Читать книгу Flight By Elephant: The Untold Story of World War II’s Most Daring Jungle Rescue - Andrew Martin - Страница 13

Millar and Leyden had retreated behind a boulder, so as to be screened from the horrible sight, if not the sound, of the Dapha river. One of the Kachin porters volunteered to go a little further north along the Dapha to see whether he could find a crossable point. The quicker he came back, the better the news was likely to be. Millar and Leyden waited, and Millar smoked. When half an hour had passed, they knew it was unlikely to be good news. It was now raining again. More than an hour had passed by the time the Kachin re-emerged from the jungle. My life depends on this man’s answer, thought Millar, and he, Leyden and Goal Miri stepped out from behind the rock to greet the man, who indicated that they should walk through the trees with him, a little way towards the red-earth bank of the Dapha.

The river fumed below them, and the Kachin pointed to where it disappeared into violet-coloured hills intersecting neatly, as in a children’s story. The Kachin believed that if they walked five or six miles along the riverbank in that direction, they might come to a crossable point. But Millar knew that, in their present condition, it would take two and a half days to cover that much dense jungle and then, the river having been crossed, they would have to spend the same time heading back south along the other side in order to be on track for civilization. It was no go; they could not afford another five days without food.

Millar looked at Leyden; Goal Miri was looking at the waters of the Dapha. Suddenly, he shouted, ‘Look, a man is being washed down the river!’ One of the Kachins was in the middle of the Dapha. Just his head and shoulders were showing, and he was going down stream at what Millar called ‘an unpleasant pace’.

But the man was not being washed down the river. He was crossing the river, in that his feet were – albeit intermittently – on the bottom: he was moving at a rapid diagonal. For every step he took towards the opposite bank, he seemed to be swept two paces downstream, towards fast rapids. If he hit those he’d be straight into the confluence whirlpool, from which he would eventually shoot out, and be borne along the Noa Dehing to its intersection with the mighty Brahmaputra, that creator of the Assam plain, and there he would arrive at civilization, most likely as a drowned corpse.

But the Kachin reached the opposite bank. He staggered out, turned, then waded in again, and came directly back. He had proved it could be done. ‘That man will live in my memory forever,’ wrote Millar. Unfortunately, he will not live in the memory of history forever because we do not know his name. Why had he risked his life in that way? It is not enough to say he was being well paid. The Kachins had been retained by Millar and Leyden in return for silver rupees (paper money was too flimsy for jungle dwellers; it tended to rot, get burnt, or be turned to pulp by the rains, or eaten by termites), and far more of them than they could earn from selling the superfluous produce of their agriculture. But the Kachins were not being paid enough to justify risking their lives, and they all knew they were doing precisely that. Millar and Leyden had told them the food was going to run out; they had been offered the chance to turn back on more than one occasion and the offer had been rejected. It was a matter of honour. Some of the porters told Millar and Leyden that their brothers served in the Burma Rifles, so they were loyal to the British (in the shape of Millar and Leyden) because their brothers were loyal to the British.

A conference was held on the original bank. The Kachins tied the party’s diminished packs onto the tops of their heads. On the rocky river beach the party formed a human chain, each man holding the other’s wrists, and the chain walked slowly into 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.