Discipleship, finally completed in Tientsin, still stands as the most significant thing Liddell wrote because the Sermon permeates every thought presented in it. It is also the closest we get to hearing Liddell speak from the heart.
‘Jesus’ life is the most beautiful life there has ever been,’ he said, explaining why his own became an attempt to mirror it in both ‘character’ and ‘outlook’. For Liddell, this meant never ‘willingly’ being rude or ‘irritated’. This meant disdaining pride, which he saw as ‘the great enemy of humility’. This meant being ‘ready to go out of [your] way to help’ and to ‘reduce people’s burdens’. And this – once more – meant striving to ‘be ye perfect’. Such high moral standards seemed unreachable – absurdly so – to some of those who heard Liddell espouse them; surely no one could be that godly.
But, within only a few months, he’d show under adversity that whatever he preached was always practised, irrespective of personal cost.
Late in the summer of 1942 the prospect of repatriation was dangled in front of the missionaries.38 Civilian Japanese held in American Relocation Centres would be swapped for Allied non-combatants in China.
By now the Japanese had bombed and forced the surrender of Singapore, cut the Burma Road, soon taking over the country, occupied the Dutch East Indies and were battling to either retain or assume control of South Pacific targets such as the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.39 Air attacks had been launched on Australian towns, among them Darwin in the Northern Territory, where almost two hundred were killed in the first raid on the harbour and two airfields, and Broome in Western Australia, which was an aircraft refuelling stage and also a stopping-off point for refugees. Between seventy and a hundred people died there in a surprise assault lasting barely twenty minutes.
Against this backdrop the missionaries in Tientsin seemed inconsequential, so the plan to be rid of them made sense.
Eric Liddell had never relaxed.40 He’d delivered the mail, which was now a dribble, throughout the Concession. He’d participated with infinite patience in games that occupied the children of the missionary family with whom he lodged. The temperature rose oppressively high; sometimes it was 100 degrees in the shade. He played cricket with the boys and tennis with the girls nonetheless. He spent spare hours affixing Chinese stamps into albums for them too. If other missionaries needed someone to complete a four at bridge, Liddell never refused appeals to make up the numbers. He did chores to ensure the house was well run. He went to the bakery at 5 a.m. to buy bread. After a terrible dust storm – sand and grit sneaking through closed doors and windows to cover the floors and furnishings – Liddell got up before 4.30 a.m. to clear it with a pan, broom and duster, doing so as quietly as possible to wake up no one else.
Now, expecting to be given a departure date, Liddell wrote to Florence to say he’d volunteer for fresh tasks in Canada. The London Missionary Society, regarding his return as a foregone conclusion, also wrote to her. The LMS enquired whether Liddell had plans post-China, ending with the wildly presumptuous ‘Best wishes to yourself and Eric if he has by any chance turned up yet’.41 Hope can bruise the spirit. Florence had tried to suppress her optimism; but the LMS was telling her that Liddell would be with her any day, and certainly before the Christmas tree needing trimming. She waited for the telegram telling her of a firm date.
The repatriations turned out to be a sham except for those who had money to bribe officials.42 Only the rich were guaranteed release, able to buy berths on the ships sailing away from China. The first batch of missionaries got only as far as Shanghai, where the position became depressingly apparent to them. The second batch, including Liddell, who lacked the funds to compete with wealthy businessmen, never left Tientsin. The Japanese decided to sweep up the stragglers. Instead of being given safe passage, the missionaries were going to be corralled in a camp where it would take fewer soldiers to monitor them.
Liddell once said that ‘half the things we worry about never happen’.43 This was not one of them. In mid-March 1943, Liddell learned he’d have a little over two weeks to sort his personal affairs, his papers and his possessions. He was being sent to a Civilian Assembly Centre in Shandong Province.
