They rose at four, long before sunrise. The elephant men worked frantically, carrying children, still half-asleep, directly from their hammocks up into the elephant panniers. They didn’t stop until every child was either walking or being carried on an elephant’s back, and they were on the move in record time.
At the first light of day came the rain. The word does not describe the stair-rods of wetness crashing through the canopy, splattering drops as big as ha’pennies on the jungle floor, turning the ground into a stinking pancake of mud and goo. What had been relatively good going became, within minutes, a seeping swamp. Would the rain stop the insects? Fat chance. They became more obnoxious, fizzing up your nose or squatting on your ears or creeping along the edge of your eye-lashes, needling you. And the leeches, too. You’d slip underfoot, crash down into the muck, get up and ten minutes later feel something on the back of your leg. And there you’d find a big fat black slug, puffed full of your blood. The best way to get rid of them was to light up a cheroot and burn the leech off, but in the downpour it was nigh impossible to strike a match. So you would have to pull the creature off with your fingers. It would go all squishy and burst, covering your fingers with blood, but somehow its suckers would remain dug into your skin, and you’d have to rip the thing off you, taking with it a lump of skin. And the next time you fell down into the mud, the broken skin and the fresh bleeding would attract a new batch of leeches, and within minutes you’d get the same tingling feeling. Disgusting wasn’t a powerful enough word for it.
Then as if someone had pulled a switch, the rain stopped. In muffled sunlight, they walked on, the jungle dripping, a brown-green stew of wet leaves, flies, heat, leeches. Abruptly, the trees thinned out. Ahead, Grace glimpsed blue sky above, Sam standing on the edge of a ravine and beyond him, a yawning gap, more than a hundred feet wide, and far below a furious stream tumbling through rocks.
Precious little space was to be had on the narrow mossy edge overlooking the drop as the elephant party backed up, a traffic jam with trunks. Sam hurried past Mother, moving uphill, away from the ravine, Winston, the Havildar and a dozen oozies in tow, carrying ropes and long doubled-ended saws. Grace called out to him from the basket: ‘What’s happening?’
‘Bloody map. The ravine wasn’t marked. Officially, it’s not there. Not good.’
‘What are you doing to do?’
‘Write a letter to the Daily Telegraph,’ and he vanished into the jungle, pursued by a posse of elephant men.
Po Net gave a command and Mother buckled underneath them. The children piled out, as accustomed to exiting the pannier as they had been to leaving the school bus, and the whole group followed the path Sam’s party had made through the jungle. At the base of an enormously tall teak tree, two teams of oozies were sawing through a top and bottom bite of the trunk furiously, their arm muscles pumping, sweat dripping off their faces. But the trunk was so fat that Grace feared it would take them all day to chop it down. After ten minutes, their places were taken by four fresh oozies, who carried on the work in a sweet rhythm. By now Grace could see a stain of sap where the saws were eating into the teak. The bite in the trunk had become a dark grin.
Behind them, they heard chains being dragged along the jungle floor. The jungle parted and Henry VIII, ridden by one oozie, with two Burmese holding spikes on either side of his head, marched up, in harness, pulling a long ribbon of chains. The elephant grunted, bent his head and concentrated on feasting on a clump of bamboo.
The saw’s bite had become yet deeper, another two feet into the trunk. Two new teams took over, losing barely a second, the teeth of the saws hissing against the trunk, the cut almost a third of the way across.
Grace’s ears pricked. Over the hiss and clatter of the jungle, she could hear a metallic barking. The chatter of a sub-machine gun, never to be mistaken, echoed around the hills. It was hard to tell the distance, but she guessed, the noise came from less than five miles away. The elephant party only carried rifles. A machine-gun meant the Japanese, attacking someone. The rearguard? No idea. All she had to do was look at Sam’s face to realise that the shooting was far too close.
‘Havildar! Get these bloody children out of the way.’
The Sikh led Bishop Strachan’s to the far side of the teak, away from the ravine. They stumbled through the undergrowth, climbing onto a slight hillock which provided a ring-side seat of the great tree and beyond it, the fearful drop and the gap it had to bridge.
‘What are they chopping the tree down for, Miss? We’re not going to walk across on the tree, are we?’ asked Ruby, her voice hushed with awe.
Grace said nothing.
‘We’re not, are we?’
‘Sssh, Ruby. I don’t want to frighten the little ones,’ whispered Grace. ‘Or me.’
Guns pock-pocked, more sporadic, not a machine-gun, but closer, much closer.
The elephants, too, were led to the safety of the far side of the teak, Oomy squashing underneath Mother’s belly. The mother elephant raised her trunk into the air, as if tasting the wind. Having seen the elephants easy and relaxed, there was no doubting their anxiety: a communal twitching of tails, ear flaps wide, trunks swishing agitatedly, this way and that. They might not know exactly what the threat was, thought Grace, but the idea that they were just dumb beasts was ignorant indeed.
The children started eating lunch, but the sense of foreboding dimmed appetites, and Grace had to cluck at the children for offering their scanty rations to the elephant calves.
