In Mawlamyine, Lower Burma, I was hated by a lot of people – and that's the only time I've been so taken seriously in my life. I was then a divisional police officer in the city, where anti-European sentiment was very strong, albeit aimlessly, just venting on small things. No one dares enough to start a riot, but if a European woman walks through the market alone, someone will spit betel nut juice on her clothes. As a police officer, I was the obvious target, and as long as I was safe, they would always try to play tricks on me. On the soccer field, a deft Burmese player would trip me and the referee (again Burmese) would pretend not to see me, and the crowd would gloat and laugh. This has happened more than once. Eventually, wherever I went, I was greeted by young men with mocking yellow faces, and when I was far away, they started to shout and curse behind me, which really made my nerves unbearable. The most furious were the young monks, and there were thousands of them in the city, all of whom seemed to have nothing else to do but stand in the streets, mocking passing Europeans.
This annoys me a lot, and it puzzles me. At that time, I had already realized that imperialism was an evil thing, and I was determined to resign as soon as possible and get out. Theoretically – and that is, of course, in the bottom of my heart – I was completely on the side of the Burmese against their oppressors, the British. As for the work I do, I am extremely reluctant to do it, and this unwillingness is beyond my words. In such a job, you can see directly the vile squalor of imperialism. Poor prisoners in stinking cages, long-term prisoners with vegetable faces, scarred buttocks after being whipped with a bamboo cane—all of this made me feel guilty and oppressed. But I can't make it all clear. I was young and uneducated, and I had to ponder these questions in silence alone, and the English in the East suffered from this silence. But I didn't even know that the British Empire was on the verge of death, and that it was much better than some of the new empires that would replace it. All I know is that I'm caught in the middle, and I hate the empire I serve, but I'm angry with the ill-intentioned little devils who are always trying to make it impossible for me to work. On the one hand, I think that British rule is an unbreakable tyranny, something that has long been pressed on subdued peoples, and on the other hand, I think that there is no greater pleasure in the world than to stab a bayonet in the stomach of a monk. Such feelings are a normal by-product of imperialism, and any British Indian official will answer you if you could ask him when he is off duty.
One day something happened that was very indirect. It was a small thing, but it made me see more clearly than ever the true nature of imperialism – the real motives of the tyrannical government. Early one morning, the deputy inspector of a police station on the other side of town called me to say that an elephant was running amok through the market and asked if I could deal with it. I didn't know what to do, but I wanted to see what was going on, so I rode off. I brought a rifle, an old 0.44 caliber Winchester, to kill an elephant, it was too small, but I thought the gunfire might have been an intimidation. Along the way, all sorts of Burmese people stopped me and told me what the elephant had done. This is certainly not a wild elephant, but a mahout elephant with spring hair. It had been chained in iron chains, as is the case with the mahouts, but the night before it broke free and fled. The only mahout who could subdue him in heat came out to chase after him, but he went in the wrong direction, and was twelve hours away, and the elephant suddenly appeared in the town early in the morning. The Burmese usually have no weapons and have nothing to do with it. It had trampled on a bamboo hut, trampled a cow to death, knocked over a few fruit stalls, had a full meal, and ran into a garbage truck in the city, and the driver jumped out of the car and fled, and the car was overturned and trampled in a rage.
The Burmese inspector and several Indian police officers were waiting for me at the place where the elephant was found. It's a civilian area, on the side of a steep hill, with dilapidated bamboo huts huddled together and roofed with palm leaves. I remember it was a rainy morning, the sky was cloudy, and the air was dreary. We began to ask people where the elephant was, and as usual, we didn't get any exact information. In the East, this is always the case, and at a distance things always sound clear, but the closer you get to the place where the accident happened, the more obscured it becomes. Some people said that the elephant was going that way, others said that it was going in the other direction, and some even said that they did not know anything about the elephant running away. I almost thought the whole thing might be a lie, when I suddenly heard someone shouting not far away. I heard a frightened cry, "Go away, boy, go away for me!" and I saw an old woman come out of the back of a bamboo hut with a twig in her hand, and chase a group of naked children. It was followed by other women, who were smacking out in horror, apparently there was something there that the children could not see. I walked around to the back of the bamboo hut and saw the body of a man lying in the mud. He was an Indian, a dark-skinned Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and had been dead for a few minutes. They said that the elephant suddenly came at him from the edge of the house, grabbed him by the nose, and stomped on his back, crushing him to the ground. It was the rainy season, and the ground was soft, and his face had made a groove in the ground, a foot deep and several feet long. He threw himself on the ground, his hands outstretched, his head twisted to the side. His face was covered with mud, his eyes were wide open, his teeth were bared, and his face was in agony. (Don't tell me that the faces of the dead are peaceful.) Most of the corpses I saw were horrible. The elephant's giant feet tore the skin on his back, as neatly as he wanted to skin a rabbit. As soon as I saw the body, I sent someone to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I have sent my horse away, lest it smell the elephant and be frightened and turn me off its back.
