Читать книгу Flight By Elephant: The Untold Story of World War II’s Most Daring Jungle Rescue - Andrew Martin - Страница 15

Exhausted after crossing the Dapha river on the evening of 31 May, John Leyden finds that his head reels every time he stands up. Night is descending rapidly. Despite having a wife and young children (all safely evacuated from Burma at an earlier date), Leyden tells Millar – a single man – that he must save himself and go on without him. He also urges Millar to do this on behalf of the people they are trying to save.

Who were these people?

They were a party of government officials and engineers; they were mainly British, but their number also included Indians, Anglo-Indians and a pregnant Burmese woman and her six-month-old mixed-race baby. Their de facto leader was Sir John Edward Maurice Rowland. In the summer of 1942, Sir John was sixty years old. He was an engineer, and the top man on Burma Railways: the Chief Railway Commissioner no less. In the Warrant of Precedence, the formal social hierarchy of the country, he stood at number sixteen, on a par with army officers of the rank of general, and he had been knighted in 1941. So he would be very indignant at finding himself starving to death in the jungle.

Sir John was not only head of the ordinary Burma Railways; he also ran a side project, which he called ‘The Burma China Construction’. This was a railway meant to run parallel to the Burma Road, and for the same purpose: to keep China supplied in its battle against the Japanese. The railway would run from Lashio, a hundred or so miles north of Mandalay, to Kunming in China, through some of the most disease-ridden country in the world, so it would have been as much a medical as an engineering feat … if it had ever been built. There is something strained about the future tense used in an article on the line that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on 27 November 1941: ‘As the Panama canal’s construction was a triumph of medical strategists, so will the completion of the Yunnan–Burma railroad be a victory of malaria, and the potential of plague and cholera.’ The author stated that 250,000 coolies would build the line, which ought to be finished in fifteen months’ time ‘if all goes to schedule’. Just as the Burma Road would be closed by the Japanese invader, so the Burma–China railway would be stopped. It has gone down as one of the great ghost railways of the world, like the plan for a railway under the English Channel in the 1880s, or the early twentieth-century German pipe dream of the Berlin–Baghdad railway.

Having been distracted by this futile endeavour, Sir John found the ordinary railways of Burma to be in what he frankly called ‘a damnable mess’ at the time of the invasion. He used the phrase in a letter. We know from the same letter that he asked for and obtained from the man he called ‘HE’ – His Excellency, the Governor – ‘dictator powers’ to facilitate evacuation north by rail.

Sir John began, as he put it, ‘hare’ing all over’ north Burma from his base at Maymyo, the hill station and hot-weather resort, from where he was ousted by the enemy on 27 April. ‘The Army had legged it a day and a half before. I had been promised 72 hours notice to evacuate [railway] personnel …’ As it turned out, Sir John was given twelve hours’ notice, and he underlined the word ‘twelve’ in his letter. The railway employees – mainly Indians or Anglo-Indians – would be pitched into ‘sauve qui peut’, for which Sir John blamed ‘the cracking up of the 5th and 6th Chinese armies’ (which had been dispatched by Chiang Kai-shek to protect the Burmese infrastructure). The reader is now perhaps beginning to get the hang of Sir John. He was not a man lacking in confidence, or opinions, and he had a paternalistic concern for ‘his people’, the ‘railway folk’.

By the end of April he had shifted 4000 of these to Myitkyina, where he attempted to shift them further – by the above-mentioned airlifts to Assam. But the airlift was so very ‘meagre’ that ‘we had to send thousands of men and women trekking on foot out of Burma’. It had been observed at the Myitkyina airfield that, while some young and able-bodied men were putting their wives and children on the planes before themselves returning to duty or starting the dangerous walk to Assam, others had been boarding the aeroplanes along with their wives and children. On 22 April, permission was given for all men over forty-five to fly out. Being sixty, and a very senior man in the administration, Sir John – whose wife had already been evacuated – could have taken advantage of this, but, as he wrote in his letter, ‘I had a seat on a plane which I refused, my remark being, “Having brought all these women and children to Myitkyina, and as they are forced to walk out, so will I.”’ The phrase ‘my remark being’ is very typical of Sir John, who continued, ‘Having brought them here, many of them to die, I would lose all self respect and would never be able to look a woman in the face again if I escaped by plane leaving them to their fate.’