Yells in Burmese, and then Sam’s voice called out: ‘Timber!’ A slow splintering of wood built through a crescendo of ripping and snapping to a Niagara of sound, a great thundering roar as the teak shivered and fell across the ravine. Through the soles of their feet they felt a great shudder; overhead, monkeys, birds and insects screeched out against this new affront to the natural order of things.
‘Miss, look!’ cried out Molly. From their vantage point overlooking the ravine the children watched, enthralled, as a man with a dirty bandage on his head clambered up the side of the great teak, stood on top, and then sauntered along the trunk across the ravine as if he was walking down a pavement on Oxford Street. He crossed to the far side and turned back to the watchers, bowed theatrically, and blew a kiss.
Sam called out to the children: ‘Your turn next, ladies and gentlemen.’
‘But the elephants?’ asked Grace. The thought of crossing the ravine was making her feel nauseous.
‘No. Children first.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the children are not heavy. The elephants might be too heavy, and we can’t take any chances. Getting you across is the easy bit.’
There was a mumble of unease from the children, which Grace determined to nip in the bud. She hated heights, but she hated the sergeant more, and she was damned if she was going to be out-braved by him.
‘Come along, children.’ She gathered together the school crocodile and led it towards the trunk. ‘Our turn now. Let’s sing a song. Ruby?’
‘Sam will be angry.’
‘He’s made more than enough noise already. Besides, it will be fun.’
‘London Bridge is falling down, falling down…’
‘Couldn’t you think of a more appropriate one, Ruby?’
‘No.’
They walked down to the trunk in silence. By the time they had got to the edge of the ravine, the elephant men had got a rope across, a handrail. Sam walked across the tree-bridge, Winston pattering along behind him, followed by the Havildar, carrying Joseph on his shoulders and holding Michael’s hand. Most of the girls, all of them older than the boys, didn’t want to look foolish and followed on. Grace occupied herself helping them get a leg-up the smooth side of the trunk, a good few feet taller than her. When it came to Emily’s turn, the girl managed to scrabble up on her own.
Molly refused to cross, point-blank. Grace implored her. She shook her head, her pudding bowl haircut swishing this way and that. She was such a determined child that Grace did not know what to do. The Havildar strolled back across the trunk, slipped down the side, bent down, and whispered into Molly’s ear. The little girl nodded, briefly, and soon the two of them were crossing the ravine, hand in hand.
How on earth did he do that? Grace wondered.
When the last of the girls were up and making the crossing, it was Grace’s turn. Po Net helped her up. Lunging for the rope hand-rail, she steadied herself and started walking. After all the hours in the dim green gloom under the forest canopy, the white glare of the wide open sky played harshly on her eyes. She dared not look down, but the distant sound of the stream bubbling furiously below gave her a chilling idea of just how far she would fall if she lost her balance.
Gunfire, not so far away. A racket of birds of paradise, trailing bright violet tails, lifted up from the bottom of the ravine and came barrelling up towards the tree-bridge. She made to duck but a disembodied voice broke through: ‘Head up, chest out, back straight’. Her father’s advice. Where was he now? What was he doing? She’d last written to him a day before they fled from Rangoon, but she was pretty certain her letter would never have left the city. Had the Whitehall warrior any idea that his plan, that Burma would be safe for his daughter, might not have worked out quite as he had hoped? The absurdity of that thought, terrified as she was, gripping on to the rope hand-rail, 200 feet from a rocky death below, lost in the middle of the jungle in High Burma, with the Japanese Imperial Army within gunshot-sound, all but her made her skip across. Squinting in the sunlight, she focused on a figure in the shimmering heat helping the girls ahead of her down the side of the trunk on the far bank of the ravine: the man with the bandaged head.
Something about the elaborateness of his gallantry sickened her, made her entirely forget where she was. She all but ran the last ten yards along the trunk, and yelled at him: ‘What the bloody hell do you think you are doing?’
‘Lending a hand,’ said Gregory, affecting hurt.
‘Leave the children alone.’ Her voice bore a querulous indignation which she didn’t like but could not help.
‘For God’s sake, Grace, he’s only helping.’ It was Sam. ‘There’s no law against that.’
‘No, I’m not putting up with this. I’ve asked you to keep this man,’ only now did Grace become aware that almost the whole school was staring at her, unkindly, as if she was some kind of madwoman barking out at dangers no else saw, ‘under control.’
‘As I said, he was only helping. I’d ask you to keep a civil tongue in your head for everybody in this party, and that includes Sergeant Gregory.’ The rebuke was all the more telling because of the unusual gentleness, the pity in Sam’s voice, as if he was becoming concerned whether Grace was losing her grip.
She had to suffer her rebuke in silence as the men worked to prepare for the elephants crossing. It was one thing to get a party of orphans across a tree-bridge. Quite different, to get fifty-three elephants across.
