For the Glory

by Duncan Hamilton

  Staffing shortages eventually meant Liddell was appointed acting superintendent of the hospital. ‘Don’t laugh,’ he wrote, adding that his new title was ‘rather a joke’ because the use of ‘iodine and magnesium sulphate’ represented the range of his medical knowledge.

  The post enabled him to make short visits to Tientsin to collect medical supplies or Chinese currency, which meant he could spend the odd day with Florence and the children. On the way there and back again, he confessed, ‘I think that I have had nearly every type of experience.’17

  The Japanese searched his shoes to check whether he was carrying secret letters in them. One soldier tried to filch his compass. Liddell phlegmatically told him the instrument was of ‘more value’ to him and so the request was dropped. On another occasion a soldier came across his copy of the Chinese New Testament, a book Liddell said he ‘constantly carried about with me’. Speaking to him in slow and broken English, the soldier managed an ungrammatical three-word question: ‘Bible. You. Christian?’ Given his Red Cross armband, his nationality and also the physical evidence of the Bible, the soldier already knew the reply Liddell would give him. After hearing it, he shook Liddell’s hand and turned away to allow him through.

  The scarcity of coal made it as precious as diamonds in Siaochang. Every lump of it the Japanese unearthed in village raids was appropriated for their own soldiers. Liddell volunteered to head to Tientsin and haul back 60 tons on a chugging black barge. No one else wanted to go because the prospect of being successful was dismissed as negligible and the chance of being clubbed or shot for the cargo was considered highly probable. ‘People said it couldn’t be done, which is always a good starting point,’18 he remembered. Navigation of the rivers had become even more difficult since his trip with the Chief. Dodging the bandits was necessary on every turn of those hazardous waters. And Liddell seemed to attract them the way a magnet attracts metal filings. The journeys there and back again proved tortuous. The Japanese held Liddell for thirty-six hours. The Chinese detained him too. On four occasions he was stopped and robbed, which whittled his finances to nothing but a few coins. On the return leg to Siaochang Liddell had to hastily organize a U-turn and sail back to Tientsin for more money. Until the Japanese became interested in his footwear, he had hidden cash in his shoe. But, as Edgar Allan Poe proved in his short story ‘The Purloined Letter’, the best hiding place is always in plain sight. Eventually Florence had one of those eureka moments that solved everything. She suggested that Liddell hollow out a baguette-shaped loaf of bread and wedge rolled-up notes inside it.19 She told him to make sure the bread protruded from his rucksack. She argued two things: no one would ever split open a loaf of bread to check it had been baked through; and something so obviously in front of the Japanese soldiers’ eyes would never arouse suspicion. She was right. ‘He didn’t have a problem after that,’ said Florence.

  That war is a pollutant on character was reaffirmed for Eric Liddell when he went to tend to one of the casualties of it. What he saw always stayed with him. What he did in response to it required cold courage. No medal – though he unquestionably deserved that recognition – was awarded to him afterwards. Liddell played things down, believing he’d done nothing more than react compassionately to a chance situation. If the London Missionary Society hadn’t been so fastidious about record-keeping, no one would have even heard about it. But, like everything significant that happened to him in Siaochang, Liddell was obliged to inform the LMS about it. His account was handwritten in blue-black ink, rather than typed, as though he’d hastily composed and posted it to London on the move. The story Liddell told is essentially broken into two parts and demonstrates how perilous the countryside had become; how ferociously malign the Japanese soldiers were; how imperturbable Liddell was under fire; and, finally, how lucky he needed to be to avoid detection and punishment.20

  At the beginning of 1939, Liddell was travelling back from Tientsin to Siaochang. On the way he heard of a man, shot and wounded, who had lain for five days on a thin mattress in a derelict temple 20 miles from the mission compound. Liddell said it was ‘a filthy place open to the wind and dust’ which ‘no one ever cleaned’. There was no heating, and the nightly temperatures there fell to freezing point. None of the locals who owned big-wheeled wooden mule carts had dared ferry the man to a hospital because he belonged to the military. The prospect of meeting a Japanese soldier scared them too much. Such an encounter would have meant death for the man, and torture before death for them. Liddell finally managed to persuade one carter to break ranks. The carter attached a proviso to the agreement. He wouldn’t go alone: Liddell would have to accompany him. Typically Liddell said it was ‘quite dangerous’ for the carter rather than for himself, which was patent nonsense. If either had been caught, the Japanese wouldn’t have discriminated between them.

