For the Glory

by Duncan Hamilton

  Florence tries to comfort her husband. She is coping. She is ‘ever so fit’. She is also ‘busy from morning to night’ and is grateful for it. ‘It is good to be busy,’ she insists, intimating that being so is the only way to block out the thought of what her life is like without him. ‘I have learnt a great deal in these two years, Eric,’ she says, without elaborating on those lessons. ‘I guess you have too.’

  The closing paragraph is like a sigh, the love and all the sad regret of absence evident. In it there is the promise of a better tomorrow for them – whenever that ‘tomorrow’ might come. There is the reassurance that he is never out of her thoughts; and also that she and ‘the girls’ will be waiting for him – however long the waiting takes. There is Florence’s belief, implicit in one sentence, that whatever changes the camp has wrought on him, and however different he might find her and the world after Weihsien, nothing will ever mar the relationship between them. All this is compressed into fifty words, which once read demand to be read again because the reader immediately begins to think about the future that was denied to them and what both could have made out of it.

  ‘Oh Eric, my thoughts and prayers are forever with you and I long for the time when we’ll be able to live as a family again . . . We will appreciate our life together all the more and in the meantime we have some wonderful memories to live on.’

  Love in a letter. Florence writes to her ‘dearest Eric’ in bold, black capitals.

  Florence admits ‘Yes, I know I have wild hopes’ and also says ‘I know I’m crazy’, which is designed to both lighten the last paragraph and make him laugh aloud to himself. The final line, however, is a declaration that only someone utterly devoted to another could ever make.

  ‘Yours forever and a day,’ she ends.

  In early July 1944 Annie Buchan didn’t so much walk into Weihsien as march through the gates.3 Indeed, she tended to march everywhere – head up, shoulders back – and the Japanese guards, as the soldiers in Siaochang had once done, learned not to obstruct her. There’d be a rebuke that crossed the language barrier through tone alone. Her friend, whom she had nursed in the British Embassy in Peking, had died five months earlier. The Japanese reneged on a promise to let Buchan remain there.

  She arrived in Weihsien shortly after two seminal moments in the camp’s history had occurred.

  In early May a new commandant took over, clamping down immediately on what remained of the original, Father Scanlan-inspired black market.4 A 6-foot-deep trench was dug outside the camp walls to block the Chinese. The digging panicked some of the internees, who mistook the construction of a defensive trench for the preparation of a mass grave. ‘I thought: If I’m going to be shot, please let me be one of the first,’ a Chefoo teacher admitted to one of her pupils decades afterwards.

  In mid-June a pair of internees – Englishman Laurence Tipton and American Arthur Hummel – became the only escapees from Weihsien.5 Both spoke Chinese. Both had shaved their heads like the Chinese. Both wore long Chinese gowns. And both spent any leisure hour, like sunbathers beside a holiday pool, tanning their skin a pale chestnut brown to more closely resemble the locals. The half-asleep Japanese never suspected an ulterior motive.

  The brain behind the brawn was Scanlan’s former lieutenant Raymond de Jaegher. His plan, formulated in a toilet near one of the kitchens, proved faultless. ‘It took a year of careful working out,’ he said. Through his various letter-drops, de Jaegher had made contact with Nationalist guerrillas. Without applying much logic to the idea, one of the guerrilla generals had gone as far as to ambitiously propose attacking Weihsien and freeing the internees in a single swoop. Rescue planes would await them, fuelled and ready to take off from a secret airfield. There was a glitch in his scheme: the airfield had yet to be built. De Jaegher saw the prospect as a sure-fire disaster in the making and dissuaded him from taking it further. Instead Tipton and Hummel, dressed in black, got away on the night of a full moon. The two of them calculated the exact hour when that full moon would cast a shadow across both a watchtower and an expanse of the wall. During the change-over of guards, Tipton and Hummel cleared it, plus the electrified barbed wire and the trench. The men met the guerrillas at a nearby cemetery and were taken to the safety of the mountains. The Mauser-carrying guerrillas, treating this first meeting like a home-coming party, unfurled white triangular banners that read ‘Welcome the British and American representatives! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!’

