Inferno - Max Hastings [145]
ENFORCED CIVILIAN MIGRATIONS were a major feature of the war almost everywhere around the globe where armies struggled for mastery. Few Burmese attempted to flee before the Japanese, because they believed they had nothing to fear from their victory, and much to hope for. When members of the newly mobilised Burma Independence Army marched through Rangoon for the first time under the eyes of its Japanese sponsors, an enthusiastic citizen wrote: “How thrilling it was to see Burmese soldiers and officers wearing assorted uniforms, bearing assorted arms, tricolour armbands on the shirtsleeve, seriousness on the face.”
But almost a million Indians also lived in the country, some dominating commercial life and others performing menial functions indispensable to the welfare of sahibs, but disdained by their Burmese subjects. The Indians were unloved, and fearful of local nationalism. As the invasion tide swept forward, the British did nothing to assist the flight of some 600,000 of these, their dependents. It was argued that the rulers had trouble enough saving themselves. But here, once again, British conduct highlighted the breakdown of the supposed imperial compact, whereby native peoples received protection as the price of accepting subjection. Rich fugitives bought airline tickets or cabins aboard ships bound for India. Indians bitterly dubbed the ferry up the Chindwin “the white route,” because access was almost the exclusive privilege of the British and Eurasians. As paddle steamers thrashed upriver, they passed corpses floating down, victims of hapless Indians’ overland “black route.”
Throngs of people too poor to purchase tickets to salvation were obliged to take to the roads and tracks north and westwards, towards Assam. The monsoon broke in May; thereafter, rain and mud clogged the passage alike of the fortunate in cars and the impoverished afoot. They were robbed and sometimes raped; they paid exorbitantly for scraps of food; they succumbed to dysentery, malaria and fever. At ferries and roadblocks, their last rupees were extracted by avaricious policemen and villagers. No one knows exactly how many Indians died in the spring and summer of 1942 on the road to Assam, but it was at least 50,000, and perhaps more. Their skeletons littered the roadside for years, to shame British passers-by when they later went that way again. An officer searching for stragglers at Tagun Hill on the way to Ledo came upon a village of the dead:
The clearing was littered with tumbledown huts, where often whole families stayed and died together. I found the bodies of a mother and child locked in each other’s arms. In another hut were the remains of another mother who had died in childbirth, with the child only half-born. In this one [clearing] more than fifty people had died. Sometimes pious Christians placed little wooden crucifixes in the ground before they died. Others had figures of the Virgin Mary still clutched in their skeleton hands. A soldier had expired wearing his sidecap, all his cotton clothing had rotted away, but the woollen cap sat smartly on the grinning skull. Already the ever-destroying jungle had overgrown some of the older huts, covering up the skeletons and reducing them to dust and mould.
Among the fugitives were many mixed-raced Catholics, who had originated in Portuguese Goa. Customs officer Jose Saldhana walked for days through the jungle with his seventeen-year-old son, George, having dispatched the rest of his family on a ship overladen with panic-stricken people. The walkers endured ghastly privations, relieved by a surreal moment in a camp in the jungle where a girl named Emily D’Cruz serenaded them: “Her voice soared clear and beautiful in the still of the night,” singing “Alice Blue Gown.” Then George succumbed to dysentery. He persuaded his father to leave him, sitting against a tree deep in the jungle. After some hours, the teenager saw a Naga woman, from a tribe of notorious headhunters. Terror overcame his weakness, and he began to walk again. For days he stumbled