LITMIR.BIZ

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4000 of these to Myitkyina, where he attempted to shift them further – by the above-mentioned airlifts to Assam. But the airlift was so very ‘meagre’ that ‘we had to send thousands of men and women trekking on foot out of Burma’. It had been observed at the Myitkyina airfield that, while some young and able-bodied men were putting their wives and children on the planes before themselves returning to duty or starting the dangerous walk to Assam, others had been boarding the aeroplanes along with their wives and children. On 22 April, permission was given for all men over forty-five to fly out. Being sixty, and a very senior man in the administration, Sir John – whose wife had already been evacuated – could have taken advantage of this, but, as he wrote in his letter, ‘I had a seat on a plane which I refused, my remark being, “Having brought all these women and children to Myitkyina, and as they are forced to walk out, so will I.”’ The phrase ‘my remark being’ is very typical of Sir John, who continued, ‘Having brought them here, many of them to die, I would lose all self respect and would never be able to look a woman in the face again if I escaped by plane leaving them to their fate.’

      By early May, a party had crystallized around Sir John, and it comprised the following:

      Edward Lovell Manley. As a captain of the Royal Engineers, he had worked on the railways built by the British in Mesopotamia from 1917. After demob, had risen to become the Chief Engineer of the Eastern Bengal Railway, whose motto was Ex Fumo Dare Lucem (‘From Smoke Let Light Break Out’), and whose crest depicted elephants and palm trees, but that didn’t mean Manley was used to living in their midst. In 1942, he was fifty-six years old, and on secondment to the Burma–China construction. He had been living with Sir John, and Sir John’s wife, in Rangoon. He had been Sir John’s guest, in other words, and Sir John felt a particular duty to get him safe out of Burma. As they entered the Chaukan Pass, Sir John would designate Manley his number two.

      Eric Ivan Milne. He was another senior railway official, aged forty-three in 1942, and the District Traffic Superintendent of Burma State Railways. He was a keen amateur cricketer who, in his final game before the Japanese invasion – railwaymen against an RAF team – had scored seventy-six not out.

      (Both Manley and Milne were married men, and their wives and children had already left Burma.)

      C. L. Kendall. A surveyor on the Burma–China construction.

      Captain A. O. Whitehouse of the Royal Engineers. We do not have his age. A photograph shows a mild looking man of about thirty in horn-rimmed glasses and pork pie hat.

      E. Eadon. An Anglo-Indian ‘anti-malarial inspector’ on the Burma–China construction. (His wife and three children – with the very Anglo-Indian names of Fred, George and Isabelle – had already left Burma.)

      N. Moses. He was a railway surveyor (among other things), rather rudely referred to by Sir John as ‘Dutch Jew’. But then Moses carried the stigma of having directed Sir John and his party into the Chaukan Pass, as we will see.

      There were also three Indian railwaymen, who had all been based at Lashio, and we know at least how they described themselves:

      C. V. Venkataraman, ‘store clerk of the Burma–China Railway’.

      R. V. Venkatachalam, ‘office superintendent of the Burma–China Railway’.

      S. T. Rajan, ‘divisional accountant of the Burma–China Railway’.

      All the above three were in their fifties or sixties, and another diary of the Chaukan would describe them as ‘elderly railway servants’.

      There was also Dr Burgess-Barnett, a medical doctor, but also Superintendent of the above-mentioned Zoological Gardens in Rangoon since 1938, the place from which the boa constrictor had escaped. He had been a house physician at St Bart’s in London, and an honorary captain of the Royal Army Medical Corps. He had been the curator of reptiles at London Zoo from 1932 to 1937, and the author, in 1940, of a pamphlet on The Treatment of Snake Bites. A good man to have in the jungle, then, except for his age (he was fifty-four), and Sir John would designate the doctor his MO, or medical officer, on the Chaukan trek.

      This, then, was ‘the railway party’. It also included two Indian porters and five Indian servants, none of whom belonged to Sir John, who wrote in his letter: ‘I brought no servants. They had all gone previously. The cook, his wife and family to India. Poor Sam, my butler, found his wife and three children had fled from Maymyo when we arrived there; his brother killed by a bomb and his sister injured by another, so he went into the wilds to seek his family. I never saw him again.’ We have the name of only one of the servants: Applaswamy, butler to Manley.

      The railway party managed to commandeer some ‘vanettes’ at Myitkyina, and in these they drove along the track (now strewn with abandoned cars) towards the town on the hill, Sumprabum. Another diarist has left a terse description of the ‘road’ to Sumprabum at this time: ‘Everything was burning.’ It was mainly cars that were burning – torched to keep them from the Japanese. As they neared Sumprabum, Sir John and his men abandoned their vanettes and rolled them into a gulley. They knew they wouldn’t be any use beyond Sumprabum. They then walked into the town of that name, and there, on 10 May, as rain fell on the tin roofs of the red houses, Sir John mustered rice rations, recruited some Kachin porters and retained two elephants and their mahouts.

      The route leading to the Chaukan Pass branched off to the left from the track leading from Sumprabum to the most northerly settlement, Putao. On 11 May, at a village along this track referred to by Sir John as Hkam Ho (it does not exist on any modern map), the railway party joined forces with what we will call Rossiter’s party.

      This was led by Edward Wrixon Rossiter, who was a colleague of one of our opening pair, John Lamb Leyden, even if he did work eight days’ travel north of him. Rossiter, like Leyden, was a sub-divisional officer of the Myitkyina District. Rossiter’s particular sub-division was Putao. In other words, he administered the most northerly and remote territory in Burma. He was also a Superintendent of the Frontier Service, the body that dealt with the outlying minorities of Burma, particularly the Shans of the north and east, with whom the British were on reasonably good terms. (Britain had never conquered the Shans, but just inherited them when she conquered the Burmese, whom the Shans did not like. They were tenants, so to speak, who had found themselves with a new and slightly more congenial landlord.)

      Edward Wrixon Rossiter’s job called for an independent-minded man, and he seems to have fitted the bill. Rossiter is the wild card of our pack, and this may have been genetically determined.

      He had been born in 1904, into the Anglo-Irish gentry. His father was a buccaneering character called Walter Wrixon de Rossiter, who had found the ‘Wrixon’ insufficiently distinctive, hence the ‘de’. As a teenager he’d left Ireland to join the Canadian Mounted Police. He also fought in the Boer War, after which he returned to Ireland and married an heiress called Catherine Frances Wright. They had five children. The first was called Edward, and died in infancy; the second, born a year later, was also called Edward and he is our Edward Wrixon Rossiter. Even though he was by now living in Frankfort Castle, which sounds roomy enough, Walter felt constricted by domesticity, and in 1910 he moved back to Canada, without his family. He became a lawman in the distinctly ungenteel environment of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, where he may or may not have started another family entirely. At the start of the First World War, he lied about his age – he said he was younger than he was – to get into the 42nd Royal Highlanders in Montreal. The battalion went to France in October 1915. Contemporary accounts depict a man cool under fire (for which he was decorated), and respected by his comrades, but Walter Wrixon de Rossiter committed suicide on the eve of the Battle of Passchendaele. He was fifty years old.

      It will be worth keeping in mind the life of the father, as we learn more about the life of the son. Let us say for now that Edward Wrixon Rossiter sailed for Rangoon in 1927, after graduating from Trinity College Dublin, and that in 1942 he had recently married and fathered a child with a young Shan woman called Nang Hmat – two children, in fact, because, in May 1942, Nang Hmat would enter the Chaukan Pass three months pregnant, while also carrying her six-month-old baby son, John, in a sling.

      Since 7 April, Rossiter hadn’t

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