Every fresh year brought another boiling point. Between the end of 1930 and September 1931, Chiang orchestrated three ‘Encirclement Campaigns’ designed to isolate Communist troops and gain supremacy. He intended to starve them of food and deprive them of military hardware. The Red Army repelled each assault. But what neither it nor the Nationalists could prevent was Japanese expansionism.
Japan’s Kwantung Army waded into and then conquered Manchuria in September 1931 to take advantage of the instability elsewhere. This was done on the false pretext that China had blown up part of a railway line that Japan commercially owned. The Kwantung had actually set the explosives itself. Manchuria became Manchukuo, the invaders installing a puppet leader with long strings, who was controlled from Tokyo. Western governments and the League of Nations were impotent against the land-grab. So was Chiang, unable to strike on a new front and retain those he held already.
China’s fury was articulated in the lyrics of a song called ‘Kill the Enemy’, which appeared in the China Times, reflecting the mood for revenge. The Japanese scoffed at it. Less than four months later came the abomination of the Shanghai Incident. Outrage was piled on outrage. The Japanese smashed and gutted swathes of the city through relentless bombing, first from naval destroyers and then from low-level air raids, the circumference of which was gradually widened. In the inferno, roads became wide pits. Homes and shops and factories became charred shells. White-eyed corpses of men, women and children were laid out and photographed among the rubble. Some civilians were hauled to a racetrack where the army bayoneted them to death.
By 1933 China, still in conflict with itself, was pressed into defending the Great Wall against the Japanese, who provoked another dispute. The Boxer Treaty had given them control of a garrison. The Japanese fabricated the discovery of two bombs inside it. In the aggression that followed, the town of Jehol was shelled, clearing a path to the wall for them. To avoid an attack on Peking, the Chinese agreed to the removal of troop battalions from almost 120,000 square miles.
China was a tinder box, always ablaze somewhere owing to either the Japanese or the civil war. A further two Encirclement Campaigns took place in March and October 1933 as part of Chiang’s attempt to crush Communist resistance. Even as the Liddells settled into their marriage during the autumn of 1934, the Communist retreat that became the Long March – lauded as an ‘epic poem’ to its cause – began unwinding in a monumental exercise of endurance on a route from southern to north-west and northern China. The 368-day trek passed through twelve provinces, crossed twenty-four rivers, went over eighteen mountain ranges and occupied sixty-two cities. Depending on whose calculations you prefer to believe, it covered between 4,000 and 6,000 miles. Afterwards myths and fictions were entwined into accounts of it, which Mao propagated. Mao didn’t march much of the way – porters carried his privileged backside on a litter like a Roman emperor – but he spun stories to glorify his Red Army, anointing his retreating soldiers as ‘heroes’. He invented battles and exaggerated derring-do skirmishes for the purpose of politics, grandeur and posterity, chiefly his own. It is said that eighty to a hundred thousand took part in the Long March. Less than one in ten is thought to have survived. The civilian casualties – murdered, starved, beaten or abused – went uncounted.
The civil war caused Liddell inconveniences and irritations at the Anglo-Chinese College.23 These became more pronounced in the months following his wedding. The Nationalist government made attendance at a two-week soldier camp mandatory for those aged fourteen. Afterwards, a twice-weekly drill became compulsory too. Also, the college had to hoist and lower the national flag daily and gather the entire roll call in front of the pole to witness it, as if the ceremony of rope and silk were symbolically sacrosanct. Government interference continued incrementally. To refuse a decree would have shut the college and seen it reopen under entirely new and more malleable management. New orders steadily encroached across the educational timetable. At the beginning of 1935 it obliterated three months of blackboard work for one class, which was marched off for ‘national service’. The government’s next move was more sinister: the college was instructed to provide Scout uniforms for pupils belonging to its junior middle. This was not an altruistic, Baden-Powell-like attempt to encourage self-sufficiency and spark the outdoor spirit. No one wearing the uniform was collecting campfire badges. The Scouts was a preparatory class for the infantrymen of tomorrow.
