For the Glory

by Duncan Hamilton

  Words in such circumstances offer nothing more than palliative care. Nothing Liddell said to Florence could make either of them feel less wretched. Every reassurance sounded like a platitude, useless and uttered to fill a silence. Instead Liddell lifted Patricia on to his lap, gazed at her with berry-bright eyes and said, ‘I want you to be a good girl. I want you to look after your mother. I want you to look after this new baby. I want you to promise you’ll do that.’13 Nearly six months pregnant, Florence bowed her head, unable to choke back tears that were unstoppable now. She sobbed as quietly as she could. Liddell had staunched his emotions, telling his daughters that he’d see them again before either had missed him. But, when the moment came to part, he did something that betrayed his distraught state.14 He kissed his children and his wife and then left without lingering. He walked briskly down the gangway of the Nitta Maru, never giving it a backward glance; or at least none that his children could recall. He did not wave from the quayside. It was as though he couldn’t bear to see the ship break away from him. ‘We can’t imagine the turmoil he must have been in,’ said Patricia. ‘At least my mother had us. He went back to Tientsin alone.’

  On board, watching the dock recede from her, Florence was resolute for the sake of her daughters. ‘I had to snap out of it,’ she said of her sadness.15 ‘I couldn’t sit and only think about myself.’ Before long the white-capped tip of Mount Fuji was glimpsed through a porthole. The angle of the setting sun through the glass splashed the snow in a rainbow of reds and greens as bright as the colours from a paint-box.

  Florence never saw these shores again.

  The telegram arrived in mid-September. Eric Liddell learned he had a third daughter, the baby christened Maureen. He cabled back immediately with two words and an exclamation mark: ‘Wonderful news!’

  He was living in a flat with A. P. Cullen, his friend and former tutor. Cullen’s presence compensated for the loss of another sympathetic voice in Liddell’s life. The Japanese had given Annie Buchan special dispensation to move to Peking, where she began caring for a sick friend.

  Faraway incarceration precipitates a pining for home. Cullen liked to listen to the BBC from Shanghai because it played a patriotically rousing recording of Vera Lynn singing ‘There’ll Always Be An England’.16 He pictured country lanes and cricket matches, church spires and thatched cottages. The war blazed on through the broadcasts, the BBC reporting what government censors regarded as permissible. The accounts Liddell heard didn’t suggest that either a swift end or a negotiated peace was possible. Winston Churchill had already warned of the impasse, using the emphatic rhetoric of the warrior-politician who understood that attempting to find compromises with a dictator was to scatter bad seed in lunatic handfuls. In mid-June Germany invaded the Soviet Union. As summer faded into autumn, the Siege of Leningrad began.17 In Germany the Jews were ordered to wear the Star of David. In America Franklin D. Roosevelt, responding after a U-boat fired on a US warship, instructed the navy to blast back if another ship was similarly threatened. But the isolationists and the interventionists remained as implacably opposed as ever there.

  And in China, as Liddell learned of the arrival of his baby, 120,000 Japanese troops strode towards Changsha, also taking the heavy support of a hundred planes, twenty ships and two hundred motorboats in another attempt to wrest decisive control. Unable to match that firepower, the Chinese managed to beat them off with artful strategy. The Japanese undermined the missionaries, making the task of calling on the villages that ringed Tientsin as haphazard and onerous as it had been in Siaochang.18 There was no structure or timetable to Liddell’s work because his travel plans could be disrupted on the say of a sentry who had woken up feeling cantankerous that morning. Only occasionally, after much bowing and the laborious presentation of his documents, did the soldiers allow Liddell to cycle to the distant farms. The lack of contribution he and other missionaries were able to make illustrated again how misguided the London Missionary Society had been in tethering them to Tientsin. Liddell would have been far more use to the LMS in Toronto or even in bombed-out London.