  Next morning the obstacle of camp roll call was cleared without much bother.6 The Japanese guards were unaware that disguised voices had called out Tipton and Hummel’s numbers. Reprisals followed as soon as the escape became known. The new commandant raged over the breakout, seeing it as an ignominious stain on his competence and a traitorous response from the internees, who in his view were ‘luckier than you think’ and ‘better off than the citizens of our home islands’ and given ‘more to eat than our soldiers in the field’.7 The roll calls became horrendously long, the guards afraid of missing another Tipton and another Hummel. Rations were slashed.8 There was even a reduction in horse and donkey meat. Those in the same dormitory as Tipton and Hummel were detained and questioned endlessly. The men without families, including Liddell, were whisked out of the hospital overlooking the wall and placed in the bell tower to prevent them from signalling to the Chinese.9

  This was Weihsien as Buchan found it – struggling on reduced rations and under the beady observation of guards who were on-edge, mistrusting the internees more than ever.10 Buchan maintained she was sent there as punishment for Tipton and Hummel’s escapade – a hardly creditable claim. By that stage of the war the Japanese were neither sufficiently well organized nor immersed in the necessary fine details to allow them to strategically plot the dispatch of a middle-aged nurse for the purposes of retribution. The Japanese in Peking merely wanted rid of her – much in the same way a family wants rid of a nuisance relative.

  Buchan never forgot watching two boys fighting ‘in earnest’ over a single crust of bread in Weihsien.11 The position there was now so serious that camp leaders arranged for six severely undernourished internees to parade in front of the commandant. One of those chosen remembered the sight of the ‘corrugated ribcages [and] our jutting cheekbones’.12 The commandant was unimpressed and unmoved, and Langdon Gilkey became convinced he had dismantled the old black market simply to create a new one. ‘He wanted to get this lucrative business into his own – or at least into Japanese – hands.’ Gilkey saw one guard thump another with a wooden club in a quarrel about stealing his customers.

  Buchan had barely got to know the camp’s roads and buildings when the profit-making Japanese spivs were made temporarily redundant.

  A mule train arrived in Weihsien, lugging two hundred Red Cross parcels.13 The contents ‘surpassed all belief’, said Gilkey. The boxes seemed ‘gigantic’ to him – 3 feet long, a foot wide and 18 inches high. Contained within them were ‘a seemingly inexhaustible supply of unbelievably wonderful things’. Here was coffee, tea, sugar, chocolate and Spam. Here was cheese-spread, powdered milk, butter and liver pâté. Here were dried prunes, raisins, jam and salmon. Here were cigarettes. Here was toothpaste and a toothbrush. And here were clothes too – shoes, an overcoat, shirts, a sweater, a cap, a pair of socks and gloves (though, oddly, no trousers). Gilkey said he ‘grasped the idea’ that his parcel meant ‘security’, which he characterized as ‘safety from hunger for an amazingly long period’. He explained, ‘No amount of stocks or bonds, no Cadillacs or country estates could possibly equal the actual wealth represented by this pile of food.’ Stencilled on the side of each box were the words GIFT OF THE AMERICAN RED CROSS. The Americans magnanimously shared the bounty. In an act of breath-taking hypocrisy some of the priests and missionaries who had got into moralistic hissy fits about smoking exchanged food for fags.

  Buchan was fortunate to be in Weihsien when it briefly became the corner grocery shop and the shelves were full. But, during those early weeks, as she
slept during the day and worked at night in the hospital, tending to patients over a shaded candle, what shocked her was the sight of her old friend.

  As a realist rather than a romantic, she had never expected to find Eric Liddell exactly as she’d last seen him; she knew he wouldn’t be pink-cheeked and sparkly-eyed. But the difference between the Liddell she discovered and the picture of Liddell she held, like a photograph, in her mind was so stark as to disconcert her immediately. The fact that he wore a shirt made from a curtain – and also that his shorts were frayed – was a minor point to Buchan. She saw that Weihsien had significantly altered the man within those clothes. Not only did Liddell look tired, he also appeared ever so slightly slower in his movements.14 There was no swing in his walk and no spring to his step. Buchan saw that his cheekbones and his chest were sunken. His eyes were further back in their sockets. His back was slightly bent. His legs, once slim pillars of muscle around the calf and thighs, looked especially stringy and frail now. His skin was pallid, a certain greyness showing through despite the summer sunburn. And, whenever Liddell spoke to her, his speech was ponderous, as if he couldn’t find the words he wanted to use and was then struggling to shape them into a quick sentence.

