For the Glory
Page 22
A sign hung over the gate, having been placed there after the Boxer Rebellion.9 It read ‘Chung, Wai I Chai’ – Chinese and Foreigners All One Home. As Liddell discovered, the sentiment was no longer true because of the deprivations war had inflicted. ‘The floods are only a small part of the sorrows of the people,’ he said.10 The bigger sorrow, he added, were those ‘bands of irregular soldiers’ who were ‘all over the countryside’, squatting in a village and then ‘living off it’ through ‘repeated demands’ for grain and money. He went on: ‘Fear reigns everywhere and the bitterest thing of all is to think that this trouble comes to them from their own in the midst of a great national tragedy. Every day brings its stories of distress, suffering . . .’
Liddell said that the people in Siaochang were ‘burdened by the struggle to live’.11 Crops had failed. Cholera was rampant. An eighty-year-old carpenter, who Liddell thought possessed ‘the fine courtesy of old China’, found himself constantly cutting wood for paupers’ coffins, supply always behind demand. The peasants’ homes were mostly identical: three curtained-off and sometimes whitewashed rooms, measuring 8 feet square, and a kitchen half that size.12 One brick-based bed was set aside for the mother, grandmother and children. The houses were slightly raised off the ground as rudimentary protection against flooding, and each family owned at least one rowing boat. The only furniture was a table, a couple of chairs and occasionally a chest. The second room was more private, containing the family shrine. Most of the cooking was done on an outside stove and the aromatic scent of woodsmoke hung overpoweringly in the air. Inside, thread and cotton and cloth were perpetually spun. The windows were box-shaped and covered in rice paper, meaning the light was ‘so poor’, said Liddell, ‘that its rays only lit up nearby things and the further parts were just dim objects’. In the three-quarter darkness he heard the ‘click, click, click’ of the spinning wheel, which was as necessary for survival as water and bread because the women made clothes to trade.
The pressure was relentless. Shells frequently flew over the compound rooftops during Japanese attacks on the bandits. Mortars exploded close to the walls. Wherever Liddell went – either to conduct services or administer pastoral care – he risked being accosted, harangued or needlessly searched and questioned by whichever army stopped him on a whim or pounced in an ambush. There was always the chance that a bullet, either a stray shot or one fired deliberately at him, would wound or kill. Villagers were afraid to give Liddell basic directions in case of reprisals from the Japanese on the grounds of collaboration. That anxiety was evident everywhere he went. The apprehension that some new cataclysm was waiting for them permeated daily life. Some villages were scared enough to station a guard at their entrance. The guard would hold up a slate on which two or three characters were chalked.13 Like the pronunciation of the word ‘shibboleth’, the characters had to be correctly spoken before the traveller was allowed inside.
There was no hiding place from the war. On the Sunday before Christmas, Liddell was performing a baptismal service in an outpost town. The ‘distant rumble of guns’, he said, had been heard twenty-four hours earlier. On the morning of the service, a Japanese scout plane began circling the sky. With rumours spreading about an imminent attack, the numbers who came to the church were ‘considerably less’ than Liddell had anticipated. He was in the middle of his address when the barrage began. Shells went off with a ‘terrific’ racket, he said. One shell fell ‘just around the corner’ from him. ‘There was silence for a moment and then we continued,’ he explained, which meant he continued and everyone else listened and pretended to ignore the shelling. When the service came to a close, none of the forty-strong congregation wanted to leave the church. Liddell organized hymn singing until thirty-one truckloads of soldiers arrived. Notices were put up in the main street telling the villagers not to be afraid. The Japanese were seeking Chinese bandits rather than hounding them – a spurious statement to say the least. Liddell noted there was comparatively ‘little’ looting during the full-scale, three-hour search that took place, which should not be read as a tacit thank you for small mercies. The soldiers were still stealing from people who couldn’t afford to lose anything in the first place. One member of the church returned home to find a huge shell-hole in the front wall of his house. His belongings were gone.
