There was another notable example of it. Liddell encouraged a sixteen-year-old Greek called Alex Marinellis to pursue running.74 Marinellis, heavy-set, told a friend that his new tutor was ‘coaching me almost daily’ and thought ‘I’ve got what it takes to be a great runner if I really work at it’. More accurately, Liddell believed athletics might reform Marinellis, who had been caught stealing coal and who spent too long as a minor henchman to Jacob Goyas during black market negotiations among the internees.
Liddell thought no one was beyond redemption.
In her memoir God Remained Outside, the French Resistance fighter Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz tells of her imprisonment in the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbruck, where around fifty thousand died.75 She prayed there, throwing herself ‘on the mercy of the Father’. She remembers being ‘answered not even by silence – but by the wretched sound of my own distress’. Certain she is about to be killed, de Gaulle-Anthonioz then asks: ‘My God . . . Why hast Thou forsaken me?’76 – the question Jesus asks in the Bible.
Eric Liddell never felt forsaken even when Weihsien was at its worst.
His close friend in camp was another missionary, Joe Cotterill.77 In the first six months he and Liddell were next-door neighbours. After the camp’s accommodation list was redrawn – following the departure of the priests and nuns and also the repatriation of over three hundred Americans and Canadians in exchange for Japanese prisoners – the two of them roomed together on the third floor of the hospital building. Cotterill, a stoker in one of the kitchens, awoke at the same hour as Liddell. ‘We began to share our Bible readings and prayed together,’ he said. Cotterill called them ‘very special times’.
The twenty-six-year-old Cotterill was married in Weihsien – partly because of Liddell’s influence. His fiancée, whom he met there, belonged to a different mission. ‘We couldn’t contact our respective mission bodies to ask advice about whether we ought to get married. And there were many people who didn’t think the camp was the right place anyway to make a decision that would be binding for life. We decided to think seriously about that. We even stopped seeing one another, except casually, to give us more time to consider what to do.’ Cotterill was unaware that his wife-to-be was seeking advice from Liddell, whose own courtship with Florence had hardly been orthodox. When Cotterill underwent an appendix operation, Liddell was the messenger who made sure his future bride was fully informed about it. She, rather than Cotterill, promptly announced their engagement at the beginning of his convalescence. ‘I don’t know what Eric did or said, but I am fairly sure he knew what was going to happen before I did,’ said Cotterill, who found Liddell had a ‘calming and very stable influence’ in the camp. ‘He was always so positive – even when there wasn’t much to be positive about, and he carried the weight of others’ worries and burdens without hesitation.’
As Weihsien deteriorated in every way, and the war ground on seemingly without end, internees who had led blameless lives began openly to question both their religious faith and the overall purpose of the Church.78 Some asked Liddell directly, ‘What is the point of continuing to pray – for food, for comfort, for rescue – when those prayers aren’t being answered?’ Where was God? Why wasn’t He listening? Also, why had He ‘allowed’ Weihsien to happen in the first place? Hearing him recite his daily devotions, Cotterill knew not only that Liddell’s own belief never wavered, but also that he reassured those who had doubts. ‘His faith grew stronger than ever in such troubled times,’ he said. ‘He didn’t blame God for the situation we were all in. He believed God was in that situation with us. That was his message and he never stopped preaching it. He’d say to us all “Have faith”.’
Liddell regularly read aloud from Discipleship and the Sermon on the Mount and dwelt on one passage: ‘Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you. Do good to them that hate you. Pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.’79 Early in 1944 he began urging the internees to pray specifically for the men in uniform – the camp guards. Liddell told his congregation and also his Sunday school classes: ‘I’ve begun to pray for the guards and it’s changed my whole attitude towards them. When we hate them we are self-centred.’ This was an extension of a sermon he’d originally given a dozen years earlier in Hawick on the Scottish borders. There he had told the story of the disciples who asked Jesus how many times someone ought to be forgiven.80 ‘They had missed the whole point of His teaching,’81 explained Liddell. ‘They could not forgive a person once. They must have the whole spirit of forgiveness.’
