As he took a rifle and followed the elephant, other people continued to follow him, until they became a crowd of over two thousand people. Knowing that the force behind him was much greater than his own, it was distracting him and he knew that "...even then I wasn't particularly thinking about my skin, but only about the watchful yellow faces behind." The pressure of his military duty was also eating away at him, thinking to himself “the crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, the life of every white man from the East, has been a long struggle not to be laughed at." The old soldiers later believed that he had done the right thing because he was doing his duty by resolving a casualty; the young soldiers thought "it was such a shame to shoot an elephant for killing a bearer" because the elephant had already calmed down and the owner was not present. Relying on optimism, Orwell ultimately settled for the victim and saw his actions as legally justified due to