  Buchan anxiously began to ask the other internees, as though searching for the definitive answer that was eluding her, ‘What is wrong with Eric?’15 The internees looked at her with incomprehension. As they saw it, there was nothing wrong with Eric at all.

  Knowing him so well, she was the first to understand – long before anyone else – that Liddell was physically ailing. She observed him around the camp. From what she saw, Buchan concluded that the ‘heavy responsibility’16 he’d assumed was ‘more than he should have had’. She told things straight. ‘People depended on him too much,’ she said. She watched him carrying buckets and running errands, pumping water and shifting sacks. She observed him taking Bible classes and Sunday school, weekend and evening sport and the usual science lessons in class. When a couple wanted to talk about their relationship, Liddell was there. When someone wanted individual tuition on his book Discipleship, Liddell was there. And when a teenager was electrocuted on the camp’s barbed wire fence – he’d reached out to try to touch the topmost strand as a challenge – it was Liddell who comforted his grieving mother, teaching her his favourite hymn ‘Be Still, My Soul’ just as he had taught an incalculable number of others beforehand.17 Buchan knew Liddell’s diligence wasn’t helping his health. But, unlike him, she still had a sad hunch that neither lack of food nor excessive work was necessarily the cause of his condition.

  Confirmation of her diagnosis came quickly.

  The top sportsman’s greatest moment is a coronation. It takes place in a theatrical fever, the crowd at fiesta-pitch, the roaring, throaty sound of it shaking the bleachers, the steep banks or the high tiers of the stadium. The frenzy is integral to the spectacle. In a few tick-tock seconds the athlete, whatever sport he plays, becomes unforgettable to his audience because what he does – a shot, a pass, a run – is acclaimed in the instant it occurs as transformative, thus making his reputation. The feat is everlasting; age does not diminish the power of seeing or analysing it. The moment survives, intact and imperishable, and defines the man who made it, gaining him sporting immortality.

  Bobby Thomson, the darling of New York in 1951, will always be swinging his bat and sending The Shot Heard Round the World skyward at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan, and then circling the bases to the accompaniment of the commentator’s breathless five-time repetition of that one shouted phrase: ‘The Giants win the Pennant!’ Long jumper Bob Beamon will always be suspended in the rarefied air of Mexico City during the 1968 Olympics, his splash into the sand marking the Leap of the Century. Joe Montana, displaying a meditative calm amid the confusion around him, will always be sending the San Francisco 49ers on that 92-yard, eleven-play drive that wins them Super Bowl XXII with only thirty-four seconds to spare, the big clock in Miami freezing Time in bright, Broadway-like lights.

  This is how sport ought to be: tens of thousands inside the stadium, incalculable millions watching from an armchair or listening to a radio broadcast.

  It was different for Eric Liddell.

  The Olympics made him a household name. In Paris he’d had the Hall of Fame hour that would come long afterwards for Thomson and Beamon and Montana. The crowd, emptying from the Colombes Stadium, had talked about him on the tram-ride home and then again next morning when the newspapers came fresh and inky, the smell of the printing presses still on them. But what he did, and the way in which he inspired whoever watched him, doesn’t rank as his number one achievement.

  Surpassing it, and saying more about Liddell than any gold medal ever can, is a race he ran in – and for – Weihsien. A race barely 1,500 people saw, making it almost a private event. A race he ought never to have attempted. A race no one registered as significant until much later.

  This was the last race of Eric Liddell’s life.

  He’d gone into the big events of his heyday, from the AAA Championships to the Olympics, as the underdog. The students of Edinburgh University were expected to put him in his place on the grass of Craiglockhart in 1921, ending a career before it began. Harold Abrahams was supposed to thrash him at Stamford Bridge in 1923. The Americans were sure Liddell would be overwhelmed and outclassed in Paris. But Weihsien always expected the star among them to win – and to win well too. None of the amateur bookmakers in the camp, who calculated the odds for the inveterate gamblers, ever gave the punters a decent price on him. He was as much the favourite as Man o’ War had been on the racetracks of the United States; Liddell was Big Red.

