For the Glory

by Duncan Hamilton

  In the spring of 1940, Liddell gave in to an appeal from Florence. The Atlantic had become a little less volatile. The armed convoys had shielded passenger ships. The Royal Navy and the German U-boats had been shadow-boxing each other. So the family sailed from Canada at last. Florence and her daughters were among only 147 passengers on a White Star liner capable of carrying more than two thousand. The serene furlough the Liddells had originally imagined in Scotland began belatedly and would be fleeting – a mere 140 days.

  The zenith of it was almost a month at Carcant, a spread of 600 acres 20 miles south of Edinburgh on the Scottish borders.27 It belonged to Liddell’s brother-in-law; Jenny had become Mrs Charles Somerville eight years earlier.

  One translation of the name Carcant is ‘a collar of jewels’, which is how it appeared to the Liddells that summer when the Meteorological Office reported ‘abundant sunshine’. Scotland got sunburned, tanning itself in its hottest June for over eighty years. The highest recorded temperature was 89 degrees. Carcant was a countryside version of Peitaiho, an idyll concealed within the wider world. Instead of sand there was grass and parched heath and drystone walls. Instead of the sea there was the shallow lochan, the shape of it not unlike a shakily drawn map of Wales. Instead of the flatlands beyond there were the Moorfoot Hills, which changed colour as the seasons changed – from purple-blue to livid bronze and then lush, variegated greens. Apart from the sheep and rabbits and cattle, plus a scattering of small farms with corkscrew rises of smoke, the Liddells had Carcant almost to themselves. It was one of those places where the sky seemed bigger and all-enveloping. Their low bungalow was built from dark wood slats and had white-framed windows, which were shrouded in net curtains. There was a stone chimney, a coal fire, a big green copper bath. Rhododendrons dressed the veranda. There was an unbroken, shut-in hush about Carcant that made it difficult to believe that the curvature of the Earth was hiding two wars, which all too soon would melt into one. You could collect milk in metal pitchers, fresh from the dairy farmers. You could bathe in the lochan. You could drink cold spring water. If you were a child, you could behave like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, everything an adventure.

  It seemed then as if summer would never come to a full stop.

  Rob Liddell decided not to go back to China; his family needed him too much. His brother, however, was already committed to returning. At the end of one sermon he’d promised an Edinburgh congregation, ‘We’re going back and we’ll stay as long as we are able.’

  In early August 1940 the Liddells sailed from Liverpool, their ship one in a convoy of fifty-five split into five lines.28 It included other passenger boats, Royal Navy warships, merchant vessels and minesweepers. From the deck, Liddell called it a ‘delightful sight’.

  The convoy was barely clear of the Irish coast when, at 8.30 p.m., he heard the thud of something against the hull and then felt the ship shake. The family’s leather trunk shot across the floor as the cabin listed and vibrated. A torpedo had hit them without detonating, the ship and its three hundred passengers unscathed. Liddell had three theories: ‘Whether it was a dud, and only the cap exploded, or whether it had expended its energy, having been fired from too great a distance, or had exploded right below us, we are not sure.’ Liddell, Florence and the children grabbed huge ring lifebelts and headed for the deck. The ship immediately began a defensive zigzag. ‘We were running for our lives,’29 said Florence.

  For the next two days, rolling on choppy seas, the convoy found itself under attack again. One of the ships at the rear was sunk and a small boat a quarter of a mile from the Liddells’ own vanished from sight within two minutes of being blown up. Hearing the mighty boom of the explosion, Liddell was certain the ‘engine boiler’ had taken a direct hit. The passengers on Liddell’s ship came on deck, half expecting to see the next torpedo cutting through the waters towards them. When nothing happened, the all-clear was sounded around noon and everyone was told to file in for lunch. Mid-way through the first course the alarm clanged again. A third ship had been hit. In the early evening a fourth and then a fifth were torpedoed too. By 9 p.m. the Royal Navy was locked in a fight with a German submarine that had risen to the surface. ‘All night people slept in their clothes with lifebelts ready,’ said Liddell, who added that ignorance of what was happening meant his daughters ‘weren’t scared at all’ – a contrast to the adults around them.

