War is all about waiting, thought Peach. Here he was, waiting by the river, waiting for the rebel oozies to return with ten elephants and Eric, alive or dead. Of course, they could betray him, sell him out to the Japanese. But one million rupees was an awful lot of money, far more than the Japanese would ever give them. Too much, thought Mr Peach. If they ever get to India, there will be a terrible argy-bargy with some revolting specimen sitting behind a desk. Well, what could they do? Sack him? Lock him up? Not hand over the money?

Ah, yes, they would do that, all right. But he would write out a receipt for the elephants and give it to the oozies, and keep a copy, and find them the best lawyer in the whole of Bengal to fight their case, and phone up the newspapermen to tell them all about it. On the bright side, he would have turned up with ten elephants and they were worth something, especially in this war. And if a million rupees was the cost of getting his chaps safely out to India, fair enough. And to get word to Grace, that she was in mortal danger. How was she doing? he wondered. She was probably in India already, draining a gin and tonic and relaxing in a cosy chair, flirting with some new victim.

Maybe not.

All he could do was wait.

 

It was amazing how quietly they could move, these great beasts, through the jungle, even though it was quite pitch-black. The first and second filed passed him, but the third one stopped and he found himself being lifted up high onto the animal’s naked back, joining another man sitting behind the oozie.

‘Ooh, look what the fucking cat’s dragged home,’ said a familiar voice.

‘How is your head, Sergeant-major?’

‘It hurts. Some bastard whacked me hard enough to send me to Kingdom Come. But here I am. Bloody hell, I don’t know how long this is going on for, but it’s bloody uncomfortable sitting here, legs akimbo.’

‘Sssh, Sergeant-major, sssh.’

Peach hissed ‘Sheffield United’.

Nothing moved.

Then a voice growled: ‘It’s Sheffield bloody Wednesday, yon idiot. I almost blew your head off.’

Their little group of nine men were reunited, but they had the river to cross, a ferocious boiling mass of water plummeting down from the mountains. The oozies had had to abandon all the elephant gear when they vanished from the Japanese camp so the animals could not be tethered together. However, they lined up the elephants, two-by-two, in five rows. Just before they were about to cross, one of the elephants whinnied in fear, and tried to pull away. Dawn was beginning to break, and everyone knew that the Japanese would very soon realise that something was wrong – and that the only direction the oozies would have taken was to the west. There was no time to lose. Desperately, the oozie urged the panicking elephant to calm down, whispering into his ear until finally the animal turned back and, an immense mass of bone and muscle, the ten elephants and their human cargo began to ford the river, the force of the current threatening to knock them sideways at every step. The light was brightening with every second – brighter out in mid-stream where the jungle canopy didn’t over-hang - and Peach felt horribly exposed. The water leapt up the flanks of the elephant carrying him and the sergeant-major, soaking them, but still the great beast plodded on. Two thirds of the way across was another islet. Bamboo parted, and they heard a high-pitched squeak as a tiny baby elephant emerged.

The bigger elephants appeared to cluck and mother him. A she-elephant wrapped her trunk around the little one’s head, and soon the whole caravan was swimming across the final third of the river. Here, the current was at its fastest and most treacherous but they made the bank, slogged up its steep side and were safe, for the time being. All they had to do now was keep one step ahead of the Japanese, and find Grace and the others before it was too late. From the direction of the sun, Peach reckoned they had saved maybe half a day’s march on where he thought the rest of the party might be. But there was no hurrying the elephants. They ploughed through the jungle, steady and slow, the little one squeaking and parping, calling out to its lost mother.

Two hours’ marching later on, there was a great crash and splintering of bamboo, and Mother burst through. The reunion of Mother and baby was one of the most touching things that Peach had ever seen, the old lady’s trunk ruffling the red-brown fuzz of hair on his back, then entwining her trunk with his. Burbling with joy, baby plugged into her teat.

‘Booger me, that’s a story to tell the bairns,’ said the sergeant-major, and Peach could not but agree.

 Soon they met up with a great Sikh with crippled hands. He was delighted to see Mother and baby reunited, but his face darkened when Peach asked him the whereabouts of Grace and Gregory. The Sikh led the way, Peach by his shoulder, pounding through the jungle. Strangely, Mother and Oomy kept up, as if they too shared Peach’s worst fears.

‘No.’ The sound came from the survivor, soft, almost beyond the edge of hearing. She dropped down and knelt, holding the lifeless head in her hands, uselessly.