The man who sent him returned a few minutes later with a rifle and five bullets, and in the middle of that a couple of Burmese men came and told us that the elephant was in the rice fields below, only a few hundred yards away. I walked together, and almost everyone in the whole district went out, and they came out of the house and followed me. When they saw the rifle, they shouted excitedly that I was going to kill the elephant. They didn't show much interest in the elephant when it knocked down and trampled on their bamboo hut, but now that it was going to be shot and killed, it was suddenly different. They thought it was a little funny, and so did the British masses. In addition, they want to get elephant meat. This made me feel a little uneasy. I didn't intend to kill the elephant - I sent someone to get the gun just to defend myself if necessary - and having a large group of people following you always makes you a little nervous. I strode down the hill, rifle on my shoulder, and a growing crowd of people following closely behind, and I must have looked like a fool, and felt like a fool in my heart. At the foot of the hill, leaving the bamboo huts, there was a gravel-paved road, and in the old days it was a mud-ridden paddy field, a thousand yards wide, which had not yet been ploughed, because of the rain, and the fields were watery and sporadically overgrown with weeds. The elephant was standing eight yards away from the side of the road, with the left facing us. It did not notice the approach of the masses at all. It pulls out the bundles of weeds, beats them on its knees, and when it is clean, it puts them in its mouth.
I stopped on the gravel road. As soon as I saw the elephant, I knew with complete certainty that I shouldn't have killed it. Killing a working elephant is a serious matter, and it is tantamount to destroying a giant machine that is too expensive, and it is obvious that as long as it can be avoided, it should be avoided as much as possible. At that distance, the elephant was serenely chewing grass, looking as undangerous as a cow. I thought—and I think so now—that its heat has probably passed, so it is at best wandering around aimlessly and catching it when the mahouts come back. Besides, I didn't want to shoot it in the first place. So I decided to watch from the sidelines and see that it wasn't wild anymore, and I went back.
But then I glanced back at the crowd that came with me. More and more people gathered, and there were at least 2,000 people, blocking both ends of the road. I looked at the yellow faces on the colorful clothes, and they all looked happy and excited for the pleasure of watching the excitement, and everyone assumed that the elephant was going to die. They looked at me like they were watching a magician do a trick. They didn't like me, but since I had that magic gun in my hand, I was worth watching. It dawned on me that I had to shoot the elephant. Everyone was expecting me so much, I had to do it, and I could feel the will of two thousand of them pushing me forward irresistibly. It was at this very moment, as I stood there with that rifle in my hand, that I saw for the first time the emptiness and uselessness of white domination in the East. I, a white man with a gun in my hand, standing in front of an unarmed local crowd, may seem like the protagonist of a play, but in reality I am just a ridiculous puppet pushed around by these yellow-faced wills behind me. I saw at this time that as soon as the white man began to become a tyrant, he ruined his own freedom. He became an empty, pretentious wooden man, the usual white lord role. Because it was his rule that made him try his best to lock down the "natives" for the rest of his life, he had to do what the "natives" expected him to do in every emergency. He wore a mask, and as the days went by, his face grew according to the mask and matched the mask perfectly. I had to shoot the elephant, and I irrevocably said I wanted to do so when I sent for the gun. The white man must behave like a white man, he must be resolute and decisive. With a gun in his hand, and two thousand people following him, he was timid when he arrived here, so he stopped, which is not good. Everyone will laugh at me, and my whole life, the life of every white man in the East, is a life of long-term struggle, and I must not give people jokes.
But I didn't want to shoot the elephant. I watched as it rolled up a bunch of grass and shook it on its knees, looking focused, like a serene old grandmother. I think shooting at it is tantamount to murder. At my age, I had no scruples or trepidations about killing a beast, but I had never shot an elephant, and I didn't want to. (Killing behemoths always makes people feel more deserved.) What's more, there is also the elephant owner to consider. The living elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds, and when it died, only the ivory was worth it, and it might be sold for five pounds. But I have to act now. I turned to a couple of experienced Burmese who had been there and asked if the elephant was honest. They all say the same thing: if you let it go, it will ignore you, and if you get too close, it will rush at you.