  Then dawn rose on Sunday, 7 December, the date that changed the shape of everything.19

  The Associated Press announced the raid on Pearl Harbor at 2.22 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Within minutes of ripping the bulletin off the wire national and local radio stations were cutting into live drama serials and documentaries, sports programmes and talk shows for one of those sombre, urgent announcements which back then were made only when a tragedy of genuine magnitude had occurred. This tragedy was still occurring, which is why nothing could be confirmed apart from the plain fact of the attack. The port was alight and the oil-black smoke from partly gutted or sinking ships obscured the detail of the losses and the number of dead. Early on neither could even be guessed at. Hearing breaking news can be a numbing and a chaotic experience, the repercussions initially hard to take in. But, as the reports were absorbed and the scale of the assault on the US Pacific Fleet became known, no one doubted what it meant for America; or how it would wash tidally into the war. Pearl Harbor would have been a day of infamy even if Roosevelt had not described it as such. Almost two hundred American planes were destroyed and eighteen vessels, including eight warships, were blown apart or damaged. The death toll, including the Japanese, was more than 2,500; a further 1,178 were wounded. The Pennsylvania-class Arizona was struck four times, killing 1,177 of the 1,400 officers and crew on board. Time regarded the raid as ‘premeditated murder with a toothy smile’ and the announcement of America’s eventual entrance into the conflict – Germany declared war on the US after Roosevelt declared war on Japan – as ‘a great relief’.20 The magazine likened the repercussions to ‘a reverse earthquake’, maintaining that ‘One terrible jerk shook everything disjointed, distorted, askew back into place . . . Japanese bombs had finally brought national unity to the U.S.’

  Roosevelt was lunching at the White House when reports of the carnage first reached him. Winston Churchill was at Chequers, dining with the American ambassador. During a telephone call, Roosevelt told his ally, ‘We are all in the same boat now,’ which was an insensitive metaphor to use in the circumstances. However maladroit the phrase, someone else was thinking of it too. After hearing of Pearl Harbor, Chiang Kai-shek put a gramophone record on the turntable. The record was ‘Ave Maria’.21 He played it as a celebration, relieved that his enemy now had other enemies who would become his friends.

  It was as though a shutter had slammed in Tientsin. Japanese reinforcements were wheeled into the city and uncoiled barbed wire to close off the foreign Concessions. A. P. Cullen saw Liddell’s distress.22 Knowing now that there was no possibility of reaching Florence and his children, he ‘just wandered the streets’, said Cullen. Like everyone else, Liddell found himself under house arrest. Also like everyone else, he had to report for questioning. The Japanese wanted lists of valuables and hammered on doors to obtain them, taking whatever was deemed inappropriate for enemy aliens to possess. Cullen had to surrender his radio. There’d still always be an England for him, but from then on he could only sing along with Vera Lynn in his head. Had Florence not taken the Olympic gold medal the Japanese would have seized that too and melted it down. Liddell was given a scarlet armband to denote his British nationality. He and Cullen were split up. Liddell was billeted with a family belonging to the Methodist Mission. Other restrictions were so prohibitively harsh that he found himself among the unemployed.23 He couldn’t teach. He couldn’t preach. Unless he was buying something in a shop or talking to a servant, he was forbidden to fraternize with the Chinese at all.

  Pearl Harbor also denied Liddell the chance to see the face of his new daughter. It was the shallowest ripple from the aftermath of that attack, inconsequential to anyone but him and Florence.

  In November she had arranged for a colour studio portrait to be taken of her and the girls.24 Patricia and Heather were scrubbed and put into their Sunday best, matching rose pink frocks with white Pilgrim
collars. Florence, wearing an unfussy green dress with puff sleeves, sat between them. In her arms she held Maureen, wrapped in a christening shawl. The photograph is the sort every family had framed for the mantelpiece or to hang on the wall, a memento to mark a glad event. This one evokes absence rather than togetherness. To see it is like looking at a table with one place setting left unfilled. The group is sorrowfully incomplete. Florence doesn’t even smile at the camera. It’s as though she was caught thinking of her husband in the second the photographer’s flash went off.

  The family without its father. A sombre Florence gathers together her children – (from left) Heather, Maureen and Patricia – for a picture she planned to send to Eric in 1941.

  The plan to get the photograph to Liddell seemed infallible. Hugh MacKenzie, who had earlier returned to Canada, would courier it in his luggage. He’d decided to go back to Tientsin, ignoring the restrictions in the region, and had booked his passage on a ship leaving from San Francisco. A conjunction of two events meant he would never see China again. These were so implausible that a novelist would have thought twice about including them in a plot to avoid the charge of relying overmuch on coincidence. Strolling along a foggy dock, MacKenzie was hit by a car. A few hours later, waking from unconsciousness, he was told his ship would not be sailing. MacKenzie had suffered his accident on the very day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He was one of the last people in America to learn of the atrocity.