Po Toke climbed onto the teak trunk and withdrew from his rucksack a length of sugar beet. Henry VIII’s trunk wafted the airwaves, picked up the scent of the sugar, stood on a side branch and was atop the trunk with all the agility of a circus elephant. Po Toke had to skip across the tree-bridge as nimbly as he could because Henry VIII almost trotted along, heedless of the drop below. Once the lord of the elephants had made the crossing, the oozies seemed more relaxed. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John trundled across, unconcerned. Ragamuffin seemed to dance, Clive crossed dully and Nebuchadnezzar took an age. Each elephant was different. Some would cross with no fuss. Others had to be cajoled, encouraged with commands or bribed with sugar beet or a handful of salt. They were working as fast as they could, but getting fifty-three across, one at a time, was going to take them the best part of an hour. The work occupied the oozies led by Po Toke. Sam and the Havildar could only watch and fret.
‘Havildar!’ squeaked Molly. ‘You promised you would tell me. If I walked across.’
‘Ah, yes.’
‘What did he promise?’ asked Grace.
‘That if I walked across the tree-trunk,’ said Molly, ‘he’d tell me the story of how he lost his fingers.’
The children, sitting in the shade on the far, western side of the ravine, listened, ears agog.
He caressed his moustache with the back of his fist, and started: ‘I was born in the Punjab – this means The Land of Five Rivers – to a family that had fought with the British since the mutiny, back in 1857. I was a boy soldier at sixteen. In the summer of 1917 we sailed from India all the way to Italy. The ship wobbled and I was sick.’
The children laughed, enraptured.
He’d loathed every second of the voyage, staring at the rocking deep blue, fearing torpedo strike or shipwreck at the sight of white caps as the wind freshened to a breeze. The docks at Naples – not normally associated with goodliness – were, to him, nirvana. The moment he crossed the gang-plank, he fell to his knees, kissed the earth and prayed, thanking God for a safe passage. Once the floor beneath his feet didn’t rock, he became his own man again, enchanting his friends in the regiment, the 13th Baluchi Rifles, with a selection of Hindi love songs, sung in a rich piping voice, as the troop train clickerty-clacked up Italy on their way to the Great War.
‘Winter was coming and I was a boy from the plains of the Punjab. I had never seen such snow, so deep, icicles hanging from the little wooden eaves of the railway halts, almost burying the houses as we pulled north. One morning the Havildar of our regiment, an ancient Baluchi, banged open the doors to our carriages and we looked up to see crags, black silhouettes against the rising sun, the Dolomites.
‘It was so cold we slept with the horses. At day break, when the silver-grey night mists still hung in the valleys beneath, we would uncap our big guns, point the muzzles at the mountain tops on the other side of the valley and blast away at the Austrians. They would fire back, sending up plumes of snow into the air, occasionally killing my friends. But this was not the worst thing for us.
‘We did not have proper winter clothing for the cold we faced. One night I felt a pain in my little toe, as if it was on fire. In the morning, coal-black, it snapped off in my fingers like a twig. The following night, the middle finger of my right hand started to burn. Our colonel, an Englishman from Todmorden in Lancashire called Malone, telephoned the Adjutant-General at staff headquarters thirty miles back from the front and demanded proper winter clothes for us. Nothing happened. Our colonel sent telegram after telegram. Still nothing. Then he went down to staff headquarters, saw the Adjutant-General, and asked him to visit the front line. Again, nothing happened. Our colonel returned to staff headquarters, found the Adjutant-General in a restaurant drinking prosecco with two women. He drew his revolver, kidnapped him, drove him back to the foot of the mountains, tied him to a mule, backwards, facing its tail, and brought him all the way up to the snows, the ice-line. In front of all of us, at gun-point, the colonel forced the Adjutant-General to strip off his warm British officer winter clothes until he was all but naked and then the colonel gave them to me, as I was the youngest of them all. The Adjutant-General put on my clothes. He started to shiver, uncontrollably. Then he asked to make a telephone call. We heard him order two hundred British winter uniforms, wool-lined boots, leather gauntlets up from the stores to the ice-line that very day. By this time I had one thumb and two fingers on this left hand and a thumb and half a finger on my right. So that’s how I lost my fingers.’
‘What happened to your colonel?’ asked Emily.
‘The next day the Military Police, the Red Caps, came to take him away. He was to be court-martialled. We all stood up, and we saluted him. The Austrians sent a whizz-bang…’
‘What’s a whizz-bang?’ asked Molly.
‘A shell, like a bomb but from an artillery piece. They go whizz, and then bang. We could tell from the whizz that this one would fly harmlessly over our heads but the Red Caps didn’t know that, and they all ducked. We Indian sepoys remained standing, saluting our brave colonel. He, too, was standing. He told us in Urdu: “There are a lot of idiots in the British Army, but sooner or later, someone stands up and does the proper thing. Remember that. Thank you, carry on.” And then, in English: “Perhaps you might tell these chaps that they can get up now. They’ll catch their death.” Without this man, I would have no fingers at all, so I bless God because I am lucky.’
Grace had never seen the children so silent, so still, so enthralled.
He got up and started organising the elephant train, while Po Toke and the oozies set about getting the last of the calves and their mothers across. The calves’ skittishness made it quite possible that they could tumble from the trunk. Their mothers lined up on the far side of the ravine, babies behind them, trunk hanging on to mother’s tail, and all crossed sweetly, the last two being Mrs Griffiths leading Dopey and Mother leading her baby. As Oomy crossed over to the safety of the west side of the ravine, he appeared to give the watching children a bow.
