Lost Worlds and Lost Causes

It was Lord Byron, himself both poet and adventurer, who said that truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes both are strange and have their own special luster. This can be seen clearly when real events inspire works of fiction, as in the case of the life of Tom Harrisson (1911-1976) and the novel by Pierre Schoendoerffer (1928-2012) that was informed by Harrisson’s adventures. 

Schoendoerffer was one of those many talented European writers and filmmakers better known in his own language and country than in English. He once had two novels translated into English decades ago, both made into films and well received at the time but out of print today (while still relatively available used) in the Anglophone world. Most of his other work is only available in French.

He was one of those protean Frenchmen (an Alsatian, to be exact) who knew 20th century conflict and war first hand—Joseph Kessel (Schoendoerffer’s mentor), Andre Malraux, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Jean Larteguy are others that come to mind—and who wrote well and creatively about those experiences with real literary power. 

Schoendoerffer’s award-winning second novel, L’Adieu au roi (Farewell to the King), published in French in 1969 and in English the following year, tells the World War II tale of Allied (British and Australian) soldiers parachuting into Borneo to raise the local native tribes as irregular forces against the Japanese. After being sent to contact the pagan Murut tribesmen, they discover the group is ruled by a white “king,” an Ulster Irish deserter from the British Army after the fall of Singapore. 

That king, the grey-eyed, red-headed Learoyd, a former sergeant in the Argylls (the 2nd Battalion of the Argyll Highlanders was, unusually, famed for its rare prowess in jungle fighting in Malaya against the Japanese) has “a chest tattoo of an eagle with wings outspread swooping on a dragon.” He claims to have learned two things in the British Army that enabled his rise to tribal kingship in Borneo, “bayonet fighting and the history of the Kings of England during the Middle Ages.” The fiercely independent Murut of North Borneo lack for nothing, except needing to trade for all important salt from the coast, for “salt means life.” 

The novel’s narrator is a British officer, former academic, and expert on tropical orchids. The narrator is shocked to discover that the Murut have learned some English and are part of a shock force calling themselves “Comanches.” Learoyd has forged a pan-tribal coalition, armed with swords, blowpipes, and a few captured Japanese weapons for his “Comanche Army.” Learoyd explains that “the men here dream of God … they want to rival the heroes of the days of high adventure.” The tribal chiefs are like medieval feudal barons united by the charismatic Irish renegade. An anti-Japanese coalition is formed between Learoyd and his men and the outsiders.

The beginnings of the revolt are intoxicating. The narrator describes the events as “the most exciting of my life.” As he reminisces, he explains how “memories unfurl and I am lost in them, lost.” The wiping out of one enemy column is as wild and “as joyful as a cavalry charge.”

Both the narrator and one other outsider dream “of taking possession in my turn of this fantastic kingdom,” as if there is something in every man that dreams of ruling, of building empires. The Japanese are desperate, brutal, and starving, their long retreat through hostile territory at one point led to the slaughter of an entire longhouse of native women and children, by way of reprisal. “In the days that followed we were merciless. We did not take a single prisoner.”  

The Japanese defeated, Learoyd the Magnificent is brought down by the Allies, but with one final twist of fate. Decades later, in a cold and rainy England, the narrator wonders about Learoyd’s ultimate destiny after having played a reluctant role in betraying him to the reestablishment of the post-war colonial order. The days of kings like Learoyd or Sarawak’s Rajah Brooke seem to have passed. And yet would it have been so terrible if his kingdom, among so many others on the globe, had actually lasted?

Schoendoerffer’s novel is a work of the imagination, enriched by his own literary influences and his experiences in Vietnam. However, it is also deeply informed by the very real adventures of British soldier-anthropologist Tom Harrisson and his comrades. Harrisson was the first man to parachute into North Central Borneo in 1945 to raise the tribes against the Japanese. He is (with elements drawn from other individuals) in a sense the origin of —both Learoyd and the narrator in Schoendoerffer’s novel. If Learoyd was “the mad king,” the very real Harrisson could be called the ‘mad major’ by his subordinates. The polymath Harrisson was, among many other things, an ornithologist rather than the narrator/orchid collector in the novel.

And instead of linking up with the Murut, Harrisson contacted the Murut’s next door cousins, the even more independent (they had their own salt supply) Kelabit tribesmen of Sarawak. They lived in that part of the island of Borneo which was ruled by a family of real British ‘White Rajahs,’ the Brookes, from 1841 to 1946. The action in the novel takes place in North Borneo (Sabah) which borders Harrisson’s real-life main area of operations in Sarawak.

Harrisson’s own 1959 book (World Within: A Borneo Story), part cultural anthropology and part war memoir, tells this compelling true-life story. The first half of the book (136 pages) is a comprehensive study of the ways of the Kelabit, while pages 137 to 343 are about the war.

This was Operation Semut (Malay for ‘ant’) carried out by the Z Special Unit of allied (mostly Australian) troops working behind enemy lines on various Pacific and Indian Ocean fronts against the Japanese during the Second World War. 

Major Harrisson was chosen for the mission because he knew something of the region—having been part of an Oxford University research expedition in 1932 to Sarawak and speaking some Malay. But when he landed in a rice field in 1945, the three tall dark Kelabit tribesmen with leopard teeth in their earlobes who met him spoke neither Malay nor English. 

