His response was generous and instinctive. An internee standing near the finish said Liddell gave Grandon a broadly beaming smile and then ‘warmly wrapped his arms around him’.23 One man tried to grab Liddell’s wrist and raise his arm anyway, as if he were a boxer in a ring at the end of a fight. He shook his head, pushing aside the gesture.
His defeat surprised the camp. But, according to Steve Metcalf, the internees assumed Liddell had experienced nothing more than a rare ‘off-day’.
No one timed that race. No one wrote a paean to it. And no one, as the war progressed through the first half of the winter, dwelt on the meaning beneath the result. The placings were simply stuck on the notice board until another, more topical item replaced them.
The passing years slowly assign context to things and place them in order of importance; we appreciate that only from the distance hindsight allows us. So it is with this race, a couple of minutes in a faraway corner of a faraway country that show the quintessential Liddell, a stricken man running because he felt it was the right thing to do. A man, moreover, who made no excuses for his defeat and got involved in no histrionics about it afterwards. As the party-like atmosphere continued that day, he merely went back to his normal duties, still pretending there was nothing wrong with him.
But seen in the terrible light of what awaited him, this race is Liddell’s best and unquestionably his bravest. Where his initial speed came from, and how he managed to sustain it for so long, is unfathomable. The courage he summoned to run at all is extraordinary, a testament to his will.
Liddell never competed again, and those privileged to see his farewell to athletics appreciated only retrospectively the absolute miracle he performed in front of them.
The dying man had lost; but to them he was still the champion.
In a normal environment Eric Liddell’s illness would have been identified months earlier; perhaps at least eight months earlier. In Weihsien, where almost everyone was unwell to one degree or another, his early symptoms were hard to pin directly on a specific cause. Only the later symptoms made his disease more obvious. It was nevertheless still difficult to diagnose categorically because conditions in the camp meant the doctors could never eliminate other possibilities, some of them fairly innocent. The hospital lacked the electronic facilities to test Liddell properly. There was no X-ray machine. The hospital was even short of medicine until four crates were eventually obtained through a cunning subterfuge.24
The escapees Tipton and Hummel were able to organize an American Air Force drop, which the guerrillas picked up and surreptitiously deposited with the Swiss consul. The real success was getting its contents inside Weihsien. The medicines weren’t available in that region of China. Unless the consul could think of a way of either hiding or disguising them, the Japanese would realize immediately that he was the final pair of hands in a long line of smugglers. The consul’s solution, a light bulb moment, was audaciously clever, deserving of applause for the child-like simplicity of the idea and the nerveless execution. He got his secretary to type out a list of medicines that were easily obtainable, telling her to leave quadruple spaces between each of them. He presented the document to his local Japanese official who, suspecting nothing was amiss, stamped and signed the bottom of it. The consul’s secretary then added the names of the medicines inside the crate, typing them into the gaps she had previously left on the paper. The document fooled the Weihsien commandant too.
A view of the watchtowers in the Weihsien camp and the rough track that carried internees there.
Nothing in those crates could have saved Liddell. The jumble of memories the internees shared of him between late autumn of 1944 and late winter of 1945 show a man in gradual but irrevocable decline; someone slipping away even as he attempted to grab and hold on to something.25 The Liddell who comes across is pained and puzzled, frustrated and irritable – though with no one but himself. He can’t conceive what is happening to him. He doesn’t understand his various infirmities. He seems to think he can get over them the way he might throw off a cold.
First, the stench of cooking began to annoy him.26 ‘We’d be frying something in the dorm and he’d ask, “What’s that? It smells awful,”’ said Joe Cotterill. Second, the day’s harshest light began to burn his eyes. ‘He preferred the semi-darkness and candles,’ added Cotterill. Third came the thumping, hammering headaches, excruciating to bear. The pain, stopping thought as well as conversation, was worse than a migraine and he could only wait for it to pass. He thought his head was on fire. Liddell lay listlessly beneath the coarse blankets on his bed, seldom able to speak. His friends lightly soaked a cloth, which Liddell hung across his brow like a bandage, also shielding his eyes.