He resolved to give the guards his ‘whole spirit’ too. Some of them had tried to forge relationships with the internees. One pruned a tomato plant for a family, bringing it back to health. Others taught judo or played chess with the children. A handful performed small kindnesses, such as donating milk for a baby, giving a bottle of sake to the head of a household or presenting a watermelon to a seamstress in return for mending a pair of trousers. But, as Langdon Gilkey stressed, there were guards who took sadistic delight in being vile. ‘They would rant and bark, slap and kick, as if the person in front of them were a hideous spider that had sent them into a panic and must be crushed,’ he said. ‘Anyone under their authority apparently inspired in them a streak of meanness, the desire to prevent another from doing what appeared fun, and on the contrary, to make him do what was unpleasant.’ A sixty-two-year-old internee was slapped for merely ‘bumping into a guard’. A thirty-eight-year-old woman was struck for no apparent reason. A sixteen-year-old was hit after being caught trying to buy honey from the Chinese.
Some thought prayer was wasted on such an enemy. Others considered Liddell’s approach as either a step too far or sheer bloody lunacy.
If taken in isolation, there are aspects of Weihsien that make it seem less like a prison camp and more like a summer camp.
There were enough books to build a small lending library.82 You could find multiple copies of Shakespeare’s Collected Works, the novels of Charles Dickens or the plays of George Bernard Shaw. You could wallow in a limited amount of romantic fiction or high-brow biography, such as Boswell’s account of trailing behind Dr Johnson across the isles of Scotland. And you could read Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Someone put a copy of John Gunther’s 1939 socio-political work Inside Asia on the shelves too. The cover was wrapped in brown paper in case the Japanese came across it and became hostile towards the content, thinking it subversive.
As well as the professional jazz combo, which played at dances, there were enough musical instruments – and a sufficient number of musicians – to form a Salvation Army band, a symphony orchestra, and a choral society.83 Joyce Stranks’s father had packed an assortment of brass instruments – including a trumpet, a trombone and a euphonium – between bed mattresses in Tientsin. His eldest daughter had walked into Weihsien with a viola strapped to her back. Internees also brought cellos, clarinets, flutes and violins. Recorders were cut from sticks of bamboo. With a piano already in camp – dusty and in need of repair and tuning – the only instruments missing were a bassoon, an oboe and a double bass, which was too bulky to transport. Recitals included Mozart concertos, Handel’s Messiah, Verdi’s Aida, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Chopin’s Polonaise. A Trappist monk beautifully sang ‘If I Had The Wings Of An Angel’. A Welsh missionary belted out a marvellous rendition of ‘I Know That My Redeemer Liveth’. The camp’s commandant once arrived at a performance of Stainer’s Crucifixion at the very moment the choir had reached the part that begins ‘Fling wide the gates’. The commandant was oblivious to the irony.
The internees’ choice of music wasn’t always welcomed. The Japanese protested when the Salvation Army band played the Star Spangled Banner to celebrate American Independence Day in 1944. The guards were at least mollified when the jazzmen dedicated a concert song to Gold Tooth, who rose from his seat and made several low bows to the audience after the announcement.84 What the
combo played was ‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You’, which Louis Armstrong had popularized in the early 1930s. Gold Tooth, liking the foot-stomping tune but not understanding the lyrics, assumed he was being paid a compliment. ‘He yelled and clapped and danced a small jig,’ reported an internee.
There were enough would-be thespians to put on shows and dramas.85 Among them was Noël Coward’s Hay Fever. The appeal for props highlighted the odd collection of impractical novelties and knick-knacks some of the internees had brought into camp, such as a cuckoo clock, a set of andirons and a Constable print in a gilt frame. Costumes were cobbled together. For a production of Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, the Roman guards’ uniforms were made from tin cans.
