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 frightful 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 dah
s 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.
DOWN THE MINE (1937) (FROM "THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER")
Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely
than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that
keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or
indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world
the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the
soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything
that is not grimy is supported. For this reason the actual process by
which coal is extracted is well worth watching, if you get the chance and
are willing to take the trouble.
When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get to the coal
face when the 'fillers' are at work. This is not easy, because when the
mine is working visitors are a nuisance and are not encouraged, but if
you go at any other time, it is possible to come away with a totally
wrong impression. On a Sunday, for instance, a mine seems almost
peaceful. The time to go there is when the machines are roaring and the
air is black with coal dust, and when you can actually see what the
miners have to do. At those times the place is like hell, or at any rate
like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in
hell are if there--heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and,
above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for
there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and
electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds of coal dust.
When you have finally got there--and getting there is a in itself: I
will explain that in a moment--you crawl through the last line of pit
props and see opposite you a shiny black wall three or four feet high.
This is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling made by the rock
from which the coal has been cut; underneath is the rock again, so that
the gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal itself,
probably not much more than a yard. The first impression of all,
overmastering everything else for a while, is the frightful, deafening
din from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see
very far, because the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp,
but you can see on either side of you the line of half-naked kneeling
men, one to every four or five yards, driving their shovels under the
fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left shoulders. They are
feeding it on to the conveyor belt, a moving rubber, belt a couple of
feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them. Down this belt a
glittering river of coal races constantly. In a big mine it is carrying
away several tons of coal every minute. It bears it off to some place in
the main roads where it is shot into tubs holding half a tun, and thence
dragged to the cages and hoisted to the outer air.
It is impossible to watch the 'fillers' at work without feeling a pang
of envy for their toughness. It is a dreadful job that they do, an almost
superhuman job by the standard of an ordinary person. For they are not
only shifting monstrous quantities of coal, they are also doing, it in a
position that doubles or trebles the work. They have got to remain
kneeling all the while--they could hardly rise from their knees without
hitting the ceiling--and you can easily see by trying it what a
tremendous effort this means. Shovelling is comparatively easy when you
are standing up, because you can use your knee and thigh to drive the
shovel along; kneeling down, the whole of the strain is thrown upon your
arm and belly muscles. And the other conditions do not exactly make
things easier. There is the heat--it varies, but in some mines it is
suffocating--and the coal dust that stuffs up your throat and nostrils
and collects along your eyelids, and the unending rattle of the conveyor
belt, which in that confined space is rather like the rattle of a machine
gun. But the fillers look and work as though they were made of iron. They
really do look like iron hammered iron statues--under the smooth coat of
coal dust which clings to them from head to foot. It is only when you see
miners down the mine and naked that you realize what splendid men, they
are. Most of them are small (big men are at a disadvantage in that job)
but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders
tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and
sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere. In the hotter
mines they wear only a pair of thin drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the
hottest mines of all, only the clogs and knee-pads. You can hardly tell
by the look of them whether they are young or old. They may be any age up
to sixty or even sixty-five, but when they are black and naked they all
look alike. No one could do their work who had not a young man's body,
and a figure fit for a guardsman at that, just a few pounds of extra
flesh on the waist-line, and the constant bending would be impossible.
You can never forget that spectacle once you have seen it--the line of
bowed, kneeling figures, sooty black all over, driving their, huge
shovels under the coal with stupendous force and speed. They are on the
job for seven and a half hours, theoretically without a break, for there
is no time 'off'. Actually they, snatch a quarter of an hour or so at
some time during the shift to eat the food they have brought with them,
usually a hunk of bread and dripping and a bottle of cold tea. The first
time I was watching the 'fillers' at work I put my hand upon some
dreadful slimy thing among the coal dust. It was a chewed quid of
tobacco. Nearly all the miners chew tobacco, which is said to be good
against thirst.
Probably you have to go down several coal-mines before you can get much
grasp of the processes that are going on round you. This is chiefly
because the mere effort of getting from place to place; makes it
difficult to notice anything else, In some ways it is even disappointing,
or at least is unlike what you have, expected. You get into the cage,
which is a steel box about as wide as a telephone box and two or three
times as long. It holds ten men, but they pack it like pilchards in a
tin, and a tall man cannot stand upright in it. The steel door shuts upon
you, and somebody working the winding gear above drops you into the void.
You have the usual momentary qualm in your belly and a bursting sensation
in the cars, but not much sensation of movement till you get near the
bottom, when the cage slows down so abruptly that you could swear it is
going upwards again. In the middle of the run the cage probably touches
sixty miles an hour; in some of the deeper mines it touches even more.
When you crawl out at the bottom you are perhaps four hundred yards
underground. That is to say you have a tolerable-sized mountain on top of
you; hundreds of yards of solid rock, bones of extinct beasts, subsoil,
flints, roots of growing things, green grass and cows grazing on it--all
this suspended over your head and held back only by wooden props as thick
as the calf of your leg. But because of the speed at which the cage has
brought you down, and the complete blackness through which you have
travelled, you hardly feel yourself deeper down than you would at the
bottom of the Piccadilly tube.
What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal
distances that have to be travelled underground. Before I had been down a
mine I had vaguely imagined the miner stepping out of the cage and
getting to work on a ledge of coal a few yards away. I had not realized
that before he even gets to work he may have had to creep along passages
as long as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus. In the beginning, of
course, a mine shaft is sunk somewhere near a seam of coal; But as that
seam is worked out and fresh seams are followed up, the workings get
further and further from the pit bottom. If it is a mile from the pit
bottom to the coal face, that is probably an average distance; three
miles is a fairly normal one; there are even said to be a few mines where
it is as much as five miles. But these distances bear no relation to
distances above ground. For in all that mile or three miles as it may be,
there is hardly anywhere outside the main road, and not many places even
there, where a man can stand upright.
You do not notice the effect of this till you have gone a few hundred
yards. You start off, stooping slightly, down the dim-lit gallery, eight
or ten feet wide and about five high, with the walls built up with slabs
of shale, like the stone walls in Derbyshire. Every yard or two there are
wooden props holding up the beams and girders; some of the girders have
buckled into fantastic curves under which you have to duck. Usually it is
bad going underfoot--thick dust or jagged chunks of shale, and in some
mines where there is water it is as mucky as a farm-yard. Also there is
the track for the coal tubs, like a miniature railway track with sleepers
a foot or two apart, which is tiresome to walk on. Everything is grey
with shale dust; there is a dusty fiery smell which seems to be the same
in all mines. You see mysterious machines of which you never learn the
purpose, and bundles of tools slung together on wires, and sometimes mice
darting away from the beam of the lamps. They are surprisingly common,
especially in mines where there are or have been horses. It would be
interesting to know how they got there in the first place; possibly by
falling down the shaft--for they say a mouse can fall any distance
uninjured, owing to its surface area being so large relative to its
weight. You press yourself against the wall to make way for lines of tubs
jolting slowly towards the shaft, drawn by an endless steel cable
operated from the surface. You creep through sacking curtains and thick
wooden doors which, when they are opened, let out fierce blasts of air.
These doors are an important part of the ventilation system. The