Flight by Elephant (5 page)

On 7 March the order was given – code ‘Red Elephant’ – for the complete evacuation of Rangoon. That evening, Royal Marines began heaving cases of whisky into the docks, having drunk as much as was reasonably possible themselves. (They knew the Japanese were partial to a glass of whisky.) The Reverend N. S. Metcalf, a chaplain with the 7th Armoured Brigade (‘The Desert Rats’), ventured towards the Zoological Gardens:

It was at about this time that George Rodger, once again going against the flow (this time he’d got hold of a jeep) and
returning
to Rangoon along the Prome Road after some adventures in Upper Burma, saw an armoured car with motorcycle outriders flashing past in the opposite direction. Inside sat Dorman-Smith. ‘Well, there goes the government,’ Rodger thought to himself. But, rather than fleeing the country, Dorman-Smith was hoping to re-establish his administration in Mandalay.

The Prome Road was periodically strafed by Japanese fighter planes. A little thing like that didn’t bother George Rodger, and the Indians were as scared of the Burmese as they were of the Japanese. They were repeatedly stopped on their trek. Like the playground enemy who puts out his arm and demands ‘Password!’, the Burmese, armed with swords and axes, had erected illicit tolls on the dusty roads. A length of bamboo would be slung across the Prome Road – not difficult since it was a dusty one-track affair – and the Indians were charged a fee of one rupee before they could continue.

George Rodger drove on, past the columns of refugees:

Others again carried more whimsical items: a tom-tom drum, a bicycle with the back wheel missing, a cross-cut saw. In the Chaukan Pass, Millar, as we have seen, did not have the strength to carry his favourite revolver. How much sooner would people abandon their harmoniums, oil paintings, photographic albums?

Prome was now a giant refugee camp infested with cholera and typhoid, where thousands of Indians waited for Irrawaddy steamers to carry them north – boats that never appeared. One option from here was to break out of Burma halfway up its western coast. This was a matter of crossing the Irrawaddy which lies immediately west of Prome – in Burma, there is always a river in the way and this was a wide one – then traversing the jungles of the Arakan Mountains by means of the Taungup Pass, aiming all the while for the small port of Akyab in the Bay of Bengal, from where it might be possible to take a boat for Chittagong, India. This was the first of two or three routes to be known, more or less officially, as ‘Valleys of Death’, and refugees were on it even as it was being surveyed – and found to be a hopeless prospect – by British officials. Among the difficulties likely to be encountered were Burmese dacoits, Japanese bombers, lack of food and water, cholera, typhoid and malaria. But it is estimated that between a hundred and two hundred thousand Indians escaped via the Taungup Pass.

On 9 March, meanwhile, Japanese forces had entered Rangoon, which had been set ablaze and partly demolished by a team of British officials and soldiers called ‘the last ditchers’. Oddly, some of them were accountants. When they’d finished their work, the cranes in the docks stood at crazy angles; the Irrawaddy river paddle steamers had been scuttled, a thousand trucks burnt out … and so the great theme of the flight from Burma – the theme of pedestrianism – was underlined. Two thousand Burmese criminals and lunatics roamed the streets. The doors of the prison, the lunatic asylum
and
the leper hospital had been thrown open. There seemed no alternative, the staff having all departed, but the official responsible, Judicial Secretary Mr Fielding Hall, was so disturbed by the action he had performed that he took his own life.

This was just the kind of setting that George Rodger liked, and he went on a sight-seeing tour, revolver in hand. He observed twenty brass Buddhas glowing red hot above a temple wall. They were thrown into relief by the black cloud that hung over Rangoon, caused by the burning of the 150 million gallons of oil in the tank farm of the Burmah Oil Company’s refinery just outside the city. This had been blown by 700 charges of gelignite laid by a captain of the Royal Engineers called Walter Scott. He was only twenty-three, but already a demolition veteran, having blown up much of the infrastructure of northern France prior to the evacuation of Dunkirk. The refinery would burn for six weeks.