Sam gave orders for Henry VIII and Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to be led up to the trunk and they hunkered head-down, to shove the great tree over the edge of the ravine. The elephant men were not going to give the Japanese the luxury of their home-made short cut. The hind legs of the five great beasts quivered with strain. It moved barely an inch, if that.
‘What about the rearguard? The Chin?’ Grace asked the Havildar but it was Sam who answered.
‘Got to leave them on the other side. No choice. They know the jungle. They can disappear into it and the Japanese won’t find them. Hopefully, they will find their way round the ravine and catch up with us. Or go home, and wait for us to return to Burma. But we can’t wait, and we can’t leave this bloody tree bridge here. That last burst of gunfire sounded too damn close. I hope these jumbos get a move on.’
A heavy branch, snagging the ground, was ripped free and the trunk began to shift more easily, testament to the immense power of the elephants.
On the far side of the ravine, about two hundred feet downhill from where they had just crossed, there was a rippling through the long elephant grass, higher than a man’s head. A voice – panting, exhausted - shouted: ‘Wait! Wait!’
‘It’s a trick,’ yelled Sergeant Gregory. ‘Everybody get down.’ Grabbing a rifle from an oozie, he ducked prone on to the ground and aimed across the abyss, firing twice.
‘Hold fire! Take cover,’ yelled Sam. Children and adults scrambled to hide behind boulders and stout tree trunks, while the oozies working Henry and the Gospel elephants urged them to push harder, so that the trunk would be over the edge before the Japanese could get to the trunk.
‘Don’t shoot. We’re British!’ The elephant grass waved this way and that, still holding the secret of who was running towards the edge of the ravine.
‘It’s a Jap jitter party,’ shouted Eddie Gregory, reloading.
A very tall British officer emerged from the grass, hands high in the air: ‘Don’t shoot.’
‘Hold fire!’ repeated Sam.
‘It’s a dirty trick,’ roared Gregory, and with his rifle sight on the stranger’s heart, he squeezed the trigger.
‘Hold fire!’
Something kicked hard against Gregory’s gun-arm and the bullet went zinging high into the jungle canopy.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing? Don’t kick me, you silly bitch!’ yelled Gregory, outraged.
‘It’s no trick.’ Grace was not for repenting. ‘I know that man. I’m sure you’ll enjoy meeting him, Sergeant. He’s a magistrate,’ and gave him another kick, no more gentle than the first.
‘Grace, it’s you!’ Hard to pack boyish delight and unbearable longing in a shout that could be heard from the far side of a ravine, but the tall soldier somehow managed it.
‘Mr Peach!’ Grace shouted back and began racing downhill to narrow the gap between them.
Absurd as it was, she found herself giggling, delight and happiness bubbling up inside her. That time they had first met, in the meeting room at Government House, she’d thought he was odd, almost freakish and not a little bit melancholic. No hint then of what she felt for him now. That ghastly time when he was drunk, lobbing billiard balls at the portraits of British Burma’s great and good on the walls – ‘no, Mr Peach, I think you’re a damned fool.’
But it was Mr Peach who had warned her to evacuate the children to India, Mr Peach who had halted the demolition of the great bridge across the Irrawaddy so that they could pass, and here he was, still a damned fool, but alive.
Alive? She winced. And the Jemadar? Was she so shallow a flibbertigibbet that she’d forgotten the one man she had truly loved so quickly? The Jemadar was dead, yes, but that was nothing to do with Mr Peach. As he staggered out of the elephant grass, she could see that he was grinning from ear to ear. A good man. No, better – rarer than that – a good man in a dark time, and his survival, through all the hardships of Burma at war, was worth smiling about.
Seven more wraiths followed Peach out of the elephant grass, pitifully thin, sun-blasted, trapped on the wrong side of the ravine, exhaustion written on their faces, the only clue that they were soldiers the rifles slung over their shoulders.
‘Oh, Christ!’ yelled Sam. ‘We thought… we thought… you were the Japs.’
‘Oh, no.’
Grace stopped in her tracks and swung around and stared and became horribly aware that a second awful mistake might be about to happen.
Sam ascended the slope to where Gregory was standing. ‘Are you deaf?’
‘I thought they were the Japs. So did you.’
‘I told you to hold fire. Twice, three times.’
‘Better safe than sorry.’ Gregory gave Sam a cold eye.
‘No, better obey orders than kill our chaps. From the state of some of those men they could be dead within a day or two. If they do die, that’s because you were too bloody trigger-happy and opened fire before we could work out who the bloody hell they were. Give me that rifle.’
Truculently, Gregory gave Sam the weapon.
‘Nobody opens fire unless I say so. When I say “hold fire” I mean it. Do you understand?’
Nothing from Gregory.
‘Do you understand?’ repeated Sam.
‘Yes,’ said Gregory, turning his back on Sam as he brushed himself down.
‘I don’t want to see you with a gun in your hands again.’ He walked away from Gregory, down towards where Grace was stood across the ravine from Peach.
‘Stop! Stop the elephants!’ screamed Grace.
