Flight by Elephant (29 page)

Mackrell had realized that for any party of sick people to be brought out of deep jungle, they would need transport; they would need to be carried, in other words, and if elephants couldn’t be taken forward, then boats would have to do the job. The boats had been ordered as a back-up, but, now that the way was barred to elephants, they would come into play. Mackrell’s plan was to take them as far upriver as possible, then send a Support Party to intersect at right angles with the track taken by the Striking Party. The Support Party would either then go along that track, catching up the Striking Party, or wait on the track for the Striking Party to come back from Tilung Hka. The two parties would then return, together with the rescued men, to the waiting boats.

On the fine morning of Friday 11 August, therefore, Mackrell left some men, and all the elephants, at the camp he had just established. He and the remainder started going upriver by boat. For much of their journey, rock walls towered 150 feet above them on either side; and the further they went, the more rapids they encountered. Seven times they had to unload all their kit and rations in order to drag the boats over shallow rapids. On the Saturday, they ‘came to a rapid we could do nothing with’, so the men built a camp. The Support Party was dispatched, and this one
was
led by Dharramsing. Mackrell embarked on another period of waiting – waiting and smoking cigarettes, since, as we have seen, he had no pipe tobacco left. The men in the government bungalow at Margherita had told him that 35,000 cigarettes had been dropped on the Dapha and Tilung Hka camps, and he was supposed to have been impressed by that. But most of them had been lost in the jungle or destroyed on impact.

Mackrell busied himself by improving the track leading down to the camp. As an added safety measure, he made creeper ropes where the track bordered the river. He and the boatmen collected banana leaves to improve the roofs of the bamboo huts. He also watched the river. The danger was that it would rise, and he would have to move the camp and boats to a higher level. The river was certainly capable of reaching the plateau on which he waited; he could tell that by the grey driftwood lying in the long grass. Meanwhile, the weather was sunny and dry, and the driftwood was good for burning.

Mackrell went fishing.

He was happy in other words.

We have film footage of this period spent far upriver on the Noa Dehing. The camera shows riverside stones, and you can’t tell how big they are. Then a smiling Gurkha walks into view, and you realize that each stone is actually bigger than a house. The camera casually pans past a sheer wall of stone that might be – what? – thirty times taller than a man. Mackrell was never idle, and filming was one way to pass the time. On other occasions, he would set his folding chair and his folding table on a high, flat stone near the river’s edge, and type letters to friends. He enjoyed working in this way, close to the white water; it was just a case of watching out for flying tree trunks. The letters were marked ‘Upper Noa Dehing’ and he would apologise for that broken letter ‘O’.

On the Wednesday, he spent over half an hour playing a fish he’d hooked: another boka, this one weighing 4½lb. ‘It fed the whole camp.’ But thunder clouds were mustering; the river was changing colour, becoming turbid. A rise was on the way. He had heard nothing from either the Striking Party or the Support Party, ‘So all must be well or very wrong, one cannot tell which.’ On the Thursday, he went deep into the jungle to look. He came back in the evening covered in leech bites, and with his shorts torn to shreds.

The next day, he and the boatmen took a walk upriver along the rocks, just in case they could see any sign of anybody or anything. They could not. They made a fire from driftwood, had a cup of tea and one cigarette each and came back to the riverside camp, where they saw Dharramsing and his Support Party. They had seen no sign of the Striking Party, so they had simply left food along what they thought was the right track. Mackrell issued a rum ration to the Support Party, and dressed their sores. It was now twelve days since the Striking Party had left; they were late, and a storm was brewing.

On Sunday the 20th, Dharramsing volunteered to go back into the jungle for another look. Mackrell agreed.

As Mackrell waited, it began to rain heavily. He built a new fire on the margins of the camp, under tree cover. In late morning, he was standing by this fire when a porter from the Support Party returned to the camp. He silently handed Mackrell a chit.

It was written by Manley, and it was the confirmation of success.

They were proceeding slowly because Captain Whitehouse was being carried, but Manley expected to be with Mackrell by about 3.30 p.m. Mackrell walked over to his personal kitbag and unwrapped the plum cake. Thanks to the cellophane, it was still good as new. Mackrell then unfolded and erected the canvas bath, and made sure the bed rolls were all laid out in the bamboo hut waiting to receive the refugees.