In the second city, Mandalay, things were going the same way, except that here it was hotter (120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade), Mandalay being in the burning desert plain of central Burma. Many of the refugees had arrived here by train, only to step directly into another giant refugee camp in which cholera had broken out. In Mandalay, as in Rangoon, the prisoners had been let out of the jail. Here, too, Dorman-Smith said the city would be held, and people ought to stay put, at least until suitable evacuation routes had been prepared. Here, too, the Burmese rioted against the Indians (resulting in 600 dead), and here also a single Japanese bombing raid – on the night of 3 April – killed 2000 civilians.

Mandalay had never been as beautiful as its name: Kipling romanticized it in his poem ‘The Road to Mandalay’, but he’d never been there. It was a shanty-town of wooden houses; a Wild West-looking place. The tallest structures on the dusty streets were the telegraph poles. Most of these were skewed after the bombing, and it is said the vultures of Mandalay had become so fat on the corpses in the streets that when they perched on the wires, the poles would collapse entirely. It was only a small comeuppance for the vultures, and in any case the telegraph station was out of action.

The predominant drift from Mandalay – for both refugees and the Burma Army – was to the north-west, over the Irrawaddy river by boat or by the Ava Bridge. The latter was supposedly closed to refugees, but there were reports of British soldiers charging them to cross, and pocketing the proceeds. The Japanese, approaching up the Irrawaddy, were kept back from the bridge retreat by 48th Gurkha Brigade. One thousand seven hundred Gurkhas faced 4000 Japanese and killed 500 of them. The bridge – a graceful iron pontoon (there being so many rivers, the British in Burma had become great bridge builders) – was blown up by the British on 30 April. To Field Marshal Sir William ‘Bill’ Slim, commander of the Allied forces in Burma, the collapse of the bridge symbolized the collapse of British power in Burma, and the military now joined the civilians in the evacuation to India.

The north-westerly drift led towards the border town of Tamu, which became the start of the main evacuation route from northern Burma. The first leg of the route ran from Tamu to Imphal, capital – and only town – of the nominally independent Indian state of Manipur. From Imphal, the route led to Dimapur in Assam, a pretty Victorian town with a railway station and pine trees, but it was very malarial and the spring rains of 1942 had brought out the notorious Dimapur mosquito. About 200,000 would go this way, contending with – besides the mosquitoes, cholera and malnutrition – dust and burning scrub giving way to mud and monsoon.

Other evacuees, including the Governor, Dorman-Smith, headed 200 miles north of Mandalay, going along the railway to Myitkyina, and into a cul-de-sac.

Millar and Leyden had retreated behind a boulder, so as to be screened from the horrible sight, if not the sound, of the Dapha river. One of the Kachin porters volunteered to go a little further north along the Dapha to see whether he could find a crossable point. The quicker he came back, the better the news was likely to be. Millar and Leyden waited, and Millar smoked. When half an hour had passed, they knew it was unlikely to be good news. It was now raining again. More than an hour had passed by the time the Kachin re-emerged from the jungle. My life depends on this man’s answer, thought Millar, and he, Leyden and Goal Miri stepped out from behind the rock to greet the man, who indicated that they should walk through the trees with him, a little way towards the red-earth bank of the Dapha.

The river fumed below them, and the Kachin pointed to where it disappeared into violet-coloured hills intersecting neatly, as in a children’s story. The Kachin believed that if they walked five or six miles along the riverbank in that direction, they might come to a crossable point. But Millar knew that, in their present condition, it would take two and a half days to cover that much dense jungle and then, the river having been crossed, they would have to spend the same time heading back south along the other side in order to be on track for civilization. It was no go; they could not afford another five days without food.

Millar looked at Leyden; Goal Miri was looking at the waters of the Dapha. Suddenly, he shouted, ‘Look, a man is being washed down the river!’ One of the Kachins was in the middle of the Dapha. Just his head and shoulders were showing, and he was going down stream at what Millar called ‘an unpleasant pace’.