  To be shut in Tientsin was like being shipwrecked on a desert island. You could only hopefully await rescue and busy yourself in the meantime as a way of avoiding the effects of the isolation. The postal system in China was erratic.25 Like the castaway, you had almost more chance of getting a message in a bottle than a letter. And if a letter did arrive, the news it contained could be up to half a year old. Eric Liddell once got two in the same post from Florence. She received a bundle of five in one delivery from him.

  Liddell managed to contact her through convoluted channels.26 He’d write to a friend in a part of China that wasn’t under the heel of the Japanese. He’d ask for the letter to be forwarded to Canada. Clandestinely, through other contacts, he also ingeniously sent a few lines of correspondence through a radio relay. This began with the Chinese International Broadcasting Station. The next stop was a listening post in Los Angeles. The listening post then sent it on to Toronto’s United Church Office. Florence, opening the message like a surprise package, got some reassurance. ‘No need to worry,’ wrote Liddell on behalf of himself and his colleagues. ‘We are all in good spirits . . . You are constantly in my thoughts.’

  A. P. Cullen became more supportive than ever of Liddell. Cullen said that ‘almost every day’27 the two of them went on long walks. This closeness allowed him an exceptional insight into Liddell’s thinking, much of which he spoke about freely to his friend. Cullen was subsequently able to talk about Liddell’s religious beliefs more perceptively than anyone else.

  The missionaries, though given licence to roam the Concessions, were forbidden to hold assemblies of more than ten people either indoors or out. Fortunately these orders, plus those given about preaching and teaching, couldn’t always be enforced because the Japanese were undermanned. The missionaries continued to stage services and hold classes privately. There were also social gatherings in family homes, which became platforms for serious debates and lectures as well as a general trade of whatever scraps of news, reliable or otherwise, had filtered through the lines. On Sundays, when the soldiers were more vigilant about checking on the missionaries, the wives hosted afternoon tea-parties during which a sermon was read. Often Liddell wrote these, running sheets of paper through a mimeograph copier beforehand so each of the congregation could take one away.

  Sermon writing was only a sliver of the self-improvement programme he devised.28 Liddell could have relaxed, backsliding into indolence, because the workload was whatever he chose to make it. There was no pressure to do more than the absolute minimum. He confessed as much to Florence in a letter: ‘It would be easy to let this time go by with nothing done; nothing really constructive, and so have the days frittered away.’ Liddell decided to treat his confinement as an opportunity to put himself through a second university education. He’d be his own tutor, reading and taking notes extensively. ‘Persistent study’29 is how Cullen described the next fourteen months for Liddell. Cullen said that ‘conscientious thoroughness’ was ‘manifested in all his work, his undertakings and his manifold interests and pursuits’.

  Liddell was always scribbling on pads and loose paper on which he put down thoughts and ideas or short quotations that inspired him. His advice to everyone was ‘Take a pen and pencil and write down what comes to you.’30 Liddell was widening his knowledge of theology and committing to memory those few books of the Bible he couldn’t already quote whole. He did so slowly. ‘Don’t read hurriedly,’ he said. ‘Every word is precious. Pause, assimilate.’ Liddell compiled an anthology of prayers, which was bound in smart navy boards. The prayers he chose and painstakingly typed out with two fingers, the borrowed machine perched on a tiny table, were printed on pitifully thin paper. The fledgling author produced another compendium called Discipleship, a collection of various readings arranged monthly over the calendar year. Later the title became The Disciplines of the Christian Life. ‘If it never comes to anything it will have been useful for my own thinking,’ he said.

