1936
IN
Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time
in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was
sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way
anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but
if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit
betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was
baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on
the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the
crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the
sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted
after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young
Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in
the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street
corners and jeer at Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time
I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner
I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically—and secretly,
of course—I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the
British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps
make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close
quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups,
the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men
who had been flogged with bamboos—all these oppressed me with an intolerable
sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and
ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is
imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British
Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the
younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck
between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited
little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I
thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down,
in sæcula sæculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another
part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet
into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products
of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way
was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better
glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism—the real
motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector
at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said
that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something
about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening
and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old .44 Winchester
and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in
terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the
elephant’s doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one
which had gone “must.” It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are
when their attack of “must” is due, but on the previous night it had broken
its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it
was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and
was now twelve hours’ journey away, and in the morning the elephant had
suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were
quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut,
killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had
met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his
heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables
were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a
very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf,
winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy
morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to
where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite
information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds
clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the
vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one
direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to
have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story
was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud,
scandalized cry of “Go away, child! Go away this instant!” and an old woman
with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away
a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and
exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to have
seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud. He was
an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been
dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him
round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back
and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was
soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long.
He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one
side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and
grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way,
that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.)
The friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as
neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to
a friend’s house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back
the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the
elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and
five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the
elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I
started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of
the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting
excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much
interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was
different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it
would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely
uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant—I had merely sent for the
rifle to defend myself if necessary—and it is always unnerving to have a crowd
following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the
rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels.
At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and
beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet
ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The
elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He
took not the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up
bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them
into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant
I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious
matter to shoot a working elephant—it is comparable to destroying a huge and
costly piece of machinery—and obviously one ought not to do it if it can
possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant
looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his
attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely
wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I
did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a
little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that
had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing
every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked
at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited
over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They
were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They
did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth
watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after
all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two
thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as
I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness,
the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white
man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the
leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to
and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment
that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He
becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib.
For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to
impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the
“natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I
had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent
for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear
resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way,
rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail
feebly away, having done nothing—no, that was impossible. The crowd would
laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one
long struggle not to be laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him
beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied
grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder
to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had
never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to
kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be
considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he
would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got
to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there
when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all
said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he
might charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I
ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his
behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be
safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going
to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud
into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed
him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even
then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow
faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid
in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man
mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he
isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong
those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced
to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was
quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges
into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew
very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre
curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to
have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with
cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would
shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought,
therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his
ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain
would be further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or
feel the kick—one never does when a shot goes home—but I heard the devilish
roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time,
one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible
change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line
of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old,
as though the frighfful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking
him down. At last, after what seemed a long time—it might have been five
seconds, I dare say—he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An
enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him
thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he
did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood
weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That
was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body
and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed
for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to
tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree.
He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly
towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me
across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he
was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his
great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open—I
could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for
him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining
shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled
out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk
when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was
dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where
not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end
to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there,
powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish
him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart
and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps
continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.
In the end I could not stand it any longer and went
away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing
dahs and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body
almost to the bones by the afternoon.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions
about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an
Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a
mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it.
Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the
younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie,
because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And
afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in
the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often
wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid
looking a fool.