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

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СКАЧАТЬ sugar, condensed milk and – being British – tea for fourteen days. They had to reach India before their supplies ran out because the jungle could not be guaranteed to yield up any food, and the country along their route was uninhabited. They were aiming for the Dapha river. Only when they reached it would they know they were on target for the plain of Assam, but they also knew that when they did reach the Dapha they would have to cross it. This wasn’t going to be easy. In 1892, Errol Gray had pronounced the Dapha ‘not fordable after early March’ on account of the meltwaters of the Himalayas. On top of that, Millar and Leyden were approaching the Dapha in the monsoon season, the rains having started about a week before they entered the pass. All previous expeditions through the Chaukan had taken place in the cold weather season – in December and January – when the many rivers are singing but not roaring.

      On the morning of that first day, 19 May, Millar and Leyden crossed a relatively small but meandering river called the Nam Yak. They then crossed it a further seventeen times, each encounter preceded by the depressing sound of its rising roar coming from beyond the trees. They would half wade, half swim over the river. The water was chest-high for Millar and Leyden, but higher for the Kachins, most of whom were about five feet tall – one of the pygmy tribes, as the early British settlers in Burma would have referred to them.

      After three days, Millar and Leyden emerged from the Chaukan Pass, but the mountainous jungle continued. In fact, as Millar noted in his diary, ‘the going became still more difficult’. They were descending only slowly from a height of about 8000 feet. They proceeded, slashing with their kukris (or large, curved knives) along the elephant tracks Goal Miri had identified, which at first, or even second, glance didn’t look like tracks at all. Or they would follow the banks of the rivers. Hitherto, these had tended to go across their direction of travel, but when they came out of the pass, Millar and Leyden struck a river that was going their way – that is, west. It was called the Noa Dehing.

      They couldn’t cross the Noa Dehing, which was about 400 yards wide, and sunk in a deep, jungly gorge. They couldn’t even see across it, steaming rain having reduced the visibility to almost nil. They were therefore stuck on the right-hand bank – and this confirmed their appointment with the Dapha, which was a tributary of the Noa Dehing shortly to come thundering in from the right. Meanwhile, it was usually better to follow the bank of the Noa Dehing than hack away at the jungle.

      So Millar and Leyden walked along the stones at the water’s edge – when there was an edge to the water – as opposed to a vertical wall of red mud. Some of these stones, Millar wrote, were about the size and shape of a cricket ball, and threatened to twist your ankle. Others were about the size and shape of a small house, so Millar and Leyden would climb up, across and down, often descending into deep pools, so that the leather of their boots began to rot. When the vertical mud wall was the only option, they proceeded monkey-like, holding onto the roots of trees or stout bamboos. It is unlikely that they talked much as they climbed. Their voices would have been drowned out by the crashing past of the river; and a malnourished man finds it hard to talk. It becomes a labour to formulate the thoughts and pronounce the words.

      The rain made it hard to light the fires they needed at night to boil up their rice. They had to search the undergrowth for dry bamboo, which they cut into slivers to make kindling. This they then tried to ignite, but the Lion Safety Matches of India and Burma were considered by many of their users all too safe: the sulphur tended to drop off the end when they were struck, or they would break in half.

      When bamboo does burn, it makes a mellow bubbling, popping sound. Every night after they’d eaten their rice, Millar and Leyden made tea: Assam leaves swirling in a brew tin full of river water. G. D. L. Millar was a tea planter from Assam – manager of the Kacharigaon Tea Company – and never let it be said of the British tea planters of India that they did not consume their own product.

      On one those early evenings by the fire, Leyden took a photograph of Millar; it shows a tough forty-two-year-old, unshaven, standing in front of a bamboo fire. The porters crouch around him Burmese-style, like close fielders around a batsman; he wears loose fatigues and the manner in which he holds his cigarette is slightly rakish. Millar was christened Guy Daisy. In the Edwardian days of his birth, Daisy could be a boy’s name; it might be further explained in Millar’s case by the fact that he was born on a farm in Cornwall. Daisy means nothing more incriminating than ‘the day’s eye’ and you might think it would suit an outdoorsman. But Millar made that ‘D’ stand for Denny.

      He was on a three-month release from the Kacharigaon Tea Company in order to do ‘government work’ in Upper Burma (and we shall come to the question of what that had involved) in the company of Goal Miri and a cranky sixty-four-year-old botanist called Frank Kingdon-Ward.

      Before coming to Millar’s companion, Leyden, a word about that cigarette of Millar’s. How had he kept it dry when crossing all these rivers in monsoon rains? There will be a lot of cigarettes in this story, a lot of rivers and a lot of rain, so it is a question worth asking.

      The cigarettes of the day usually came in cylindrical tins about two and a half inches in diameter. The tins were sealed below the lid. A small, levered blade was set into the lid; you pressed it down and rotated the lid in order to break the seal. Until then, the tin was entirely waterproof, and it was still fairly waterproof afterwards. The tins, which contained fifty cigarettes, were too big to put in a normal pocket, so most people decanted them into a slim cigarette case – but cigarette cases were for the drawing room, and in the jungle Millar smoked his straight from the tin.

      Millar’s travelling companion, John Leyden, was a civil servant of British Burma, a colonial administrator. He could be loosely referred to as a DC, or Deputy Commissioner. More correctly, he was a sub-divisional officer of the North Burmese district of Myitkyina where, according to Thacker’s Indian Directory, the languages spoken included Burmese, Kachin, Hindustani, Lisu, Gurkhali and Chinese. Myitkyina was the last decent-sized town in Burma; the railway ended there, but a dusty mule track snaked north from the town, through a mosquito-infested jungle and scrub unfrequented by Europeans apart from the odd orchid collector. The path winds towards a small settlement of green and red houses perched on top of a treeless green hill, like a place in a fairy story. This was Sumprabum, the centre of Leyden’s particular sub-division. (And while we are in this remote vicinity, let us note an even narrower track winding down the hill and meandering still further north to an even smaller, even more malarial settlement called Putao.)

      John Lamb Leyden was born into a distinguished Scottish family, and was a descendant of another orientalist, John Leyden (1775–1811), poet, physician and antiquary, who ran the Madras General Hospital and held various official posts in Calcutta. Ominously for John Lamb Leyden, his ancestor died of fever on an expedition to Java.

      We have a photograph of John Lamb Leyden on his trek – probably taken by Millar after Leyden had taken his. It shows a cerebral looking man with swept-back, receding hair. At thirty-eight, Leyden was younger than Millar, but looked older. Next to him, a bamboo fire smoulders thickly. He and Millar would light these at every camp, hoping the smoke would attract the planes that periodically flew overhead, but as Millar wrote, ‘… on each occasion failure to observe us was apparent’. They had no tents, so every evening they spent a couple of hours building a hut of the type known locally as a basha.

      How do you build a basha?

      In a lecture entitled ‘Keeping Fit in the Jungle’, given to the Bengal Club of Calcutta in early 1943, Captain Alastair Tainsh explained:

      The way to keep fit in the jungle is exactly the same as anywhere else. All one needs is sound sleep, clean water, a reasonable diet, and a liberal use of soap and water. But how is sound sleep to be obtained? Well, one must learn how to make oneself comfortable in the worst conditions. It is not being tough or clever to sit in the open all night … The easiest form of shelter to build is made by fixing two upright poles СКАЧАТЬ