  Running at full speed – ‘far above its average’, said Liddell – the ship pulled itself out of range of the ordinary subs. ‘Only an ocean-going one could come so far, and there were few of those,’ Liddell explained. That Sunday he was asked to perform a service of thanksgiving in the first-class lounge. ‘I only had my sports coat and flannels,’ he said, as if sartorial elegance had suddenly become de rigueur in the middle of an ocean-going wartime convoy.

  One theatre of war disappeared behind him.30 The one in front of him, however, had worsened considerably during his furlough. Approximately a million Japanese soldiers were now occupying China – fanned along the coast, the railway lines, and holding strategic positions in the centre of the country. While outnumbered man to man, the Japanese had superior communications, which was proving crucial. The Chinese were also pinned down because of unsuitable roads, insufficient troop transport and a lack of both general and military supplies. A mass of soldiers had to dig in around each vulnerable area to counter the swifter-moving Japanese divisions. The Japanese were muscling aside the opposition. Between May and September 1940 the Japanese dropped almost thirty thousand bombs on Nationalist-held cities. And, just as Liddell embarked for China, the Communist Eighth Army launched the Hundred Regiments Offensive, losing twenty-two thousand men in the fighting to Japan’s three thousand.

  Tom McKerchar, a father of thirteen, with his family in Edinburgh. The boy in his lap is named Eric, after the Olympic champion.

  Liddell was also coping with a piece of sad personal news, which awaited him in Toronto, the mid-point of his travels.31 His coach, Tom McKerchar, had died of a stroke, aged sixty-three. He’d been admitted to Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary on the very day the Liddells left the dockside at Liverpool. His death came less than twenty-four hours later. The paid advertisement announcing it in the Edinburgh Evening News made no mention of Liddell and the Olympics or even of McKerchar’s career as a coach. When Liddell heard of his passing, McKerchar’s cremation was over. The mourners present had been asked not to bring flowers.

  It was late autumn when Eric Liddell saw the Siaochang mission and the hospital again.32 He described it as a ‘garrisoned village’. The Japanese had poured across the area and were now more conspicuous than ever. Liddell was thankful that Florence and the children were in Tientsin, where he could see them during forays for supplies. He tried to continue as before and put the bravest of faces on his circumstances. He pedalled into the countryside, took services and tried to re-engage with communities, which had become fractured and tense. ‘When I am out it is giving, giving all the time,’ he wrote. He said this was his attempt to ‘leave a message of encouragement and peace in a time when there is no external peace at all’.

  Liddell felt powerless. Land was being ‘ruthlessly’ requisitioned without compensation by the Japanese, he said. Ancient burial mounds and graves were wantonly desecrated; soldiers drove or marched across them. The persecution Liddell had previously witnessed had escalated. The Japanese no longer made attempts to conceal it or to blame someone else for such aggression. The locals were simply ordered to hand over their possessions, their food and their livestock; those who refused were shot or beaten or, like the artist Liddell had rescued, given the sharp edge of an officer’s sword. Men were commandeered for manual labour: digging trenches, making roads, building walls, and fetching and lifting for the Japanese. ‘Watching them work makes you think of the old Roman press gangs,’ said Liddell, his gloom and dismay detectable. He said the soldiers were stirring an ‘increasing hatred and rebellious spirit’. The locals were defenceless against each hum
iliation.

  There was a solitary spot of colour for Liddell.33 He presided at a wedding on a chilly, windy day. The bride was carried into the church on a sedan chair. She and it were traditionally dressed in red. The bridegroom wore a trace of red too, a sash looped around his waist and shoulder. ‘Everyone loves a wedding,’ said Liddell, so pleased to be there. The occasion, however, didn’t stop a prolonged exchange of fire afterwards between the Japanese and the Communists. That evening, during the bridal feast, heavy gunfire was also heard only a mile away. The following day the Japanese shot twice at Liddell, who presumed the soldiers had mistaken him for a member of the Eighth Army on a bicycle.