  Their small train set off. The carter led the way and Liddell cycled after him. After a few miles Liddell overtook the cart and went on ahead to the village where the temple was located specifically to ‘see the Headman . . . and make arrangements’ to transport his patient. Liddell discovered that the nervous villagers wanted the wounded man gone as soon as possible. No one would take him in, though one friend went daily to feed him. As Liddell explained: ‘If the Japanese descended on them and found that a home had anything to do with the military, it would be destroyed at once and the lives of those in it would be in danger.’ He was told that the nearest Japanese troops – plus a tank and ten motor lorries – were stationed less than a mile from them.

  Liddell went into the temple, marvelling that the man had survived the bitter nights. He told him to hang on; the cart would be there at dawn. Wrapped in his sheepskin coat, Liddell settled down to sleep, his mind turning over the practicalities to come. He remembered asking himself: ‘Suppose I met the Japanese? What would I say?’ Liddell reached for his Bible, which he said ‘fell open at Luke 16’. He read verse ten – ‘he that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much; and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much’. Those lines, he said, ‘seemed to me to bring me my answer’. From them Liddell drew this meaning: ‘Be honest and straight’.

  The Japanese were closing in. Next morning he and the cart went through one village as soldiers in vehicles simultaneously went around it. ‘We fortunately missed each other,’ said Liddell. The roads were difficult because deep tracks and pot-holes had been worn into them. Some of these were ‘like enlarged trenches’ according to Liddell. At one point a wheel slipped into a trench and the cart swayed and creaked before overturning. Liddell and the carter righted it again and then made a rest-stop at another temple.

  Their cart and its passenger rolled in as the old Chinese year was rolling out, the new one about to be born. During the celebrations for it Liddell learned of another victim of the war – a second ‘wounded man whom we could pick up by going out of our way a short distance’, he said.

  Behind that bland sentence was a tragedy far more grotesque than the first.

  The Japanese had rounded up a gang of six men who were supposedly members of the underground resistance. There was no evidence against them, and no trial for them. An officer yelled charges; he was judge, prosecutor and jury, and his verdict was execution. The Japanese soldiers ordered the men to kneel in front of them. Five did so, and were swiftly beheaded with a sword. The sixth refused to kneel and remained standing. Instead of forcing him to the ground, he and the officer stood eye to eye. The officer then drew back his blade, still bloody from the previous murders, and slashed at him twice. The man dropped into the dust. Assuming he was dead, the Japanese marched away, leaving the villagers to bury his corpse and the others’ too. But the swing of the sword had delivered neither a clean nor a fatal blow to him. The blade left instead an angled and horribly deep gash stretching from the left to the right ear. After regaining consciousness, the man began to moan and whimper. The villagers, still convinced he would die through loss of blood, hid him behind an i
dol in the temple before carrying him to a bed in a dark shack. Dirty rags, wrapped around his neck and face, were used as makeshift bandages.

  When Liddell and the cart arrived, the man had already been there for several days. Liddell promised to take him to the hospital at Siaochang. ‘I could not guarantee his safety,’ he said. ‘If we met the Japanese, he would have to take his chance.’ Liddell also explained that the cart ‘was only a small one’, constructed for one person. So the man agreed to be placed in its shafts. The cart trundled on for another 18 miles, the weight of the two passengers slowing its progress through the narrow, jarring pathways, which Liddell chose to avoid the regular routes. At the outset Liddell stared skyward and saw a Japanese aeroplane, which he said was ‘circling round slightly south of us’. He was all too aware of what its presence meant: ‘Japanese troops were moving almost parallel to us a mile or two away.’ The odds of avoiding them, as well as the other patrols, were unfavourably long. Liddell, constantly expecting to be apprehended, could only have pleaded for mercy, which the Japanese were unlikely to grant him. He’d be considered as the enemy’s friend. The Siaochang hospital was strictly humanitarian. War didn’t taint the Hippocratic oath, and the doctors there didn’t take sides on the operating table. Chinese and Japanese combatants, as well as rebels and guerrilla fighters, were treated alike. Impartiality and medical ethics was only one of two hopeful cards Liddell could have played in his defence. Another was to claim that he’d found both men on the roadside and considered them to be innocents caught in the fighting.