Next his memory, previously excellent, began to drift.27 He tested it regularly, attempting to measure its deterioration. He read a cloth-bound edition of Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, the pages tattered through constant use, and tried to recite the soliloquy of Sydney Carton, who demonstrates devotion to the woman he loves by taking her husband’s place at the guillotine: ‘I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy . . . I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence . . . It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.’ Carton’s speech had resonated with Liddell ever since he’d first read it as a boy. Once he had been able to remember every line, faultlessly. Now Dickens’s composition began to slide away from him. Only odd phrases stuck. ‘I don’t know what’s going on with my head,’ he said. ‘But it’s frightening.’ He’d tried to memorize the passage as he pumped water.28 He’d put the book on the ground and would pick out a sentence on every downward stroke of the pump’s handle. But, as his appetite waned and the weight began to drop off him, Liddell became too weak for manual labour. He was even too weak to deliver Christmas cards and messages. His body was wasting away incrementally, draining him of vitality. The headaches brought dizzy spells, which sent his balance awry. Sometimes Liddell would tilt and stagger, a sideways sway of a step or two before standing upright again. He looked like someone aboard a small ship, suddenly listed by the toss and roll of the waves beneath it.
The camp underwent more turmoil and tumult, the most spiteful and divisive incident since the first prisoner stepped inside it.29 Food was to blame. Early on in Weihsien, Langdon Gilkey took a mental note of the fact that nationalities soon became irrelevant. No one cared where someone came from. His sentiments echoed Mary Scott’s. ‘A man’s excellence was revealed through his willingness to work,’ he said. ‘People became to us personalities, pleasant or unpleasant, hard working or lazy . . .’ In January 1945, however, the question of nationality did become an issue. The mule train returned, bringing more Red Cross parcels than before. ‘Everyone was laughing and crying at once,’ said Gilkey. Not everyone, though, thought these parcels – sent again from the American branch of the Red Cross – should be divided equally among the other internees. Some slippery manoeuvring ensued. The parcels were placed in the church, awaiting a decision on distribution from the commandant. Gilkey remembered: ‘Every row of rooms and every dorm where Americans lived with other nationals began to stew in bitter disputes.’ When the commandant stipulated that every American ought to receive one and a half parcels and every non-American should get one parcel, a group of seven Americans opposed him, their stance vehement and venomous. Finally the commandant asked for arbitration from Tokyo, which took a week and a half to come. The hiatus, said Gilkey, swelled ‘hostility, jealousy and national pride’ among the hungry. He quoted Bertolt Brecht’s couplet: ‘For even saintly folk will act like sinners, unless they have their customary dinners.’ The lack of them led to fist-fights, the camp degenerating in front of Gilkey into a ‘brawling, bitterly divided collection of hostile national groups’. Eventually Tokyo decreed that every internee should get one parcel.
Amid that sordid a
nd unedifying tussle, the desperately sick Liddell made a quiet, private gesture, the exact opposite of the selfishness going on around him.30 He had seen Steve Metcalf wearing only socks or pieces of cloth that were tied and glued to the old sole of a boot. Liddell fished out the athletics shoes he’d won in the camp races and cleaned them up, scrubbing the fabric and then binding and strengthening it with wound string. ‘Here,’ he said to Metcalf. ‘You could get some use out of these. They might stay together until the spring.’ Metcalf held out his hands, like Oliver presenting his bowl, and Liddell placed the shoes in them. ‘To give away an old pair of shoes may not seem like much,’ said Metcalf. ‘But it was a wonderful and generous thing to do in the camp, where every possession was valued – especially footwear in winter.’ Metcalf finally understood that Liddell was unwell. He still supposed the cause was extreme weariness. ‘You could see he wasn’t himself. You could tell it from his face and his eyes. We simply weren’t aware of the agony he was going through. He kept that to himself and tried to act as normally as possible.’
