For the Glory

by Duncan Hamilton

  The climate worked against the internees too. The winters were so cold that those peeling vegetables in the kitchen sometimes couldn’t feel a cut caused by a slipped knife; their fingers were just too numb. The summers were so hot that the perspiration fell off the workers, sapping them of energy. Whatever the season, Weihsien life was predominantly about the drudgery of a rigid routine. This was both wearing and also strangely necessary. The camp’s strict structure forced the internees to engage with every day through the obvious need to survive. The tasks were grindingly dull, but at least none was ever senseless, each of them serving a bigger purpose – except the forced tedium of roll call, which was called tenko.

  Liddell was a roll call warden. Every morning the bell called the internees to it at 7.30 a.m. It could be a laborious process. ‘Often we had to stand in lines for hours,’38 said an internee. ‘The guards had difficulty counting us. They would count the several long lines, compare notes, then count again.’ It soon became obvious that simple mathematics was not the guards’ only deficiency. They didn’t possess cut-glass minds.

  When several internees were discovered to be missing, another internee was told to locate them. The roll call then became such a protracted affair that some of the elderly fainted during it. Eventually the guards calculated that only one person was now absent. A further recount, dragging on painstakingly, took place before the truth finally became apparent. The ‘missing’ internee was the man who’d originally been sent to hunt down the others. He was still searching for them. Internees subsequently brought fold-up canvas stools or rickety deckchairs to avoid standing. Others carried books to pass the time or small musical instruments, such as accordions or harmonicas, for a sing-along. Young boys dug shallow holes for games of marbles. Middle-aged women took their knitting. The fussiness of the roll call caused antagonism between the internees and the guards, each party blaming the other for the length of time it took to complete.

  In the beginning the Japanese were an intimidating presence. ‘A loud grunt and a pointed bayonet struck fear into the hearts of even the most recalcitrant,’39 was the verdict of a camp newcomer. The guards, few of whom spoke English, threw their arms around and barked orders incomprehensibly in what sounded like a choleric rant of confused abuse. The decibel level was the only guide to its urgency.

  As the months went on, however, the internees grew less daunted, the guards becoming comic buffoons to them. Some of the 6 feet-plus-tall Americans and Europeans towered over these gaolers, making them look like small boys in costume. Sometimes the guards betrayed oversensitivity, thinking general banter between internees – joshing one another and laughing at puerile jokes – was actually insolence towards them. The guards would then complain about lack of respect. To pacify them, internees were told to ‘give way’ on the streets, which meant altering ‘course to port or starboard to avoid a head-on collision’, said one.

  This still wasn’t enough. One of the guards was known as Gold Tooth because of the dentistry work on his left incisor and one other front tooth.40 He carried a swagger stick and his moods were described as ‘obnoxious at best to downright sadistic’. His ego was said to have ‘exploded beyond the bounds of reality’. Some went further, thinking he was ‘mentally deficient’. He held sway over the stores and blamed any failure to understand what was required from them on the internees rather than his own poor grasp of their language. Gold Tooth would go into a dancing rage, padlock the stores and disappear out of pique. He hated internees who sang to get through a day’s work, his swagger stick wielded against them.

  Another guard became known as King Kong because – short and squat and square – he was the complete opposite of Merian C. Cooper’s colossal screen invention. Like Gold Tooth, he also had an aversion to musical accompaniment. In his case a specific song grated on him. The internees, gathering in the canteens for meals, would sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to whoever was celebrating one. With so many people in the camp, it was always someone’s birthday; and sometimes there could be half a dozen choruses sung on the same morning. The guards, who weren’t familiar with either the tune or the lyrics, began to think it was a protest song or another way of criticizing them. King Kong put a blanket ban on ‘Happy Birthday’.