The graver the situation in Siaochang, the more determined Liddell became to head into the countryside every day, which he did unflinchingly. His fellow missionaries said he possessed ‘an utter fearlessness’.14 There was nothing swashbuckling about him. He worked in a patient, placid way, tending to small lives in that big war so that each good deed was a counterstroke to the bad ones he saw around him. In winter he wore an old sheepskin coat or a plaid quilted jacket. In summer he’d be seen in a short-sleeved shirt, shorts and a pair of calf-length socks. The soldiers had guns and trucks. He criss-crossed the treacherous, potholed paths of Siaochang on a bicycle and wore a Red Cross armband to signify his neutrality. When another missionary wanted to arm himself, stuffing a hand-gun in his pocket, Liddell persuaded him against it.15 ‘Put it down. Don’t even handle it. You will be shot long before you get to your pistol.’
In his rucksack Liddell carried only what he considered to be essential – a Bible, a prayer book, a compass. In his head he carried something else: the Chinese proverb that said ‘Everywhere the crows are black’, which he interpreted as ‘Everywhere human nature is the same’.16 Wherever he went, whatever he saw and whoever he met, Liddell remembered that saying, believing wholeheartedly in the truth of it to comfort him.
But war warps whatever it touches, and one of the first things to bend is human nature. A specific case highlighted that fact more than any other he would ever face.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Sharpest Edge of the Sword
COUNTRY EVANGELISM WAS Eric Liddell’s forte. He had been born for it. Within six months, after his Chinese began to improve markedly, he was certain that leaving Tientsin for Siaochang had been a ‘destiny-fulfilling’ decision for him after all. Once asked outright by the inquisitive Annie Buchan whether he ever regretted his move, Liddell replied ‘Never’ and then explained why: ‘I have more joy and freedom in the work than I have ever experienced before.1’ Liddell said it was ‘wonderful to feel one with the people’. Florence Liddell saw the change in her husband.2 ‘It was quite obvious he did the right thing,’ she said. ‘He loved the work . . . and I think he blossomed out in a new way.’
Liddell considered the Chinese to be ‘calm, patient, willing to suffer a great deal with very little complaining and content with very little’.3 He could have been describing himself as well. Predictably he became confidant, comforter, grief-counsellor, social worker, diplomat and problem-solver in Siaochang – inside as well as outside its walls. If there was a quarrel, he was ‘used as a buffer’, recalled Buchan, whose initial scepticism about whether Liddell could transform himself from classroom teacher to missionary quickly passed. To the Chinese, who looked on him so fondly, he became Li Mu Shi: Pastor Liddell. When any decision had to be reached – and especially if it was likely to stir controversy or required mediation – Buchan would hear someone say, ‘Ask Li Mu Shi what he thinks about it.4’ The preachers, the nurses, the students and the Chinese ‘hung on his words’, she added.
The formidable Annie Buchan marches through the Concessions in Tientsin.
His surname gave him an advantage among the locals that was denied to other missionaries. He wasn’t a stranger to them. As Buchan pointed out, Liddell’s father James was ‘still revered and loved’ in Siaochang.5 The children James Liddell had known now had children and grandchildren of their own and remembered his kindnesses and also his fierce commitment to China. Liddell never spoke to them about being an Olympic champion. There was no point. No one in the outback of Siaochang had any concept of the Games and its ribboned gold medals. His prestige came from his lineage. To talk about his father was like presenting an impeccable character reference. There w
as an instant connection, which brought an instant trust, because stories could be swapped about a shared past.
Buchan also said Liddell possessed his father’s ‘winning personality’ and was always thorough and organizationally innovative in his work. He drew maps of the area because none except the most rudimentary had previously existed. These highlighted safe short-cuts that ducked away from known Japanese patrols. According to Buchan, he compiled charts and schedules too, which enabled him to ‘systematically’ visit churches and regularly hold meetings there.6 No one in his parish felt neglected. Space was created in his diary for ordinary house calls, dropping in on parishioners to whom, Buchan insisted, ‘he never expounded elaborate theories but suggested the possibility of a way of life that was Bible-based and God-governed’.7 Buchan, a loud bell-ringer for Liddell, thought he ‘had the sympathy and patience needed’ to convert ‘a slow-moving people’ and also the ‘seething masses who tax one’s strength from dawn to midnight’. What Florence identified as her husband’s blossoming was actually renewed confidence in himself, which stemmed from the sense of purpose Siaochang provided.
