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Flight By Elephant: The Untold Story of World War II’s Most Daring Jungle Rescue. Andrew Martin
Читать онлайн.Название Flight By Elephant: The Untold Story of World War II’s Most Daring Jungle Rescue
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007468805
Автор произведения Andrew Martin
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
Frank Kingdon-Ward, botanist, explorer and thoroughgoing eccentric, was the author of books such as On the Road to Tibet, Land of the Blue Poppy, In Furthest Burma and Assam Adventure. In 1942, he was fifty-seven years old, and he bore the nickname ‘Old Kingdom Come’. He was a depressive who could easily go for a whole day without saying a word to his travelling companions, one of whom noted that his real happiness was to be ‘utterly alone’, which in the context of the British-in-Burma actually meant ‘… with nothing but coolies, a cook, and a couple of servants to make his bed’. He was one of the few men who knew the topography of the Burmese–Indian border, and, early in the war, he had been given the special – and odd – military number of 00100. Reviving his First World War rank of captain, but operating as plain Mr Ward, he was dispatched to South Asia. In October 1941, he had checked into the Strand Hotel, Rangoon, from where he wrote to his sister, Winifred, that he was ‘off on an expedition plant hunting’, plausible enough given that, aside from the above-mentioned books, he was also the author of Plant Hunting on the Edge of the World, Plant Hunting in the Wilds and Plant Hunter’s Paradise, but he had underlined ‘plant hunting’ in red, a likely indication that this time he was, for once, not going plant hunting, but was engaged in work for one of those martial agencies that proliferated in Burma, under the auspices of which any old jungle wallah might immediately become an army officer: the Military Survey Service. Certainly by March 1942, Kingdon-Ward was in Upper Burma, and helping to facilitate the civilian evacuation, and it seems that Guy Millar had assisted him in this endeavour, which he refers to in his diary simply as ‘government work’.
Kingdon-Ward, Millar, Goal Miri and Rossiter discussed their options. Rossiter was all for heading east, to China. He knew of a couple of airfields there from which a flight to Assam might be secured. He knew that all evacuees had been ordered to stay out of China, an enemy-occupied country, but as an independent-minded man with a small baby and a pregnant wife, he was willing to defy this diktat. Kingdon-Ward, too, thought China a reasonable idea. He also suggested simply hanging around until the Japanese came, his consideration being that a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp would be easy to escape from. In the end, Kingdon-Ward went off on his own, as he tended to do, walking into Assam via the shakily independent mountainous state of Tibet (‘the Roof of the World’), where the flora were particularly varied and fascinating.
On 9 May a Kachin runner or messenger arrived at Rossiter’s bungalow. He had been sent along the track from Sumprabum by Rossiter’s colleague, Leyden. He handed Rossiter a chit (or note), written by Leyden. It said Myitkyina had been entered by the Japanese. All the officials had been cleared away ‘by another route’. Leyden himself had been ordered to leave, and he had been destroying important papers prior to doing so. The Chaukan Pass had been recommended to Leyden. He admitted that he had heard bad things about the Chaukan, but he had reason to believe a rescue party would be sent into it from the Assam side, a theory apparently based on radio messages, or rumours of radio messages. In fact, at about the time Leyden was writing this chit, RAF planes sent from Assam were dropping messages in the vicinity of Sumprabum specifically forbidding entry into the Chaukan Pass, it being considered impassable. But these messages were never picked up, just as letters and radio messages giving the same warning were never received.
Rossiter, too, had heard bad things about the Chaukan Pass, but it seemed that Leyden’s message convinced him, or half convinced him. He mustered his own party, with supplies of food but no elephants. The party consisted of Rossiter, his Shan wife and child, Millar, Goal Miri and twenty Indian ‘subordinates and servants’, plus an unspecified number of porters. On 11 May, as mentioned, they teamed up with Sir John and the railway party at the spot called Hkam Ho, fifty miles short of the Chaukan Pass. On 13 May, they were joined by Leyden, who brought some porters of his own, and a man called Ronald Jardine, who was forty-five but, being white-bearded and already haggard, looked older. He was an employee in Rangoon of Lever Brothers, the soap manufacturers, and, although not currently very fragrant, he had married into Coty, the French perfume dynasty. (Jardine’s wife, too, had already been evacuated.)
On 14 May, by which point they had progressed about fifteen miles towards the pass from Hkam Ho, trudging along a rocky mule track winding through fine soil – dust, really – and dried scrub, Sir John’s two elephant men refused to go any further ‘as the road is so bad and there is no fodder for animals’. Sir John paid them off, and they and their elephants turned back to Hkam Ho.
On 17 May, the monsoon proper started, and Sir John was getting into his rhetorical stride: ‘The day’s march was a most loathsome one, carried out under the most disgusting weather conditions along a jungle track which went up hill and down dale with slopes as steep as 1-in-1 in some places, the track itself being in many places a stream of liquid mud inches thick.’ It brought them to a village of bamboo houses, called by Sir John Hpaungmaka: ‘This camp is full of winged insects of every description, sandflies and blood blister flies, abounding in myriads, were a pest to everyone.’
The going had become next to impossible, and they weren’t even at the pass yet. It was therefore decided to dispatch three of the younger, fitter men as an advance guard, together with porters. So it was that Millar, Leyden and Goal Miri set off with their dozen porters, with the idea, as Sir John fate-provokingly put it, ‘… of doing double marches per day, get to Assam as quickly as possible and to send a relief force to us with rations and medical stores at whichever point we might have reached on the route’.
It was cold at dawn in the jungle on 1 June, and still raining. Leyden was definitely not at all well, and he kept insisting that Millar go on without him. ‘I was unsympathetic,’ Guy Millar wrote, ‘and even uncouth, I’m afraid.’
With the rising sun came heavier rain. There was no food for breakfast, so Millar lit a cigarette and he made a decision: he and the young elephant tracker, Goal Miri, would make a last dash for a village, while Leyden and the Kachin porters would come through at their own pace.
The two set off, marching all day ‘at a hard pace’ through thick jungle, and making tree cuts – incisions in the bark – on the way so that Leyden and the Kachins might follow. Eventually they came to what Millar called ‘a small river, the Debawng’. But the Debawng, or Debang, river is small only by the standards of upper Assam. It occupies a gorge about 200 yards wide. In the dry season, a few shallow streams – each as wide as an ordinary English river – meander through the white rubble of the river bed. In the monsoon, things are different: Millar and Leyden were staring at white rapids. It was probably shallow enough to wade through, but there was the question of tree cuts. How would the following Kachins and Leyden know where they resumed on the opposite bank? At four o’clock, the rain stopped. In two hours, it would be pitch dark. Millar contemplated the river, then he looked at the red mud of the riverbank, and he saw a footprint.
At first, he didn’t point it out to Goal. He just sat and stared at it: ‘… the first signs of man for nineteen days over a journey of a hundred miles.’
It was not a boot print, but a footprint. It pointed left, in the direction of the bigger river towards which the Debang was flowing, in other words the Noa Dehing, the river that Millar and Leyden had been shadowing all along, and whose tributaries they had been crossing, and falling into. Millar pointed out the footprint to Goal Miri; they lit a bamboo fire as the light faded.
A fire ought to go with food, but there was none. After an hour or so, they heard the sound of twigs snapping in the jungle. That meant people. Animals did not break twigs as they walked. The beam of an electric torch shone through the trees: Leyden and the porters had arrived. Leyden could hardly walk, and seeing Millar by the river he lay down