Every omen was dark. The differences between the Nationalists and Communists were irreconcilable. Japan continued to devour territory, further infiltrating North China, where it ignored Boxer protocols, strengthened its fortress forces and assumed control.
The outcome was predictable.
The first Sino-Japanese War had started in late summer 1894, and lasted only nine months. The second, beginning in July 1937, was far bloodier. In his Penguin History Jonathan Fenby writes two sentences that require reading at least twice because the figures contained within them are so horrifying. You re-check them to make sure your eyes really have sent the information correctly to your brain. Writing about the second Sino-Japanese War, he says, ‘The death toll of soldiers and civilians . . . will never be known. Estimates range from ten million to twice as many, with most in the fifteen to twenty million range.’ He adds that the official history of the Nationalists, which omits Communist–Japanese encounters, calculated 1,117 ‘major’ battles and 38,931 ‘lesser engagements’.
Like so many wars, the beginning of it turned on a minor disturbance. The scene was the stone Marco Polo Bridge, which spanned the Yungting River. A unit of Japanese soldiers was involved in a field exercise on a night when the moon over Peking could barely be seen between galleon-sized clouds. A shot was fired and returned. A Japanese messenger went missing temporarily. In the game of claim and counter-claim that followed, the Japanese blamed the Chinese for aggression. More gunfire came with the dawn. A ceasefire, token and shaky, was cobbled together. Nineteen tense days passed. Japan gave China an ultimatum: remove two divisions within twenty-four hours or face the consequences. It didn’t bother to wait for a reply. Attacking the Summer Palace, its ground and air forces mowed down and bombed hundreds of Chinese troops.
A day later Liddell, already planning for Siaochang, was walking casually through Tientsin. In the distance he heard what sounded to him like the pop and crack of fireworks, the sort that might greet a New Year.24 An explosion, loud and hard enough to shake buildings, blew away any thought of celebration. The Japanese had dynamited the university. Next came the drone of twenty-eight planes. For four hours Tientsin came under siege from the sky and also from the deadly arc of artillery shells. More than seven hundred died. More than a thousand homes and public buildings were destroyed. More than two thousand displaced Chinese attempted to move into the Concessions, which weren’t shelled to avoid foreign wrath.
Afterwards, an agency report said that there was an ‘unearthly quiet’ in the city, which was ‘broken only by the crackling of the blazing buildings’.25 On a hot, windless afternoon black-grey smoke rose in straight funnels all around Tientsin. Liddell watched the carnage from a rooftop, knowing a new reality had come to China.
A new reality loomed for him too.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Everywhere the Crows Are Black
ERIC LIDDELL WAS precise and clear-eyed about the sort of missionary he intended to become.1 He didn’t want to be seen only as a do-gooder, who dispensed the scriptures competently enough but remained dispassionately aloof from the world in which his words were heard. As Liddell saw it, religious zeal alone didn’t qualify you to be a missionary anyway. You had to ally it with a solid purpose; and you had to know how that purpose would be achieved. He believed missionaries ought to ask themselves one thing before venturing overseas. The question was particularly relevant in China.
‘What exactly had one got to give?’
‘Anyone going to China had to think that over a long time,’ explained Liddell. ‘For in China on
e was dealing with a people who had produced great philosophers, who had given to them a way of living which had enabled them to continue down through the centuries.’
From his father, Liddell appreciated that change in China would never be wrought suddenly. Even the distant past, belonging to Lazoi, Confucius and Sun Tzu, influenced the present integrally there. This wasn’t a straightforward case of honouring the country’s heritage or adhering to old customs. It was bone and blood and breath to the Chinese. But everything will retrograde if it does not progress, and Liddell was conscious, well before returning to his homeland, how much China required ‘a push’ to place it on a different course – and also how gently persuasive that push needed to be. Otherwise he’d alienate the locals.