The cheery masquerade Liddell perpetuated in front of Metcalf fell away whenever he saw Annie Buchan.31 He and Buchan would sit against the trunk of a tree. He’d produce a pocket-book and glance through snapshots of his children. ‘He didn’t have to pretend with me,’ she said. He confided in Buchan, telling her what she described as his ‘one big regret’: he hadn’t spent enough time with Florence. The decision to go to Siaochang in 1937, leaving her in Tientsin, bothered him enormously now, as if he ought to have opposed the London Missionary Society’s decision to ban the family from travelling. As his headaches persisted, he slipped into a dark mood and became uncharacteristically pessimistic and doubtful. Liddell the eternal optimist became Liddell the depressive. ‘One day he told me he couldn’t see the future. Everything seemed black,’32 said Buchan. ‘This wasn’t like him. He’d always been full of hope.’
He had begun to look over and across his life, as if striving to make sense of it.33 In the evening especially, shortly before lights out in his room, the melancholy threatened to drown him. This wasn’t unusual among the men in his dorm as the war dragged on. What became noticeable, however, was that Liddell couldn’t shake himself out of it next morning. His depression wouldn’t go away. He remained distressed, dwelling again on his separation from Florence and also discussing the baby he’d never seen. He was missing them all ‘very much’, said Cotterill. ‘The letters he got from home made him more depressed after the initial pleasure of reading them went away because each made him think even more about his family.’
Already fragile, Liddell was weakened still further when influenza with sinusitis struck him.34 The usual treatment brought no respite. The man who once did everything could now do almost nothing except lie in bed and take short, plodding walks. He looked like someone slogging across sand. He was determined nonetheless to preach in church, writing out short lessons in a shaky hand and speaking them slowly, his voice like a record played at slightly the wrong speed. At the end of January 1945, arriving at the hospital to ask for another check-up, he fainted near the entrance. The internee who discovered Liddell gathered him up, as if lifting a child from its cradle.35 He summoned friends, who commandeered a door and used it as a stretcher to carry his limp frame into the whitewashed ward. Liddell had never been a bed-ridden patient before. He’d only ever gone into the ward as a visitor, once tending to a nun who had typhoid. The winter of 1944/45 was far colder than the previous one and the thirty-bed wards were regularly full. The doctors, anxious to discharge everyone but the desperately sick as soon as possible, treated him as a bed-blocking malingerer. Buchan had to force them to accept him. Liddell, she insisted, wouldn’t have come in for treatment unless he urgently needed it.
The camp hospital where Eric Liddell died in 1945.
In the beginning Liddell was advised that his condition was purely ‘psychological’.36 The cause was linked to ‘over-work’, which only rest and recuperation would remedy. The doctors mentioned the possibility of a ‘nervous breakdown’. Liddell told Cotterill that he didn’t believe ‘a Christian should have a nervous breakdown’ because his faith ought to sustain him through whatever traumas he faced. In the coming week he showed no signs of deterioration or improvement. He also confessed to Cotterill’s fiancée, ‘The doctors think I’m spinning this out,’ an opinion that upset him.37
The seriousness of his illness became apparent on the second Sunday in February.38 Liddell went into a coughing and vomiting fit before suffering a slight stroke. There was damage to his left leg, which left him with a limp, and also to his left eye. The lid drooped over the pupil, blurring his vision. ‘He was so courageous,’ said Buchan. The doctors, she added, still had a ‘he’ll get over it’ attitude towards him, assuming Liddell would be back in the bell tower within a week or two. The ‘nervous breakdown’ was categorically diagnosed now. For a while, the doctors suggested, Liddell should give up teaching and sport and work in the bakery instead. That verdict and also the planned change of Liddell’s duties came as a relief to his friends, convinced he’d make a full recovery.