  The unequal struggle between the missionaries and the troops lasted so long only because the Japanese allowed it. But no one believed – least of all Liddell – that the Siaochang compound would remain intact indefinitely. Something was always going to give, particularly when another war was tearing up Europe and North Africa. Winston Churchill once dismissed China as a country of ‘four hundred million pigtails’. So what happened in an obscure missionary station planted in an equally obscure region of it was unlikely to divert his attention; certainly not when London was under a nightly blitz from German bombs. The Japanese could commit any crime, knowing its disclosure would be low on the British government’s agenda.

  The missionaries were working under the eye of the clock, and time ran out for them early in 1941. Already there’d been rumours that deportation or internment was imminent. The Japanese then posted an unsubtle warning. Soldiers arrested the Chinese headmaster of the mission school and a handful of his staff. The allegation against them was anti-Japanese teaching. Even Liddell realized the position in Siaochang was untenable now. If the missionaries didn’t go of their own accord, the Japanese would turn on them next. The sequence of events wasn’t difficult to predict: false charges, questioning, harassment and imprisonment.

  The compound closed on a cold morning in mid-February 1941, and the missionaries headed for Tientsin. The Japanese made an inventory of each piece of furniture and equipment, which was claimed as reparations for the inconvenience the missionaries had caused them. Annie Buchan said the soldiers ‘didn’t allow’ her or anyone else to take ‘anything’ with them.34 She spoke of the ‘awful feeling of emptiness, frustration’ after being ‘stripped of everything, most of all the work which was so dear to us’. Much later the mission was ‘completely destroyed’, said Buchan, ‘with every brick and every piece of wood or iron scattered’. After the missionaries left, the headmaster and his teachers were released.

  One forced retreat was always going to lead to another, and then another, until there was no ground left on which the missionaries could safely operate. The Japanese had made that much obvious. The London Missionary Society’s decision-makers, still wearing blinkers, bafflingly announced that the situation didn’t warrant ‘any general withdrawal’. In Tientsin, however, Buchan saw another example of vindictiveness. Five months earlier the Japanese had signed the Tripartite Pact, which allied them formally with Germany and Italy.35 Pockets of anti-Semitism, though not common, emerged simply to satisfy the Germans, who encouraged them. Buchan witnessed the rounding up of several hundred Jews. Their passports were ‘thrown into the waste baskets’, she said. ‘The Jews knew what that meant. They belonged to nowhere. Some turned away with wild weeping and wailing. Others stood with grey, ashen faces glued to the spot with a dumb fear gripping their heart.’

  The LMS gave new assignments to the missionaries. Liddell was put back into the field, where he understood what his employers did not. Soon Tientsin, a bomb waiting to go off, would be no safer than Siaochang. The missionaries would eventually be pushed out of there too – deported at best, imprisoned at worst.

  And then Florence let slip her secret to him. She was pregnant again. Their baby was due in September.

  Part Three

  Stronger

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Man Who Isn’t There

  ERIC LIDDELL HAD become a specialist in saying goodbye at the boat dock or the railway station, which can be such maudlin places for the leaving and left-behind alike. These farewells had been the theme of his life, beginning in boyhood. So had the routine and the rituals attached to them: the embrace, the kiss, the forced smile, the stock phrases of solace.

  Nothing, though, had prepared him for this. For a fraught month Liddell and Florence debated whether or not she should take the children back to Canada.1 From the start, the parameters of the question were so narrow as to make the answer straightforward. Only that thing called love complicated it.

  China was too volatile for Florence to give birth there. Liddell’s contract with the London Missionary Society nonetheless bound him implacably to it. His conscience wouldn’t allow him to sever that tie. However much heartache it brought to those he most cherished, Liddell had to remain in Tientsin. Always referring to the Chinese as ‘my people’,2 he declared he’d neither desert them nor renege on his obligation to his demanding employers. Liddell didn’t need to make this clear to Florence. She knew duty came first for him; that, after all, was the sort of man she’d chosen to marry.

  Whenever you don’t want to face the obvious, you tend to put off seeing it. Whenever the head is in conflict with the heart, you pretend the head will eventually surrender to the heart’s will. And whenever you’re reluctant to make a decision, you cling to the fanciful hope that something – anything, in fact – will resolve your problem before you cave in to the inevitable. So it proved for the Liddells.

