Flight by Elephant (8 page)

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, and Walter Wrixon de Rossiter was killed at Passchendaele, aged fifty.

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 had a clue what was going on in Burma, because his government radio had been commandeered and his personal radio was on the blink. All he knew was that the Japanese were coming, and he’d better get out. In early May, he had received a visit from the other of our original pair, Guy Millar, who was accompanied by his elephant tracker, Goal Miri, and Frank Kingdon-Ward.

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
foot
print. 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 immediately. Millar wrote, ‘The pangs of hunger were now acute. The [porters] sat around glaring at each other, thinking, I suppose, the end was in sight.’ Nobody seemed very impressed by the footprint. After a while, the Kachins made flares of burning grass. They took these to the water’s edge in order to hunt for crabs – which they did not find. When they had left his immediate vicinity, Millar realized he could still see the footprint quite clearly. Moonlight.
The moon was full –
they did not need to wait for dawn to follow the track indicated by the print.

They followed the prints, Leyden being supported by two of the Kachins, and after a while these were joined by two other sets of prints, indicating three men going towards the Noa Dehing river. Satisfied that this was the direction, Millar and Goal Miri returned to Leyden. They explained that they must all follow the tracks, but it was obvious that Leyden could not stand up again, let alone walk. His feet were bleeding, swollen and infected; they looked as if boiling water had been poured over them, and his temperature was higher than it had been the day before. Again, he insisted that everyone else go on and leave him, but Millar and the Kachins cut down bamboos to make a stretcher. Leyden would be carried. It took them an hour to make the stretcher. At four o’clock in the morning, they set off in the direction of the footprints.

At nine o’clock in the morning they arrived at the place towards which the makers of the footprints had been heading: two bamboo and palm huts in a red-mud clearing, the Noa Dehing singing beyond the trees, otherwise all quite silent and deserted. And then things were not silent. Leyden, lying on his stretcher, opened his eyes. A plane was approaching. It came over fairly low; then another came, equally low and loud. Millar did not believe they were Japanese planes; they had come from the west, from central Assam, and civilization. Surely they were rescue planes. They might come back; a signal must be sent. The sun was now shining, and while the ground in the clearing might be muddy, the huts were dry. Millar struck a Lion Safety Match and put it in the palm-leaf roof of the first hut. The hut began to smoke, then to burn furiously, sending up a thick column of black smoke … just as the sound of the aeroplane engines faded from earshot entirely.