‘I told you, didn’t I?’ said Gregory plaintively.

‘Oh, no,’ she repeated, kissing the hair on top of the victim’s head.

‘Your decision, love.’

The good and the beautiful die, and the people left alive know only one thing for certain, that they do not deserve to breathe, that life is some absurd and cruel gift, granted by a malign idiot. Not that she would live long. Gregory had her in his power, and she knew that soon he would become bored and shoot her too. And there was nothing she could do to stop him. For him, killing was as simple and natural and necessary as breathing. Someday, the good people might catch up with him but so far Gregory’s luck had proved stronger than justice. In front of him, human decency seemed to shrivel and die.

He raised the tommy gun straight at her chest and started to smile. An evil smile. Was this to be her last ever thought?

There was a grey blur, a thud, a sickening crack, the sound of a branch snapping in two. The jungle, for once still, the quiet broken by gargling from a blood-frothed throat; the mouth spurting bright red. She hated Gregory more than she had ever hated anyone or anything in her whole life, but she could not but wince.

Flies immediately settled on the blood-flecked mouth, black, green, iridescent; beyond them, fuzzy, out-of-focus, men, and then one man hurtling towards them, his absurdly long legs bounding through the jungle, other British soldiers following him, then more elephants, ridden by oozies she did not recognise at all.

Peach took in the scene, Grace nuzzling the schoolgirl with a bullet through her brain, surreally beautiful in death, the sergeant on the ground, face down, dead, gripping a tommy gun in one hand, a letter with a swastika on it close by, the paper rustling in the light morning breeze, spotted with blood. A few yards off, a baby elephant suckling his mother, the latter’s eyes blinking in quiet ecstasy, a splash of red on one of her front feet.

‘Grace!’ There was something intense about the way he said her name.

She kissed the forehead of the dead girl.

‘Christ, Grace, I’m so sorry.’

‘He should have shot me. He had no reason to kill her.’

‘Grace, it’s not your fault.’

Kneeling, Peach held her, as she held the dead girl, locking together the living and the dead.

After a time Peach motioned to the killer on the jungle floor, his bloody mouth already black with flies.

‘How?’

‘Mother,’ said Grace.

‘What?’

‘The mother elephant. She knocked him down and I heard the sound of his spine breaking.’

‘Why?’

Grace explained ‘We’d been climbing out of a riverbed. I believe Gregory deliberately cut the cradle they were using to haul the baby out of the river. He fell back into the water and disappeared. Mother got her own back.’

‘No.’ The story affronted Peach’s sceptical intelligence.

Mother nuzzled her baby, as peaceably as any living thing.

‘Is she capable of revenge?’

‘Yes, Bertie, I do believe she is. Gregory did wrong by her baby. That’s all.’

The elephant men started digging two graves, one for the killer, one for his sometime lover. They buried the two bodies far apart, Emily in a little dip, open to the sky, kissed by sunlight, with a view of the setting sun to the west; Gregory in a dank bog, the shallowest of graves, the big toe of his right foot, blue-grey, peeping through the soil. Two bits of wood tied together made a cross for Emily; nothing for Gregory.

Over Emily’s grave, Peach said the Lord’s Prayer in a dull, official’s voice. As he did so, Grace wept soundlessly; Ruby sobbed Emily’s name out loud again and again, shrieking, until the Havildar gently hugged her into silence. The other children stood mute.

Then they left.

They walked in silence for hours.

But eventually the rhythm of the journey took over, and besides, Peach had his duty to learn what the enemy was planning. In late afternoon they stumbled across a fossilised oyster-bed, a thousand miles from the sea.

They stared at the coils of rock while Peach summoned up the courage to raise the subject of the letter with the swastika on it.

‘That letter. It was from Bose. Have you any more?’

‘About a dozen.’

‘Bloody hell. How on God’s earth did you get hold of this stuff, here, in the middle of the Burmese jungle? It’s from Berlin. Bose is in Berlin. Of all the places on earth, what’s it doing here?’

‘Long story.’

‘Grace, I know you think I’m a bloody fool but I happen to be an Intelligence Officer and I can’t just produce this and they ask, “Where did you get it?” and I say, “Long story”. It just won’t do.’

As they walked on, she told him all of it, her love affair with the Jem, how he had confessed to her that he had been a Jiff, his horror at discovering the true ambitions of the Japanese, giving her the letters, how Gregory had killed him at the ferry crossing on the Chindwin and how eventually Gregory had found out about them from Emily and stolen them.

‘He called the Jem a traitor.’

