Since neither road nor rail could get them to Siaochang, the Liddells decided to think laterally. The two of them would sail there instead. The option was risky. Parts of the river were still swollen after the floods and stretches of embankment had also crumbled away. The unrepaired bridges made the waters harder to navigate because strewn debris turned them into an obstacle course. There was also the question of the river pirates, who patrolled the unpopulated banks the way Blackbeard had once patrolled the Caribbean seas. These armed men weren’t inclined to take no for an answer and then wish you a breezy so-long. Nothing deterred the Liddells, however. The result was a daring escapade not unlike the sort John Buchan could have put into one of his adventure-cum-spy novels.
In ten days, starting in late November 1937, the Liddells were twice robbed at gunpoint, the awful evidence of the war always around them. A five-and-a-half-page account of the journey was neatly typed and sent to the LMS afterwards. Although authorship was shared – and Liddell’s name came before his brother’s at the head of the document – the writerly credit belongs to Rob. He described the drama in a casually deadpan manner, as if near misses with death were no more traumatizing than a paper cut. ‘We thoroughly enjoyed the whole affair,’ he concluded, also remarking that the ‘fresh air, the long sleeps and a healthy amount of exercise’ amply made up for the bothersome interruptions of bandits brandishing weapons at them. To read the narrative is to appreciate the closeness of the brothers, who were so supportive and caring of each other and relished being together, even in a situation as treacherous as this one. The Liddells simply muddled through.
To reach Siaochang required two boats. The captain of the first was a local character called the Chief of the West River. He was proud of that grand epithet, and wore it like a campaign medal. It was bestowed on him because the boat’s 55-foot mast ranked as the tallest in the region. The mast was the boat’s only virtue. The unprepossessing 110-foot-long wooden vessel resembled a pair of ramshackle boats welded together. Its sail, said the Liddells, was ‘quite a complicated affair’ and looked as though it had ‘weathered many a storm’. The Chief gave the brothers his cabin, tucked away at the stern. Like the sail, the cabin had been patched up to make it presentable. This was not luxury cruising. The ceiling and the walls were so cracked that the Chief had plastered them with paper, a botched piece of DIY that constantly needed repairing. His attempt at a homely touch was a bolt of cloth that decorated the lower part of one of the walls. The trailing end of the cloth was draped across a section of boarded floor like ill-fitting carpet. The rest of the floor was covered in straw matting. There was no heat, obliging the Liddells to sleep in most of their winter clothes. The boat lacked speed too, the Chief piloting it along the Hutuo River as ponderously as a Sunday motorist driving a brand-new car. To stretch their legs the Liddells merely had to jump off and walk briskly beside it. At various stages the brothers – and their travelling companions – helped to pull the boat ropes from the towpath because ‘it was going too slowly for our liking’. At other times the Chief and his crew used long poles, as though punting, to navigate those areas where the floods had smashed or blistered the mud banks, clogging the black water.
The detritus of war littered the countryside. Its effect on the Chinese, predominantly the farmers, was ruinous. The Liddells had a better view of this than the newspaper correspondents, who were trying to make sense of Japanese dominance and Chinese defeats and give both an accurate shape on maps of the fighting. The intelligence was frequently unreliable and often contradictory, which meant their grasp of the war was incomplete. The truth leaked out only in fragments. The Liddells saw for themselves the dark trail the Japanese had cut through the agricultural lands. Silhouetted against the sky were wrecked or abandoned cars, trucks and buses – the discarded junk of battle. Although there was ‘little’ evidence of ‘actual fighting’, said the Liddells – resistance trenches had been dug but seldom used – what the brothers found instead troubled them because the short- and long-term ramifications were dreadful to contemplate.