  There had been a number of races in Weihsien since he’d beaten Aubrey Grandon in the first of them. Liddell lost only the odd relay, his team sometimes unable to exploit the enormous advantage he gave them. No one had ever bested him in an individual contest, however. The old master had always been too fast for any pretender. ‘He’d even find a way to beat us boys in the casual races we held,’18 said an internee. ‘He didn’t want one boy to crow over another about beating him in case the boasting turned nasty.’

  Competition was postponed during most of the late spring and summer of 1944. ‘We didn’t have much strength for athletics,’ explained Steve Metcalf. ‘All the strength we did have was saved for chores rather than for running.’ The hiatus led to a quiet eagerness in Weihsien for the return of its ‘Sports Days’. A month or so after the Red Cross parcels arrived, galvanizing the camp again, the internees packed the course to watch another of them.19 The competitors were fortified by the liver pâté, the cheese-spread and all that caffeine. Had coloured bunting been available, it would have been strung between the buildings in celebration.

  Liddell was sicker than ever. He was perpetually exhausted. He was losing weight at a shocking rate. His belt had so many fresh notches on it that the thin leather was about to disintegrate. But he continued to do his work around the camp and he saw it as his obligation to be a crowd-pleaser too. He participated in the race because he didn’t want to let anyone down. The internees, still ignorant of his condition, supposed he would canter through the event without difficulty or drama.

  The race followed the same irregular route as before, starting at the softball field, turning into Main Street, crossing the Market Square and down Tin Pan Alley.20 Also as before, the pathways were scuffed and dusty and the acacia trees, thicker and denser now, formed a leafy tunnel. The shade was welcome on a hot afternoon.

  This time the distance covered would be shorter than usual – only two circuits rather than four – as a concession to the athletes, none of them exactly sure how much the awfulness of the year so far had taken out of them. Nor did Liddell give anyone a head start now. He stood on the same line as everyone else, the starter once more atop a packing crate and ready to wave his white handkerchief. Grandon was beside Liddell and comparatively robust in the circumstances.21 Even throughout the food shortages he had done the drill of h
is daily exercises, a testament to his youth and his vigour, and the sun had given his skin a healthy burnish.

  There was respectful, anticipatory silence before the starter’s voice shouted that familiar instruction – ‘Ready, set, go!’ – and then a whoop and a holler when it broke the air and the dozen or so runners shot off, the dust as ever lifting in small, gritty clouds around them.

  Liddell began predictably, striding clear because he was aware of the need to establish an early lead.22 On the opening lap, the chasing pack – Grandon jostling near the front of it – were like hounds after a hare. You could hear the stampede of thumping feet against the hard earth. You could see the short shadow each man cast and also the strain on their faces and in their eyes, the desperation of some who were already being left far behind.

  Liddell was still ahead of them all at the halfway point of the second lap. This was the Olympian everyone knew – the frantic whirl of the arms, the high knee lift, the head back. The spectators, given another exhibition of it, waited for the climactic rush he always demonstrated. He’d slip into a gear no one else could match. He’d glide further away. He’d triumph again easily. Only Grandon clung on, close enough to Liddell to give the appearance of a contest; though no one really believed Liddell was beatable.

  That assumption was wrong.

  With a muscled power, his arms pumping across his chest, Grandon gradually began to claim back the yards taken from him at the beginning. When he and Liddell reached Market Square for the last time, Grandon made his move. Worn down after his long months of illness, Liddell lacked the breath to resist or respond. With Tin Pan Alley in sight, his legs let him down; he couldn’t find any ‘kick’ in them. For once, throwing his head further back wasn’t enough to give him that late spurt. There was no spark, no extra burst of energy in him. His heart was willing. His body was not. Grandon, surprise in his eyes, came on to Liddell’s shoulder and then moved past him, overtaking on the widest part of the course. Liddell saw what his opponents normally did: a figure hurtling away, uncatchable. The broad-backed Grandon surged on, the lowered sweep of the white handkerchief signalling that the honour belonged to him. Liddell came second, several yards adrift.