Books: Jumbo in Burma

ELEPHANT BILL (250 pp.)—Lieut. Colonel J. H. Williams—Doubleday ($3).

Burma is full of elephants that never forget. Back in the ’20s and ’30s, when J. H. (“Elephant Bill”) Williams was working as elephant manager for the Bombay Burma Trading Corp., he traveled from camp to camp, inspecting the jumbos whose job was pushing & pulling four-ton teak logs down from the hills.

On such visits, Williams often had to syringe the sinuses of his charges, inoculate them against anthrax, and doctor them generally. He once spent three weeks treating an elephant called Ma Kyaw (“Miss Smooth”) for some tiger-claw gouges on her back. Two months later, Williams was having tea outside his tent when Ma Kyaw passed by. Hearing his voice, she turned around, came up to his camp table, sat down, and “leant right over towards me so as to show me her back.” That afternoon at the inspection, Williams found out why: one of Ma Kyaw’s wounds still pained her and she wanted another treatment.

After the Thunder. Cornwall-bred Williams got his first experience with outsize animals when he served with the British Camel Corps in World War I. After the war he went to Burma and graduated to elephants. Elephant Bill is the modest, rambling story of what he learned about the beasts during the next 25 years.

That old tale about wild elephants going off alone to die in inaccessible “elephant graveyards” is one that Williams can refute from observation. What really happens, at least in Burma: somewhere between an elephant’s 70th and 80th years, his big, coconut-size heart becomes as worn-out as his teeth. Too tired to follow the herd any longer, he grazes alone, but finds gathering his daily ration of 600 pounds of fodder a mammoth task. Thin and feverish, he moves down to water during the dry months and stands around keeping cool.

Then, “one sweltering hot evening in late May … he hears a mighty storm raging ten miles away in the hills and knows the rains have broken.” A wall of brown, log-choked water bears down on him. “He staggers and falls, but the groan he gives is drowned by peals of thunder,” and his carcass is smashed to bits as the flood hurtles it along. The reason elephant remains are seldom found: porcupines gnaw away the tusks to get at the nerve pulp, other scavengers destroy whatever else remains.

After Hannibal. Teak (for the decks of combat ships, etc.) had a high priority in World War II. It was Elephant Bill Williams’ job to get it out. Later, on active duty as a lieutenant colonel, he used the animals to haul bridge timbers and supplies, hoist bogged-down army equipment out of the mud.

When the Japs threatened northwest Burma early in 1944, Williams was told to lead his 45 elephants out any way he could. His story of how he coaxed them, their riders, and a small army of hungry refugees over more than 100 miles of plains and mountain wilderness between Kan-chaung, Burma and Silchar, India will remind readers, as it does Elephant Bill himself, of Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps. But Williams keeps his voice at a modest pitch even when reciting this journey’s most spectacular feat, i.e., leading his charges across a 3-ft.-wide ledge hundreds of feet high. Says he: “I learned more about what elephants could be got to do in that one day than I had in 24 years.”