Liddell publicly announced that he’d always ‘felt destined’ for China, which allowed him to develop a plan for it and also list those things he sought to achieve.2
His primary task was to pass on ‘The Great Message’, he said. Liddell went so far as calling that message ‘so great that it was worthwhile trying to add to what those great philosophers had already given to China’. He summarized it in a sentence: ‘What we [have] to give the Chinese [is] the love of God in their hearts.’
The first step was education. Illiteracy was the enemy. ‘Until they were taught to read, the Bible was a closed book to them,’ he said of the converts his father had made. The second step was education too. He wanted equality, respect and better treatment for the less fortunate. Knowing that the well-off disparaged the poor – sometimes appallingly – Liddell was determined to show China ‘the value of life and an idea of service’ which would correct ‘the absence of help for those unable to help themselves’. The disabled, who were denigrated in China as being near worthless, were a priority to him. China must ‘look with sympathy on those who were infirm’, he said.
Liddell was convinced any programme should start with the young, which is why he taught at Dr Lavington-Hart’s Anglo-Chinese College for so long. Now the first part of his missionary life was over. He could barely wait for the second part to begin.
His original reservations about being posted to Siaochang vanished as soon as the decision to resign from the college was made. Afterwards China seemed to open up afresh for him. Nothing could change Liddell’s mind about going into the country at last – not even the awful escalation of the Sino-Japanese War.
In August 1937 Chiang Kai-shek proclaimed that China’s ‘limits’ of ‘endurance’ had been reached with the Japanese.3 There was no option but to fight them ‘to the bitter end’. Without pause or mercy, the next six months brought weekly accounts of Japanese progress and Chinese collapse, particularly in the north. Peking was captured and the fight for Shanghai began along a front stretching for 40 miles. In a forty-eight-hour spell, 2,526 bombs fell on that city. The coast was bombarded too and then attacked through amphibious landings. After thirty thousand men piled into Hangzhou Bay, the Japanese began a rear assault as well. ‘Towns on the route were devastated – dogs grew fat on the corpses,’ wrote Jonathan Fenby. The Rape of Nanking was not far away, and as a prelude to it the farmland between that city and Shanghai was turned into a graveyard containing almost ‘a million’ corpses.
Obscenities followed the taking of Nanking, a savage and deliberate slaughter of soldiers and innocents alike. It is said, but still disputed, that three hundred thousand Chinese died in the massacre. Other figures, taken from contemporary records, estimate that a hundred thousand or fewer perished. Inarguable is the fact that entire families were wiped out. Some people were buried alive. Often a head was left poking from the soil to allow hungry dogs to tear at the face. The Japanese also tied victims to posts or nailed them to boards before bayoneting them. Nanking was a torture chamber. ‘Martial arts swordplay was practised on defenceless civilians,’ wrote Fenby, who listed other methods of murder there: ‘run over by vehicles, mutilated and disembowelled, sprayed with acid or hung up by their tongues’. In the first month of occupation approximately twenty thousand women and girls were raped and then put to death to cover the original crime. ‘Some died with sticks rammed into their vaginas. Foetuses were ripped from the bodies of expectant mothers,’ said Fenby. ‘The killers felt no shame at their savagery. Some photographed the killings, and sent the negatives to Shanghai to be developed.’
The Anglo-Chinese College opened at the start of the academic year, as though impervious to the ramifications of the new war.4 Nearly six hundred pupils enrolled, and Liddell continued to teach them. There was another consolation for him, which cultivated a sense of normality, however false: Liddell had the company of his brother. Well before the Sino-Japanese conflict began, blocking roads and railways, Rob Liddell had brought his sick son to Tientsin from Siaochang for an X-ray. This revealed tuberculosis of the spine. No Chinese hospital had the facilities to treat him. The boy was placed in a body-cast and sent back to Britain with his mother. Rob planned to return to Siaochang alongside Eric and Florence, who had been safely in Peitaiho with the children when Tientsin fell to the Japanese. As unafraid as her husband about the prospect of Siaochang, she’d resolved to go there with him. ‘I’d been brought up in China,’ she said. ‘I knew what to expect from a place like Siaochang.’