By early May, a party had crystallized around Sir John, and it comprised the following:

Edward Lovell Manley. As a captain of the Royal Engineers, he had worked on the railways built by the British in Mesopotamia from 1917. After demob, had risen to become the Chief Engineer of the Eastern Bengal Railway, whose motto was Ex Fumo Dare Lucem (‘From Smoke Let Light Break Out’), and whose crest depicted elephants and palm trees, but that didn’t mean Manley was used to living in their midst. In 1942, he was fifty-six years old, and on secondment to the Burma–China construction. He had been living with Sir John, and Sir John’s wife, in Rangoon. He had been Sir John’s guest, in other words, and Sir John felt a particular duty to get him safe out of Burma. As they entered the Chaukan Pass, Sir John would designate Manley his number two.

Eric Ivan Milne. He was another senior railway official, aged forty-three in 1942, and the District Traffic Superintendent of Burma State Railways. He was a keen amateur cricketer who, in his final game before the Japanese invasion – railwaymen against an RAF team – had scored seventy-six not out.

(Both Manley and Milne were married men, and their wives and children had already left Burma.)

C. L. Kendall. A surveyor on the Burma–China construction.

Captain A. O. Whitehouse of the Royal Engineers. We do not have his age. A photograph shows a mild looking man of about thirty in horn-rimmed glasses and pork pie hat.

E. Eadon. An Anglo-Indian ‘anti-malarial inspector’ on the Burma–China construction. (His wife and three children – with the very Anglo-Indian names of Fred, George and Isabelle – had already left Burma.)

N. Moses. He was a railway surveyor (among other things), rather rudely referred to by Sir John as ‘Dutch Jew’. But then Moses carried the stigma of having directed Sir John and his party into the Chaukan Pass, as we will see.

There were also three Indian railwaymen, who had all been based at Lashio, and we know at least how they described themselves:

C. V. Venkataraman, ‘store clerk of the Burma–China Railway’.

R. V. Venkatachalam, ‘office superintendent of the Burma–China Railway’.

S. T. Rajan, ‘divisional accountant of the Burma–China Railway’.

All the above three were in their fifties or sixties, and another diary of the Chaukan would describe them as ‘elderly railway servants’.

There was also Dr Burgess-Barnett, a medical doctor, but also Superintendent of the above-mentioned Zoological Gardens in Rangoon since 1938, the place from which the boa constrictor had escaped. He had been a house physician at St Bart’s in London, and an honorary captain of the Royal Army Medical Corps. He had been the curator of reptiles at London Zoo from 1932 to 1937, and the author, in 1940, of a pamphlet on The Treatment of Snake Bites. A good man to have in the jungle, then, except for his age (he was fifty-four), and Sir John would designate the doctor his MO, or medical officer, on the Chaukan trek.

This, then, was ‘the railway party’. It also included two Indian porters and five Indian servants, none of whom belonged to Sir John, who wrote in his letter: ‘I brought no servants. They had all gone previously. The cook, his wife and family to India. Poor Sam, my butler, found his wife and three children had fled from Maymyo when we arrived there; his brother killed by a bomb and his sister injured by another, so he went into the wilds to seek his family. I never saw him again.’ We have the name of only one of the servants: Applaswamy, butler to Manley.

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. Contemporary accounts depict a man cool under fire (for which he was decorated), and respected by his comrades, but Walter Wrixon de Rossiter committed suicide on the eve of the Battle of Passchendaele. He was fifty years old.

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.