Title: Shooting an Elephant

Author: George Orwell

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.

THE END