What should I do, it seems clear. I should have walked closer, about twenty-five yards or so, to test its temperament. If it rushes at me, I'll shoot, and if it ignores me, let it go and wait for the mahouts to come back. But I also know that I can't do that. My marksmanship is not good, the mud in the field is wet and soft, and I get stuck in one step. If the elephant rushes at me and I miss, my fate will be like a toad under a bulldozer. But even at this time, I didn't think about my own life, but about the yellow faces behind me. Because at this time, with so many people looking at me, I can't be as scared as if I was alone. In the presence of the "native," the white man cannot be afraid; The only thought in my mind was that if something went wrong, the 2,000 Burmese would see me being chased, caught, and trampled to meat sauce by elephants, like the baring Indian corpse on the mountain. I can't let them laugh at me. There is only one way. I loaded the bullet and lay on the ground to aim.
The crowd was silent, and many people sighed in their throats with a low, happy breath, as if the audience had seen the curtain finally open, and finally waited for a good show to be seen. A beautiful German rifle with a crosshair. Little did I know at the time that to shoot an elephant you would have to aim at an imaginary line between the ear holes of both ears and shoot it off. So, now that the elephant is turning to me, I should have aimed it straight at one of its ear holes, but in reality, I aimed the tip of the gun a few inches in front of the ear holes, thinking that the elephant's brain was in front of it.
When I pulled the trigger, I didn't hear the gunshots, and I didn't feel the recoil—you don't always feel when you shoot—but I heard the crowd burst into cheers. And at this point -- it's so fast, you wonder how the bullet could have gotten there so quickly -- and the elephant suddenly changed, mysteriously and horribly. It didn't move, it didn't fall, but every line on its body changed. It grew old all at once, and shrunk all over, as if the terrible power of the bullet had not knocked it down, but had frozen it there. After a long time, I estimate about five seconds, it finally fell to its knees with weak legs. Its mouth was drooling. The whole body appeared to be in an old state of dragon bell. You feel as if it's thousands of years old. I fired another shot at the same place. It refused to collapse after being shot a second time, and although it was sluggish, it struggled to get up, barely standing, its legs limp, its head drooping. I fired a third shot. The shot finally turned out to be it. You can see that the pain of the shot shook its whole body, knocking out what little strength it had left in all four legs. But when it fell, it seemed to stand up, because when its two hind legs were paralyzed under it, it seemed like a boulder when it fell, but its upper body was raised, and its proboscis rose to the sky, like a big tree. It let out a long roar, the first and only one it roared. Eventually it tumbled to my side, and the ground shook so hard that I could feel it even where I was lying on my stomach.
I stood up. The Burmese had already rushed to the field, apparently the elephant could no longer stand up, but it was not dead, it was still panting rhythmically, its throat was purring, half of its body was lying together in pain, its mouth was wide open, I could see the depths of the pink throat all the time. I waited for it to die, and I waited for a long time, but its breathing did not weaken. Finally I shot the remaining two bullets at what I estimated to be its heart. Blood gushed out like red velvet, but it still wouldn't die. Its body did not shake when it was shot, and its painful gasps continued. It was dying slowly, in extreme pain, but it had reached a world far away from me, and bullets could no longer hurt it. I feel like I should put an end to that nasty gasp. It was very unpleasant to see the giant beast lying there, unable to move, unable to die, and unable to get rid of it immediately. I sent for my small-caliber rifle and fired it again and again into the heart and throat. But it doesn't seem to have an impact at all. The wheezing of pain continued, like the ticking of a bell.
I finally couldn't take it anymore and got out of there. Later, I heard that it took half an hour before it died. The Burmese came with buckets and baskets before I could go away, and by the afternoon they were said to have stripped them down to their bones.
Later, of course, there was a lot of talk about the shooting of the elephant. The elephant owner was angry, but he was an Indian and couldn't do anything about it. Moreover, from a legal point of view, I did not do well, because if the master could not control it, the mad one must be killed, like a mad dog. As for the Europeans, the opinion is different. The older people said I was doing the right thing, and the younger people said it was too bad to shoot an elephant in order to trample a coolie to death, because the elephant was worth more than a Coringi coolie. I secretly rejoiced in hindsight that the coolie had died well, so that I could shoot the elephant justly and be in the right position before the law. I've often wondered if people knew I shot the elephant just to not look like a fool in front of everyone.