The Brooke Raj had outlawed headhunting but otherwise left the tribes alone, protecting them against both unwanted missionaries and unscrupulous commercial traders. There was great goodwill towards the British as a result of this experience among these tough inland, upriver people. 

The Japanese occupation in Borneo had been brutal, particularly in coastal regions, but it had hardly touched these tribes. They had no guns (the Japanese had confiscated any guns they could find) but the tribesmen had the perfect weapon for jungle warfare, the sumpit, a spear-topped blowpipe used with poison darts. Any Japanese patrol that ventured too far upriver had been wiped out, with no survivors to tell the tale.

That these parachuting white outsiders were coming to distribute rifles (and Sten guns, grenades and high explosives) was received enthusiastically by the tribes, “all that any ordinary man wanted was to be allocated some lethal weapon.” That they were being encouraged to kill Japanese (and unsaid but implied, to maybe take their heads in the old ways) was even better. “These hillmen were fundamentally fighting men still. They admired boldness, the urge to fight and kill.” The totality of their culture “honored physical bravery in combat and this had been denied them for many years past.”

And after arrival and meeting with tribal chiefs who did speak some Malay, Harrisson “woke up to find [him]self a Rajah.” Harrisson attributes this to the gold major’s crown insignia on his cap, but it was also likely recognition that he was the senior outsider on the ground, the white man who gave orders to the other white men and who brought all sorts of interesting items in by air. Harrisson would soon enough look the part—barefoot, wearing a sarong with a soldier’s cap and crown insignia, They called him Tuan Besar, “the boss.”   

The eccentric but capable Harrisson (a 1997 biography is titled The Most Offending Soul Alive) enforced several tough rules on his incoming Australians: no dallying with the native women, soldiers needed to go barefoot, they should eat mostly local food rather than airdropped rations, and his soldiers were to be distributed among the tribes in small numbers to learn the language and customs. Harrisson was a man who inspired both love and loathing his entire life, but not one of the men under his command died, and (perhaps more surprising) very few of the tribesmen died either.

In contrast to the drama of Schoendoerffer’s book, the ravaging Japanese soldiers never got close enough to massacre any of the interior tribes, although the risk of that happening was real. Harrisson and his men trained and armed about 2,000 tribesmen in 1945 who by one estimate killed about 2800 Japanese soldiers, losing only about 120 of their own fighters. The tribesmen also provided key intelligence for the invading Australians and rescued downed allied airmen from Japanese retribution. 

Although Borneo was a major source of petroleum (providing up to a third of Japan’s supply), the military theater was very much a sideshow. And Operation Semut—42 allied soldiers and 2,000 rampaging tribesmen—was a sideshow of a sideshow, if an extraordinarily colorful one. 

While there was no Learoyd character to betray, the Allies did in a way seek to betray their tribal allies once the war was over and the Japanese defeated. The Dutch especially sought to impose the old colonial order, and everyone wanted the tribes disarmed while there were still ragged units of desperate, suspicious Japanese soldiers marauding in the interior. Harrisson and his men, many of whom had forged a special bond with the Kelabit, did all they could to lead and protect the tribesmen, even clashing with Japanese troops in the months after the end of the war as ammunition began to run low. A final column of 340 Japanese surrendered to them on October 28, two months after the formal end of the conflict. 

Harrisson would spend much of the next two decades in Sarawak, heading the local museum and working as a “government ethnologist.” Amazingly, in 1962 he would be pressed back into military action. He roused his old tribal brothers in arms back into service as “native irregulars” when the traditional Red Feather of War was sent upriver against a leftist Indonesian-back insurgency, the first stages of a years-long low intensity conflict between Indonesia’s Sukarno against the British and the creation of what is now Malaysia. By then the Kelabit and Murut were Christians, but they were still ready for a fight.

Both the Schoendoerffer novel and the Harrisson memoir are fascinating, worthwhile reads that complement each other. Both books touch on hoary themes that seem to be hopelessly out of fashion in our so-called progressive era: the brotherhood of arms crossing ethnic and cultural divides, individual bravery in battle, the not entirely negative heritage of imperialism and colonialism, the manly quest for building empires. Both books—the fictional and the historical—touch upon what conservative commentator Charles Haywood has called “armed patronage networks” as organizing models, a seemingly archaic concept which may not be completely obsolete in some possible future scenarios. 

Both of these European writers also shared several personal characteristics, both were orphans or near orphans, both sought adventure early on and had formative experiences as young men in foreign countries that would shape their creative and scholarly lives. Both were successful in their chosen fields, although the Oscar-winning Schoendoerffer perhaps had the more conventional life. But how many Oscar recipients also received the Croix de guerre?

Harrisson spent the most productive and longest period of his life in Southeast Asia and died there. Schoendoerffer would repeatedly return to soldiers and the jungle in his literary and cinematic career. Even in his 1966 noirish crime caper film set in Paris, Objectif 500 Millions, the hero is a cashiered paratrooper who dreams of “jungle and monsoon.”

Both were soldiers and something more … something else. The Frenchman lost a war, the Englishman won one, but both transmuted it into tokens of fidelity. For Harrisson, the faithful ones were the Kelabit, for Schoendoerffer, it was the French soldier, especially in Indochina. Harrisson first went to Sarawak when he was twenty years old, returning to fight when he was thirty-three. Schoendoerffer celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday as a French Army combat filmmaker besieged at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Like Harrisson, he had parachuted into a jungle war and that would permanently mark his life.