It was more like 6 p.m. when the Striking Party and the Support Party came into the camp together. Captain Whitehouse, still wearing trilby and tortoiseshell glasses, was strung over the shoulders of the political porter called Taja Tami, like a scarf. Tami was not a big man, but nor was Whitehouse – not by now at any rate. Dr Burgess-Barnett … Manley … the four servants … all were filthy, exhausted and ill to varying degrees, but not so ill that they couldn’t eat dinner after their hot baths: dall soup, tinned lamb, tinned peas, boiled onions and fresh potatoes. For pudding, tinned peaches and plum cake – and sweet tea, of course, all taken under a wide tarpaulin with the rain sloshing off the edge.

At 7.30 p.m., the refugees filed into their bamboo hut. One hour later, Mackrell went over and had a look in. They were all asleep.

Mackrell returned to the fire and broke out the rum. The porters of the Striking Party told Mackrell how, when they came to a precipitous landslip-headland, a place where it was impossible for a man to walk if he happened to be carrying another man on his shoulders, they had simply dropped Whitehouse into the river, and then run around the headland to catch him on the other side.

The next morning, Mackrell took Whitehouse breakfast in bed, since he couldn’t stand up: tinned sausages and chipped potatoes. It would be a day of eating. Rabbit curry for tiffin. For dinner, steak and kidney pudding, tinned parsnips, beans and potatoes; apple rings and rice-in-Klim for pudding. Mackrell noted that the rescued men were ‘all improving visibly’, all except Dr Burgess-Barnett, who had a high fever. Also, it was still raining so that Mackrell could not dry the rescued men’s clothes, which he had washed.

On the night of Wednesday the 23rd, the Noa Dehing river came to pay a call. Whitehouse and Burgess-Barnett had to be carried to higher ground; and then the boats had to be manhandled up a cliff and out of the way of a whirlpool that had already flung a few tree trunks into the camp, one of them flattening the custom-built refugee hut. Mackrell erected his personal tent on the higher ground, and put Dr Burgess-Barnett into it. He wrapped himself in a bath towel and rain cape, and lay down between two rocks. In the morning, he was pleasantly surprised that his ‘old enemy’, sciatica, had not returned despite such a generous invitation to do so. It had stopped raining. Mackrell noted, ‘Dr Burgess-Barnett fitter today and Whitehouse looks a little stronger. Manley very weak but looks better. Saw a school of otters in a rapid and some blue sky. Looks hopeful. Took stock of all rations. Not too bad but must be careful. One tea-spoonful of sugar each three times a day is all we must use of that … Decided to have a try at getting down.’

By a combination of elephants and boats, and with – in the case of the latter – some capsizes, Gyles Mackrell reached the Dapha camp once again on 1 October. He stayed there two days, during which he took white stones from the river so as better to define the grave of Captain Street: ‘I am afraid it will go out of sight though very quickly.’

He reached Miao at five o’clock on Saturday 3 October, and the headman, Mat Ley, told him that a group of Nagas settled nearby had found the cow elephant that Mackrell had lost en route to the Dapha on 9 June. It was perfectly safe and would be restored to him on payment of fifty silver rupees, which they hoped he would agree was a reasonable price. Mackrell ‘arranged for this’.

He arrived at the Margherita golf club on Tuesday 6 October, where he was greeted by the Refugee Administrator for North Assam, Pearce, who congratulated him on disobeying the orders from Political Officer Walker and Mr Justice Braund, which he himself had endorsed. ‘I take my hat off to you,’ he said. On 7 October, Mackrell saw one of the rescued men at large on the fairways, not playing golf – that would be too much to expect – but ‘Whitehouse was walking with a stick!’ Mackrell then wired Sir John in Simla to say that all the rest of his people were out, and Sir John wrote to his wife that he was ‘thumping glad’ to hear it.

