The danger of meeting the Japanese trumped the consideration that getting from Shinbiwyang, at the start of the Hukawng Valley, to the supposed safety of the route’s terminal point, Margherita, in Assam, was a matter of walking 140 miles over eight jungle ridges, each about 4000 feet high, and crossing seven or eight fast-flowing rivers and numerous streams. British officials in Burma had only ever ventured into the Hukawng Valley in well-equipped and well-armed parties. The last hundred miles were uncharted, and almost uninhabited. Almost. The territory was in fact the home of the Naga tribesmen, known to the British for their great charm and their even greater violence. In particular, they were head-hunters – but Christian head-hunters, since many had been converted by the American Baptist missionaries who, with British encouragement, had been busy on the Indo-Burmese border at the turn of the century.
Ever since the British first arrived on the border, they had been alternately fighting against and cooperating with the Nagas, who held a romantic appeal to a certain kind of British official/anthropologist as being nobler than the Burmese or the Bengalis, both considered effete and evasive. The British took steps to protect the hill tribes of the Indo-Burmese border, requiring visitors to have a special permit, and these efforts would be increased as Indian independence, and the prospect of homogenization on the sub-continent, loomed after the war. (In Nagaland, Jonathan Glancey writes, ‘We fool ourselves if we think that just because a keen young man staring out from an old photograph in khaki and a sola topee looks like a parody of a bumptious British officer of nearly a century ago, he must have been aloof and narrow minded.’)
At the time of the First World War, some Naga tribes had been getting on sufficiently well with the British for a unit of Nagas to have fought for the Allies on the Western Front where, it is said, they hunted the heads of German soldiers, who complained to their commanding officers at having to fight ‘savages’. The aim of the head-hunter was to capture the spirit of the deceased, and the skull of a foreigner is ideal, because the spirit does not know the lie of the land, so is less likely to escape having been captured. And any head counts: there is no taboo against taking the heads of women or children.
In the 1920s, the British criminalized head-hunting. British officials would visit Naga villages where, emboldened by a sense of moral superiority – and fifty supporting rifles – they would opine that the dozen desiccated heads dangling from the head tree in the centre of the village were really nothing to be proud of. But head-hunting by the Nagas – mainly of other Nagas’ heads – continued to the extent that an anti-head-hunting expedition was mounted in 1937. It didn’t work, and the British were still fighting the Nagas about head-hunting and territorial questions in 1939. They were the most notorious of the hill tribes, and British and Indians undertaking the Hukawng route might have wondered whether the murderous or hospitable tendency would be uppermost.
The other big question was when the monsoon would start. In early May, the atmosphere was oppressive enough to suggest it might be soon, but humidity was better than the things the monsoon would bring, so with luck it would hold off until most of the refugees had completed most of their treks. It did not do so. Whereas the monsoon of 1941 had started on 21 May, that of 1942 started in mid-May. Nobody (apart from the Nagas, who were already there) went into the Hukawng Valley in the monsoon.
But in 1942 normality was suspended, and those who did undertake the Hukawng trek were assisted by teams of volunteers placed along the route, all of whom worked in the same profession: the same one as that from which the volunteers who staffed the Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur route had come. They were tea planters, and their Indian labourers. We will describe their work in more detail shortly, but let us say for now that the Hukawng Valley would become the second main evacuation route from Upper Burma after Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur. It is estimated that 20,000 went through (soldiers and civilians), of whom 5000 died.
One other route had been talked of in Myitkyina.
On 3 May, before the bombing of the airfield, a group of Burmese officials had flown to Dinjan to suggest this route. Its main – and only – attractive feature was that it lay about as far to the north as you could go in Burma, so was well away from the Japanese advance. But officials in Assam had ruled it out because they knew the terrain to be impassable on the Assamese side. It was decided therefore to send radio messages to Myitkyina warning against this route and urging use of the Hukawng Valley instead. But the receiving station at Myitkyina had closed down. Therefore letters were sent by plane conveying the same warning to the Deputy Commissioner of Myitkyina, but it seems these were never delivered. That Deputy Commissioner was a man called McGuire. He was the immediate superior of John Leyden, and the frowned-upon route in question was the Chaukan Pass.
Exhausted after crossing the Dapha river on the evening of 31 May, John Leyden finds that his head reels every time he stands up. Night is descending rapidly. Despite having a wife and young children (all safely evacuated from Burma at an earlier date), Leyden tells Millar – a single man – that he must save himself and go on without him. He also urges Millar to do this on behalf of the people they are trying to save.
Who were these people?
They were a party of government officials and engineers; they were mainly British, but their number also included Indians, Anglo-Indians and a pregnant Burmese woman and her six-month-old mixed-race baby. Their de facto leader was Sir John Edward Maurice Rowland. In the summer of 1942, Sir John was sixty years old. He was an engineer, and the top man on Burma Railways: the Chief Railway Commissioner no less. In the Warrant of Precedence, the formal social hierarchy of the country, he stood at number sixteen, on a par with army officers of the rank of general, and he had been knighted in 1941. So he would be very indignant at finding himself starving to death in the jungle.
Sir John was not only head of the ordinary Burma Railways; he also ran a side project, which he called ‘The Burma China Construction’. This was a railway meant to run parallel to the Burma Road, and for the same purpose: to keep China supplied in its battle against the Japanese. The railway would run from Lashio, a hundred or so miles north of Mandalay, to Kunming in China, through some of the most disease-ridden country in the world, so it would have been as much a medical as an engineering feat … if it had ever been built. There is something strained about the future tense used in an article on the line that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on 27 November 1941: ‘As the Panama canal’s construction was a triumph of medical strategists, so will the completion of the Yunnan–Burma railroad be a victory of malaria, and the potential of plague and cholera.’ The author stated that 250,000 coolies would build the line, which ought to be finished in fifteen months’ time ‘if all goes to schedule’. Just as the Burma Road would be closed by the Japanese invader, so the Burma–China railway would be stopped. It has gone down as one of the great ghost railways of the world, like the plan for a railway under the English Channel in the 1880s, or the early twentieth-century German pipe dream of the Berlin–Baghdad railway.
Having been distracted by this futile endeavour, Sir John found the ordinary railways of Burma to be in what he frankly called ‘a damnable mess’ at the time of the invasion. He used the phrase in a letter. We know from the same letter that he asked for and obtained from the man he called ‘HE’ – His Excellency, the Governor – ‘dictator powers’ to facilitate evacuation north by rail.
Sir John began, as he put it, ‘hare’ing all over’ north Burma from his base at Maymyo, the hill station and hot-weather resort, from where he was ousted by the enemy on 27 April. ‘The Army had legged it a day and a half before. I had been promised 72 hours notice to evacuate [railway] personnel …’ As it turned out, Sir John was given twelve hours’ notice, and he underlined the word ‘twelve’ in his letter. The railway employees – mainly Indians or Anglo-Indians – would be pitched into ‘sauve qui peut’, for which Sir John blamed ‘the cracking up of the 5th and 6th Chinese armies’ (which had been dispatched by Chiang Kai-shek to protect the Burmese infrastructure). The reader is now perhaps beginning to get the hang of Sir John. He was not a man lacking in confidence, or opinions, and he had a paternalistic