Essay

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 lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the 
long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged 
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 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 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 palmleaf, 
winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, 
stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the 
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 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, 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 smelt 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 that 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 experienced-looking 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 
steam-roller. 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 ear-hole 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 of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, 
shrunken, immensely old, as though the frighfful impact of the bullet had 
paralysed 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 upward like a huge rock toppling, his 
trunk reaching skyward 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 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.