The oozies urging the big tuskers on to push the great tree over the cliff were higher up the valley and did not heed her shouts. Over the roar from the falling water below they could not possibly hear her. Gregory, closer to the oozies than Grace or Sam or the Havildar, waved them encouragement, to keep on with what they were doing.
‘Stop! Stop the elephants!’ Her shout ended in a sobbing whimper. ‘Stop! For God’s sake, stop!’
Their massive skulls pressed against the cylinder of teak, the elephants shoved again, spurts of dust rising from where their heels were grinding against the earth. What happened next took place with unconscionable slowness, like scenes from a movie shown by a faltering projector. The great tree began to tip over the edge of the ravine, inch by inch. The elephants gave one last burst of power, the balance of weight teetered and the tree accelerated into the ravine, great boughs breaking against the rock walls, generating a splintering roar which echoed around the hills as it crashed down to the rocks below and landed with a giant thud.
The absurdly tall Englishman walked up to the edge of the ravine, looked down at the bridge that was a bridge no longer and fell to his knees, burying his face in his hands. The watchers on the far bank looked on, aghast, silent but for one.
‘Oh, Bertie,’ cried Grace. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Pulling himself up, he shook his head once with aching slowness, then fixed the grimmest of smiles on his face. He retrieved a book from his knapsack, tore out a blank page and wrote something on it in pencil. Turning his back on the watchers from the western side of the ravine, he did something with the paper.
He stood up and walked to the very edge of the ravine, in his hands a paper plane, and threw it towards Grace. The plane flew straight and true for some seconds, darted this way and that, and then started to fall down towards the torrent far below. But at the last moment it rose up, powered by some unseen uplift, and cleared the rock edge, landing in the grass at Grace’s feet.
She picked up the plane and opened it out. On one side were a few lines of Japanese writing, indecipherable to her. Puzzled, she looked across at him. He motioned for her to look at the other side. And there, written in English, were these words:
Ono no Komachi, 9th century
Holding the paper plane to her lips, she kissed it.
On the far side of the ravine, a ninth man, Sergeant-Major Barr, had caught up with the others. ‘We’d better move, sir. It’s a bit fooking exposed here. Come on, let’s hop it.’
But Peach stood stock-still, staring at Grace.
‘We’re sitting ducks here. We’ve got to fook off, sir.’
Gregory walked out of the shade. He was the best part of two hundred feet across from Peach, his features washed out by the acid brightness of the sun, but even so there was something about him that jolted Peach.
‘Sir…’ said the sergeant-major, anxiety giving an edge to his ordinarily flat tone.
A file lying open on Peach’s desk back in Rangoon. A photograph, a striking, child-demon face and blond hair – and beneath it, typewritten, double-spaced, the details.
‘Them Jap buggers are on our tails,’ Barr fretted, ‘and if we don’t move sharpish, they’ll have us.’
Peach had become pretty familiar with reports complaining about the poor quality of some of the troops sent out from Britain to this forgotten war, but even so, that particular file had offended his sense that the Empire’s military necessity should not override every consideration. What was the name? Damn his memory. He’d forget where he’d left his nose next. Name of a bishop. No, a pope…Pius? No. Constantine. No. Gregory. That was the man’s name. What had he done again? A custodial sentence, yes, but for what? It was lost, one line of detail in tens of thousands of typewritten files, blurred and fuzzy, a few months away in time, a world away, standing in this jungle, on the wrong side of hope.
‘Oh, Christ!’ The most beautiful woman in the whole world, separated from him by a bloody ravine, was in grave danger. So were they all.
Peach yelled: ‘That man – he’s a murderer!’ but he was drowned out by a metallic roar. Overhead, a fat bough of a banyan tree trembled and fell to the ground, shredded by a mortar. A second mortar landed with a sharp clang against an outcrop of rock, a third whizzed into the greenery, sending a troup of macaque monkeys screaming and gibbering away across the tree-tops. On the far side of the ravine, the elephant men and the orphans were vanishing into the jungle.
‘Murderer!’ screamed Peach, but a fresh hail of mortar shells crashed in, rendering his warning fatuous.
‘Stop fannying about, you idiot, you’re going to get fooking killed,’ roared the sergeant-major. ‘Move, you daft bugger.’
He physically grabbed Peach and pushed him back into the elephant grass.
The elephant men harried the children and elephants to move as fast as they could until the immediate danger of the Japanese mortars was safely behind them. Once the pace had slowed down a little, Sam walked back down the line of elephants and found Grace.
‘I’m going on ahead with ten men, no elephants, so that we don’t have any more unpleasant surprises like the ravine,’ he told hero. ‘The Havildar will be in charge of the main party. I’ve told that idiot Gregory to leave you well alone. That’s the best I can do for now. But, for your part, stop going on about him.’
Grace nodded, not trusting in her judgment to challenge him.
Sam’s scouting party climbed up and up, ascending three, four thousand feet, the jungle thinning dramatically as they entered a new world of Alpine meadow, sparsely covered with brush, often treeless. Six thousand feet high, maybe more.