Aside from culture, the other regular recreation was baseball or softball.86 The teams were given names such as the Peking Panthers, the Tientsin Tigers and the Priests’ Padres. Before leaving the camp Father Patrick Scanlan had even created a side called the Black Marias to honour the black marketeers. Mary Scott got involved enthusiastically. ‘No one thought it was strange or undignified for a woman in her thirties to be playing ball,’ she said. Aubrey Grandon, a natural athlete, regularly thumped home runs over the wall, forcing either the Chinese to throw the ball back or the guards to go and retrieve it. The softball games, like the athletics races, were landmarks – benignly rowdy and boisterous affairs. The Chefoo pupils, said one internee, were told there was no such thing as a set of manners for the outside world and another set for the concentration camp.87 ‘You were supposed to be as refined as the two princesses in Buckingham Palace all the time,’ she said. That refinement was forgotten on the softball field. ‘We whooped, we hollered, we flipped hand springs and slapped each other on the back. Our teachers shuddered.’
Those who weren’t sporty, couldn’t play an instrument, and couldn’t sing or dance or act gave talks and lectures instead.88 The artists in Weihsien – one of them had work hung in London’s Royal Academy – produced colourful posters to promote topics as widely different as atheism and agnosticism, the practicalities of woodwork and the works of the Greek philosophers. In the search for entertaining speakers Eric Liddell was prodded into giving a lecture about his athletics career.89 He did so reluctantly, of course. As ever, Liddell made it sound as though becoming champion in 1924 had been a fluke, a combination of wild chance on his part and bad luck on the part of those who ran against him. The talk was based around others’ achievements. Liddell said his success in Paris wouldn’t have been possible without the influence of Tom McKerchar and the encouragement of his friends from Cambridge. He skimmed over his own race, as if it weren’t worth dwelling on, and spoke instead about watching Harold Abrahams and Paavo Nurmi. His audience – about sixty-strong – learned of his admiration for Henry Stallard’s courageously inspiring effort. Speaking about his head-back running style, Liddell wove in the story about his collision with the Tientsin photographer, who had knocked him unconscious. He told it against himself, as though he ought to have seen the camera on the track and avoided it. That part of the lecture, which seemed hilarious at the time, would return darkly to the minds of the internees soon enough.
Other ostensible signs of normality were dotted through the camp.
At Christmas Liddell organized the distribution of cards and goodwill messages, which were made from any scrap of loose paper the internees could find.90 Several months after Mussolini was deposed, a hundred Italians were arrested in Shanghai and brought into Weihsien. Liddell made sure the spirit of the season was extended to them too. He put the cards and messages in a vegetable sack and went on a delivery round like a festive postman.
One man planted gladioli bulbs and saw them flourish.91 One boy raised four peregrine falcon chicks.92 One woman painted watercolours of the camp’s buildings and its flora and fauna; another kept a snowy-coloured kitten until a guard dog mauled it to death.93, 94 Students sat Oxford Matriculation Exams, which were among papers carried into Weihsien.95 The university ratified the passes after the war. Girl Guides and Brownies, Boy Scout and Cub Scout troops were formed.96 Those in them earned badges for a selection of disciplines – tying knots and folk singing, sewing and fire-building, and reading and the study of nature.
Don’t be fooled. This was still no playground of carefree freedom. The rigours of the place were always severe. The entertainments, arranged to bring a creative structure and a spirit to the camp, went on against a gruesome backdrop: the various sicknesses – malaria, dysentery, dehydration, scarlet fever, exhaustion, low blood pressure, long clinical depressions and short mental crack-ups; the lack of medicines with which to cope with them; the bickering that became bitterly intense between internees growing ever more irritable and desperate under the cumulative stresses of being locked up; the scurrilous behaviour, such as stealing, that those stresses initiated even among those who had previously shown impeccably solid morals; the shortages of food, the servings so meagre that eventually the enfeebled prisoners concluded that starvation would come before liberation.
How long can anyone live on crumbs? The average man will burn 400 to 500-plus calories per hour while doing heavy manual labour. Weihsien’s calorie count fell to barely 1,200 per day.97 There were internees who foraged for weeds, boiling pigweed and dock after green vegetables ran out.98 One of the Japanese owned a nanny goat, which once strayed from the officers’ and guards’ compound.99 The animal was immediately milked before the guards realized it was missing.
