Flight by Elephant (19 page)

As the light faded, a bedraggled figure in sunglasses came staggering through the darkness into the camp: it was Captain John Fraser, the man who had escaped from the Japanese together with Sergeant Pratt, and who – with Pratt – had gone ahead with that earlier advance guard, the Commando party. He came into the camp from the wrong direction: that is, from the direction of the Tilung Hka. Sir John would have been surprised to see him, and possibly apoplectic. The Commandos were meant to be miles ahead.

Captain Fraser was half soaked, but then so was everyone. In Fraser’s case it turned out to be river water, because he, too, had fallen into the Tilung Hka. He was given a change of clothes, and installed in the camp’s main lean-to, which now had a good fire burning at one end. Ironically in view of the food committee’s grim conclusion of a moment ago, he had come back to Sir John in order to get a meal, since his pack had been washed away in the river, and the other Commandos had almost run out of food. He was given a full cigarette tin of the rice broth with the ferns in it, which Sir John’s party would henceforth refer to – without affection – as skilly soup. Fraser consumed it rapidly, having taken off his sunglasses, because the soup made them steam up.

When he’d finished eating, John Fraser put his sunglasses back on and told the story of his encounter with the Tilung Hka, the necessary preliminary to which was the story of what the Commandos had been doing since they’d left Sir John’s railway party on 1 June in order to make their ‘double marches’.

The first thing to say is that the Commandos did not encounter the Indian rescue party promised by the radio message. That was because there wasn’t one. They had – like Sir John following behind – shadowed the right bank of the Noa Dehing, sometimes wading through its edges, sometimes climbing near-vertical wooded hills as steep as the walls of houses, with sheets of red mud flowing down on either side. It was all ‘up and down’ country, although broadly they were descending from the high point of the Chaukan Pass. The ‘forestry men’ in the party had known what to expect; the others had just been appalled. Whereas the railway party and the Rossiters had made diffuse camps, combining tents, grass huts and suspended tarpaulins, the Commandos had built a single bamboo hut every night, with a roof made of bamboo leaves. They all then lay down next to each other, and if one turned over, they all had to. The rain would always come in somewhere, and it was a lottery as to who it fell on. The thing was to stop counting the drops and go to sleep.

The Commandos carried both army packs (rucksacks) and haversacks (shoulder bags). Young Second Lieutenant Bill Howe carried one change of clothes, a groundsheet to roll his blanket in, a kukri, ‘the old-fashioned long-barrel services revolver’, a long-sleeved pullover, a petrol lighter and an aspirin bottle full of petrol, and ‘a few personal things’. He also carried a rain cape, which he would later throw away, since it was too heavy to carry.

Ritchie Gardiner carried two pairs of shorts (he would later decide that his chief lack was ‘a pair of long trousers’), two bush shirts, one short-sleeved pullover, one towel, two blankets, a .38 Colt automatic pistol and a .44 Winchester carbine rifle, both of which seemed to become heavier with every passing day, and he had jettisoned most of the cartridges for the rifle early in the walk. His pack weighed so heavily upon his emaciated frame that he threw away the orchids he had collected in the Chaukan Pass, all but the copper-coloured one, ‘which I am going to call the Chaukan orchid as it was my first find’.

And he determinedly retained a sterling silver ‘Eversharp’ propelling pencil (advertised throughout India as being ‘For the Man of Action’), which he would hold onto even when he became so weak that it began to constitute a burden. The other Commandos said this was because he was Scottish. In fact, Gardiner – a man of action who usually ‘avoided the pen’ – had become addicted to keeping a diary: ‘I really suspect that it began to be a substitute for alcohol (of which of course we had none) for every evening about sundown I would feel the urge to write come over me.’ He used any old scrap of paper, ‘including some which normally is used for another purpose altogether’. Gardiner had been worried about his knees, but these were ‘behaving like bricks’, and he gradually transferred his anxieties to his feet. He wore a pair of rubberised snipe boots ‘borrowed’ from Rowes Gentleman’s Outfitters of Dalhousie Street, Rangoon, ‘during the demolition period’. Snipe boots are essentially low wellingtons, meant for splashing, gun in hand, through the marshes in which the snipe lives. Gardiner regretted that they were not better fitting
leather
boots, since his ankles were beginning to swell, which might be the cumulative effect of hundreds of leech and sandfly bites, or the first stages of beriberi. Gardiner did not know.