No man’s-land, a void, where immense foothills higher than any mountain in Scotland ran down from the Himalayas and formed the backbone which split India from Burma. No one had ever built a road here, no one had bothered to cross it and certainly no one had ever bothered to map it. Marco Polo had crossed the Gobi Desert centuries ago and the Sahara was like Piccadilly Circus compared to this. Well, Sam conceded that he might be over-egging the pud a bit. That was the trouble with spending too much time without company of your own kind. You started chattering on to yourself. Stop that talk, Sam, stop it now.
They marched on.
Until just before sundown, a full stop. Dead ahead lay a wall of rock, tinting red in the dying light, God knows how many miles long and impossibly high. After the Great War, he’d spent a month’s leave in Rome. The Coliseum was just short of two hundred feet high. This rock was maybe two and a half times that, perhaps 500 feet. From what he could see through his binoculars, the rock was sheer. No man could climb it, certainly no animal. Making a tree-bridge across the ravine had bought them half a day – he was pretty sure that the Japanese didn’t have the professional lumberjacks amongst their men that he had – but they weren’t far behind the main party led by the Havildar. To the south, the Japanese. To the north, more Japanese, pressing on towards Imphal. They heard the artillery duels in the neighbouring valleys more clearly now they were high above them, making short, sharp bangs, more snappy than thunder. It was plain as a pikestaff to Sam that the war was catching up with them. Their only route was straight ahead, due west, but they weren’t tunnel men.
And elephants can’t fly.
He could be wrong, but it looked as though they were finished, that his dream of taking his jumbos out of Burma by a route that didn’t exist was dead. It had been a good dream while it lasted, but soon it would turn into a bloody nightmare.
A thin chimney of smoke rose above the jungle a few hundred feet away. He ordered a halt, and complete silence, and took Po Toke with him, crawling through the undergrowth to discover a few huts in a clearing by a stream, abandoned. They got up and walked towards the smoke and found a pot of stew still bubbling over an open fire.
On the edge of the clearing, something moved, a blur, vanishing into the jungle. Sam called out to whoever it was in Burmese or Urdu, but he remembered that someone had once told him that up here, the Naga people spoke something quite different, half-Thibetan, half-Stone-Age-ish.
The elephant men were on edge. They didn’t much like the idea of taking over someone else’s village. None of them had been this far north in their lives. Come to think of it, no one he knew had. They were uneasy about the Naga people, believing that they still hunted heads, despite the official line from the Governor in Rangoon – not that there was a Governor in Rangoon any more – that cannibalism was a thing of the past.
‘No shrivelled heads here,’ said Sam to Po Toke, the others listening in. The claim fell on silence. His elephant men weren’t having any of it. The power of their traditions was not to be taken lightly, and out of respect for them, he slogged upstream another quarter of a mile, pitching camp not far from the base of the rock. It loomed over them, blocking out the stars of the western sky.
Sam hadn’t shared his pessimism with Po Toke, still less the other Burmese, but it was obvious that the rock spelt trouble. His men hurried to pitch hammocks and make a camp before the light died.
As night fell, it grew shockingly cold. The chill got to the Chin and the oozies, bringing out malarial fevers in some of his chaps. Long ago they’d abandoned blankets and warm clothes, since it was ludicrously hot down in the jungle, but up here, you could almost smell the snow blowing in the wind from the north, from the Himalayas.
And now they had to climb a bloody mountain of rock and that looked impossible. Just before the light died to the west, he studied the rock with his binoculars, once again.
No way out.
Twenty-two years he’d spent in the jungle in Upper Burma, and it had taught him one thing above all: never take the jungle for granted. During the Great War he had served in the Camel Corps in the Transjordan, doing his utmost to keep the ill-tempered ships of the desert healthy in the service of the British as the Ottoman Empire crumbled to dust. Sam was a natural when dealing with animals. He’d find foot-rot in one camel missed by the vet, soothe a red-eyed beast famous for being obnoxious, dangerous even to any European master, disappear for days and then reappear with a score more semi-trained beasts he’d tracked down in the desert. Back at their base in East Jerusalem, he had spent hours with the Bedouin and a translator, soaking in their knowledge of how a thirsty camel can taste water on the wind, how many days a camel could go without food and water, what were their tolerances before they gave up the ghost. Soon, word got out that if you needed a camel train for a journey into the desert, there was no point in leaving until Sam Metcalf had checked out the beasts, adjusted their saddles, talked to the Bedouin, planned the route from well to well. But, best of all, you’d better take Sam with you.
At the end of the war, just as they were winding down the Camel Corps, news of a job came up in Upper Burma, handling elephants. Sam knew nothing about them, apart from the fact they had bigger ears, were occasionally more dangerous but on the whole wiser and more intelligent than camels. At least, they didn’t spit. He got the job on the strength of his references from the Camel Corps and he sailed for Rangoon, and then took a stern-wheeler up the Irrawaddy into the jungle. At that time in the early twenties the Burma Teak Corporation pretty much owned all the teak in the country, as of right. All they had to do was to get it down to the sawmills of Mandalay and Rangoon, though that wasn’t quite as easy as it sounded.