But the man was
not
being washed down the river. He was crossing the river, in that his feet were – albeit intermittently – on the bottom: he was moving at a rapid diagonal. For every step he took towards the opposite bank, he seemed to be swept two paces downstream, towards fast rapids. If he hit those he’d be straight into the confluence whirlpool, from which he would eventually shoot out, and be borne along the Noa Dehing to its intersection with the mighty Brahmaputra, that creator of the Assam plain, and there he would arrive at civilization, most likely as a drowned corpse.

But the Kachin reached the opposite bank. He staggered out, turned, then waded in again, and came directly back. He had proved it could be done. ‘That man will live in my memory forever,’ wrote Millar. Unfortunately, he will not live in the memory of history forever because we do not know his name. Why had he risked his life in that way? It is not enough to say he was being well paid. The Kachins had been retained by Millar and Leyden in return for silver rupees (paper money was too flimsy for jungle dwellers; it tended to rot, get burnt, or be turned to pulp by the rains, or eaten by termites), and far more of them than they could earn from selling the superfluous produce of their agriculture. But the Kachins were not being paid enough to justify risking their lives, and they all knew they were doing precisely that. Millar and Leyden had told them the food was going to run out; they had been offered the chance to turn back on more than one occasion and the offer had been rejected. It was a matter of honour. Some of the porters told Millar and Leyden that their brothers served in the Burma Rifles, so they were loyal to the British (in the shape of Millar and Leyden) because their brothers were loyal to the British.

A conference was held on the original bank. The Kachins tied the party’s diminished packs onto the tops of their heads. On the rocky river beach the party formed a human chain, each man holding the other’s wrists, and the chain walked slowly into the water. Every man was thus anchored by all the other men; on the other hand, if one man was swept into the rapids, they all would be. They would move a little way, then brace, then move again, Millar – who was at the front, holding his rifle above his head – shouting ‘Go!’ every time.

They reached the opposite bank, and climbed out exhausted. There was no possibility of any further walking that day. They moved into the trees, so as to escape the worst of the rain, and the Kachins set down the loads. Every man looked at every other man, and every man grinned. Millar was thinking of the enigmatic Errol Gray, of Woodthorpe and MacGregor and their collapsible boat, of swaggering Henri of Orleans. He had, in a sense, beaten all of them. He wrote, ‘We felt extraordinary mental elation – at least I did – at having crossed this river after heavy rain three months later than the last date it was thought to be fordable.’

They made a rough canopy of bamboos, lit their fire and continued to gaze at each other, too tired to speak, let alone move on. And then a new thought came to Millar. Would anybody ever know they’d crossed the Dapha?

What use was mental elation without food? Also, Leyden was now running a fever. What this amounted to we don’t know. Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta is full of young British men and women who died of unspecified ‘fever’. In Leyden’s case, the possibilities were all too numerous. The most obvious is malaria. It’s true that mosquitoes thin out above 2000 feet, so there had not been too many of them in the Chaukan Pass itself, but now Leyden was lower down. In any case sandflies, which the British in Burma called polaungs,
increase
above 2000 feet, and these transmit leishmanaisis, with its own accompanying fever. Or their bites can turn septic, as can leech bites, or any other cut, and monsoon rain turns the skin wrinkly – as when one has spent too long in the bath – and liable to splitting. Or the fever might have been dysentery, typhoid or cholera – the embarrassing symptoms of these perhaps being thought unmentionable by Millar.

All these possibilities would have been encouraged by exhaustion and malnutrition.

Going back to the sambhur in that jungle clearing … why didn’t Millar and Leyden shoot more than one? The true jungle wallah might also demand to know why they didn’t preserve the hacked meat by wrapping it in a wide leaf – a bamboo leaf would have done perfectly well – and smoking it in the embers of a fire so that it would last for many days. And then again, surely there are edible plants in the jungle?