By now his body had become wasted to the extent that his limbs and his neck were like stalks; but no one in Weihsien, including the medical staff, expected him to die.
The following Sunday the Salvation Army band, stationed below Liddell’s window, was asked to play a request for the patient.39 With chapped, frozen fingers and cracked lips, the wind blowing in gusts around them, the band fulfilled it. Liddell heard his favourite hymn, the notes of ‘Be Still, My Soul’ gliding across the cold air. He then took tea with a missionary and his wife, climbing four flights of stairs to see them.40 He wore a dressing gown and needed a nurse to support him. The nurse told him the effort of taking those steps was akin to ‘reaching for the stars’. When Liddell got to the top, finally sinking into a chair, he was visibly out of breath. ‘It was obviously difficult for him to talk,’ said his host. Within forty-eight hours Liddell saw the same missionary friends again and once more mentioned his ‘nervous breakdown’, suggesting he still felt inexplicably guilty about it, repeating to them what he’d told Cotterill. ‘There is just one thing that troubles me,’ he said. ‘I ought to have been able to cast it all on the Lord and not have broken down under it.’
Is your head better? he was asked.
‘To answer that question I should require to know what is going on inside my head,’ he replied.
That afternoon he began to compose a letter to Florence. He borrowed a hymnal from a friend in the women’s ward. He wanted to check the accuracy of a quotation.
On Wednesday, 21 February Liddell was fit enough to go for a stroll around the camp. He wanted to post his Red Cross message to Florence, which had been typed out for him that morning. One Chefoo pupil saw him on the baseball field.41 ‘As usual he was smiling,’ he said. And one woman walked with him for a quarter of an hour. She told him he ought to be ‘resting more’. He told her, ‘No, I must get my walking legs again.’
Early in the evening Liddell received his usual visitor, Joyce Stranks.42 He’d continued to teach her from his book, Discipleship. He was in bed, lying on his left side on a rough grass mattress and a straw-stuffed pillow. His blankets were a dull grey colour, the consequence of constant washing without sufficient soap to scrub them properly. Stranks pulled a chair across the concrete floor and placed it beside him. The two of them were discussing chapter three – the surrender to God’s will. Liddell tried to say the word ‘surrender’, managing only to utter the first syllable three times as his head jerked backwards in a spasm. His whole body stiffened. His eyes widened. His mouth gaped open. He was convulsed with pain. Stranks, completely distraught, rushed to find Buchan. The nurse swept towards the bed and pulled across the screens to shield Liddell from prying eyes. She turned to Stranks, grabbing her shoulders with both hands and shaking them vigorously. ‘What did he say to you?’ she asked angrily, repeating the terse question before the tearful Stranks could p
rovide an answer. ‘You shouldn’t have been here,’ Buchan went on, as if searching for someone to blame.
His second stroke, which came shortly afterwards, was far more severe than his first had been.43 For two and a half hours he drifted in and out of consciousness. Buchan was able to ask Liddell whether the medical staff knew what had happened to him. ‘They haven’t a clue,’ he said to her. She stood guard beside his bed, leaving only briefly to seek out his doctor. ‘Do you realize Eric is dying?’ she asked him, knowing the tide of his life was going out.
‘Nonsense,’ she was told.
Buchan was the only witness to overhear his last words and preserve them.44 Looking at her, he said softly, ‘It’s complete surrender.’ Within seconds of that sentence leaving his lips, Liddell suffered a third stroke and fell into a coma. The rest was silence.
At 9.20 p.m. the doctors pronounced him dead.
Nature’s timing is sometimes impeccable.45 The internees awoke next morning to an ice storm that encased the camp in a hard, clear glaze. Ice smothered the ground. Icicles the size of a child’s fingers hung from the eaves of the buildings and across the lintels of doors. Every branch of every bare tree was wrapped in ice too. It was as though the whole of Weihsien had stopped, it and Time frozen in a symbolic act of mourning.
For the Glory Page 33