  The most unflattering label was pinned on a sergeant.41 He became Bo-shing-de, generally translated as either ‘it’s forbidden’ or ‘not do’. The sobriquet stuck because ‘Bo-shing-de’ was his answer to everything. The phrase was uttered aggressively too, as though some personal affront had been committed against him. The camp regarded him as a blustering bully. The children still mocked the sergeant incessantly, fearlessly trailing after him and shouting ‘Bo-shing-de’ before running off. When a pup somehow crept into the camp, it was christened Bo-shing-de, which gave them another chance to shout the name. The sergeant eventually captured the pup and threw it back over the wall. He grew indignant over his ribbing, insisting this notice was pinned around Weihsien on his behalf: ‘By Special Order of His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of Japan, “Sergeant Bo-shing-de” is NOT to be known as Sergeant Bo-shing-de . . .’ The word ‘not’ was even underlined, as though Hirohito had left the Imperial Palace and dictated the sentence himself after considering the matter gravely important. He became more of a laughing stock than before.

  The guards didn’t endear themselves to the internees over the worst of the privations in the camp either. There was never enough to eat; hunger almost always sat in the belly of everyone. You either talked about food, dreaming aloud about the delicacy you’d most like to eat, or you said nothing because the thought of a favourite meal made the mouth salivate unbearably. Someone wanted fried oysters. Someone craved Dover sole. Someone else wanted a breast of chicken. A lot of internees spoke of sirloin steak and pork chops. Rations were appallingly inadequate; indeed to call them food was stretching the point to ridiculousness. Those who cooked the meals pinned up joke menus, which promised ‘Medallions of Beef’, ‘Whitebait’, ‘Chicken in a Cordon Bleu Creamy Sauce’ or ‘Boeuf Mironton’.42 What appeared on the plate was slop and mush; though some didn’t even own plates, eating instead out of tin cans, enamel mugs, saucepans and pots or frying pans and soap dishes.

  The repetitiveness of the diet was crushing. Breakfast was the wheat grain kao liang, which grew abundantly and became a dietary staple. No more needs to be said than the fact that local farmers used it to feed pigs rather than themselves. There was also a bean, lu dou. Lunch was a greasy, tough stew. The internees called it SOS – Same Old Stew. The smelly grey meat and slabs of liver to make it arrived in a semi-rotted state from slaughtered horses and donkeys. In the summer flies came in dark swarms, like a sweep of heavy rain, and fed off the meat or laid eggs on it. The meat could stink so much that, as one internee remembered, ‘it was noticeable some distance away even if a lot of pepper had been added’. Supper was usually soup made from watered-down leftovers, potatoes and stringy vegetables such as cabbages, cucumbers, carrots, white radishes and aubergine. There were also thin porridges, the basis of which was often sour-tasting bread containing weevils that could not be sieved from the flour. At each meal weak black tea was served out of pails.

  There was plenty of bread in the camp because the Japanese had a decent supply of flour and yeast. But margarine and butter were scarce and the skimpy amounts available were frequently mouldy or littered with straw. The internees slightly amended the opening line of the Lord’s Prayer, which was recited as ‘Give us this day our daily bread – and some jam to spread on it’. Just occasionally that plea was answered. Early on, some of the missionaries were fortunate enough to get food parcels. A woman found Golden Syrup in her package.43 Sadly the joy of it didn’t last long. Rats had infested her building. One of them fell into the tin, which she threw away, unable to contemplate either fishing out the rodent or eating the contaminated contents. After she told another internee about what had happened, and offered him the syrup instead, the tin was taken out of the rubbish. The sticky rat was removed
from the syrup, which was then boiled for ‘several hours’ before being eaten.

  No one really wanted to know where the food had come from; and no one really wanted to know either what condition it had been in before reaching them. The internees ate things we would spit out in horror. In error, one of the cooks, a Belgian priest, admitted he ‘put a great lump of salt’ in the soup and thought no one would eat it.44 ‘Everyone did,’ he said, ‘because we had nothing else’ and also because ‘we had to chew on our mistakes or go hungry’. One family was fortunate.45 A pigeon flew through the front window. It was instantly plucked and cooked and then dropped into a pan of soup.

  The Japanese were sometimes cruel. Once a horse died near the officers’ quarters. The animal was putrefying before the guards allowed the internees to skin it and hack away the decay. A heap of potatoes was treated the same way. The Japanese put them off limits until the point at which rot took hold.