  Miraculously, Liddell didn’t have to reach for any excuse or explanation. The carter and his cart, Liddell and his bicycle and the victims of the war arrived safely, without encountering a solitary soldier on the way. That outcome seemed both outrageously freakish and fantastically mysterious to those who heard about it afterwards and knew, first-hand, the difficulty of travelling half a country mile in Siaochang without stumbling into the Japanese.

  The first man died two days later. The second lived, his face for ever scarred. He was a stout character and what saved him was his unusually thick, muscled neck. Not only the compassion Liddell had shown him, but also the fact that he’d agreed unhesitatingly to go across terrain as perilous as a minefield on his behalf, turned the survivor into a Christian. Pretending he’d only been a distant observer, rather than the protagonist, Liddell used the man’s conversion as an inspiration during subsequent sermons he gave for the LMS.

  If only the Society had done as much for him as he consistently did for it.

  Apart from a few days eked out in Tientsin, plus a holiday in Peitaiho, Eric Liddell had barely seen Florence, Patricia or Heather for more than eighteen months because his obsessive sense of duty made him an absent husband and father. ‘It was hard for him,’21 said Annie Buchan, who saw the agony Liddell went through because of that separation. Once he’d settled into Siaochang, Liddell had again pressed the LMS to allow Florence and the children to move to Siaochang. The Society, initially more sympathetic towards his situation, first said yes and then said no for the second time. The organization’s general secretary was travelling on a train with Liddell when a segment of blown-up track forced the carriages to an abrupt halt. It unnerved him. Afterwards he decided unilaterally that the rural areas still weren’t ‘safe’ for Florence. There was no opportunity to make a third application.

  Bad timing dogged the family now. With Europe sliding into war, Liddell was due his second furlough, the outline sketch of which he’d already drawn. The family intended to sail to Canada, spending a month in Toronto. The next stop was Scotland. D. P. Thomson had arranged numerous personal appearances and speaking engagements for him. Liddell’s mother was waiting to see the grandchildren, who to date had been no more than framed photographs on the mantelpiece to her. Rob Liddell, who had come home eight months earlier, was waiting there too. With his son still requiring specialist treatment for his spinal condition, he was forever turning over a question in his mind: should he go back to China at all?

  Hitler rearranged Liddell’s itinerary. The sequence towards the Second World War – the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Germany’s Pact of Steel with Italy, the invasion of Poland – is so well known as to require no elaboration. But, as Liddell weighed up which move to make, he saw each flashpoint in isolation. What is historical record to us was daily experience to him. There was no chance to appraise it objectively because no one could foresee the next event or know exactly how it would precipitate another. Like everyone else fed on this daily diet of bad news, Liddell hoped beyond hope that what he feared would be avoided through rational negotiation.

  When Neville Chamberlain arrived back from Munich, he’d looked like an Edwardian butler smugly announcing that his employer had guaranteed him an improvement in below-stairs conditions. When he gathered the country in front of the wireless to hear him declare war on Germany, he sounded like an undertaker explaining the procedure for a state funeral. By then the Liddells were in Toronto.

