Flight By Elephant: The Untold Story of World War II’s Most Daring Jungle Rescue. Andrew Martin

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      But as far as the British were concerned, the role of the Flying Tigers was precautionary. After all, a Japanese invasion of Burma had been officially ruled out by Far Eastern Intelligence Bureau (an organization credited by Tim Carew with being ‘a mine of misinformation’). The Japanese couldn’t possibly invade Burma. Proudly neutral Thailand was in the way … unless Japan reached an accommodation with Thailand (which is just what happened, in October 1940).

      It was as though the British in Burma, enervated by the climate, were sunk in a languorous dream: a world of white-turbaned servants bowing low in the clubs; of palms and jacaranda trees in the wide, white avenues of the city, with green parakeets skimming through the pale blue skies above; of pretty, pert Burmese women – unconfined by veil or purdah – sporting orchids in their piled-up hair, with golden bangles on their slender wrists. They would twirl their paper parasols while puffing coquettishly on outsize cheroots and generally presenting very good wife or (more likely) mistress material. Outside Rangoon, the flower-bedecked houses and shops … the smiling villagers trundling by on slumberous bullock carts, through a shimmering countryside dotted with Christmas treelike pagodas.

      Burma offered a more leisurely life than India. Its branch of the Indian Civil Service was less competitive, and so attracted the more easy-going sahib. In The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj, David Gilmour writes that some members of the Indian Civil Service regarded Burma as ‘a place of banishment … The climate was unhealthy and debilitating, especially in Upper Burma … and the mosquitoes were so bad in some areas that even the cattle were put under nets at night.’ A vivid, if jaundiced, account of the life is given by George Orwell in his novel of 1934, Burmese Days, which is based on his experiences as a police officer in Upper Burma. The central character, Flory, works in the Forestry Department. In view of what would happen to the British in Burma, it is interesting that he seems half menaced by nature, half enraptured by it. He spends the cooler months in the jungle, the rest of the time in a bungalow on the edge of an Upper Burmese town. He describes Burma as ‘mostly jungle – a green, unpleasant land’. In the garden of the town club, where the back numbers of The Field and the Edgar Wallace novels are mildewed by the humidity, some English flowers grow: phlox and larkspur, hollyhock and petunia. They will soon be ‘slain by the sun’. Meanwhile, they ‘rioted in vast size and richness’. There is no English lawn, ‘but instead a shrubbery of native trees and bushes … mohur trees like vast umbrellas of blood-red bloom … purple bougainvillea, scarlet hibiscus … bilious green crotons … The clash of colours hurt one’s eyes in the glare’. Vultures hover in a dazzling sky; in early morning temperatures of 110 degrees Fahrenheit, the Englishmen of the club greet each other: ‘Bloody awful morning, what?’

      The country grips him like a fever, and sometimes the effect is euphoric. When Flory meets Elizabeth Lackersteen, the love interest of the book (Flory’s native mistress, Ma Hla May, cannot be so described), they bond over flowers. ‘Those zinnias are fine aren’t they? – like painted flowers, with their wonderful dead colours. These are African marigolds. They’re coarse things, weeds almost, but you can’t help liking them … But I wish you’d come into the veranda and see the orchids.’

      Flory works some of the time ‘in the field’, but even he gets lost on a short walk through the jungle with his own spaniel bitch, Flo. The box wallahs (office workers) of the British Secretariat would tend the flowers in the gardens of their bungalows at Maymyo, the hill station to which they repaired to escape the oven that was Rangoon in summer, just as their counterparts in Calcutta went to Darjeeling. They rode horses through the margins of the jungle, but they would not penetrate deeper, to encounter, say, the giant banana plants that might for all they knew be quite literally the biggest aspidistras in the world. The evening breeze might bring the sound of a tiger’s roar intermingled with the tinkling of the temple bells, but that tiger was safely confined in the Maymyo Zoo. The British were protected from the jungle by their punka-wallahs, their chowkeydars (nightwatchmen) on the veranda, by the elevation of their houses above the malarial ground, their quinine pills and the revolver in the study drawer.

      The Governor of Burma, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith (Harrow, Cambridge, Sandhurst), was a fitting leader for this decorous and unreal society. A very good-looking man – almost too good looking – with a fondness for fragrant pipe tobacco, Dorman-Smith had seen action briefly in the Great War, but his former tenure as Minister of Agriculture under Neville Chamberlain hinted at a bovine temperament. He was not the sort of man to notice that he sat atop a very rickety edifice.

      Burma has been called an ‘anthropologist’s paradise’; it might also have been called a colonialist’s nightmare. Aside from a couple of battalions of British soldiers in Burma, the main defensive force was called the Burma Rifles, which had British officers and supposedly Burmese other ranks … except that the soldiery of the Burma Rifles largely comprised ethnic minorities – the Shans of the east, Chins of the west, Kachins of the north, Karens of the south – because the loyalty of the indigenous Burmese could not be taken for granted.

      The British in Burma were buttressed in their eminence by a million Indians. In Rangoon, they operated the infrastructure: drove the trams and trains, manned the docks, and they were hated by the Burmese, either for taking the jobs they themselves might have aspired to, or for abetting the imperial power. The Indians needed the social order to remain stable, otherwise they would be preyed upon by the Burmese dacoits, or criminal gangs, and the incidence of dacoity in Burma was high. The Burmese had rioted against the Indians in 1937, hence the granting of a measure of self-government, a reform that did not negate Burmese nationalism. In 1940, it had been necessary to arrest the first Burmese Premier to serve under the new dispensation, Baw Ma, on a charge of sedition. And with the coming of war, a Burmese Independence Army would at first fight alongside the Japanese invader before switching sides. Rising nationalism on the eve of the war had been manifested in an increasing intolerance of Europeans keeping their shoes on when visiting the pagodas. The ubiquitous sign ‘Footwearings not permitted’ was ceasing to be a joke. But no alarm had been raised.

       The Dapha River

      May the twenty-sixth 1942, and it was still raining heavily in the jungle. With at best five days’ food left, Millar and Leyden continued to follow the Noa Dehing, but had now moved to lower terrain. They were covered in sores, and their boots had fallen apart. At first, they had tried walking without boots, as the Kachin porters did, but that lacerated their feet. So they wound canes around their feet like bandages, and wore belts of reserve canes around their waists.

      As they walked beneath the trees near the roaring river, they saw a tiger walking ahead on the same path. Even to ‘jungly’ Englishmen – and Millar was more one of those than Leyden – the sight of a tiger would prompt an instinctive glance around for the cage from which it had escaped. The tiger walked on, and so did they ‘for some distance’, not trying to catch it up, but not particularly lagging behind either. Millar was carrying his favourite single-action revolver; Leyden was carrying a rifle. In 1885, Major MacGregor had reported to the Royal Geographical Society: ‘A few tigers had also taken up their abode in the valley, a fact which came unpleasantly home to our coolies, two of whom, poor fellows, were carried out of camp at night by a man eater, who was, I am glad to say, eventually shot.’

      Millar and Leyden’s tiger having veered off the path and jumped into the river, they came to a clearing where they saw a herd of sambhur, which are hairy deer. Sambhur don’t look as if they belong in a jungle, or even a jungle clearing. They look as though they belong on a Highland moor in Scotland. The teeming rain added to the effect, even if the suffocating air detracted from it.

      There were twenty-six sambhur. They had probably never seen a man before, and they continued to graze even as Goal Miri – who had requested the first shot – took Leyden’s rifle and aimed. The porters ate their meat while СКАЧАТЬ