Sergeant Pratt had done most of the cooking: such delicacies as rice and tinned cheese, or rice on its own, or – a speciality of Pratt’s – Marmite soup. A couple of times he’d got up early and cooked porridge, and they’d all appreciated that. The Commandos generally had a lot of trouble getting fires started, and had all been very badly bitten by sandflies.

On 2 June, they’d seen a tree cut and a knife-cut inscription to the effect that a party from the 10th Gurkha Rifles had been that way on 29 January 1942 – early evacuees, in other words. This inscription was taken to be proof that the Commandos, Sir John and the Rossiters had been in the Chaukan Pass after all. So Moses, the Dutch Jew, now accompanying the Commandos, had been right.

Later on 2 June, Ritchie Gardiner had shot a muntjac deer that was being swept along by the Noa Dehing; they managed to get it out, and had a really good roast dinner around a big fire. That (sandflies apart) had been a red-letter day. There’d been another treat six days later on 8 June, when white-bearded soap manufacturer, Jardine, the ‘old man’ of the party, had become even older. He turned forty-five on that day, and he produced a large slab of chocolate, so that they all had one square with their usual midday lunch: a single cream cracker. They were all extremely hungry all the time, and everything they ate that was not rice tasted ‘absolutely first class’. In spite of his great age, Jardine was doing ‘damn well’, and the only reservation about him was that he turned out to be an ardent Catholic, and would alarm them all by periodically dropping to his knees to pray for deliverance for them all.

But what happened on the banks of the Tilung Hka suggested that no one was listening.

That river had checked the progress of the Commandos, and in the late afternoon of 12 June they were joined on the riverbank – as they prowled the long, man-high marshy grass looking for a place to cross – by the previous day’s breakaways from Sir John, namely Lindsay, Cumming, Kendall, Eadon and their accompanying Gurkhas. It was hot, and it was raining. The water level was rising fast, so a quick decision was required. The first idea was to ask the Gurkhas if they wouldn’t mind chopping down a couple of big trees to make a bridge. But halfway through the chopping, the plan was abandoned.

The men spread out again, looking for a crossing place. Young Bill Howe found what might be a good bet: two fallen trees, one on either bank. They remained attached by their roots to the banks, and the ends where the branches were had become partly wedged in river rocks; parts of both logs were under the water and other parts above it. The trouble was the gap of churning water in the middle. Howe walked along the river, calling out to summon the others, who were widely dispersed. The first to arrive at the crossing point were Lindsay’s Men plus the enigmatic Dutch surveyor, Moses, but minus the radio operator, Corporal Sawyer. It seems that while Howe was trying to round up the others, Lindsay’s Men and Moses crossed the river, because they were nowhere to be seen when Howe returned to the fallen trees with the Commandos. So the second breakaway party from Sir John had overtaken the first, acquiring Moses in the process, but leaving behind Corporal Sawyer. Lindsay’s Men were always going to be the quicker party, with their Gurkha porters, and it seemed they were on their way.

The level of the river was rising fast, which is why Lindsay’s Men hadn’t waited for the others. Captain Boyt went first over the logs, and he had no trouble. That was to be expected: he was the true commando of all the Commandos. Howe, Gardiner and McCrindle also crossed. Sergeant Pratt was next. At the end of the first log, there was a gap of about ten feet to the second, but this second one was slightly downstream of the first, so it was a matter of going with the flow of the water, and trying to veer right towards the second log. Halfway across the gap, Pratt went under. But he came up holding onto the second log. ‘Old Man’ Jardine was next and despite a too sedate looking breaststroke, he managed to get from the first to the second log.

Then it was Captain John Fraser’s turn. He’d been the slowest of the walkers, possibly because of the ankle swellings caused by the Japanese ropes, and as he inched along the first trunk he kept stopping to push his prescription sunglasses up towards the bridge of his nose. This was not promising. At the end of the first trunk, he took his sunglasses off, and put them into the top pocket of his bush shirt. He came to the point where the first log was almost completely submerged, and the force of the water on his legs sent him cartwheeling over, and into the water, where he immediately grabbed hold of a smaller passing log, which carried him crashing into a boulder. Fraser remained pinned against this boulder by the force of the water, with only his head above the water. Ritchie Gardiner, who had already crossed over, now sacrificed his position of safety; he dropped into the freezing water, and allowed himself to be swirled towards where Fraser was trapped. Fraser’s pack had become entangled with the log that trapped him, and Gardiner freed Fraser by cutting it away with his kukri. The pack rolled away in the water. It had contained six packets of biscuits, a tin of cheese, a tin of butter, a jar of Marmite. Now Corporal Sawyer, radio operator of the Oriental Mission, was astride the first tree trunk. He had hesitated before beginning to cross, thinking he had better go to the aid of Fraser and Gardiner, but from the water Gardiner signalled him to start.