‘The Indian chap on the motorbike, escorting the bus? Crossed the Irrawaddy with you?’

‘Yes, that’s him.’

‘I remember thinking… These letters, they are pure gold. I’ll recommend the Jem for a medal. Posthumous, of course, so it won’t make a damn bit of difference to him, but his family might appreciate it.’

‘I’m not quite sure they will, Bertie.’

‘Oh.’

‘His grandfather is in jail.’

‘One of ours?’

‘Yes.’

 ‘The Jem will get his medal. They can always throw it back at us. I probably would.’

Two scouts from Sam’s party found them. With the help of the scouts, the elephant party arrived at the foot of the rock in the last hour before sunset.

Sam was struck dumb by their news, the murder of Emily, the killing of Gregory. He closed his eyes and held his head in his hands for a time.

‘I let you down,’ he told Grace.

‘Sam, we would all of us be dead without you. It’s no one’s fault. Or rather, it’s all of our faults.’

He was overjoyed to see that Peach had brought with him ten more elephants. But he had news of his own and it was grim.

‘We can pass, but not the elephants. The track’s not wide enough. We’re going to have to abandon the elephants. Or risk losing them to the Japanese. Or shoot them.’

Grace asked to borrow his binoculars. The rock glowed a darkening pink with the dying of the light.

‘Sandstone,’ she said.

‘So?’

Close by, an outcrop of rock punched through the green mattress of the jungle floor. Grace asked, ‘May I borrow your knife?’

‘Yes, but what are you doing?’

‘This rock is sandstone. Watch.’

She took the heavy dah, raised it over her head and slashed down into the side of the rock. It didn’t bounce off, as Sam expected, but bit into the rock, surprisingly deeply. She pulled the knife out, and slashed again, at a different angle. Three more cuts and a lump of rock fell away, leaving a rough bite out of the rock, like a quarter-moon.

‘I didn’t teach all that geography for nothing,’ said Grace. ‘You can carve sandstone.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘You can sculpt it, carve it, shape it. We can shape the rock so that the elephants can pass.’

‘What a bloody marvellous example of the fair sex you are.’

 ‘It will be as hard to work with as frozen butter.’

‘You bloody marvel. You bloody marvellous girl. If I weren’t so old, I’d kiss you. Havildar! Havildar! Where’s that bloody Sikh? Havildar, get twenty men with dahs, now, and lights, torches. We’ll work through the night.’

‘Me too,’ said Grace.

‘But you’re just a girl.’ Sam regretted saying it as soon as he had opened his mouth. ‘I thought you might be a little afraid.’ She gave the elephant man such a look of scorn. ‘Yes, of course you will. I don’t know what I was thinking.’

‘Miss Collins isn’t afraid of a Bengal Tiger,’ said the Havildar, wiggling his two-and-a-half fingers.

The moon rose behind them them as they clambered up the rock, framing a tusker against its silvery disc. ‘Elephant Moon,’ said Grace, and brushed her hand against Peach’s.

They laboured as the wind hissed and whistled, carving the sandstone. When the moon sank, they carried on working by feel and touch, rather than seeing, occasionally lighting small fires which cast eerie shadows against the rock. To one side was a chasm, unseen, black, to the other, the rockface at its narrowest. They chipped away with jungle knives and sharp-edged rocks. As dawn broke, the grey light revealed their work.

‘What do you think?’ asked Grace.

 ‘You might be able to squeeze a thinnish pig, the runt of the litter, along here,’ said Peach. ‘But there’s not enough room for an elephant.’

After they were relieved by a fresh roster of elephant men, Sam sought out Peach.

‘The rearguard.’

‘Is there one?’

‘No. We kind of mislaid it, back at that ravine.’

‘We’ll handle that,’ said Peach.

‘Get some rest for an hour or two. And then–’

‘Five miles down the track?’

‘Yes. Good luck.’

Grace and Peach began the descent back to the camp. When they reached the jungle floor they walked off the main path for a distance and came to sit on a mossy bank to catch their breath. Sunlight cast threads of golden light against the higher treetops, while rags of mist still drifted this way and that, drawing a curtain between them and the world. It was the first time they had been alone together since they had met at Government House in Rangoon, when he had been obnoxiously drunk.

‘I feel so guilty,’ said Grace, ‘so guilty to be alive.’

‘You shouldn’t.’

‘I didn’t used to believe in evil. But I do now.’

‘Yes. There doesn’t seem to be another explanation. I still don’t quite believe that an elephant deliberately killed a man. They seem such gentle creatures.’