Everywhere the camp was under pressure. In the kitchens the cooks couldn’t cope with the lack of supplies. The stokers, constantly aching and dirty, wanted a break from firing up the ovens. Some of those who pumped water began complaining of pulled back muscles, arm strains and hernias, and also blistered hands. A few of them collapsed through fatigue. A few more claimed to be too sick to leave their beds. Gastric and bowel illnesses were common. So was gingivitis and other gum diseases. The internees sang a song called ‘Weihsien Blues’.100 It ended with the lines:
Since we’ve come to Weihsien . . . they’ve worked us till we’re dead, Though now we’re called the labour corps, we’ll be a corpse instead.
Some were desperate enough to attempt suicide.101 Over two and a half years a clutch of attempts were made through slitting a wrist, drinking stolen morphine or swallowing painkillers from the hospital, ingesting match-heads and hanging. None succeeded.
Without the likes of Eric Liddell, the camp would have come apart. He was a singularity in it – a one-man task-force. Every morning he wound himself up for another great burst of work, often overheard singing one of three hymns during it: ‘There’s A Wideness In God’s Mercy’, ‘Gracious Spirit, Dwell In Me’ and ‘God Who Touches Earth With Beauty’.102 ‘The more he was needed, the more he did. I don’t remember hearing him ever saying no to anyone,’ said Joe Cotterill. ‘You only had to wait your turn in the queue for his time.’
Weihsien thought Liddell was indestructible. After all, he was an Olympic gold medallist. He could come through anything, as though that medal were the equivalent of Achilles’ shield. The grateful internees were too familiar with the sight of him – and also the diminishing sight of themselves in the mirror – to notice much difference either in his appearance or in his bearing. But throughout the spring and summer of 1944 he became progressively thinner. He became tired more quickly than before too. He found tasks, completed routinely in the past, were harder now. He discovered that easy sleep eluded him. He blamed the diet and assumed his condition was no different from anyone else’s. It took an unweary pair of eyes to enter the camp, see Liddell afresh and register the changes in him.
Those eyes were Annie Buchan’s.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Call to Me All My Sad Captains
ERIC LIDDELL WAS frequently seen staring at photographs of Florence and the children, as if contemplating the life he might have lived well away from war and Weihsien.1
The letters he received from her came only fitfully, the
mail travelling slowly across sea and land and then seldom reaching him anyway because the 6,000-mile chain bringing the post contained too many vulnerable links ever to guarantee reliability. A ship could be sunk or forced to change course. A truck might be blown up or ambushed. A lazy or indifferent hand might casually throw away or burn her words before the Red Cross received them. Florence wrote on regardless, hoping the next letter – or the letter after that – would get through.
The letter telling Liddell of her father’s death in November 1943 did reach Weihsien. The one informing him of his mother’s, ten months later, did not.
The most poignant of Florence’s letters is painful to read even now because hindsight allows us to know that the longing contained in it went unfulfilled.2 The knowledge that her husband read it, and also knew that their separation hadn’t diluted what she thought or felt about him, proved to be no consolation for a long while afterwards.
The letter was posted at the end of August 1943. Liddell didn’t receive it for another six months. She wrote to him in the way he was obliged to write to her – in capital letters, which always take longer to put on paper than the flow of normal handwriting. It’s as though Florence has used them to make certain her hand doesn’t rush ahead of her emotions and make them illegible on the page. With capitals, Liddell won’t have to stop suddenly or hesitate over a word or a line that is difficult to decipher.
‘Dearest Eric,’ she begins.
Florence says the children are ‘growing like weeds’. She adds that it gave her a ‘queer feeling to realise they really belong to me’. She composes pen pictures of them. Patricia’s hair is ‘short and curly’. She is ‘quite the young lady’ and has learned to swim. Heather now has pigtails and is so ‘inquisitive’ as to be ‘interested in the whys and wherefore of everything’. A baby no longer, Maureen is still ‘a wee thing’, who carries herself ‘very straight’ and has ‘such a determined walk’. Of her, Florence also says: ‘I wish you could see her trying to make herself heard above the babble of the older children. She is developing quite an auctioneer’s voice – and she likes to hear her own voice too.’ She tells him: ‘The children miss you so and are always asking about when you [will] come home.’
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