  Liddell considered Discipleship to be a ‘companion booklet’ to his daily prayers and took no credit for the contents, claiming he’d merely plucked out quotations for it from some of his favourite devotional books. Cullen disagreed, saying ‘much of it is actually his own’, and thought Liddell’s ‘personality and character breathe from every page’.31 The sight of these books confirmed something for Cullen. He believed Liddell’s progress since arriving in China could be legitimately compared to the races he ran to become Olympic champion.32 As a runner Liddell was ‘always a bit slow in getting off the mark’, he explained, perfectly serious in the analogy he was about to make. In the same way, he continued, Liddell had been slow to make an impression as a prospective missionary. Indeed Cullen thought there was ‘nothing remarkable’ about his initial strides to become one. He was adamant that Liddell had established himself only as his ‘momentum . . . steadily increased’. The assessment was accurate. Liddell admitted as much in Discipleship, writing that ‘careful attention and repetition’ should be ‘the method’ used in both learning ‘any new subject’ and also becoming ‘proficient in any game’. Just as he’d trained himself to become a runner, gradually in the beginning and then with a ferocious intensity of purpose, so he’d trained himself to become a missionary too. ‘The Christian life should be a life of growth. I believe the secret of growth is to develop the devotional life,’ he said.

  Cullen observed close up that such a devotional life meant Liddell was ‘completely dedicated to the service of God and man’.33 He put it as plainly as possible. It was ‘absolute surrender to the will of God’. Cullen had heard Liddell say ‘absolute surrender’ so frequently that he claimed categorically: ‘The conception was always in his mind . . . God should have absolute control over every part of his life.’ Liddell was emphatic about it: ‘Every Christian should live a God-guided life. If you are not guided by God, you will be guided by something else.’ He even outlined how he made this happen. ‘If, in the quiet of your heart, you feel something should be done, stop and consider whether it is in line with the character and teaching of Jesus. If so, obey that impulse to do it, and in doing so you will find it was God guiding you.’ For him, ‘obedience’ was always ‘the secret’ of that guidance.

  Liddell took inspiration from diverse sources, such as Aristotle, who he said had kept ‘the passion of resentment under control’,34 and also the African-American educator Booker T. Washington, who eschewed confrontation even when he was vilely heckled for being black. Liddell cited one instance of it in Discipleship. An incredulous companion, who saw Washington t
reat his racial abusers with politeness, asked, ‘Why raise your hat when they slight you?’ Washington replied, ‘Why should I stoop to be less than a gentleman because others do?’ Liddell treated the Japanese in the same way.

  The Sermon on the Mount remained the keystone of his faith.35 Liddell argued that each passage of it required reading ‘over and over again’. He confessed how intimidating the Sermon had originally appeared. The strictures it laid down had seemed unachievable to him. ‘The first time you read it you feel that it is impossible,’ he said. Clarity came to Liddell only after he returned to the text, looking at it anew. ‘The second time you feel that nothing else is possible,’ he added. The Sermon became Liddell’s manifesto, and he became the exemplar of it to a literal degree. He believed it constituted ‘the technique of being a Christian’ and also counted as a ‘working philosophy of life’.

  Liddell owned a postcard-sized picture of the Danish artist Carl Bloch’s painting of the Sermon, one of twenty-three scenes commissioned at the end of the nineteenth century for the chapel at Frederiksberg Palace in Copenhagen.36 He used it as a bookmark. Bloch depicts Jesus in ankle-length red robes and a grey shawl half a dozen shades darker than the rock on which he sits. His right hand is raised. The multitudes are listening to him speak. Liddell’s card was frayed and slightly bent over at the corners, demonstrating the number of miles it had travelled inside his Bible.

  Liddell felt ‘at least one good book’ about Jesus ‘should be read by everyone – Christian and non-Christian alike’. The book he recommended, cherishing it in an ever-expanding personal library housed in a blackwood bookcase, was The Christ of the Mount, published in 1931.37 Like the Bloch card, the pages became rather tatty and dog-eared after Liddell repeatedly referred to them and readily lent out the book. Written by the American theologian and missionary E. Stanley Jones, a confidant of both Gandhi and Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Christ of the Mount added enormously to Liddell’s comprehension of the Sermon. Jones said that the Sermon, which he considered a ‘portrait of Jesus’, was as grand as an ‘Everest peak’. His work was the catalyst for Liddell’s decision to put together an earlier book, his own twenty-four-page analysis of the Sermon modestly subtitled ‘Notes for Sunday School Teachers’. As the war widened, becoming all-engulfing, his opinions chimed with Jones’s. ‘The Sermon challenges the whole conception of force which militarism holds,’ said Jones, arguing that ‘blows could only beget blows and hate will beget hate, and you will find yourself in a vicious circle’.