  Liddell sent an air-mail letter to the London Missionary Society.22 His suggestion was sensible and logical: he should take his furlough in Canada because German U-boats had turned the Atlantic into a shooting gallery for ships. Only eleven hours after Chamberlain’s broadcast, the 14,000-ton liner SS Athenia was torpedoed and sunk 250 miles off the north-west coast of Ireland, killing 117 passengers and crew. It was carrying no bullion, no guns, no munitions of war. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, ordered armed convoys to operate along the route. Liddell still thought it ‘most unwise’ to travel. The reply was glib and insensitive. Always impecunious, the LMS rattled on about ‘maintaining the Society’s income’,23 which was a sideways nod to Liddell’s abilities as a fund-raiser. The man Liddell had saved in the cart was an artist. Liddell had procured paints and paper for him during his convalescence and got in return a watercolour of a peony rose. Hundreds of lithographs were made of the picture and Liddell planned to sell them in Scotland at a shilling each for the LMS. But why couldn’t he sell them in Canada instead?

  The answer the LMS gave is essentially summed up in the thirty-eight words that concluded its letter: ‘We shall have to leave the final decision with you, but we are anxious on the one hand to have you in England and, on the other, to avoid unnecessary risk of travel to your wife and family.’

  The sentiment the LMS expresses in the second half of the sentence contradicts that expressed in the first. If genuinely wanting to ‘avoid unnecessary risk’ – and, pointedly, Liddell himself isn’t mentioned in relation to it – the LMS ought to have unequivocally told him to stay in Canada. Or at least the organization could have made it clear that remaining there was perfectly understandable in the circumstances and didn’t reflect poorly on him. But concern for themselves overrode concern for their loyal missionary. The opening, ‘we shall have to leave the final decision with you’, reads like the weary gasp of a parent towards a child who is being a bit awkward. The next part, ‘but we are anxious . . . to have you in England’, is a blatant appeal to his conscience and his weighty sense of obligation. This was a craven and manipulative response from the LMS, which was too afraid to say outright what it really wanted – presumably on the basis that it could rinse its hands of responsibility if things went wrong. Instead it gently implied, as if to cultivate some guilt within Liddell, that he would be letting the team down. It was shameful anyway that the LMS didn’t contact Liddell before he contacted them. As it turned out, the letter took so long to reach Canada that he was forced to make his decision before receiving it. Liddell felt there was no option but to go alone to Scotland, breaking up the family again, because he couldn’t endanger Florence and the children.

  Liddell reached Edinburgh in November 1939. Thomson found him ‘different in many ways from the man we had farewelled some seven years before’.24 Once, while swimming in Peitaiho, another missionary had slapped him across the top of his balding head: Liddell was breaking the waves and his colleague mistoo
k his glistening pate for the domed body of a stinging jellyfish. He looked noticeably older to Thomson because of that baldness. Liddell was also ‘more serious’ in his approach, added Thomson, who wasn’t privy yet to the scale of the traumas he’d either witnessed or endured in Siaochang.

  For the next nine and a half months Liddell did what he could in a country clothed in khaki, amid black-outs, gas masks, the fear of bombings, the introduction of rationing and other hardships. The posters implored the population to Make Do and Mend and Dig for Victory. Liddell’s youngest brother Ernest had gone into banking. The prospect of becoming a missionary had never interested him. Now twenty-seven, he volunteered for the army. Liddell himself tried to enlist in the Royal Air Force – despite never having flown in a plane – as a member of the flight crew.25 At thirty-seven he was deemed to be too old for service. The RAF, thinking of Liddell as a motivational figure, offered him a uniform and a desk instead, which he declined. He could inspire as easily from a pulpit in his suit and tie.

  ‘Deputation work in war-time was a very different thing from what it had been,’ said Thomson. The swarming rallies could not be replicated. The men attracted to them had signed up as soldiers. The women had gone into the factories to replace them. The black-outs had curtailed night-time assemblies in the winter. A further three Olympics had also come and gone since Liddell’s gold in Paris. Thomson nonetheless saw no slackening off in the interest surrounding him. ‘Everyone still wanted to shake his hand,’ he said. Liddell lectured on China, principally because the war in Europe had made the conflict there seem more irrelevant than ever to his audience and he wanted to remind them of it. He was convinced the missionaries were within sight of a ‘breakthrough’26 in Siaochang. ‘At no time have we had such a great opportunity as we have now. Every home is open to us. The people feel as though we are working with them and they will listen to our message everywhere,’ he said in a speech.