LITMIR.BIZ

       PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

      (In approximate order of appearance)

      Guy Millar: a tea planter. Early in the war, he had been engaged on secret ‘government work’, surveying the terrain of Upper Burma.

      Goal Miri: an Assamese elephant tracker, and Millar’s servant.

      John Leyden: a colonial administrator in Upper Burma; owner of a pregnant spaniel bitch called Misa.

      Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith: Governor of Burma, the elegant product of Harrow, Cambridge, Sandhurst.

      George Rodger: British photographer and correspondent for the American magazine, Life.

       In ‘The Railway Party’ …

      – Sir John Rowland: Chief Railway Commissioner of Burma (the top man on Burma Railways). In 1942, he was sixty years old, and working on ‘the Burma–China construction’, a projected railway between Burma and China. He was the leader of the ‘railway party’ of refugees, and he drove them on hard.

      – Edward Lovell Manley: Chief Engineer of the Eastern Bengal Railway, he assisted Sir John on the Burma–China project. In the jungle, Sir John designated Manley his ‘number two’. He was fifty-six years old.

      – Eric Ivan Milne: District Traffic Superintendent of Burma State Railways; keen amateur cricketer and committed Christian.

      – C. L. Kendall: railway surveyor on the Burma–China project.

      – Captain A. O. Whitehouse: officer of the Royal Engineers.

      – N. Moses: enigmatic Dutch railway surveyor, sometime magician and ‘international boy scout’.

      – E. Eadon: Anglo-Indian ‘anti-malarial inspector’ on the Burma–China project.

      – Dr Burgess-Barnett: medical doctor and Superintendent of Rangoon Zoological Gardens. In the jungle, Sir John designated him ‘PMO’ (Principal Medical Officer).

       In ‘Rossiter’s Party’ (sub-group of the above) …

      – Edward Wrixon Rossiter: Colonial administrator of Upper Burma; member of the Anglo-Irish gentry, accomplished linguist and maverick.

      – Nang Hmat: Rossiter’s pregnant Burmese wife.

      – John Rossiter: six-month-old baby son of Edward Rossiter and Nang Hmat.

      Ronald Jardine: white-bearded devout Catholic; senior employee of Lever Brothers, soap manufacturers.

      Frank Kingdon-Ward: botanist, explorer and loner. (He bore the nickname ‘Old Kingdom Come’.)

      Gyles Mackrell: fifty-three-year-old former fighter pilot, supervisor of tea plantations, elephant expert; the leader of the rescue.

      Chaochali: Assamese; Mackrell’s chief ‘elephant man’.

       ‘The Commandos’ …

      – Ritchie Gardiner: Scottish timber merchant and jungle wallah (a man adept at jungle-living). As one of the ‘last ditchers’ he had helped blow up the infrastructure of Rangoon to keep it from the Japanese.

      – Lieutenant Eric McCrindle: timber merchant and jungle wallah.

      – Captain Ernest

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