No More Learning

The, boredom in that
crowded, comfortless room was now unbearable. Even smoking had ceased, for a tramp’s
only tobacco is picked-up cigarette ends, and, like a browsing beast, he starves if he is
long away from the pavement-pasture. To occupy the time I talked with a rather superior
tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar and tie, and was on the road, he said, for lack
of a set of tools. He kept a little aloof from the other tramps, and held himself more like a
free man than a casual. He had literary tastes, too, and carried one of Scott’s novels on all
his wanderings. He told me he never entered a spike unless driven there by hunger,
sleeping under hedges and behind ricks in preference. Along the south coast he had
begged by day and slept in bathing-machines for weeks at a time.

We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system which makes a tramp spend
fourteen hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging the police. He
spoke of his own case — six months at the public charge for want of three pounds’ worth
of tools. It was idiotic, he said.

Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and what I thought
of it. And at that he changed his tune immediately. I saw that I had awakened the pew-
renter who sleeps in every English workman. Though he had been famished along with
the rest, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been thrown away rather than
given to the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.

‘They have to do it,’ he said. ‘If they made these places too pleasant you’d have all the
scum of the country flocking into them. It’s only the bad food as keeps all that scum
away. These tramps are too lazy to work, that’s all that’s wrong with them. You don’t
want to go encouraging of them. They’re scum. ’


I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept repeating:



‘You don’t want to have any pity on these tramps — scum, they are. You don’t want to
judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They’re scum, just scum. ’

It was interesting to see how subtly he disassociated himself from his fellow tramps. He
has been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not
a tramp. His body might be in the spike, but his spirit soared far away, in the pure aether
of the middle classes.

The clock’s hands crept round with excruciating slowness. We were too bored even to
talk now, the only sound was of oaths and reverberating yawns. One would force his eyes
away from the clock for what seemed an age, and then look back again to see that the
hands had advanced three minutes. Ennui clogged our souls like cold mutton fat. Our
bones ached because of it. The clock’s hands stood at four, and supper was not till six,
and there was nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.

At last six o’clock did come, and the Tramp Major and his assistant arrived with supper.
The yawning tramps brisked up like lions at feeding-time. But the meal was a dismal
disappointment. The bread, bad enough in the morning, was now positively uneatable; it
was so hard that even the strongest jaws could make little impression on it. The older
men went almost supperless, and not a man could finish his portion, hungry though most
of us were. When we had finished, the blankets were served out immediately, and we
were hustled off once more to the bare, chilly cells.

Thirteen hours went by. At seven we were awakened, and rushed forth to squabble over
the water in the bathroom, and bolt our ration of bread and tea. Our time in the spike was
up, but we could riot go until the doctor had examined us again, for the authorities have a
terror of smallpox and its distribution by tramps. The doctor kept us waiting two hours
this time, and it was ten o’clock before we finally escaped.

At last it was time to go, and we were let out into the yard. How bright everything
looked, and how sweet the winds did blow, after the gloomy, reeking spike! The Tramp
Major handed each man his bundle of confiscated possessions, and a hu nk of bread and
cheese for midday dinner, and then we took the road, hastening to get out of sight of the
spike and its discipline. This was our interim of freedom. After a day and two nights of
wasted time we had eight hours or so to take our recreation, to scour the roads for



cigarette ends, to beg, and to look for work. Also, we had to make our ten, fifteen, or it
might be twenty miles to the next spike, where the game would begin anew.


I disinterred my eightpence and took the road with Nobby, a respectable, downhearted
tramp who carried a spare pair of boots and visited all the Labour Exchanges. Our late
companions were scattering north, south, cast and west, like bugs into a mattress. Only
the imbecile loitered at the spike gates, until the Tramp Major had to chase him away.

Nobby and I set out for Croydon. It was a quiet road, there were no cars passing, the
blossom covered the chestnut trees like great wax candles. Everything was so quiet and
smelt so clean, it was hard to realize that only a few minutes ago we had been packed
with that band of prisoners in a stench of drains and soft soap. The others had all
disappeared; we two seemed to be the only tramps on the road.

Then I heard a hurried step behind me, and felt a tap on my ann. It was little Scotty, who
had run panting after us. He pulled a rusty tin box from his pocket. He wore a friendly
smile, like a man who is repaying an obligation.

‘Here y’are, mate,’ he said cordially. ‘I owe you some fag ends. You stood me a smoke
yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box of fag ends when we come out this
morning. One good turn deserves another — here y’are. ’

And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette ends into my hand.


A HANGING (1931)

It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was
slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned
cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell
measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot
of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars,
with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged
within the next week or two.



One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man,
with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly
too big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall
Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them
stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain
through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his anns tight to his sides.
They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful,
caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like
men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood
quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what
was happening.

Eight o’clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the
distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of
us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an
anny doctor, with a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. “For God’s sake hurry
up, Francis,” he said irritably. “The man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren’t you
ready yet? ”

Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his
black hand. “Yes sir, yes sir,” he bubbled. “All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman
iss waiting. We shall proceed. ”

“Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can’t get their breakfast till this job’s over. ”

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with
their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and
shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and
the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped
short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened — a dog, come
goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a
loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at
finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half
pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had



made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood
aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.

“Who let that bloody brute in here? ” said the superintendent angrily. “Catch it,
someone! ”

A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and
gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian
jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the
stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the
grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of
the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we
put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still
straining and whimpering.

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner
marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily,
with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his
muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet
printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by
each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy,
conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the
mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This
man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were
working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming —
all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the
drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw
the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned —
reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing,
hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap,
one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.



The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and
overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with
planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The
hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his
machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the
two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him to
the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman climbed up and
fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.