It was as if everything that had gone before was preparation for this.
Liddell liked to teach the Chinese hymns.8 He’d cycle the back roads singing them to himself. He was keen on both ‘God Who Touches Earth With His Beauty’ and ‘There’s A Wideness In God’s Mercy’. His particular favourite, which he sang repeatedly in both English and Chinese, was ‘Be Still, My Soul’. Written in 1752 by the German Katharina von Schlegel, an expressive Lutheran, ‘Be Still’ wasn’t translated into English until a century later, which made the Church rather slow on the uptake. Liddell’s infatuation with it began in 1927 when von Schlegel’s lyrical four verses were attached to Jean Sibelius’s symphonic poem Finlandia. Liddell said it was ‘a calm, restful, beautiful tune’ and he never tired of hearing it. ‘Be Still’ also contains a line that embodies the message Liddell was always attempting to press on his congregation: ‘Through thorny ways lead to a joyful end’.
Thorny ways were a part of life in Siaochang. The letters Liddell sent to friends and the annual reports he filed to the London Missionary Society continued to illustrate the awfulness of the situation and also the resourcefulness, mental strength and raw courage required to cope. ‘The scenes have changed so quickly and the problems have been so varied that I almost wonder if I have been looking through a kaleidoscope,’ he said of Siaochang.9 If so, the image within that kaleidoscope was a vile one. For Liddell there were intensely sad cases to handle and intensely tragic scenes to witness. He came across men shot dead and thrown into ditches and dykes or left hanging from clumps of hedgerow. He found women, their starving bellies bloated, begging for food. He discovered babies and children naked and abandoned.10 That sight distressed him most because he thought of his own daughters. Three instances were so especially harrowing to him that he recorded them briefly, as though needing to bear witness. A small girl, unwanted by her parents, suffered frostbite so extreme that her feet had to be amputated. A carpenter made her replacement feet out of blocks of wood. Another young girl was sold as a slave and ‘ill-treated so badly that she became very ill’, said Liddell. After her rescue, she was taken to the hospital, her body ‘marked and dreadfully bruised’, to be nursed back to health. When a house was torched after guerrilla attacks, he was told of two malnourished families huddled in the blackened shell that remained. Liddell walked into what he said was ‘one of those pathetic’ scenes of war – a wooden house set alight and gutted except for two rooms. The blaze left only ‘great long pieces of burnt timber’ among which two widowed mothers and two children lived. The Japanese had taken one of the husbands and demanded a ransom for his return. When the wife could not pay it, the Japanese had executed him. ‘At no other place did the horror of war strike me so much as there,’ said Liddell.
Commercially and culturally, Japanese influence was becoming unbreakable. Goods from Japan dominated the Chinese market and their non-competitive pricing excluded other importers. A Japanese bank was established, which issued its own banknotes and raked in Chinese currency in exchange. In many schools pupils were pressed into marking Japanese military victories with parades. The children were given either Japanese flags or the old five-barred flag of China to wave. ‘The invaders were trying to convince the people that they had not come as conquerors, but merely to establish a new China,’ explained Liddell.11
Communication was haphazard. Rarely did English-language newspapers reach Siaochang. The Chinese editions were either closed down or censored and the rabid propaganda of the Japanese-controlled press dominated the market. The Chinese were forced to take these newspapers, which were thrown into their homes. Payment for them had to be given, like a tax on information, at the end of the month. Radio signals also drifted weakly across the Great Plain, and no newsreel could ever be seen there. Accounts of the fighting on the home front came spasmodically, delivered whenever a new face arrived at the mission or a familiar one returned. Accounts from Europe were patchier still, a piecemeal passing along of information down a human chain, which meant words and whispers could be lost, misunderstood or mistranslated. The Anschluss in Austria, the claim on the Sudetenland, the Munich Agreement, Neville Chamberlain’s waved sheet of worthless paper promises, the smashed windows and the scrawled graffiti of Kristallnacht: Siaochang heard about these belatedly and incompletely. Still, no one doubted the implications of them. Hitler told you what was on the way. But what was looming elsewhere was then less important to Liddell than the aggression and oppression on his own doorstep.