 ‘They’re gentle, that’s true, Bertie. But they’re more like us than you think. They joke around, they get angry, they remember.’

He fell silent. Sunlight slid down the tree trunks, burning off the mist, igniting the light in her eyes, the oval beauty of her face framed against the dank green-blackness of the jungle behind her.

An awkwardness between them.

‘Did you love him, the Jemadar, very much?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’

He was soon to go back down the track, towards Burma, towards the Japanese. He might never come back, he might die like all the others, the hanged planter, the refugees by the roadside, Miss Furroughs, Allu, the Jemadar and Emily.

Part of her was utterly afraid, afraid that this love too would end with a bullet in the throat. Did she love Peach? Not as much as she should, as she had loved the Jem. But there was something pitiful about his ‘oh’ – so full of frustrated desire and unquenched lust and human need that touched her.

‘Come here, you damned fool.’ Her fingers lightly brushing his shoulders, running down his chest, undoing the buttons of his shirt. The touch of her fingers on his skin made him shudder, as if she had whipped him with an electric live wire, and the aching hunger of his desire was matched by her unfathomable lightness of spirit, masking the guilt rippling through her.

When they were done he rolled off her and lay on his back and started to laugh, a rich deep sound, like a big Atlantic wave crashing into a shingly beach.

‘What?’ She was a little taken back, a trifle angry.

‘I’ve dreamt about this, about us making love, about you and me, a thousand times. Since that very first time.’

‘There was a lizard on the wall. I had come to complain about a man reading Mein Kampf.’

‘A Burmese in a suit. Wearing glasses. Great description.’

‘You still haven’t explained. Why laugh?’

‘Well, after all that effort, chasing you around Rangoon and up the length of Burma, and all the people we’ve lost, I finally get to make love to you. This is the greatest moment in my entire life.’

‘So why are you laughing?’

‘Because I am lying in elephant dung.’

And when he put a hand underneath his bottom and it came out with a handful of tangy elephant muck she started to laugh too, lost in the pure absurdity of the moment. Right then, she began to believe that Peach could be her man.

An hour later she woke up to find him dressed and ready to go.

‘Rearguard duty. No problem. I’m sure the Japanese have given up long ago.’

‘The truth?’

‘They don’t give up very easily. But fingers crossed, they’ve gone.’

She kissed him hungrily, then they hurried down to the main elephant camp where the children and the oozies eyed them with comic knowingness. Peach and his Sergeant-major left to head back down their track, east, him turning to her and waving shyly just before he disappeared from view. For the first time in a long time she closed her eyes and made a prayer, to the God of Love, that, of all the thousands who had died on the road of this terrible journey, Bertie Peach would make it back, whole.

It was hard, exhausting work, sawing and chopping, levering out a few inches of rock at a time. But the elephant men knew what was at stake and they were relentless. At times, their jungle knives would snap in two, at others the wind, soughing down from the Himalayas, would gather force and they were compelled to lie flat and grip the rock lest they be blown over the side to a certain death hundreds of feet below.

The slenderest of eclipses grew and grew as the elephant men fought against the rock, wider and deeper, higher and bigger.

By the end of the day the Havildar came down from the rock, his beard coated in sandstone dust.

‘Well?’ asked Sam.

‘It will still be a squeeze for the bigger elephants. ’

‘But possible?’

‘So long as they breathe in. Yes.’

 ‘Fingers crossed, eh, Havildar?’ It was a joke that Sam risked only when he knew the Havildar was in a very good mood.

‘When do we start?’

‘The hour before dawn.’

To begin with, everything went beautifully to plan. Henry VIII, led by Po Toke gently holding his ear, ascended  the land-slip in the half-light before sunrise, one footfall at a time, until they reached the flattish start to the goat-track. Sam, superstitious, decided to walk on ahead, to the other side of the narrow path sculpted by the Havildar and his men.

He waited an eternity of time – or so it felt like, to him – but eventually he caught sight of the magnificent tusker rounding the bend, his enormous belly scraping against the freshly sculpted rock wall, and hundreds of feet far below, an eagle spiralling on a thermal. Then came Po Toke, who gave Sam an enormous wink, and behind him, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Claude, Ragamuffin, Nebuchadnezzar, and all the other elephants following steadily, their oozies on foot. He stood and counted every single one go past him. Forty-five adults and eight calves, fifty-three in all, the last being little Oomy, trotting on behind Mother, her aching leg muscles shivering with fatigue.