This new home was called Weihsien.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
No More Happy Birthdays
THE MOST TERRIBLE nightmares are those in which the dreamer believes himself to be awake. To be captive in Weihsien, especially during the early days there, was akin to that feeling.1 That proclamation over the main gate – Courtyard of the Happy Way – was a grotesque distortion of what awaited those who went inside.
No one old enough to remember the camp clearly ever forgot the first sight of it. Plaster had been hammered off walls. Water pipes and radiators had been torn out. Holes had been hacked in brickwork. Windows had been broken. Desks and chairs, once used in classrooms, had been smashed or split and then left to rot or rust uselessly in the open air. So had bed frames and wardrobes, tables and chests of drawers. The wells had been deliberately dirtied – used either as trash bins or toilets. What Weihsien had once been, an immaculately spick-and-span American Presbyterian mission, was now a wreck, every pathway cluttered with debris and heaped with garbage. It was as if something meteorologically freakish had swept across the place.
The truth was more prosaic. First Chinese bandits and then Japanese soldiers had ripped through Weihsien long before its designation as a Civilian Assembly Centre. Hooliganism had destroyed the fabric of the buildings. Looting had picked the camp almost clean of valuables from the hospital, the school, the kitchen, the church and the barrack-like accommodations. Even the latrines had been vandalized. None of them flushed, so the bowls overflowed. The stench of shit and piss was choking. There was no running water. There was no heating either. Electric light offered measly illumination – no more than a mid-Victorian gas lamp.
There was a grey, 8-foot-high wall surrounding Weihsien, and later on electrified bands of barbed wire. In conical corner towers, from which searchlights could burn through the darkness of the night, guards stood with machine guns poking through slots. On the ground there were another thirty or so guards with rifles and bayonets, still wearing winter black uniforms and calf-length boots. Some of them held a German Shepherd dog on a chain lead and also had a sword in a sheath tied to their belts.
Eric Liddell hadn’t known what to expect from the camp. Nor had he known who else would be there. The Japanese had given the new internees from Tientsin instructions rather than information. Liddell was told he could send a bed and a mattress to Weihsien in advance of his arrival. He could dispatch three other big pieces of luggage that way too. Everything else had to be carried either on his back or in his hands.
No one thought about seeing Tientsin again. If the war went well, the internees expected to be liberated overseas. If it went badly, who knew what tortures the Japanese would put them through? Whatever was left behind would soon be lost to them for ever. So those going to Weihsien wrapped sentimental keepsakes and small heirlooms as well as practical essentials.2 Liddell packed his clothes, his Bible, his prayer books and a selection of other titles, including E. Stanley Jones’s The Christ of the Mount and a red, leather-bound edition of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. As a precaution – the Japanese hadn’t mentioned cooking utensils – he took cups and plates and a knife and fork. Soldiers checked the sharpness of each in case Liddell planned to turn them into weapons. He pushed sets of cushions and curtains into his leather cases. He reckoned the curtains could be used for extra bedsheets. He took photographs of his family. He gathered up what remained of his athletics medals and also two watches: the gold half-hunter that Edinburgh’s city fathers had given him for winning the Olympic title and a stopwatch, which he had also brought to China almost twenty years earlier. Into one suitcase he slipped his university blazer and the pair of spiked running shoes – dark grey canvas uppers and long grey laces – that he’d worn in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
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bsp; Liddell was lucky. He got to the camp with his possessions intact. Elsewhere internees found the Japanese brazenly stealing from them.3 The soldiers’ excuse was always that something – especially gold or silver – counted as unsuitable cargo and could therefore be taken with impunity. It was pointless to argue. The internees had to placidly surrender whatever the occupying army fancied taking from them.
Liddell didn’t escape the minor humiliations inflicted on everyone sent to Weihsien. The Japanese made sure photographers recorded the departing internees, glum-faced with apprehension and stooped under the weight of their suitcases.4 They trekked in a crocodile line like a regimented bunch of hobos. The Chinese, many of whom had worked as household servants, tearfully saw them off. This was done mostly in silence. The penalty for attempting to speak to a prisoner could be a rear or a frontal blow from a swagger stick or a rod of bamboo.
