Of elephants and oozies

Richard West Afew months ago, when I was crossing Ploenchit Road in Bangkok, I saw to my great surprise and joy, a full-grown elephant with a driver, bearing on its back a load of plastic buckets. The surprise was all the greater since Ploenchit Road is one of the noisiest and most hellish in what is a city maddened by motor traffic; and elephants are no longer common even in northern Thailand because of the wicked destruction of 80 per cent of the country's teak forest. The attack by Japan on nature in South- East Asia may come to be seen as far more pernicious and lasting than anything done to human beings during the Second World War.

An elephant, even when burdened with plastic buckets, would surely have gladden- ed the heart of the first Chakri king who founded Bangkok 200 years ago. The first of the dynasty, Rama I, was a specialist in the elephant craft and loved the beasts so much that he wanted to build a causeway for them to Bangkok over the swamp. His advisers warned him that this would lay him open to Burmese attack. When, five years later, Rama I led an invasion of Burma over the mountains, his favourite elephant sickened and he himself took the job of nursing it and persuading it to eat. In that campaign, the paths were so steep that the elephants had to ascend by coiling their trunks round trees and hauling their bodies forward. Many died falling from cliffs.

Rama IV, whose life was caricatured in The King and I, wrote a treatise on white elephants, which should possess 'a beautiful snore'. Although these beasts, really a dull pink, were objects of venera- tion, they were not regarded as gods or kings, as some foreign visitors thought. White elephants could be punished, as an Englishman noted. 'A keeper pricked the foot of one in our presence, with a sharp iron until blood came although his majesty's only offence was stealing a bunch of bananas; or rather snatching it before he had received permission.'

The elephant was revered but not always sensibly treated in some of the other old kingdoms of Indochina. In Burma, at what is now Mandalay, a British diplomat in the 1830s witnessed the unsuccessful staging of elephant fights: 'The elephant is not a courageous animal, nor is it pugnacious. After a rencontre which does not last above a few seconds, one of the parties is sure to run away.' At Saigon, the same English diplomat witnessed a series of combats bet- ween elephants and a tiger, which was tethered about the loins. 'The mouth of the unfortunate animal was sewn up, and nails pulled out ... No less than 46 elephants, all males of great size, were brought to attack the tiger'. Before it was tossed to death, the tiger managed to spring on the head of one of the elephants, whose rider was there and then punished with 100 lashes.

Only decadent kings or princes tried to pervert the elephant into unnatural behaviour like fighting. The wisdom and usefulness of the beasts were more often acknowledged in South-East Asia, and noted by Europeans as well. 'In my judg- ment there is not a beast so intellective as are the elephants, nor of more understan- ding in all the world,' wrote the Venetian Caesar Frederick, ... for he will do all things that his keeper sayeth, so that he lacketh nothing but human speech.' Quoting this in The Making of Burma, Dorothy Woodman wrote that the sixteenth-century traveller 'was in fact an early edition of Elephant Bill'.

This was a reference to the book Elephant Bill by Lt-Col J. H. Williams, published in 1950, and just now republished in paperback form (Granada £1.50). As an animal book it ranks with the very greatest, like Jock of the Bushveldt, and ought to be read not only for fun, but to draw attention to what ecologists call an 'endangered species' — not only endangered, but surely quite as worthy of preservation as man.

Colonel Williams went out to Burma after the First World War as elephant man to one of the teak firms, but he was not one of those animal lovers who hate the human race. He got on well with the Burmese, 'those cheerful Irishmen of the East'; his marriage to an English girl sounds good from her account as well as from his (she wrote a memoir after his death); he even en- joyed Rangoon and the hill stations. Indeed after perusing many accounts of British Burma, I get the impression that expatriates loved it, except George Orwell, who liked to be miserable everywhere.