  There were occasional treats. Roughly one tablespoon of sugar was the weekly allowance of each internee. That entire entitlement was collectively donated to the cooks, who, on high days and holidays, made something with a loose acquaintance to gingerbread, shortbread and cake. While not exactly mother’s home recipe, these things nevertheless came hot out of the oven and were preferable to another ladle of over-boiled vegetables or a grisly forkful of donkey meat. When a few dozen oranges arrived, straws were drawn to determine who received them. Internees previously in Peking had fixed it for Chinese friends to dispatch parcels for them. These rarely arrived without having been partly picked apart, the choicest goods stolen in advance or even the entire contents of the box removed. The Japanese blamed the Chinese and vice versa.

  However hard the kitchens tried, it was impossible to provide the internees with enough food. Some shed as much as 7 to 10 stones. Adolescent girls didn’t menstruate. Children’s teeth began to grow without enamel. Such a beggarly diet even took ‘the spring’ out of Liddell, said one internee, who noticed he began to lose weight at the same rate as everyone else.46 Liddell avoided telling Florence about it.

  The Japanese allowed the establishment of a White Elephant Shop, which originally let the internees swap goods between themselves and then later sold dried fruit, toothpaste, toilet paper, cigarettes, peanuts and soap.47 Occasionally shoe polish was for sale, which seemed bizarrely superfluous because so few had footwear requiring it. To buy these ‘luxuries’ the internees used an allowance known as Comfort Money, worth only one or two Chinese dollars per week. The Red Cross provided it and the cash was supposed to be repaid at the end of the war; recipients even had to sign a promissory note.

  The shop’s limited range of goods was never sufficient to nourish the internees, who began to look elsewhere. The Japanese treated the Chinese who lived outside the camp as pariahs. Peasants with homes and farms nearby were considered untouchables, lower than the bugs and the flies. The only locals ever allowed inside the camp were coolies who carried ‘honey buckets’ to remove excrement from the latrines. The internees saw them differently. Those beyond the walls were capable of aiding those inside them – providing there was a decent incentive.

  The Weihsien black market was about to open for business; and Eric Liddell willingly played his part in it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  You Can Run . . . But You Won’t Catch Us Old Man

  WHEN HE FIRST arrived in Weihsien, Eric Liddell was asked by a fellow internee, ‘Do you do any running still?’1

  It was a well-intentioned attempt to open a conversation. The tone of the question was badly off, however, making it sound like sarcasm. Those who heard it anticipated an acid response from Liddell, still a stranger to most of them then.

  Nearly two decades had slipped by since his Olympic win in Paris. He was forty-one years old and bald. He hadn’t run competitively since 1937. Anyone sensitively thin-skinned over glories long gone would have given back a burst of invective capable of turning the air Prussian blue. To ask such a thing anyway, given the state of the camp, appeared idiotic. But Liddell neither wanted to embarrass the man nor cause offence. He looked solicitously at him and said, without rancour, ‘No. At my age I am a little past it.’2

  Being a ‘little past it’ meant something different to Liddell than it did to others in Weihsien. Of course, he couldn’t run the 400 metres in under fifty seconds any more. As a former Olympic champion, he could nevertheless out-dash men in their early twenties. As late as 1939, during his furlough in Scotland, Liddell had demonstrated how much of his sprinter’s speed still remained.3 There were no crowds cheering from the stands. In fact, there were only two spectators – his daughters Patricia and Heather – and Liddell chased a rabbit across a field rather than an athlete around a track. He’d taken them for a walk at Carcant. The rabbit ran in front of them and Liddell went off in pursuit of it, thinking of dinner. You have to be particularly fleet of foot to catch a rabbit, which is capable of clocking between 25 and 45 miles per hour to avoid capture. In this contest, however, there was only ever going to be one winner. Liddell grasped the rabbit by the hind legs, and it went into a pie.

  Soon enough Weihsien witnessed how quickly Liddell was capable of running too.