High up in the forests, the loggers would bring the teak crashing down, great monsters of trees. Using hand saws seven feet long, they would hack off branches, reducing the tree to a series of roughly smooth sections, twenty or thirty feet long. Enter the elephants. They would push, shove or drag the logs tumbling into dry riverbeds, pointing sweetly downstream, not blocking the flow. Come the monsoon, the rains would turn a sandy riverbed into a raging torrent in a few hours, violent with energy, lifting the great logs as if they were as light as lily-pads, and sending them floating down a series of bigger and bigger tributaries. Once they entered the larger rivers, the Corporation’s flotilla of barges would capture the logs, lash them to each other to make enormous floating rafts, then nudge them downstream to the sawmills. From the moment a tree was felled to its floating to the sawmill in Rangoon could take a year. Or four. When you had the timber rights for the whole country, time didn’t matter that much.
None of this could happen in the road-less wastes of jungle were it not for the elephants and their extraordinary relationship with man. Immense strength, tamed by guile and goodness. Sam had got to know his animals so well that a famous man-killer like Rungdot – Henry VIII was how the kids called him – in musht, trusted him enough to allow him to pierce an abscess the size of a football with a hammer and a knife. One powerful strike and the boil was burst, then wiped clean with disinfectant, all the while the elephant eyeing him attentively. Had Sam dithered or faltered, the beast could have knocked him over and stamped on his head in a flash of time. But Rungdot had trusted him. Soon the great tusker was back at work, nuzzling 20 ton monster logs of teak into line as if they were matchsticks.
Twenty-two years, the prime of his life. He’d married, had children – they were safe and sound in India, God bless them – but still he kept on going back, when a chap of his years could easily have got a desk job, running an inkwell and a typewriter in Simla or some damnfool place. But now his hubris had come to haunt him. How was he going to explain to the others, especially the children, that they were road-blocked by a lump of rock? That it was now very likely that they would never make it out to India.
He reflected on what High Burma had taught him.
That fear of a nat – a jungle spirit – could kill a man, as surely as a shot to the heart.
That elephants had real intelligence.
And that men were stupid and cruel to one another, and to creatures too. Which was why he’d spent so much of his time alone, apart from his dog and the Burmese oozies and the elephants, which wasn’t alone at all, really.
But it turned out that he could still be surprised, surprised by the speed and ferocity of the Japanese attack, surprised by the chaos and, yes, the lack of the right stuff from the British forces, and lately surprised by a bloody Hants and Dorset bus arriving in the middle of his jungle, crammed full of kids and their schoolmarm to boot.
The jungle had played perhaps one last trick on him. A bloody great big lump of rock just where he hadn’t been expecting it. An owl hooted somewhere close by, and Sam twitched. A real owl? Or a Japanese jitter party? His men were too few to put out pickets to guard their approaches. He relied on his jungle skills and the antennae of his men, but neither was infallible.
Once, a bull elephant that had already killed three men charged at him. Armed only with a one-chambered elephant gun, he’d taken aim, fired, but the round was dud. He’d broken the shot-gun, extracted the dud, rammed in a fresh round, taken aim and shot the bull. It slumbered to a slow fox-trot, swayed and collapsed a single yard from Sam. After that, word got round High Burma that Sam Metcalf had nerves of steel. If a hoot from an owl could turn him into a scared little bunny rabbit, his nerves were shot.
The reddening sky cast the rock into dark shadow. If the worst came to the worst and there was no way through, then he wondered how he would break it to the main party, travelling two days’ march behind him now. They could try and sneak past the Japanese, but he feared the elephants would be shot up, and the children would be helpless if forced to make it to India on their own, having to carry what food they had left. Many of them, the little ones, and that little lad who was a bit simple, they would die.
Oh, Christ, perhaps they should never have tried it.
One of the chaps came to Sam to explain that they’d pretty much run out of food. Sam had an answer to that – and sod the Japanese. The echoes would fool them. A few hundred yards down from their camp ran a branch of the stream they had been climbing up, which filled out into a deep pool. Hurrying to catch the available light, he scampered down, fetched his knapsack off his back and took out a hand-grenade, pulled out the pin and lobbed the grenade into the still water.
Bang! A great whoosh of water, soaking him, enough noise to wake the dead in Thibet, the sound of the explosion echoing against the rock. As the water in the pool settled, a dozen perch, two or three a respectable size and one enormous, ugly thing, with long barbels extruding from its mouth, like the tendrils of a tramp’s beard, floated belly-up, on the surface. Very satisfying. He gave permission for the men to light a fire. True, the Japs were out there in the jungle, somewhere. But there was another jeopardy, that his men, over-worked, exhausted, half of them coming down with malaria, under-nourished and cold to the marrow, wouldn’t be able to push on, if they didn’t have some fresh hot food and a warm fire through the night. He’d picked a heavily wooded spot in a cleft in the mountain for their camp, so the chances of anyone seeing the fire through the tree cover from far away was dim. But the bang had been loud enough. Still, lobbing the odd hand-grenade in a pond remained, to Sam, the finest way to fish. No messing about with trying to put a worm on a hook. Bugger that.
