LITMIR.BIZ

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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?

      There are, but even Captain Tainsh couldn’t list many in the Bengal Club of Calcutta, and he was a man obsessed with emergency nutrition, to the point where his autobiography is entitled Fungi in Peace and War, 1917–47.

      The fact is that Millar and Leyden did not have time to be smoking meat or nibbling plants to see whether they were poisonous. Instead they were in a great hurry, because they formed an advance guard, a breakaway from a party of British and Indian evacuees whose ability to proceed through the mountainous jungles of the Chaukan Pass and beyond was considered less than that of Millar and Leyden. In short, if Millar and Leyden did not get through, many people behind them would die.

       Beyond Mandalay

      In coming to Myitkyina, the British had reached the end of the line – literally, in that it was the last stop on the sparse Burmese railway network. It was also a dead end. Mountainous jungle lay to the north and west, occupied China to the east, Japanese soldiers to the south. The only way out short of entering those jungles was by air, and there was an airfield outside the town. It was just a clearing in the trees with a bamboo hut, like a cricket pavilion. Evacuation flights – to Dinjan, Assam – had been shifted there as airfields to the south were successively abandoned to the Japanese.

      Life correspondent George Rodger had stopped off at Myitkyina airfield before he himself walked out of Burma. He took a photograph and sent it to The Times where, to the annoyance of the British government, it was published on 15 April 1942. The caption ran: ‘Ready for Evacuation – The RAF has evacuated hundreds of women and children from the fighting areas in Burma. Some are seen sheltering from the sun under the wing of an aeroplane before leaving.’ Sunglasses, smiles and sola topees are the order of the day, and the subjects look very unharassed, like tourists rather than refugees. The half-dozen women, five children and one man look to be British or Anglo-Indian at the darkest. There are no Indians among their number, even though Indians constituted the great majority of the refugees.

      In The Story of Burma, F. Tennyson Jesse attempts a corrective:

      The following figures may be of interest to those who accuse us of furthering the interests of the whites, for they show what the RAF, the US Air Corps, and the Chinese National Airways Co did to evacuate people from Myitkyina to India in May 1942: 8616 persons were evacuated, of whom about 6000 were civilians and 2000 were army casualties. Of the 6000 civilians, 3500 were Eurasians and Burmese, 2200 were Indian, and 300 were English.

      By ‘May’ she means ‘early May’ because the flights would not continue throughout that month.

      Every morning, would-be passengers trekked through jungle scrub from the nearby refugee camp, suitcases in hand, to wait for the two Douglas Transports – lumbering mules of planes that landed each day from Assam. With each successive day, they appeared later and later out of the thick white cloud in which the monsoon was brewing. From mid-April, these clouds had been threatening to halt the flights altogether; by 6 May they had blotted out the mountains to the north-west over which the refugees hoped to be carried. The cloud also made each day more suffocating, yet the women and children – they mainly were women and children – who waited for the planes seemed to have been at the dressing-up basket: the women might be wearing two hats, or two dresses, or they might be wearing coats in 110 degrees Fahrenheit. These were the clothes they could not fit into their suitcases.

      On 6 May the first Transport landed, and those with passes for it boarded by means of the usual regulated scramble. When the doors of the aircraft were closed, a small girl stood screaming repeatedly beside it. Her mother was on the plane and she was not. This minor tragedy (nothing much by the standards of the evacuation) was about to be overtaken by a bigger one. As the Douglas Transport prepared to take off, the sound of another plane was heard coming from within the cloud. It was not the second Douglas Transport; that was not due, and this unseen aircraft had a thinner engine note. A Japanese fighter – one of those nihilistically called a Zero – came out of the clouds and the refugees who’d been unlucky a minute ago, being unable to board the plane, were lucky now, because they could race into the jungle. As they ran, the first Zero circulated the airfield three times with a red flag sticking from the cockpit window. It was later surmised that this had been a warning pass, and the door of the plane on the ground did open, and three or four people did jump out; but, by then, another three Zeros had come out of the cloud, and they machine-gunned the Douglas Transport. They circled away, came back, machine-gunned it again. At least thirty-five people were killed, and many more injured.

      Just as Rangoon and Mandalay had been abandoned after a Japanese air raid, so now was Myitkyina airfield, and two days later, the Japanese took the town. It is estimated that 40,000 refugees were scattered into the surrounding countryside by the fall of Myitkyina, and they were the ones who’d been banking on the airlift, and who were all geared up for it, with their cotton frocks, high-heeled shoes and children in tow. They were not dressed for long-distance walking.

      The Governor, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, had himself boarded one of the last flights. He would establish a Burma government-in-exile from the hill station of Simla, India, where he would write an elegant, rueful report on the evacuation, characterizing the main theme as sauve qui peut, possibly because it sounds better than ‘every man for himself’. The military word was ‘fluid’. The situation had become fluid. This was especially the mindset post-Myitkyina. Army officers (always British) lost their men (usually Indian), and vice versa. Senior British police officers found that all their Burmese and Indian policemen had melted away. Telegraphic and telephonic communication did not exist. There was a shortage of wireless sets, which in any case didn’t work well in the mountainous terrain towards which everybody was heading. All civil and

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