ELEPHANT MOON (20 page)

‘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, 9
^th
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.’