  In those early months the camp was more preoccupied with sorting propaganda from truth – both of which ‘passed through it like wildfire’ according to an Australian Cistercian monk called Father Patrick Scanlan.4 In his mid-forties, Scanlan had previously been in a Trappist monastery north of Peking and had once taken a vow of silence lasting almost ten years. He was a bulky man with thinning red hair and a deliberately ponderous manner of speech, which didn’t betray to the guards that his alert mind whirled as colourfully as a fairground carousel. Scanlan remembered that there were ‘many ways of hearing or half-hearing’ misinformation. The Japanese guards would talk among themselves and be overheard. The Chinese shouted news at the internees from over the wall. An English language newspaper, the Peking Chronicle, specializing in the spread of false gossip, came into the camp either whole or in bits, a few pages wrapped around supplies. That items the Chronicle contained shouldn’t be taken at face value was evidenced from its description of Weihsien. The paper claimed the place was ‘equipped with all facilities to make [living there] as comfortable as possible’. The writer then added: ‘Inmates are allowed to lead lives as if they were in their own homelands.’

  Misinformation about the war was non-stop, most of it preposterous.5

  The camp heard that the Japanese were advancing through Australia. London had been bombed so ruinously that nothing recognizable of it remained; all was rubble there and Winston Churchill was dead. The German invasion was only a week away. In Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt was pleading for peace and reconciliation. On the West Coast, the Emperor’s imperial navy was sailing into San Francisco harbour and his troops were preparing to march along the Golden Gate Bridge. There’d been a second revolution in Russia, far worse than 1917’s. The Allies planned to drop soldiers over the Himalayas and fight in the south of China. And Chinese irregular soldiers were poised to smash open the Weihsien gates in a daring rescue mission, forcing the Japanese to close the camp and dispatch everyone in it to Tokyo.

  There were three stories even more bizarre than those. In the first, the Hollywood beauty and soprano Deanna Durbin – her film career began alongside Judy Garland – had died in childbirth. In the second, the dancer Carmen Miranda, famed for her exotic clothes and her tutti-frutti hat, had been involved in a car crash, resulting in the amputation of both her legs. In the third, Churchill and Roosevelt had set off to rescue the internees on camels before becoming marooned near the Yellow River. No matter how implausible that last tale sounded, the internees were still ‘eager to hear the next one’,6 said Scanlan, because the most far-fetched speculation was somehow invigorating, a way of emerging from the limbo state of Weihsien. Scanlan explained that the camp was ‘always anxious to hear something that might show us that the end was coming, that our internment would be soo
n over’ and so ‘anything that aroused our hopes we grasped and welcomed – though we knew in our hearts that it was an idle grasping at a shadow’.

  One maliciously mischief-making internee made it his business to disseminate a different rumour every day, which he passed on during his morning walk inside the wall.7 He’d then eavesdrop conversations over breakfast and lunch to discover not only how far his piece of nonsense had travelled, but also the amendments and elaborations attached to it during constant re-telling. One of Scanlan’s colleagues, a Belgian named Raymond de Jaegher, retaliated, starting what he called equally ‘wild rumours’ that were ‘mixed [with] items of real news’.8 These were aimed against the Japanese. He claimed the Emperor had been assassinated and that ‘two hundred thousand of his soldiers’ had been killed ‘in one battle alone’.

  De Jaegher managed to get letters out of Weihsien after procuring Chinese-style envelopes and addressing them to what he called ‘loyal Chinese friends of certain prisoners in camp’.9 The envelopes were then tied to a brick and thrown over the wall. The replies de Jaegher received enabled him to plot troop movements. So did a scheme he created, equally cleverly, with the cesspool coolies. He rolled up letters and placed them in a sealed tin box. The box was dropped in the coolies’ pails of human excrement, which the Japanese only later began searching by poking through it with a long stick. Coolies also brought in information on small pieces of silk paper.10 These were either deposited in their mouths and spat out or forced into their noses and blown out. De Jaegher collected them from the spittle and the snot on the floor.