescue. He then wrote a letter to ‘All my loyal helpers’, ordering them to leave the camps. ‘I will find my own way out.’

He gave both these letters to Edward Rossiter to take back with him. He also gave him six elephants, and sent him and his party on to Dapha with all necessary mahouts and porters. Before he departed, Rossiter told something about the food drops. There had been no further drops after 26 July. And the ones that had been made contained not nearly enough food, yet toys by the hundredweight for baby John. There had also been many sackloads of ‘venereal cures’. Clearly these medicaments had been misdirected; there had been enough of them, Mackrell observed, ‘to cure half the force of our gallant Allies for whom this was no doubt thought necessary’, a reference to the Americans.

As Edward Rossiter disappeared into the sun-dappled trees, Mackrell turned and faced the other way: towards the Upper Noa Dehing as it wound away through its great stone canyon.

As soon as he had dispatched Rossiter, Mackrell and his men crossed the river with the remaining fourteen elephants, taking their camp with them. On the right bank they met up with Havildar Dharramsing who, while Mackrell had been reading and writing letters, had been prospecting forward with a single elephant of his own. This had been a ‘test’ elephant. If it could follow a track towards the Tilung Hka, then so could fourteen others. But there was no suitable track, the ones that might have served being blocked by landslips.

So Mackrell organized what he called a ‘Striking Party’ to go forward on foot, using the track Rossiter had taken. Mackrell did not include himself in this party. As he explained to the others, he was too old. He actually described himself, albeit in Assamese, as ‘an elderly European’. Nor was Havildar Dharramsing in the party. Mackrell would have liked him to lead it, but he was experiencing intermittent fever. Mackrell does name the men of the Striking Party. There were three Gurkhas of the Assam Rifles: Naik Gyanbahadur (Naik meaning corporal), Compounder Havildar Sanam Lama (a compounder is a medical assistant), Lance-Naik Manichand Rai; and six political porters: Gangabahadur, Tami, Santabir, Chintamani, Dilbahadur and Karnabahadur. They were all, Mackrell notes, ‘fit and confident of success’. The men were dispatched on Monday 7 August. They carried fresh onions, cigarettes, potatoes, sugar, butter, dried apple rings, Klim, Marmite, bully beef, soap, Lysol disinfectant and a lilo for Captain Whitehouse.

At a new camp on the right bank of the Noa Dehing, Mackrell commenced a period of waiting – and fishing. On Thursday 10 August he was assembling his fishing rod on the stony banks of the Noa Dehing when he glanced to the left. He saw a rousing sight: men in boats, and not just that, but men in boats going
against
the current, fighting it, paddling hard, their three long canoes bouncing and swaying in the water. They were boatmen of the Singpho tribe, and they wore circular cane hats. Mackrell was not entirely surprised to see them. Along with the letter ordering him to return to Margherita, another had come, written by one of the Assam Rifles at Dapha. It said that Mackrell’s boats had arrived at Dapha. Later that day, Mackrell wrote of the boatmen: ‘They had been nine days getting up from Dapha. They say the river is terrible.’ One of them, a man called Chandram, said to Mackrell, ‘You asked a hard thing of us Sahib but we are here and ready to go further if you say so although the river is like no river we have ever seen.’ Mackrell wrote, ‘It is a splendid effort.’ Boats and tame elephants were unprecedented this high up the river. Mackrell made tea for all the boatmen and handed out cigarettes.