On 10 October, Mackrell was driving towards the dusty, bustling town of Dibrugarh with Dr Burgess-Barnett in the passenger seat. They were going shopping, and Mackrell wanted to see ‘Routledge, Superintendent of Police about tyres’ (a recondite bit of business that need not detain us). They came to what passed for a traffic jam in that town at that time. They were stationary on a pot-holed road when a lorry came reversing towards them out of a side road. It was carrying long bamboos, sharpened at the projecting ends. These crashed through Mackrell’s windscreen, and he and the doctor were about to be impaled when ‘some Americans in a Jeep’ drove directly into the side of the lorry’s cab, so as to alert the driver.

On Sunday the 11th the two motored to Shillong, where they both lived. Mackrell drove first to the doctor’s house, and waited outside in the car so that the reunion might be a private one. The noise from the doctor’s house, Mackrell wrote, ‘sounded like a football match’.

He thought he might have to go in and ‘rescue him all over again’.

On arrival in Calcutta, all evacuees were pressed to give their names to the women volunteers of the Evacuee Enquiry Bureau of 12, Wood Street, Calcutta. The women compiled two Registers of Evacuees from Burma, each disarmingly prefaced by ‘an apologia for the many errors it contains’. Volume 1 listed ‘European, Anglo-Burman, Anglo-Indian and other Non-Indian Evacuees’; Volume 2 listed Indian evacuees, or a small fraction thereof. Most of the evacuees mentioned in this narrative appeared in these volumes, including such Indian railwaymen as were named by Sir John in his diary: C. V. Venkatraman, R. V. Venkatachalam and S. T. Rajan all appear in Volume 2, giving date of arrival in Calcutta as 7 August.

Absent from the register – even though we know he got out safely – is the name of Moses, that enigmatic Dutch wanderer, the International Boy Scout and supposed cheerleader for the Chaukan Pass. It would almost have been disappointing if his name
had
appeared.

In both volumes, there is a category: ‘Casualties due to enemy action in Burma en route to India and deaths since arrival in India’, and there, in Volume 1, appears the name of C. L. Kendall, railway surveyor, whom we last saw being taken by ambulance from Margherita. He died at Panitalo Hospital on 8 July of cerebral malaria, leaving a young wife and a two-year-old son.

For most of the returnees, there was a good deal of form filling, and a good deal of letter writing. Everyone wrote to everyone. (Almost everyone: as far as we know, Mackrell received no communication from Edward Wrixon Rossiter.)

On 15 August, Eric Ivan Milne, the railwayman who’d come out with Sir John, wrote a letter to Mackrell, who did not read it until later, since he was at that point on his way back ‘into the blue’ for a second time. The letter touches all the bases we might expect:

My dear Mackrell,

I write and send you my warmest thanks for all you have done for us blokes through the Chaukan Pass from Burma. There is no doubt we should have been scuppered had it not been for you. We know you will get the rest of the party out.

I flew to Delhi and got to my family at Bombay on 14th where I found everyone in great form. Unfortunately I had a bit of the reaction again and malaria and so I can do nothing much, not even buy clothes. The doctor (Col. Morrison of Rangoon) whom I know very well, said I was to have complete rest for 2 months! Well I doubt whether I’ll stick to that without a game of squash or something.

My wife joins me in thanking you again for all the effort you made to get us out.

Cheerio,

Yours sincerely,

E. Milne.

Eric Ivan Milne quickly recovered and was soon, as his wife noted, ‘eating like six horses’. He and his family sailed for England in 1945; he died in 1978, aged seventy-nine, in Uckfield, East Sussex.

After checking into the Grand Hotel, Calcutta, Sir John Rowland had a ‘real good go’ of tertian malaria, but on 30 August he was fit enough to leave Calcutta by train for Delhi; he had an entire carriage to himself, personally reserved for him by the General Manager of the East Indian Railway, the biggest and the grandest of the Calcutta-based networks. It was the least that one top railwayman could do for another. At Delhi, Sir John took the train to the verdant, and cool, hill town of Simla, where he checked into the best hotel, the Hotel Cecil.

The government of Burma – or at least the British version of it – was being run from Simla. The Governor, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, was there, writing his Evacuation Report. On 3 September, Sir John had lunch with Dorman-Smith and recounted what probably became, over the years, the mother of all anecdotes. He wrote, ‘H.E. was most interested in the tale and said, ’altho’ I might not think so, he was most concerned over the fate of my party and myself and exceedingly worried.’