The floods had protected some villages and a few of the small towns from invasion. Others were so primitive that, apart from the odd ancient rifle or small firearm, the population had been defenceless and hadn’t attempted to put up much resistance in case the consequence was unnecessary shooting and a lot of casualties. Their huts and shacks, and also a few concrete buildings, stood intact and mostly unmarked because no cannon or bullet had been fired to claim them. The mere presence of the Japanese had been enough to guarantee surrender. The men had stayed behind, forming a human barrier initially to protect the women and children and then to allow them to escape. What horrified the Liddells was the fact that these communities were then systematically ‘stripped of everything’ valuable or useful. Homes were empty shells. Food was picked clean from the shelves and larders. Furniture was confiscated and chopped for firewood. Doors and windows were torn off and taken for kindling too. Utensils and farming equipment were commandeered. And any livestock – hens and chickens in particular – were immediately whisked away as bounty, destined for a Japanese cooking pot. Those who remained because there was nowhere else for them to go collected the splinters and scraps of what was left, setting it alight for flickering warmth. There was almost no food; and there was no prospect either of getting fresh supplies because these victims of Japanese looting now had nothing to trade or barter in return for them. ‘Poverty will walk through the countryside this winter until it is possible for those who have been able to plant wheat to reap it in the spring,’ was the dire forecast of the Liddells’ report to the LMS. ‘There was not a hen to be seen, an egg to be purchased.’
The brothers had taken ten brown loaves of bread and ate two meagre meals per day. At certain points vendors appeared from the hedgerows and trees and the boat pulled close to the bank, allowing them to leap on to the deck and sell food such as the grain kuo tzu from baskets and trays. One of the vendors fell into the water after the boat lurched, and he narrowly avoided being crushed under the hull in his attempt to claw back supplies that were floating away from him on the river tide. That he was willing to risk his life for his livelihood demonstrated the scarcity of basic food. The Liddells watched him retrieve a package and knew he’d be able to sell it, however water-soaked the goods were inside.
The iron rations, the snail-like progress of the transport and the uncomfortable chill of the conditions on and off board were still minor inconveniences compared with the menace of the bandits, who lurked near bridges and hid on bends.
War is a perpetual excuse for a multitude of misdeeds, an open invitation to slide off the moral scale. The bandits sometimes cloaked themselves as Robin Hoods, claiming theft as philanthropy on behalf of the underprivileged. It was a lie, but propagating it satisfied their own idea of fairness and justice. These thugs were the worst kind of opportunists – vicious and exploitative even towards their fellow countrymen and women. The Liddells had prepared themselves for the possibility of such an encounter and were coldly composed when it arose. A doctor and a missionary were seen as small-fry and safe prey for bandits because neither concealed a gun and wouldn’t be inclined to fight back.
On the morning of the brothers’ first brush with banditry, the Liddells wrote of being ‘very rudely awakened’. The Chief’s boat was approaching a bridge when a roughly dressed group claiming to be self-appointed ‘peacekeepers’ blocked the way. No one could protest. The bandits were clutching rifles, evidently knew how to fire them, and stood 20 yards apart to ensure the boat couldn’t manoeuvre beyond them. ‘We could do nothing but draw to the edge of the river,’ said the brothers. One of the bandits had covered his nose and mouth with a muffler. The small firearm he waved about was hidden behind a handkerchief. He was the ringmaster of a motley crew. To prove it, and liking the sound of his own voice, he dashed along the bank shouting orders at the other bandits and also at the Liddells’ boat. His main accomplice came on deck, a riding whip in his hand.
The Chief attempted to sweet-talk him. ‘Don’t take the luggage,’ he asked, which only made it sound as if the cases contained something highly prized. Realizing his mistake, the Chief tried bribery instead. He was immediately beaten for it. The bandits snatched $700 worth of cigarettes and stole $70 from the passengers.
The Liddells, who had emerged from their cabin as soon as the commotion began, were told to return to it. After what the brothers called a ‘bit of a pow-wow together’, the two of them decided to try to negotiate with the man disguised beneath the muffler. The bandit refused to remove it and ‘gesticulated’ at the brothers with his revolver whenever he spoke. ‘He met us with sarcasm and courtesy, which do not mix well,’ said the Liddells. He stole a further $20 from them and then irrationally returned $1.60 without explaining why. Equally irrationally he also gave them a box of cakes and a carton of cigarettes. They got off lightly. ‘Another boat, much smaller than ours, was in their hands at the same time,’ said the brothers. One of its Chinese deck-hands was shot before the bandits even boarded it.
