I am not going to write about Tuesday’s election in the Polarized States of America. No, I am not! The other significant event this week was Remembrance Day. Veterans' Day in the U.S. Armistice Day in some other countries. I have no personal stories of service in war. I was too young for the Korean War; after that, I didn’t want to serve in any war. So I'll tell you instead about my uncle, Andrew Copeland Taylor, who never intended to be a soldier at all. He wanted to be a missionary doctor. He did serve one term as chief and often only surgeon in a rural hospital in India, the land of his birth. But when he returned to Canada towards the end of the Depression -- before air travel, missionaries served seven years overseas and then had one year of “furlough” -- his church ran out of money to send him back. So (like a certain TV host) the United Church fired anyone not in active service. To get back to India, Andrew Taylor accepted a commission in the British army’s Indian Medical Service. He didn’t know it would mean a 13-year separation from his wife and children. Four years later, World War II broke out. Uncle Andy was transferred to active duty. When Japanese forces started overrunning southeast Asia, he was put in charge of a 1000-bed field hospital in Burma, just east of Mandalay. Singapore fell. Rangoon, the capital of Burma, fell. Mandalay was next. Andrew Taylor had to evacuate his patients. As he wrote later to his wife, he packed a train with “over 900 men from all four hospitals in like sardines. It was the most crowded train I’ve ever seen -- piled into carriages as thick as they could stand.” It was the last train to leave the city. Uncle Andy followed in a convoy of ambulances, carrying the casualties too wounded to send on the train. Over roads that snaked through precipitous mountain ranges, cratered by bombs, sodden in the monsoon rains. Japanese forces were so close behind, Andy’s convoy was under orders not to stop to help anyone who fell behind. He did, anyway.
They made it to Mandalay. With “a Japanese air raid in progress, the centre of the town flattened, not a living soul to be seen anywhere.” Andy’s ambulances were the last vehicles to cross the bridge out of Mandalay, across the Irrawaddy River. They could look down and see the dynamite already strapped to the girders. Like the famous Bridge on the River Kwai -- only much bigger. Other medical units took over Andy’s last patients. The roads were destroying his ambulances anyway. He helped push the last one over a cliff. Then he walked all the way to Bengal, treating sick and wounded at every stop. He threw away all his possessions, carrying only his revolver and a blanket, sleeping in ankle-deep mud. By the time he reached India, he had malaria and dysentery. Never a large man, he lost over 30 pounds during the two month ordeal. But he survived; 30,000 others didn’t. He later received six awards: the Oak Star, the Burma Star, the Defence Medal, the War Medal, the 1945 Star, and the Order of the British Empire. When the war ended, the last officer out of Burma found himself Surgeon to the last Viceroy of India. Lord Louis Mountbatten had been appointed to oversee India’s independence. It was, I argue, the most momentous political act of the 20th century. As the planet’s second-most populous country, the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire, India’s independence paved the way for today’s Commonwealth of Nations. And Andrew Taylor lived in the middle of it. At the cremation of Mahatma Gandhi, he squatted crosslegged on the ground, a white man within yards of the funeral pyre. During the chaos of partition, New Delhi had daily massacres, riots, shootings and lootings. My uncle slept with a loaded revolver under his pillow. He would have had incredible stories to tell. But he never did. He was sworn to secrecy. For life.
After Independence in 1947, all British civil servants were sent home; the Indian Medical Service disbanded. But Uncle Andy and a few others stayed one more year, through the personal intervention of India's new prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Andy returned to Canada in 1948, to became Chief of Surgery at the Regina General Hospital. But he wasn’t forgotten. On one of Queen Elizabeth’s visits to Canada, she and Prince Philip made a special trip to Regina to meet a man they still held in high respect. On Remembrance Day, I remember Uncle Andy.