His Burmese seemed happy as Larry, roasting the fish on a hand-made spit, laughing and making a little too much noise. Once more, he weighed the risk of being caught napping by a Japanese scouting party. What were the odds? Hard to judge. They were on the very far edge of the Emperor of Japan’s domain, taking a route which, it turned out, made no military sense whatsoever.
He loved his elephants, missed them more than it would appear proper to say. In the old days he’d hunted, killed elephants for game too, something he now regretted. These days, after all his time working with the great beasts, he put special store by the human-elephant relationship, but he wasn’t a bloody Buddhist. Jungle leeches? He’d exterminate them, quick as a flash.
Somebody had had to scout the route to India ahead and he had been best-placed to do so, to shoulder the responsibility. If someone had to make a decision and it ended up being a terrible mistake, then it was better him than anyone else. They had only one shot at it. A mistake like walking into a slab of rock 500 feet high. But he also knew that a little part of why he had elected to go on the scouting mission was his dislike of people, of getting tangled up in the lives of others.
Take Grace. A woman of stunning beauty, but half-crackers too, raving on about how that wounded sergeant had shot her Jemadar. Hmm– maybe there was something in it. He’d given orders to the Havildar to keep the sergeant out of her hair and to keep an eye on him at all times. But he was sceptical, suspected that she might have got the wrong end of the stick. The Jemadar could well have been felled by a stray bullet. Somebody else could sort that one out, when they got to India.
If they ever got there.
Po Toke approached with roast fish, a little black around the edges, wrapped in a shiny banana leaf.
‘Fish, but no chips,’ said Po Toke in his passable English and the two men laughed. Sam had explained the weird culinary pleasures of the British to the Burman long ago. Sam hadn’t had fish and chips in a very long time. It was funny what you missed, what you had fantasies about. Not lobsters or oysters or a great salmon, but simple fish and chips wrapped up in yesterday’s Western Daily Post, a bottle of beer and, as the sun dipped, the flash of the nearest lighthouse. No chance of that here.
He ate. The cooked fish was good, the first proper meal, not out of a tin, that he’d had in ages. He was more hungry than he’d realised, and when he’d eaten, he slumped into his hammock, cursing their luck. All this way, but no way out.
In the morning: ice-grime.
A coating of frost covered their bedding, their faces, their feet where they protruded out of their blankets. The Burmese had never seen anything like it, tiny crystals of coldness, which burnt the tongue. Sam told them about snow, so deep it could bury a man, and they looked at him as if he had turned idiot.
They shivered violently as they rolled up their hammocks and prepared for the day’s work. Sam divided up the party into five groups of two, and set off to explore the rockface. The fittest, youngest ones were sent off to the furthest extremities, north and south, while Sam and Po Toke had given themselves the task of examining the rock immediately in front of them. To the north for two miles, nothing. They retraced their steps and found, almost immediately in front of the camp, a landslip tumbling down towards them, strewn with boulders and overgrown with lianas and bamboo.
He doubted whether he could get up the fifty feet of the landslip, let alone an elephant. Po Toke, who knew what elephants could do, better than any man alive, shook his head. But still, they had no choice but to explore it.
They spent two long hours hacking through the undergrowth to climb forty feet or so. The last ten feet were almost perpendicular, Sam having to jump from one stony outcrop to another, but eventually he hauled himself up onto a goat track, invisible from below, which slowly ascended, running to the south-west around the side of the rockface. Gingerly, Sam and Po Toke followed the path upwards. Much of the time, it was ten feet wide, maybe more, but they came to a narrow point, just twelve inches wide, curving around a bend in the rock, the path out of view, as if ending in the sky itself. Sam made himself go first, edging his way along, facing the wall of rock, eyes on the path ahead, not daring to look down to the drop below.
Four feet along and the path narrowed an inch or two. A spasm of fear gripped him. Going back now would be more dreadful. His legs froze, his arms extended, fingers scrabbling and flailing to gain some traction on the smooth-as-soap surface. Despite himself, he looked down the sheer wall beneath his feet to the jungle far below, as green as a bottle, welcoming, seductive, deadly.
They had no hope. The path was barely wide enough to allow one man, impossibly narrow for an elephant, let alone fifty-three. The smallest calf would be knocked off the goat-track by the fatness of his belly.
To the north, a mass of clouds piled up, punctured by the sun. The wind, cold and fresh from Thibet, soughed over the rocks. Hard – no, impossible – to judge the distances made by sounds. Was that the soft crump-crump of the big guns? And, not so far off, the fire-crackers of small-arms fire? Or thunder and lightning from fifty miles away?
Out loud, Sam heard himself say: ‘Get a grip, old man,’ and he straightened his back and started moving, imagining that he was about to plunge into the sea off Cornwall. Five, six, seven steps, a bend – and the path widened to a large space, covered by an overhang of rock, shading him from the sun, almost dark, as spacious and restful as a hay barn. Giddy with suppressed fear, he made for the ground furthest from the drop and pressed his back against the rock, luxuriating in its solidity.
Forcing himself back to the cliff edge, waiting for Po Toke, he tried to affect an air of nonchalance, but in his heart he had to deal with facts.
There was no way out.
They had lost. He’d have to shoot the elephants.