The Liddells and the Chief had to transfer the bandits’ gains from both plundered boats on to a third and watched the masked leader sail clear of them without a backward glance. ‘We parted silently from our friends with no great demonstration of affection, not even the kindly words tsai chien – see you again,’ said the Liddells, insouciantly summoning humour to play down the severity of a scrape in which only diplomacy and acquiescence had saved them from harm.
Another wasn’t far ahead. Having left the Chief, who was heading in a different direction and gallantly refused the offer of payment from them, the Liddells found another captain to take them to Siaochang. During the brief stop between boats, Rob took that pensive photograph of Eric. On what the brothers called a ‘never to be forgotten day’ more bandits targeted them. Again the Liddells were confronted with a row of rifle barrels. The men claimed to have the right to ‘borrow from all people and boats passing that way’. The Liddells explained ‘who we were [and] what we were doing’. That explanation wasn’t entirely successful. The bandits snatched at the brothers’ identity cards and marched them to a checkpoint. The Liddells called it a ‘veritable stronghold’ because everyone there seemed to be armed. Those who didn’t have a rifle carried a revolver. One of the bandits gleefully toted a machine gun. Far from keeping the peace, the men were in the business of disturbing it for anyone who had the temerity to stray into their territory. The Liddells were held until the boat was ransacked. ‘We found that nearly everyone had lost something – a little money, some clothing or goods.’
Less than 10 miles further on there was a third armed gang awaiting them. Wary and weary and also convinced that the tense cycle of these ordeals would never end – the bandits parroted identical threats and commands at them – the passengers disembarked, wanting the thing to be over as quickly as possible for the sake of their nerves. When one of them gave what the Liddells regarded as an unintelligent answer to a question, a shot was discharged into the far distance. The bang and ringing echo of it was enough to bring the quarrelsome traveller to heel. Hearing about the earlier checkpoints, this gang eventually parted, like an open gate, and let the boat through, believing there was nothing else worth taking from it.
The closer the brothers got to Siaochang, the more peaceful their passage became because flooding had made much of the land impassable.
Reporting on the final third of their passage, the Liddells slipped a colourful local into their writing. Her name was Ta Chiao, an inn-owner, and she appears in print the way a good soldier might make it into dispatches from the front. The translation of Ta Chiao is Big Feet, which is scarcely complimentary: in China small feet were still considered to be an important sign of feminine beauty. The Liddells described Ta Chiao as being of ‘large dimensions’. She was ‘capable of holding her own at any time and fearless in what she said’, and they compared her to ‘a hurricane’. Ta Chiao spoke without pause or punctuation at incredible speed and blew the listener backwards with the force of her words. Those who heard her, the Liddells added, felt like ‘the rustics’ who appear in Oliver Goldsmith’s seventeenth-century poem The Deserted Village, which is written in heroic couplets. To sum up the extraordinary sight of Ta Chiao, as well as her garrulousness, the Liddells quoted a line from it: ‘And still they gazed and still the wonder grew’. However formidable, she impressed the brothers, who thought of her as ‘businesslike’. Inherent in the paragraphs about her is relief. The worst of the Liddells’ trials were over now. Ta Chiao’s inn was a safe haven.
The brothers, bedraggled and dirty, walked the final 10 miles to Siaochang. At journey’s end neither their clothes nor their skin had seen soap and water for almost a fortnight. The dust of the fields clung to their big boots. Their beards were unkempt and straggly. The lone missionary who greeted them initially thought he was hallucinating. He’d supposed no one could possibly reach him until well into the New Year. The two men standing in front of him looked like tramps in search of a soup kitchen; both of them certainly smelled like tramps in need of a bar of carbolic. He hugged them nonetheless. So did Annie Buchan, perplexed to see Liddell in particular because, she said, ‘everyone was surprised’ that he had decided to become a missionary.
She was not surprised for long.
