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
s?cula s?culorum, 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.