Colonel Williams corrects some of the legends that have attached to elephants. They can forget, though they will long remember a kindness like medical treat- ment. They are not frightened of mice but loathe dogs, even puppies. The training of elephants, even of those who are born in the wild, need not involve any serious cruelty; scarcely more discipline than is needed by human children. Elephants have a life cycle exactly matching the human, so that the beast may grow up alongside its oozie, or driver, and grow old in friendship and understanding. Elephants fall in love like human beings, but when the female has given birth she takes as companion and helper another female or 'auntie'. Together they guard the calf against the tiger, which tries to drive off mother and 'auntie' in a stampede. 'To do this,' Colonel Williams

explains, 'he will first attack the mother, springing on her back and stampeding her; then he returns to attack "auntie", who defends the calf, knowing that in a few moments the mother will return. On many occasions I have had to dress the lacerated wounds of tiger-claws on the backs of both a mother elephant and her friend.' Colonel Williams would sit up all night to discover when elephants sleep, and for how long. 'The time is never the same, but it is always at that eerie hour when even the insects stop their serenades.'

'Savage elephants are as rare as really wicked men,' Colonel Williams said, but they sometimes have fits of bad temper. He tells how a young European assistant, home on leave, tried to impress his mother and sister.by giving commands to an elephant at the London Zoo. "Shall I make her sit down?" he asked, then shouted out "limit!", like a Burmese oozie. The elephant merely swished her tail. "Hmit! Hmit! Hmit!" At last the elephant con- descended to notice him . . . With lightning swiftness, she seized a lump of her dung the size of a cottage loaf and slung it at the young Assistant. It missed him, but it knocked a feather out of his mother's hat and exploded against the wall behind.'

When the Japanese invaded in 1942, Williams used elephants to carry a group of women out of Burma over the mountains to India, at an altitude higher than Hannibal reached when crossing the Alps. The journey included a stretch on a ledge that was narrower than the width of an elephant, overlooking a precipice. Colonel Williams, who suffered from vertigo, led the party on all fours, with his eyes shut; but not one human or elephant fell. Later, Williams employed his beasts on building bridges for Slim's 14th Army. The guerrilla leader, Brigadier Wingate, also used elephants, which had the advantage over motor transport of silence, and of mobilitY in the virgin jungle. However, the Japs used elephants too, and scores of animals perish- ed when dive-bombed and machine-gunned by Allied planes, a task the pilots hated.

Elephants were again used in war by American Special Forces in Vietnam in 1967, near the Cambodian border, west Of the town of Ban Me Thuot. As it happens, I was the first and I think the only reporter to travel by elephant on a military operation in Vietnam. Both helicopters and jet planes had been attacking the elephants, so our lit- tle party carried the Stars and Stripes to drape on the animals' backs at the sound of approaching aircraft. Elephant-riding in- volved other perils, especially the big red ants that drop off the branches on to your hair and shirt, but I found myself growing to love this way of travelling through the forest. To quote from a book I wrote soon afterwards: 'We forded a shallow stream in which the animals drank and showered and enjoyed themselves. We passed through a plain of tall, silken elephant grass, which the Vietcong in these parts use as shelter for ambushes. The driver pointed out gaudY lizards and stick insects crouched on the

tree trunks and branches. The American and Montagnard troops had lit many brush fires in this forest to rob the Vietcong of their shelter and once a gust of wind brought a ripple of flame to the convoy, the elephants reared on their hind legs, uttered a trumpeting squeal and bolted into the bamboo brush, but luckily none of the riders lost his balance'. At that point I got off and walked the rest of the way.

The Saigon command did not approve of the elephants, nor indeed the Special Forces, the Green Berets, whom I liked and admired. Very few of the animals survived the war. The region west of Ban Me Thuot, where we went by elephant through the forest, was used by the North Vietnamese to launch their final offensive against the South in March 1975. When I went back to Vietnam two years ago, 1 travelled a little in what had once been elephant country but got no chance to go near the Cambodian

border. However, one might expect that, whatever their faults, the new Communist rulers of Vietnam are conservationists. Unlike the capitalists of, for instance, Thailand, they will not allow the forests to disappear for a few quick yen. Apparently Burma is good in this respect. When Col- onel Williams finished his book, in 1950, he noted sardonically that the socialist govern- ment of Burma had nationalised the elephants; which may have turned out well. It is hard for the tourist to get permission to enter the northern part of the country to see the elephants and the teak forests but, so one hears, they still survive, along with the tigers, the oozies and sprites.

Richard West, author of Sketches from Vietnam (1968) and Victory in Vietnam (1974), is just completing a third, called Peace in Vietnam, on the still-continuing war in South-East Asia.