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 unnamed officer's peers are divided between older officers and younger officers, and each group holds opposite opinions to the other. Where the older officers assure our protagonist that he was in the right for putting down a potentially dangerous animal, the younger officers believe that it would be better to let the animal live. As for who is right and who is wrong, it comes down to a basic interpretation of the text and the morals of the individual reader.

The younger officers are, indeed, difficult to sympathize with, considering their extremely prejudiced language. They say quite explicitly, "an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie,"  meaning that the elephant was more important than the native person that it had killed. However, when looking at the text as a whole, and the hatred and prejudice that the officers experience at the hands of the Burmese people (in the beginning of the text, Orwell explores the cruelties enacted by the natives in reaction to the very strong "anti-British" feeling in the area), we can understand the reactionary emotion behind it. In addition, Orwell's character states, "as soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him... [a]nd 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." However, pressured by the Burmese people who had been the cause of many of his torments, the protagonist has a strong desire to appease the natives, and kills the animal anyway.

By contrast, the older officers had spent more time in the area, dealing with these people, and therefore had a better sense of how to remove themselves from the emotional aspects of the job. For the safety of the officer (and to make the job easier), it is a wise decision to gain the trust and respect of the people under their protection. And as the elephant had already killed a man, it was the right thing to do to put the elephant down. As for which is the correct approach, or who was in the right, the question simply boils down to the audience's moral code and interpretation of the text. The fun thing about literature is that there is rarely a single "right" answer, so long as you can back it up with evidence from the text.

The older Orwell—or more precisely, the speaker (there is debate as to whether the speaker is Orwell or a fictional character based on Orwell)—sums up the differences between himself and the young Orwell in the following sentences:

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.

Both Orwells hate imperialism, but the younger Orwell, living in the moment, can't get a handle on what is going on.

Orwell wrote the essay in 1936 based on his time in Burma from 1922 to 1927. By the time he wrote it, he had been away from Burma from nine years and had had time to look back and analyze his experience there. As he notes, his younger self believed the British Empire was all powerful, fixed, and eternal. That perspective informs his thinking in the act of "saving face" for the Empire by shooting the elephant unnecessarily.

Now, by the mid 1930s, he knows the British Empire is rotting and that what he witnessed in Burma were signs of the rot. The British Empire is not eternal. It is also, he now realizes, having discovered the evils of the new Nazi Germany, not as evil as other "younger" empires. With a more informed perspective, he suggests, he might have behaved differently, but at the time he felt trapped and without a choice.

Well done for identifying the two central characters that we are presented with! In this essay, the narrative form that is used is first person retrospective narration, which means that we have an older, maturer and wiser central character looking back and describing something that happened to him or her in the past. Of course what makes this narrative form so interesting is the way in which the older protagonist often can comment on his or her earlier actions.

In this essay, therefore, we have the younger Orwell who gets caught up in the situation and is aware of the contradictions of his position but feels unable to step outside the expectations of role and race. The older Orwell, however, looks back with greater distance, perspective and maturity and displays a keener and shrewder awareness about the ironies of his situation. The younger Orwell feels pressurised and hassled, but the older Orwell is more detached and able to comment more freely, with the benefit of time, space and distance, on why he did what he did during that time.

Your question refers to the final paragraph, which comes after Orwell has shot the elephant, and which tells us the way that the other colonial officers greeted the news of what happened. Let us just remind ourselves of what the text says at this point in the novel:

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 afterward 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.

If we look at this quote carefully, we can infer that the division of opinions is related to the age of the colonial staff that give their opinion. It is perhaps the older men who are more able to grasp the bigger issue that is at stake with their experience. They perhaps know, even better than Orwell does, the way that it is important to maintain the illusion of power and provide a spectacle for the "natives," even though, as Orwell eloquently establishes, that power is actually ironically based on a kind of slavery. The younger men think only of profit and economic motives, which places the life of an elephant as being worth more than a "coolie." Clearly, their opinion is related to their lack of experience and knowledge concerning colonialism and the narrow, profit-based motive that is at the heart of so much colonial enterprise.

Personally, I think the older men are right, as their opinion shows their experience and their appreciation of the kind of situation a white man finds himself in when he takes power over others. The younger men's view shows their lack of experience and their narrow, restricted view of the situation.