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
lockups, 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 evilspirited 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 saecula saeculorum,
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 byproducts 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 palm-leaf, winding all over a
steep hillside. I remember that
it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of
the rains. We began questioning
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 an 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
smelled 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 the
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 experiencedlooking 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
steamroller. 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 earhole 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 on his body had altered. He
looked suddenly stricken,
shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralyzed
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 upwards like a huge rock
toppling, his trunk reaching
skywards 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
the 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.