Nothing betrays the character of a man like his manners – a phrase slightly misquoted from the poet Edmund Spenser that Eric Liddell never forgot.12 He even extended his courtesies to the occupying force in Siaochang – and not only because it pays to be polite when someone is pointing a gun at your head. Liddell followed two self-made rules in his dealings with Japanese soldiers. The first, he said, was ‘Take it all with a smile’,13 referring to crudely deliberate attempts to rile and intimidate. The second was ‘However troublesome, don’t get annoyed’.
The Japanese wanted rid of the missionaries without upsetting Western governments. The first commander in Siaochang had been raised in California and spoke impeccable English. Out of earshot of his own troops, he’d refer to the doctors and the missionaries as ‘buddy’.14 The commander’s mother was also a practising Christian, which meant he gave the mission a lot of leeway, often turning a blind eye to comings and goings there. His replacement was different. His tactic was hardly a bright one, but nonetheless proved effective because it rubbed on the nerves. He implemented a policy of daily disruptions. He organized an anti-British demonstration outside the gates of the compound. He even built a stage so the sound of propaganda speeches could be heard over the wall; a strong wind fortunately blew the stage down before a word was spoken.
He was more successful in turning travel into a trial for the missionaries.15 Patrols were increased and a policy of stop-and-search to niggle them began. This was carried out in a passive-aggressive way. The Japanese commander mistakenly believed that Liddell and his ilk would close down the mission out of sheer exasperation; alternatively the missionaries would be worn out by these petty inconveniences and minor persecutions. The plan was to goad them and spark a gung-ho incident somewhere – disobedience, the discovery of contraband or a loss of control – that could be used as a legitimate excuse to remove them permanently.
The soldiers were told to demand identification papers ‘on sight’. These would be checked and re-checked laboriously, as though each was a possible forgery. What ought to have been a five-minute process was often stretched to half or three quarters of an hour. The papers were held up to the light. The missionary was frisked. His bag was opened, the contents tipped unceremoniously on to the ground, like hurling down a sack of rubbish. Each thing in it was examined with an aching slowness. Even the saddle of a bicycle was searched. Liddell moved so ex
tensively around Siaochang that the soldiers always recognized him. The same procedures were followed with him nonetheless. There’d be tiresomely predictable questions too. Where was he heading? Who did he plan to see? Had he spoken to anyone else? When would he be back? Interrogations occurred at least twice per day. The most awkward soldiers would claim there was something amiss either in the papers presented to them or in the answers given. The missionary would be instructed to go to district headquarters, an errand designed to humiliate. The Japanese were playing a game.
Fortunately Liddell knew how to play back, and he also had the verbal flails to bamboozle them. He met malevolence with compassion, which threw the soldiers off stride. The angrier someone became, the more measured his response. Liddell behaved towards them in war exactly as he would have done in peace because he knew no other way to act. Tact, cheerfulness and the warmth of his personality defused confrontations. He made open-palm gestures. His smiles were undoubtedly sincere, signalling forbearance. As protocol demanded, he bowed to the Japanese – though from the neck rather than the waist. He was canny too. Slid into his wallet were two square photographs of his daughters that he’d show to the family-oriented Japanese, who automatically became friendlier towards him. Some took out pictures of their own families in a like-for-like trade of love and longing for home.
He even refused to condemn or criticize the soldiers who attempted to bully him. One of his colleagues put it perfectly. For Liddell, the Japanese were ‘not to be feared or hated, but sought as sheep far from the fold’, he said.16 He forgave them their trespasses. The Japanese came to accept him because he was efficient and ever present. He tramped and cycled the Siaochang roads endlessly, never missing a church service.