It was 300 miles from Tientsin to Weihsien.5 Liddell walked to the railway station wearing his fur hat and an overcoat. He climbed into a third-class carriage. After ten hours he changed trains. After a further five, the city of Weihsien loomed ahead of him at last. The final leg of his journey was a 3-mile, forty-minute truck ride. He and the other internees rattled and shook over cobbles and along rutted tracks. He arrived to find Weihsien already crowded with people exactly like him – pasty-pale, their complexion the colour of wet clay. The dishevelled groups were hollow-eyed, sorely in need of sleep. Some were distractedly sorting through the rubble. Some were peeling freshly dug vegetables, which were still half-covered in soil. These had been heaped in front of them the way a farmer dumps fodder for his livestock. Some were disoriented, still clutching baggage like travellers stranded at the wrong stop. Some, despairing and inconsolable, wandered without apparent purpose, the scenes of human frailty and lowliness too much to bear for them. On that same day, speaking in the chandeliered splendour of London’s Waldorf Hotel, Winston Churchill declared that a ‘bitter and inexorable war’ was being fought to ‘ensure that the spirit of liberty and human dignity shall triumph over the satanic forces that have set at nought all the laws of God . . .’ Neither liberty nor human dignity was triumphing in Weihsien.6 The laws of God seemed to lie far outside its walls because within them there was only the chaos of almost 1,800 internees crammed in a space barely 150 yards long and 200 yards wide.
No one put the sight of it better than Langdon Gilkey, a Harvard-educated teacher who in the mid-1960s wrote Shantung Compound, an account of his imprisonment.7
Weihsien, 1943. The map was drawn by a Roman Catholic priest, Father Leonard Verhoeven.
Facing him was a ‘great crowd of dirty, unkempt, refugee-like people . . . coldly staring at us with resentful curiosity’. Gilkey noticed that their clothes looked ‘damp and rumpled’ and were ‘covered with grime and dust – much as men look who have just come off a shift on a road gang’. He asked himself the question everyone there before him had already thought about: ‘How can anyone live enclosed in this tiny area for any length of time?’
Ever the bright optimist, Eric Liddell focused on the positive; and never more so than in his letters from Weihsien.8 Acutely conscious of how his correspondence would be received back home, Liddell suppressed the truth about the camp because he believed telling it would serve no constructive purpose and that sorrow would be rust to the soul for his wife. The London Missionary Society informed Florence about her husband’s captivity. He guessed she would fear the worst, so his priority was pretence, created to shield her from the awfulness of his surroundings.
Every month the internees were allowed one Red Cross message comprising twenty-five words. It was like the 1940s equivalent of a modern-day tweet. These had to be written in capitals on a white form, measuring 6 inches by 10, which was headed ‘To The Comité International De La Croix-Rouge’. The sender had to include name, nationality and matriculation number – Liddell’s was 3/88 – and the content was supposed to be ‘family news of [a] strictly personal character’. That instruction, like every other, was set in blood red type. In both outgoing and incoming mail the Japanese learned how to spot double meanings, such as ‘Can’t wait to speak to Uncle Sam again’ or ‘John Bull might be seeing you soon’.9 The guards were less adept at picking out metaphor. One writer was eventually able to alert an internee about the bombing of Germany by writing about ‘pigeons’ that were ‘flying into a troublesome neighbour’s garden’. When the Japanese deemed a piece of information inappropriate, the sentences were redacted with a thick black pen. The letters and forms then became largely incomprehensible, the families struggling to make sense of them. Even holding the flimsy paper up to the light made no difference. Words the Japanese didn’t want read were completely obliterated. Sometimes the guards found the work too time-consuming and tiring and simply destroyed the Red Cross messages or stacked them in a shed, never to be posted on.
