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John Donne, in his ‘Progress of the Soul’, hails ‘Nature’s great masterpiece, the Elephant’, adding ‘The only harmless great thing’. Well, this may be generally true of the Indian elephant, docile, biddable, hard-working, faithful and affectionate — its intimate and loving relationship with its mahout (known as an oozie in Burma) is akin to marriage. But even an Indian elephant can be dangerous when in must, as we remember from that dark and touching essay by George Orwell, recounting the occasion when he was required to kill one of the great, patient beasts, already recovering from its fit, simply to ‘save face’ and satisfy the expectant villagers. This was when he was an officer in the Burmese police. Would that this wise and saintly man were ruling Burma today!
The African elephant, however, cannot fairly be described as harmless. It is, to begin with, much bigger and stronger. It can — I have seen it — pull up a sizeable tree by the roots, and throw it 20 yards over its shoulder. It does this to eat the tasty bits on the top or just for the hell of it. From my observation, African elephants enjoy displaying their size and strength. A bull elephant killed in the Angolan bush in the 1950s, which can now be seen in Washington’s Smithsonian, must have weighed nine tons when alive and is 12 feet high at the shoulder. Sometimes the tusks reach colossal size. There is a pair in the British Museum which weigh nearly 300 pounds, and the larger of the two is 12 feet long. Its tusk is 18 inches thick. Imagine what a plenitude of precious objects could be made from such a monumental molar! Elephants have been hunted down for their ivory for thousands of years. One of the earliest trading posts in Ancient Egypt was Elephantine Island in the Nile (the hieroglyphics for ivory and the beasts were similar), where the pharaohs’ traders met hunter-chieftains from Central Africa.
Maybe ancestral memories in the great pachyderms give them a residue of hatred for man, based on prescriptive atrocities, for they can turn unpredictably nasty, with instant and devastating consequences. The couple who recently aroused the interest of an African elephant in a safari park, and felt it resting its huge trunk on the roof of their car, were right to be frightened, and lucky to survive. I was once in a Land Rover in Bechuanaland, and a huge beast slowly approached. The ranger with me said tersely: ‘Keep absolutely still.’ It carefully kicked up a bit of dust and edged nearer, and it was plain that the morning had gone ill with him — a bad trunk day, perhaps. I quote P.G. Wodehouse: ‘I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.’ When ten yards from us, he gave a sort of elephantine grin, raised his trunk in a Bronx cheer, and abruptly trotted off. ‘My oath,’ said the ranger, an Aussie, ‘that was a close one.’ That night, round the camp fire, tales were told of calamities. ‘There were eight of us in this big Range Rover. The brute stopped, looked at us carefully, came over and picked up a large gentleman. He threw him on the ground, stamped on him half a dozen times, and then went off, all without a word. That gent was a successful grocer from Milwaukee. Makes you think, eh?’
Was that elephant a distant descendant of the tame executioner-beasts which in antiquity were used to stamp to death certain grades of malefactors in public arenas, before hosts of applauding spectators? I wish an expert would write a book about the use of elephants in war. Alexander the Great fought a desperate battle to defeat the 200 martial elephants of Purs on the Hydaspes in 326 bc. He did not use elephants himself, thinking them more trouble than they were worth, but his Ptolemy successors did, and later Hannibal. The fact that the Romans had no use for war elephants persuades me that Alexander was right. Of course these beasts, known as ‘Lucanian Oxen’, were all of the Indian type, or a small north African species, now extinct.
Some ancient writers insist that elephants have a strong sense of humour and can be delightful comedians. True? Certainly, John Milton accepted the belief. I am fond of Milton, despite his gruesome religious beliefs, and on one occasion, when a fierce woman don insisted that Milton was humourless and that the entire corpus of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained did not contain a single joke, I quoted Book Four, describing Adam and Eve’s honeymoon and the efforts of the animals in Eden to entertain them:
The unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth used all his might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis.
This was the earliest circus elephant in history, the original Jumbo, though the first so-named was the large African beast which gave rides to children at the London Zoo, was sold to Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth in 1882, and killed by a railway engine three years later. In the army, if you are big and nice you are known as Jumbo, like Colonel Trotter in Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen, or if you are big and fierce they call you ‘Bull’, like General Allenby. Colonel Wigg MP, head prefect of Harold Wilson’s Number 10, was a Jumbo type, for though fierce and often furious, his antics, facial expressions, threats (‘I’ll have your guts for garters’) and conspiracy theories were a source of endless chuckles.
By contrast, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was the bull African elephant type. If you went to his little den off the Oval Office, with its four TV sets fixed in the wall, all on, he would try and terrify you. His face was enormous, and on each side was a colossal ear, exactly like the beast in the bush. He would gradually move his face nearer yours, until his massive nose was almost touching. Men came out of his presence bruised, and women hysterical with fear. But if you kept your head and laughed, he would suddenly change tactics and inundate you with self-pity, pouring out of his side-pockets all his medical records, cardiograms, etc. No self-respecting elephant would do that.
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