Sawyer wore his pack on his back, and over the top of it his rain cape, since he’d decided this was
not
a superfluous luxury in a monsoon. He inched along the first trunk, went into the river, fought the freezing water for a minute then grabbed hold of the second trunk and hauled himself onto it. Young Bill Howe was sitting astride the second trunk, waiting to grab onto Sawyer, and he had actually got hold of Sawyer’s arm when Sawyer spilled off the tree trunk. He was instantly out of reach, owing to the force of the water on his rain cape, and within a few seconds he’d disappeared around a bend in the river. Meanwhile, Gardiner, half wading and half swimming, dragged Fraser back to the first bank. So for Gardiner it was back to square one: he had returned to the wrong side of the river. Both he and Fraser were exhausted, and they walked – ‘like drunken men’, Gardiner wrote – through the tall grass of the riverbank back to a fire the Commandos had made the night before. ‘We were lucky to find the fire still in and wood to build it up, so stripped nude and got half dry and warm which served to bring us round.’ Corporal Sawyer was never seen again (early the next morning, Ritchie Gardiner would find one of his socks further along the river), and nor was his pack, which had contained a tin of cheese, some butter, Marmite and all of the Commandos’ salt.

That night, as we have seen, Captain Fraser, half dried out, walked back alone to Sir John’s camp, where he spent the night. It did not rain during the night. At dawn the next morning, Fraser returned to the river where his comrades the Commandos were waiting for him. They got him over, and they pressed on through the jungle again, aiming for the Dapha river, with Lindsay’s Men and their Gurkhas a few miles ahead. The Commandos had roughly seven days’ food left, allowing half a cigarette tin of mouldy rice with a little Marmite, one biscuit and about half an ounce of cheese per man per day. They also had very little tea left. At their present rate of progress – they were averaging about six miles a day – that food would carry them twenty miles. But it was sixty miles to the Dapha river and Gyles Mackrell.

Mackrell had now decided to stay put on his riverbank just as Sir John had on his. It seemed that others would soon need his assistance in crossing the river.

Mackrell’s servant, Apana, had become ill, which was put down – perhaps not very logically – to his having brewed the tea in the rain. Apana had also been sleeping in wet clothes, as had Mackrell and the other men. He had a high temperature and a pain in his chest. He sat under the big tarpaulin and Mackrell gave him Sloan’s Liniment to inhale. This made Apana cough, and at one point Mackrell thought he’d choked him.

That day, Mackrell did the cooking. He also supervised the creation of a proper camp in the lee between two river cliffs. Bashas were built, tents erected. The wide tarpaulin became the focal point, and the sacks of rice were stored here. A bamboo fire was kept constantly burning. Mackrell unrolled the two white oilcloths he’d brought, and made a big letter ‘T’ on a flat patch of ground, the crossbar of the ‘T’ being placed in the direction of the prevailing wind. This was a guide for aeroplanes, and a target for any food drops.

The rain drummed down on the white ‘T’ and on the wide tarpaulin. Mackrell sat under the tarpaulin, and watched the river.

Mackrell’s diary is silent about Friday the 12th, the day on which the Commandos were doing battle with the Tilung Hka, but the entry for Saturday the 13th begins with a sigh of relief expressed in the single word: ‘Sun.’ Bed rolls were opened out and dried; clothes were washed, and Apana came out from under the tarpaulin. The Sloan’s Liniment had ‘put him right’ after all. Towards evening, Mackrell noted, ‘Saw three large buffaloes.’ Here was the young naturalist of Epsom College speaking, the boy who had taken
Acidalia trigeminata
. He seems pleased to have seen the buffaloes – which were in the tall grass near the river – but most people would not have been. Wild buffaloes were considered by the tea planters of Assam (who called them ‘buffs’) to be the second biggest menace after tigers. Like tigers, they might attack without provocation. They would come up and stare at you, and it was fatal to turn away and run. You had to outstare them; then they would usually shamble away. By the same token, a buffalo was the second most prized ‘bag’ for an Indian white hunter after a tiger, as Mackrell well knew.