Four of those Liddell wrote are typical of his chin-up-and-make-the-best-of-it attitude. The first, sent a fortnight after his arrival, began: ‘SIMPLE HARDY LIFE UNDER PRIMITIVE CONDITIONS’. The second, dispatched shortly afterwards, repeated the phrase ‘simple and hardy’ and stressed the ‘community life’ he was experiencing in the ‘open air’. The third, written to mark his tenth wedding anniversary, promised: ‘I [AM] FIT, BUSY AND NO COMPLAINTS’. The fourth, composed five months later, said: ‘HEALTHY, ENJOYING SOME READING . . . CONSTANTLY REMEMBER AND PICTURE YOU ALL . . . EVERYTHING SUFFICIENT’. If you didn’t know Liddell was a prisoner of war, you might think he’d sent a seaside postcard. Apart from the word ‘primitive’ there’s no suggestion that anything much is wrong. This wasn’t entirely through self-censorship or the restriction on the number of sentences he could string together before running out of space. It’s because Liddell’s character and his beliefs never allowed him to be depressed or negative, irrespective of the hardships.
A fellow internee, remembering the 694 days Liddell spent in Weihsien, said he was an ‘unruffled spirit’10 with a ‘serene temper’ and a ‘constantly smiling face’. Another recalled him as ‘always cheerful’,11 as though to be otherwise set a bad example and counted as a dereliction of duty. ‘He never let anyone see him downcast,’12 said a third. ‘Every day to him was still precious. He threw himself into it to make others feel better about the situation all of us were in.’ Langdon Gilkey remarked that Liddell ‘didn’t look like a famous athlete – or rather he didn’t look as if he thought of himself as one’.13 Gilkey regarded him as ‘surely the most modest man who ever breathed’ and soon realized that this was ‘one of the secrets of his amazing life’.
Weihsien was under the control of the Japanese Consular Service rather than the country’s army or military police, and the guards themselves came from varying backgrounds and were either older or younger than those automatically sent to the front line. The atrocities and brutalities perpetrated elsewhere under the flag of the Emperor, such as forced marches, human experimentation, tortures and beheadings, and also the starvation of men to skeletal waste, were not repeated here. The conditions were nonetheless horrendous.
The Japanese hadn’t thought through how Weihsien would work practically. What had appeared to them as the straightforward solution to one difficulty – coping with a civilian, non-combatant population – merely created others as a consequence of rushed and lackadaisical thinking. Internees were drawn into the camp from numerous points in China, including Peking and Tsingtao as well as Tientsin.14 But there had been no comprehensive pre-planning about what would happen once the Courtyard of the Happy Way had swallowed them up. From the outset Weihsien became a logistical conundrum, which the Japanese lacked the wherewithal, the will and the resources to solve. It was deficient in basic facilities. It lacked regular supplies. And, above all, it was impossibly claustrophobic.
Every stratum of society was locked into it.15 There were the seriously wealthy, who’d led almost an aristocratic existence. Their lives had revolved around chauffeurs, waiters and cooks. Amahs had cared for t
heir children. Even the opening swish of the bedroom curtains each morning had been done for them. One was said to own at least two Rolls-Royces and several mansion-like homes. Others, regarding themselves as superior and upper middle class, came from well-to-do commercial businesses. There were bank managers and clerks, stockbrokers and company directors, chartered accountants and architects, government employees and merchants and mining engineers. Also caught in the Japanese net – beneficially so for the camp – were doctors and surgeons, nurses, dentists, lab pathologists, teachers and lecturers, tailors, cooks and those recorded as ‘artisans’, such as carpenters, masons and general handymen. Four black American jazz musicians had been brought to Weihsien from the stage of a nightclub. One woman listed her occupation merely as ‘sewing teacher’. One man described himself as a ‘lighthouse keeper’. The religious community was diverse. There were Roman Catholic and Protestant priests, Trappist monks and nuns, members of the Salvation Army and also lay teachers. Liddell was one of almost two hundred missionaries.
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