Full of brio, Florence began packing as Liddell made transport arrangements for three adults and two children. She gathered up the family belongings and cleaned her home. She said goodbye to friends. In a disgraceful act at the eleventh hour, the London Missionary Society, as if possessing the moral right to assert control over Florence, forbade her to travel. The LMS decided it was ‘too dangerous’. That arrogance failed to take into account two points: the risk was hers rather than the LMS’s, and she deserved to decide for herself whether or not to take it. Florence was livid. Not wanting to create a scene, she instead went into the bedroom where the luggage was already roped together. She took her fury out on the cases. ‘I kicked them all around the room,’ she said.
The best photograph ever taken of Eric Liddell captures him in his absolute prime. He’s wearing creased civilian clothes rather than his athletic kit, and he’s gazing directly into the lens. The picture was taken with a standard box camera, and Liddell didn’t pose for it. It’s as if the photographer – his brother Rob – has surreptitiously loaded a roll of film and then slyly framed the shot before shouting at Liddell to turn towards him. It’s almost noon on a particularly bright day. Liddell’s lampblack shadow doesn’t fall far. He’s sitting on a mound of scruffy earth in a dark polo-neck sweater and an equally dark calf-length overcoat, its wide lapels slightly upturned against the cold. He also wears a pair of thick grey flannel trousers, badly in need of pressing, and woollen, fingerless gloves. On his head is a straggly-looking fur hat, which lies slightly below the tips of his ears. He resembles an explorer, who could be walking across the Russian countryside rather than China’s. The landscape immediately behind him is bare and stony. Only in the middle distance is there any sign of vegetation: the scrub of short hedges, winter trees without a leaf, uneven fringes of grass and tufts of old crops. The sky appears milky white, making the distant scene indistinct. Nothing more than the shape of buildings and a grain store is visible.
The compelling aspect of the photograph is the look on Liddell’s face. The eyes are squinting against the glare of the sun, which is reflected off the baked soil. He’s unshaven, the dimple in his chin accentuated by fine stubble. The firm set of the mouth gives him a rugged appeal too. What strikes you most about Liddell nonetheless is something very traceably poignant in his expression. In this square, amateur snap you see the determination within him. It’s as though he’s been interrupted momentarily from some deep, hard thinking; and, during the half-second that lapses before he can return to it, the thoughts in his mind can be read on the face he presents to the camera. Liddell is in the midst of one struggle and there are others, much more arduous, ahead of him. To appreciate that properly requires an understanding of the story behind the photograph.
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Portrait of a missionary: Eric Liddell, resolute but slightly dishevelled and unshaven, on his way to Siaochang in late autumn 1937.
He has left behind Florence, Patricia and the baby Heather.
He is on his way to Siaochang at last.
As the conflict between the Chinese and the Japanese grew ever more violent, it was originally impossible for Eric Liddell to break out of Tientsin and fill the post the London Missionary Society had given him.
That autumn he and Rob had made two early attempts to reach Siaochang, much of which had been devastated by flooding.5 In the chaos so many bridges were either badly damaged after bombing or partially dismantled – the Chinese attempting to check the march of the Japanese – that dead-ends were frustratingly common for the traveller. The Siaochang compound scarcely functioned. Only one staff missionary remained to oversee it. Overworked and anxious, he wrote to the Liddells pleading for reinforcements. His appeal never reached them, the letter lost in the confusion that had enveloped everything. Aware of his difficulties nonetheless, the Liddells piled a few essential belongings into black canvas bags and set off. The railway timetable was erratic because sections of track had been ripped out – again to hamper the Japanese – or destroyed during fighting. Knowing that the fickleness of the service could maroon them anywhere along the route, the Liddells still took a chance that a train might get them close enough to Siaochang to make the latter stages of the journey walkable. The route was not direct. The first train carried them only as far as Tsangchow, a distance of 600 miles. A week later the Liddells got as far as Tehchow – 100 miles further – before the Japanese blocked them again, refunding the brothers’ fare and actually apologizing for the inconvenience.
For the Glory Page 20