Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II

When writing about English colonies and former territories, it is nearly impossible to avoid deploying a set of tropes about what colonialism means and how its structures of power operate. While Williams himself occasionally evades the worst of these stereotypes—he is genuinely willing to learn from the indigenous uzis who work with his elephants—he is nevertheless continually implicated in them. His paternalistic attitudes toward the uzis belie his underlying prejudices, while his awe of the elephants serves to highlight his colonial presumptions: as he repeats, he learns more from the courageous elephants than he does from the potentially treacherous natives—even Po Toke, who saved his beloved Bandoola, comes under suspicion at numerous moments throughout the book. The people, the reader is reminded, are always a contentious point of concern, a threat to the imperial project and British rule, with their desire for independence. Additionally, as the author unironically announces, “Burma was an icon of the exotic East and all its mysteries” (36). For Williams and the other Westerners who settled and worked in the colonies, these foreign places are rendered as the antithesis of England and its values. They are places of adventure and self-discovery, comprehensible only through the Western gaze.

As the author recounts Williams’s first forays into Burma and the jungle, she engages in several colonial tropes: the foreign place is still a “savage country” that is populated with “barbaric tribes” who still “practice head-hunting” and “performed human sacrifices” (9). The natives could even “transform themselves into ghost cats” (9). All of this romanticizes and exoticizes the locale while it dehumanizes the locals. The ways in which the Englishmen cling to their rituals only serves to underscore the fact that they do not belong: “No matter where the outpost in Burma, forest managers had their dinners served properly—white tablecloths, bone china plates, and perfectly cooked English meals, starting with a soup course” (33). Williams’s admiration for the attentive kindness of the villagers at his camp reveals the “imperial gaze” at work: while he is rightly “humbled by the care these strangers lavished on him” (52), he—along with the author—seems not to consider that this care comes on the heels of colonial conquest and at the expense of indigenous natural resources. The solicitousness Williams enjoys is almost certainly, at least in part, the result of coercion and force.

There are frequent references to Englishness throughout the narrative: English products, English meals, his boss Harding’s “very English face” (77). These references emphasize the difference between the English and their way of life and the indigenous Burmese and imported Indian workers and their (presumably inferior) way of life. The title of Chapter 8, “Sex, Cricket, and Blue Cheese,” is meant to invoke all that remains British in the colonial territories: Williams corresponds with every available young Englishwoman he knows, hungry as he is for companionship—an indigenous prostitute or mistress is not suitable as a companion. The prodigious amounts of mail Williams receives as a result interferes with Harding’s shipments of “blue Chesire” cheese and other English luxuries (81), so they distract themselves by playing the very English game of cricket (now a mainstay in many former colonies—the stubborn residue of empire). This chapter culminates in the incident wherein an elephant’s wounds have been overlooked, and Williams supplicates himself before Harding alongside the native uzi, in apology for the oversight—“an extraordinary act for a British man here” (83). Yet, the act merely highlights Williams’s excessive decency—a definitively English quality—rather than genuine solidarity with the plight of the uzi. The author’s repeated invocations, without irony, of Rudyard Kipling, the patron saint of English imperialism, exposes the point of view from which the reader is intended to empathize. When “God Save the King” plays on the wireless, “both Jim and Susan would rise from their canvas camp chairs and stand at attention” (178).

Finally, throughout Part 3, there is a complex intersection between the growing fervor for independence in the colonies and the continued loyalty between the locals and the colonial rulers. For example, the Japanese success in Southeast Asia could be attributed, at least in part, to the growing agitation against the British Empire: “At one point, Japan would count forty thousand Indian soldiers on their side, many of whom believed this would be their path to independence” (206). This conflict is also mirrored in the relations between elephants and man: on the one hand, the elephants are trusted workers, performing tasks that are instrumental to economic interests and, later, to the war effort; on the other hand, they are still wild creatures, yearning for freedom—and they sometimes quite literally lash out, occasionally with fatal results, at their masters. The disparities between the amenities and privileges the colonial settlers enjoy and the intensive labor and degradations that the indigenous workers must endure become more glaring in the light of war. The inequalities are unsustainable, as Williams well knows: “The world he loved was not just disappearing; it was already gone. The British Empire would shrink away from its borders” (282). The elephants would return to their forests, the Burmese would gain independence, and Williams would spend the rest of his days in Cornwall.