Free Flight by Elephant by Andrew Martin

Rossiter is the wild card of our pack, and this may have been genetically determined.
    He had been born in 1904, into the Anglo-Irish gentry. His father was a buccaneering character called Walter Wrixon de Rossiter, who had found the ‘Wrixon’ insufficiently distinctive, hence the ‘de’. As a teenager he’d left Ireland to join the Canadian Mounted Police. He also fought in the Boer War, after which he returned to Ireland and married an heiress called Catherine Frances Wright. They had five children. The first was called Edward, and died in infancy; the second, born a year later, was also called Edward and he is our Edward Wrixon Rossiter. Even though he was by now living in Frankfort Castle, which sounds roomy enough, Walter felt constricted by domesticity, and in 1910 he moved back to Canada, without his family. He became a lawman in the distinctly ungenteel environment of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, where he may or may not have started another family entirely. At the start of the First World War, he lied about his age – he said he was younger than he was – to get into the 42nd Royal Highlanders in Montreal. The battalion went to France in October 1915, and Walter Wrixon de Rossiter was killed at Passchendaele, aged fifty.
    It will be worth keeping in mind the life of the father, as we learn more about the life of the son. Let us say for now that Edward Wrixon Rossiter sailed for Rangoon in 1927, after graduating from Trinity College Dublin, and that in 1942 he had recently married and fathered a child with a young Shan woman called Nang Hmat – two children, in fact, because, in May 1942, Nang Hmat would enter the Chaukan Pass three months pregnant, while also carrying her six-month-old baby son, John, in a sling.
    Since 7 April, Rossiter hadn’t had a clue what was going on in Burma, because his government radio had been commandeered and his personal radio was on the blink. All he knew was that the Japanese were coming, and he’d better get out. In early May, he had received a visit from the other of our original pair, Guy Millar, who was accompanied by his elephant tracker, Goal Miri, and Frank Kingdon-Ward.
    Frank Kingdon-Ward, botanist, explorer and thoroughgoing eccentric, was the author of books such as
On the Road to Tibet
,
Land of the Blue Poppy
,
In Furthest Burma
and
Assam Adventure
. In 1942, he was fifty-seven years old, and he bore the nickname ‘Old Kingdom Come’. He was a depressive who could easily go for a whole day without saying a word to his travelling companions, one of whom noted that his real happiness was to be ‘utterly alone’, which in the context of the British-in-Burma actually meant ‘… with nothing but coolies, a cook, and a couple of servants to make his bed’. He was one of the few men who knew the topography of the Burmese–Indian border, and, early in the war, he had been given the special – and odd – military number of 00100. Reviving his First World War rank of captain, but operating as plain Mr Ward, he was dispatched to South Asia. In October 1941, he had checked into the Strand Hotel, Rangoon, from where he wrote to his sister, Winifred, that he was ‘off on an expedition plant hunting’, plausible enough given that, aside from the above-mentioned books, he was also the author of
Plant Hunting on the Edge of the World
,
Plant Hunting in the Wilds
and
Plant Hunter’s Paradise
, but he had underlined ‘plant hunting’ in red, a likely indication that this time he was, for once,
not
going plant hunting, but was engaged in work for one of those martial agencies that proliferated in Burma, under the auspices of which any old jungle wallah might immediately become an army officer: the Military Survey Service. Certainly by March 1942, Kingdon-Ward was in Upper Burma, and helping to facilitate the civilian evacuation, and it seems that Guy Millar had assisted him in this endeavour, which he refers to in his diary simply as ‘government work’.
    Kingdon-Ward,