LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

       The Man in the River

      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

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