Killing elephants with swords

[George Armstrong Custer]

The Central-African-born novelist Wilbur Smith is justly renowned for the background research which lends historical accuracy to those of his novels set in historical periods. His new bestseller, The Triumph of the Sun is set during the 1884/5 siege of Khartoum in the Sudan by the Dervish forces of the Mahdi. At one point Smith describes an elephant hunt which is conducted by Emir Osman Atalan, en route to Khartoum from the Red Sea Hills. The modus operandi of the hunters is astonishing - and the descriptions of their weapons and their devotion to them is instructive:

'[Emir Osman] held the scabbard of his broadsword clamped under his right knee against the saddle. The hilt was exquisitely fashioned from rhinoceros horn with a patina like amber, and the blade was inlaid with gold and silver.......While the horses rested the aggagiers took down their swords and shields from where they were tied to the saddles. They sat in a small, companionable group in the sunlight, and began to strop their blades on the cured giraffe hide of their shields. The hide of the giraffe was the toughest of all wild game, yet not so heavy as that of the buffalo or hippopotamus. The shields were round targes, unadorned with image or emblem, marked only by the blade of the enemy, or the claw and fang of the chase. Blade-honing was a pastime with which they filled their leisure, as much a part of their life as breathing.......There was silence except for the susurration of steel on leather. They paused in this endless activity only to test an edge with a thumb. Each blade was about three and a half feet in length, and double-edged. It was a replica of the broadswords of the crusaders that, centuries before, had so impressed the Saracens before the walls of Acre and Jerusalem. The most treasured blades had been forged from the steel of Solingen, and handed down from father to son. The marvellous temper of this metal imparted immense power to the blade, and it was capable of taking an edge like that of a surgeon's scalpel - the lightest stroke would split hide and hair, flesh and sinew to the deepest bone. A full stroke could divide an enemy at the waist, cutting him in two as effortlessly as though he were a ripe pomegranate. The scabbards were fashioned from two flat pieces of soft mimosa wood, held together and covered by the skin of an elephant's ear, dried hard and strong as iron. On the flat of the scabbard were two raised leather projections about twelve inches apart, which held the weapon securely under the horseman's thigh. Even at full gallop, it would not flap and bounce in the ungainly manner of the swords of European cavalry...........'

The hunters later discover three bull elephants, and how these are felled is awesome:

'Osman dared not approach closer whilst he was mounted. He slipped from the saddle and girded up the hem of his jibba with the blue sash, leaving his legs covered only with baggy breeches. He tightened the straps of his sandals, then drew his broadsword. Instinctively he tried the edge and sucked the drop of blood that welled from the ball of his thumb.........The bull seemed as majestic as a three-decked man-o'-war. It seemed impossible that such a mighty beast could fall to the puny blade. Osman stepped lithely and lightly with the grace of a dancer, carrying the sword in his right hand. However, he had bound the first hand's breadth of the blade above the cruciform crosspiece of the hilt with a strip of skin from the ear of a freshly killed elephant: now that this had dried and cured it formed a double grip for his left hand..........Osman changed his grip, two-handed now for the fatal stroke, and moved down the bull's flank close enough to touch him with the point of the sword.........His aggagiers watched him with awe and admiration. A lesser warrior would have chosen to hamstring his quarry, approaching the unsuspecting beast from behind and, with swift double strokes, severing the main tendons and arteries in the back of the legs above the huge, splayed feet. That injury would allow the hunter to escape, but cripple and anchor the bull until the severed arteries had drained the life from him, a slow death that might take up to an hour. However, to attempt the head-on approach as the emir was doing, increased the danger a hundredfold. Osman was now well within the arc of the trunk, which was capable of delivering a blow that would shatter every bone in his body. The huge ears picked up the smallest sound, even a carefully controlled breath, and at such close quarters the rheumy little eyes could detect the slightest movement..............The dangling trunk was also shielded by the thick yellow tusks. Osman had to entice the bull into extending it towards him. Any untoward movement, any incongruous sound would trigger a devastating response. He would be clubbed down by a blow from the trunk, or trampled under the pads of those great feet, or transfixed by an ivory tusk, then knelt upon and ground to bloody paste under the bulging bone of the bull's forehead.........Osman twisted the blade gently between his fists and, with the polished metal, picked up one of the stray sunbeams that pierced the canopy above his head. He played the reflected sunbeam onto the bull's gently flapping ear, then directed it forward gradually until it shot a tiny diamond wedge of light into the bull's half-closed eye. The elephant opened his eye fully and it glittered as he sought out the source of this mild annoyance. He detected no movement other than the trembling spot of sunlight, and reached out his trunk towards it, not alarmed but mildly curious.........There was no need for Osman to adjust his double grip on the hilt. The blade described a glittering sweep in the air, fast as the stoop of the hunting peregrine. There was no bone in the trunk to turn the blow so the silver blade sliced cleanly through it and half dropped to the ground........The elephant reeled back from the shock and agony. Osman jumped back at the same instant and the bull spotted the movement and tried to lash out at it. But his trunk lay on the earth, and as the stump swung in an arc towards Osman, the blood hosed from the open arteries and sprayed in a crimson jet that soaked his jibba. Then the bull lifted the stump of his amputated trunk and trumpeted in mortal anguish, his blood spraying back over his head and into his eyes. He charged into the forest, shattering the trees and thornbushes that blocked his path. Startled from the brink of sleep by his trumpeting screams, the other bulls fled with him.............'

The story continues with the hunters riding down the other two bull elephants, and, leaping from their horses, despatching one by the same method of trunk amputation, and the second by the slower method of slashing with swords the arteries and tendons in the rear legs. By the time this last elephant is brought down, the two whose trunks had been slashed off had bled to death - the blood pumped out of the arteries in the trunk stump at a great rate as the distraught animals charged through the bush. Two of the hunters are killed in the process. I hope these brief extracts might whet your appetite to read the whole book. Its worth it for the whole story of the hunting of the bull elephants by sword alone. It's also the best fictionalised account I've read of the events in the Sudan in 1884/5 which culminated in the fall of Khartoum and the death of General Charlton Heston (oops! I mean General Charles Gordon, of course!)

Ciao,
GAC