We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the
gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It
was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! ”, not urgent and fearful like a
prayer or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog
answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a
small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the
sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!
Ram! ”

The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass.
The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, “Ram! Ram! Ram! ” never
faltering for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the
ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed
number — fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had
gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at
the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries — each cry another second of
life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that
abominable noise!

Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift
motion with his stick. “Chalo! ” he shouted almost fiercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the
rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of
the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a comer



of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went
round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was dangling with his toes pointed
straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.

The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated,
slightly. “HE’S all right,” said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows,
and blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He
glanced at his wrist-watch. “Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning,
thank God. ”

The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of
having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the
condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The
convicts, under the command of warders anned with lathis, were already receiving their
breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two
warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly
scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was
done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone
began chattering gaily.

The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a
knowing smile: “Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard
his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. — Kindly
take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the
boxwallah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European style. ”

Several people laughed — at what, nobody seemed certain.

Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. “Well, sir, all hass passed
off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished — flick! like that. It iss not always
so — oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the
gallows and pull the prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable! ”


“Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,” said the superintendent.



“Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the bars
of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six
warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him.
“My dear
fellow,” we said, “think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us! ” But no, he
would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome! ”

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent
grinned in a tolerant way. “You’d better all come out and have a drink,” he said quite
genially. “I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it. ”

We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. “Pulling at his legs! ”
exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began
laughing again. At that moment Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all
had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a
hundred yards away.


BOOKSHOP MEMORIES (1936)

When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one,
as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound
folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop
had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers
knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers
of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still,
and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were
commonest of all.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere
but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants
a book for an invalid’ (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who
read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy.
Unfortunately she doesn’t remember the title or the author’s name or what the book was
about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. But apart from these there are two
well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the



decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several
times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders
large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our
shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order them if necessary,
for people who arranged to fetch them away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered
books from us ever came back. It used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They
would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise over
and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to return. But many of
them, of course, were unmistakable paranoiacs. They used to talk in a grandiose manner
about themselves and tell the most ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to
come out of doors without any money — stories which, in many cases, I am sure they
themselves believed. In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite
certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops,
because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time
without spending any money. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a
glance. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very
often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside the books he
asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment he had gone. None of them,
I noticed, ever attempted to take books away without paying for them; merely to order
them was enough — it gave them, I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real
money.

Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand
typewriters, for instance, and also stamps — used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors are a
strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently,
fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. We also
sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the
Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of them
myself, but the people who bought them often came back and told us how ‘true’ their
horoscopes had been. (Doubtless any horoscope seems ‘true’ if it tells you that you are
highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity. ) We did a good
deal of business in children’s books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are
rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would
sooner give a child a copy of Petrenius Arbiter than PETER PAN, but even Barrie seems



manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we
spent a feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are
tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It used to interest me to
see the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the
Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase
from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: ‘2 doz. Infant Jesus with rabbits’.

But our principal sideline was a lending library — the usual ‘twopenny no-deposit’ library
of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the book thieves must love those
libraries! It is the easiest crime in the world to borrow a book at one shop for twopence,
remove the label and sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless booksellers
generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books stolen (we used
to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers away by demanding a deposit.

Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we
were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors. Probably our library
subscribers were a fair cross-section of London’s reading public. It is therefore worth
noting that of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was —
Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick
Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell’s novels, of course,
are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might
expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that
men don’t read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they
avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the AVERAGE novel — the ordinary,
good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the nonn of the English novel — seems to
exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective
stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our subscribers to my
knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others
which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the
same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of trash (the pages read
every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three quarters of an acre) was stored for ever
in his memory. He took no notice of titles or author’s names, but he could tell by merely
glancing into a book whether be had ‘had it already’.



In a lending library you see people’s real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing
that strikes you is how completely the ‘classical’ English novelists have dropped out of
favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the
ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-
century novel people say, ‘Oh, but that’s OLD! ’ and shy away immediately. Yet it is
always fairly easy to SELL Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens
is one of those authors whom people are ‘always meaning to’ read, and, like the Bible, he
is widely known at second hand. People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar
and that Mr Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was
found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the ‘back parts’ of the Lord. Another thing that is
very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books. And another — the
publishers get into a stew about this every two or three years — is the unpopularity of
short stories. The kind of person who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly
always starts by saying ‘I don’t want short stories’, or ‘I do not desire little stories’, as a
German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they sometimes explain
that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of characters with every story; they like to
‘get into’ a novel which demands no further thought after the first chapter. I believe,
though, that the writers are more to blame here than the readers. Most modern short
stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and worthless, far more so than most
novels. The short stories which are stories are popular enough, VIDE D. H. Lawrence,
whose short stories are as popular as his novels.

Would I like to be a bookseller DE METIER? On the whole — in spite of my employer’s
kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop — no.

Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person ought to be able
to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless one goes in for ‘rare’ books it is
not a difficult trade to leam, and you start at a great advantage if you know anything
about the insides of books. (Most booksellers don’t. You can get their measure by having
a look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don’t see an ad. for
Boswell’s DECLINE AND FALL you are pretty sure to see one for THE MILL ON THE
FLOSS by T. S. Eliot. ) Also it is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized
beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent
bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the



hours of work are very long — I was only a part-time employee, but my employer put in a
seventy-hour week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours to buy books — and it is
an unhealthy life. As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too
warm the windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books
give off more and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of
a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I
was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives
him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and
hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight
and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing
pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction.
There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind
of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of
forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading —
in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the
odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the
Girl’s Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books.
Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly
sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read
and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me
no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead
bluebottles.


SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (1936)

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 Bunnan 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 nonnal 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 Bunnese 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 comer
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 unanned 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.