After the elephants passed him, he heard a snatch of something on the wind. It died, and came again, stronger this time, all the stranger and more moving because it was sung here, far above an alien jungle, on one of the highest points on the India-Burma border south of Thibet itself, so utterly, eerily, out of place:

Bishop Strachan’s filed past, Joseph in a litter hanging from bamboo poles carried by two oozies, Ruby with Molly and Michael, and last, Grace, and every single one of them grinned at Elephant Sam as he looked on, upon a peak in Burma. Not one child looked down at the appalling drop a few feet away. They were all too busy singing, singing their hearts out.

The chatter of machine-guns rang out across the mountain. The Japanese were on their tails, again. The children hurried on towards India, but going back down the track at a tremendous rate was the Havildar, carrying a rucksack heavy with grenades. The plan had been simple. Once the rearguard, made up of Peach’s men, appeared and climbed past the narrow ledge of the goat-track, they were going to blow a bloody big hole in the mountain, making it impossible for any Japanese to follow in their footsteps.

 More gunfire from below, from where they’d just come. The children quickened their pace. Sam took the rucksack from the Havildar and the two men started placing the grenades in the holes that had already been drilled, prior to demolishing the track. He looked up and scowled.

‘Grace, you need to be with the children. We’re going to blow the track.’

‘Sam,’ the Havildar grunted and vanished back down the narrow path.

‘Grace, you must go. The children need you. We’re going to blow the track.’

‘Let me…’

‘What now, for Christsakes?’

The Havildar returned, panting. ‘No sign of Peach. Six, seven Japs, coming up the track. Behind them, another thirty, half a mile back, with dogs. Moving fast.’

‘Well, let’s blow the bloody thing to Kingdom Come. Grace, you must go.’

‘You’ve got to wait for Peach,’ said Grace flatly.

‘Enough,’ cut in Sam.

‘Wait for him. You must!’

‘Please don’t fool around,’ said Sam.

‘Hold the demolition! Don’t blow the track. You need to double-check.’

‘I’ll go and check,’ said the Havildar.

‘No, God help me, I will,’ said Grace, and before they could stop her she was gone around the bend, towards the Japanese.

‘That bloody woman!’ cried Sam, taking the binoculars and following her around the ledge. The wind was freshening, and began to whistle sourly through the chiselled half-tunnel.

Down below they could see the Japanese, unmistakable in their uniforms of burnt ochre, climb up the land-slip.

‘You see Grace, we’ve got no choice.’

There came a ragged burst of fire, and it was the turn of the Japanese to scatter. Five British soldiers emerged from cover at the very top of the land-slip and started to run uphill. None of them was especially tall.

‘Once these chaps are through, we’ve got no choice.’

More gunfire, then a small barrel of a man appeared, giving a piggyback ride to a daddy-long-legs of a man, moving with unbearable slowness.

The first of the Yorkshiremen arrived at the neck of the narrow gap, gasping for air. He turned round, aimed his rifle at the Japanese, and started firing. Two, three, four, five men made it. The barrel-man and his gangly burden were still hobbling towards them.

The Havildar disappeared, rattling down the slope at an astonishing speed for such a big man. He reached the pair, shouldered the tall man and began racing up towards them, followed closely behind by the sergeant-major.

A bullet hiss-cracked overhead, a second slammed into the rock beneath them, sending shards of sandstone spinning down to the jungle floor below.

They ducked, backing into the shadow of the half-tunnel, and had barely come to rest when the giant Sikh appeared carrying Lieutenant Herbert Peach, his face a deathly green, his right calf a porridge of skin and blood and bone.

‘Bertie!’

‘They shot him up, Miss,’ said the sergeant-major. ‘Not sure he’s going to make it.’

The wound to his leg was ugly. Sam looked grim, shook his head. ‘Not good. May lose the leg. May lose him. There’s some new medicine, pencillin they call it. Might fix it, but we need to get him to a hospital fast. Once we’re in India.’

Peach groaned, opened his eyes, saw Grace, and said with limpid clarity: ‘Grace, about that glass of champagne…’

And then he passed out. More bullets whined past their heads, chipping the rock.

 ‘Everybody out of here, NOW!’ shouted Sam.

They all ran through the half-tunnel to the far side. Sam had wired the grenades together, so that with one yank of the wire, the whole lot would go up. At least, that was the theory. He counted to thirty, giving the others enough time to climb further up, flattened his belly to the ground, pressed his head into the rock and pulled.