  During the first months of 1941, the fighting in Europe was spreading apace into North Africa.3 The Luftwaffe was still bombing London. The German infantry tore into Greece and Yugoslavia. The war’s rate of expansion made it unlikely that Asia could escape the conflict. ‘It was like sitting on the edge of a volcano,’4 said Florence. Already the Japanese had secretly dispatched a spy to take notes about that spot on the map called Pearl Harbor. As well as the Allies’ pursuit of Hitler, the draught of which would soon blow his way, Liddell became more preoccupied than ever with the conflict swirling around him, including the role of the mercenary bandits who were everywhere, like scavenging dogs. He grew increasingly afraid that he or his family, especially now with a baby on the way, would be kidnapped as other Westerners had been, forcing him into an untenable position.5

  The most rational and practical of men still equivocated about sending Florence home to Toronto; and Florence, also aware of what needed to be done, equivocated too. The thought of being separated from him again was agony for her. The couple had been apart from each other for more than half of their marriage, which was now in its eighth year. Those absences had been filled with letter-writing, a correspondence amounting to gallons of ink and forests of stacked paper. But the Liddells wanted more than love slipped into an envelope.

  The LMS was maddeningly inept, insisting that neither the war nor the prospect of the Japanese entering it warranted a retreat from China.6 The aim, it said, was to work on until ‘conditions render this impossible’. The LMS’s lack of worldly awareness, plus its inability to understand China, suggested an organization possessing only the vaguest acquaintance with reality. Given the hazards, the LMS should have released Liddell and the other missionaries, allowing them to kick their heels clean of the country before escape became impossible. There was no gain in occupying areas where Japanese interference effectively made it an act of tokenism to stay.

  The Liddells sorted through each option, which was a prolonged misery because the process was circuitous, always dragging them back to the depressing point where the discussion had begun. Protecting Patricia, Heather and the unborn child was paramount. Finally the Liddells accepted that splitting up the family was the sole way of guaranteeing its safety. ‘I wouldn’t have gone if it wasn’t for the children,’7 Florence stated.

  Liddell tried reassuring her that one of two outcomes was likely.8 Soon stability would return to China, allowing them to be reunited
. Or, if the situation deteriorated irrevocably, the LMS would arrange his evacuation. Liddell told her about another of his ambitions.9 In the future he was sure awaited them together, he was planning to work with the tribes of native North Americans and Canada’s First Nations people. Even seen at its brightest – Liddell attempting to make the best of his own and also Florence’s sadness – his sunny optimism is the classic example of whistling through a thunderstorm. There was no possibility of peace between the Chinese and the Japanese. The hatred between them was entrenched. The top brass of the LMS had a wonky antenna for danger and were incompetent about responding to it even when the signal reaching them was strong and unambiguous.

  Liddell’s first decision was strategically shrewd.10 He booked a cabin for the family on the 17,163-ton Nitta Maru, a 560-foot-long fledgling ocean liner with a single black funnel and an impressive sweep of glass, which allowed light to pour into its upper decks. The ship had made its maiden voyage only two months before. The key piece of equipment on the Nitta Maru was the Japanese flag, guaranteeing its neutrality in the Atlantic. No submarine was going to take a pot shot at it. ‘Some of our friends still thought we were asking for trouble,’11 remembered Florence.

  Whatever the Liddells said, each striving to convince the other that a reunion wouldn’t be far off, the couple packed as though the opposite were true. The show-cabinet, where Liddell had displayed his athletics prizes, was more than half-emptied.12 Florence re-boxed his Olympic gold and bronze medals and put them in a trunk – a move that didn’t suggest confidence in Tientsin’s long-term security.

  The Nitta Maru was docked in Kobe and the family sailed to Japan across the Yellow Sea to meet it. The girls, Patricia and Heather, retain small fragments of memory of those clear May days: Liddell dressed in a uniform of white – short-sleeved shirt, long shorts and high socks, which were folded evenly below the knee; the grey bulk of the harboured Nitta Maru; their father boarding it to settle them and then embarking on an exploratory tour of the decks; their labelled luggage stacked in the cabin.