Since Eric Liddell did his talking from the pulpit, and spoke mildly there, others failed to appreciate the resilience behind his gentleness. Stuck in a district that Annie Buchan described as being ‘infested with bandits and soldiers’, he now showed he could be as hard as hand-made nails because the conditions forced him to reveal it.6
On the road. The brothers, rugged-looking, have still to wash the dust off themselves after reaching Siaochang.
On his arrival, he’d said undramatically, ‘So this is Siaochang.7’
It was only half-familiar to him, most of the images of his infancy now cloudy. Behind its high wall, the mission compound contained a stone church, a boarding school for primary pupils, four detached dwellings, normally used as houses, and a hall capable of hosting an audience of five hundred. The roofs were made from corrugated iron. The men’s and women’s eighty-bed hospitals, as well as a dormitory, lay beyond the main buildings. There were no tennis courts here. No tinkling piano to signal the start of the cocktail hour. No excuse-me dances to the accompaniment of a twelve-piece orchestra. In fact there were scarcely any activities that allowed the compound residents to fritter hours away festively. Nearby, however, was a Japanese fort.
The geography of the Great Plain was still as Buchan had discovered it more than a decade earlier: the mud-brick villages and the scattering of towns around which the agricultural year of reaping and sowing progressed slowly, and only when nature gave its permission. War had considerably worsened conditions during the months immediately before Liddell’s arrival. That deterioration continued apace now, the Japanese always in the ascendancy.
Buchan gave Liddell a graphic account of what she’d seen and heard.8 The sword-carrying Japanese kicking open doors and terrifying those behind them. Villages cleared before being torched. In one of these only a barking dog remained alive, yelping for its owner. In another she calculated that a hundred were killed and ‘a big number’ wounded. She’d watched groups of bound prisoners being paraded through the streets towards an executioner whose ‘long carved knife’ was already ‘dripping with blood’ from earlier beheadings. ‘Every so often the column [of them] stopped,’ she said, ‘and he lopped off a few more heads, tossing them into a basket.’
Frequently the Japanese stomped into the Siaochang compound unannounced. Men either awaiting an operation or convalescing from one were seized from their beds. The soldiers claimed to be arresting known Communists or guerrillas. Doctors were interrupted during surgery, the Japanese demanding to take the patient even before his incision had been stitched. On one occasion Buchan searched in vain for a surgeon, who was needed to examine a desperately sick man. As a last resort she went into the operat
ing theatre where she found a Japanese soldier beating the surgeon over the head with a baton. Buchan instinctively swatted the baton out of his hand and calmly said that she required the surgeon urgently. The soldier, rather than attacking her, stepped back, agog that she wasn’t afraid of him. Another soldier, bored and badly drunk, once staggered into Buchan’s quarters and pushed her aside on his way upstairs. With Buchan screaming at him to leave, he stood in front of her full-length mirror and saluted his reflection before turning around and departing wordlessly. She also told Liddell something else: he was more likely to see dead bodies than flowers along the roadside.
Liddell’s mission in Siaochang was no more than a needle point in this ghoulish tapestry. There was heavy fighting to the south and skirmishes to the east and west. The outskirts of Siaochang had what Liddell said was a ‘small taste’ of what was happening there. The population was still cowed and afraid. Seldom did a day pass without the unmistakable, if distant, noise of guns, which sounded like cackling. The infestation Buchan had talked about meant missionaries such as Liddell were trapped in the middle of the competing sides, comprising Japanese and Nationalist soldiers, the troops belonging to the Communist Eighth Army, and the bandits and chameleon mercenaries, who changed their battle colours when it suited them.
There were two main rail tracks, which ran parallel to each other. The first connected Tientsin to Shanghai, 40 miles to the east of Siaochang. The other ran from Peking to Hankow, a similar distance to the west. The Japanese had claimed both of these lines. The Chinese had taken most of the land in between them. The complications for those, like Liddell, caught within it increased after each country banned the other’s currency in the territory it controlled.
Leaving the relative civility of Tientsin, even under the Japanese flag, for the volatility and desolate austerity of Siaochang was traumatic. The place had become a pit, and problem upon problem was being piled into it.
For the Glory Page 21