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P= na AN ELRPHANT : ea ), , in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do, , ee stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans,, , allthis was perplexing and upsetting, For at that time I had already, A up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner, made ked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically—and, ane of course—I was all for the Burmese and all against their, mr vors, the British, As for the job I was doing, I hated it more, oe Jy than I can perhaps make clear, In a job like that you see, ay work of Empire at close quarters, The wretched prisoners, r dling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces, pete long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who, on been flogged with bamboos—all these oppressed me with an, ha Jerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I, inte oung and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems, ue utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East., : did not even know that the British Empire was dying, still less did, | know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are, oing to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my, ete of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited, 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 by-products 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, Icould 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, ‘00 small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in

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‘must’ is, Volker Its mahout, the only person who, when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had, = direction and was Now twelve hours’ journey away,, taken the moming the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town,, = ances Jation had no weapons and were quite helpless, 7 a caitly destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a, = = i fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met, caged is and, when the driver jumped out and took to, , municipal rubbish van ; p, = ee van over and inflicted violence upon it., , Burm i tor and some Indian constables were waiting, a See asta whitre the elephant had been seen. It was a, for me m, , i squalid bamboo huts, thatched with, very a Che ee fas hillside. I remember that it was, 1 > tuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began, a eae ¢ the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as, usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the, case 4 the East; a story always sounds clear enough ata 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 any 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, scandalised 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. | 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

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ee : elephant—it is comparable to destroying a, pepsin Be eee hivecy—and obviously one ought net eae, if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating,, , the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow, | thought then, , and I think now that his attack of ‘must’ was alread:, , 'Y passing off;, in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the, mahout came back and caught him, Moreover, | 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—faceg, 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 realised that I should have to shoot the elephant after al}., 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 T 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, conventionalised figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his mule, that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’, and, $0 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. 1 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