For the Glory

by Duncan Hamilton

  The letter informing Florence of a backlog of Eric’s Red Cross post.

  The last words of Eric Liddell: one of the pieces of paper on which he wrote random thoughts shortly before his death in Weihsien’s hospital.

  The camp wept for Eric Liddell. Some of the toughest of men openly cried out their grief for him. His roommates stared at his empty bed, gathering like the sad captains of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to find some sort of solace in companionable silence. Each wore the expression of solemn disbelief. How could Liddell be dead at forty-three, taken in midlife? And how could his death have come so suddenly? One of them – he’d later call a son Eric in tribute to Liddell – secretly kept a pocket diary throughout his internment.46 His account of the camp’s response to Liddell’s death is wrenching. ‘It leaves me shocked and bewildered,’ he said, hoping the act of writing about it would enable him to comprehend what had happened. ‘His passing stunned us. We could hardly believe it was true.’ He encapsulated what Liddell had meant to Weihsien. ‘We confided in him, went to him for advice, looked on him as probably the most perfect and honourable Christian friend we had ever known and the whole camp feels that in losing Eric they have lost a real friend. He was loved by everyone . . . It is my prayer that I may live like Eric, a life that is exemplary, lovely, useful [and] full of caring service to others.’

  The best tribute he paid was this one: ‘For over a year six of us have lived together like brothers and we all looked on Eric as our older brother.’

  Without its older brother, the camp felt empty.47 ‘We sat in the quiet of the dormitory thinking about him,’ said Joe Cotterill. ‘Some of us couldn’t speak. There were no words that could make us feel better. His death seemed so unfair. We thought about his wife and his children – especially the child he’d now never see. He’d loved children so much and it seemed so unjust that he’d be denied the company of his own.’

  The doctors, who hadn’t believed Liddell to be in danger, quickly found the cause of his death.48 A tumour had grown on the left-hand side of his brain. The medulla was also found to be full of fresh blood. When the result of the post-mortem began to spread, there were those in Weihsien who remembered Liddell’s talk about his athletics career and asked themselves whether or not the tumour had developed as a consequence of that on-track collision with the Chinese photographer’s camera in Tientsin. Now that story wasn’t funny to them.

  Annie Buchan had one last duty to perform for her friend.49 She prepared his body for burial, washing and then wrapping it in a sheet. He was laid in a shed behind the hospital.

  There’d been twenty-six previous deaths in Weihsien. None of the funerals was ceremonially as memorable as Liddell’s. It was called ‘one of the most moving events in the whole of camp life’.50 A witness to it remembered the pianist playing ‘I Know That My Redeemer Liveth’, and also the crowds, who crammed into the pews and spilled on to the roads outside and lined the route to the graveyard, where plot 59 awaited him. The ice storm had frozen the topsoil more than an inch deep, which meant a pick axe as well as a spade had had to be used to make the hole.51 The work was carried out under the inscrutable gaze of the guards, who stood at a respectful and cautious distance from the two grave diggers – one local Chinese, one American internee. The guards tethered German Shepherds on their leads in case the tools were used against them as weapons.

  Liddell’s rectangular casket – no more than a rough box – was gnarled and elephant-grey.52 Small splinters, as fine as bristles, stuck out of the wood. The lining of it was made from a freshly laundered bedsheet, which was torn into long, wide strips. The construction was so fragile that some of the pall-bearers – among them Steve Metcalf – feared the nails and glue holding it together might fall apart.53 It had to be lifted and carried with exaggerated care. The pall-bearers, dressed in coats and hats and gloves, walked in shuffled half-paces. The temperature had risen the day before, bringing a cold rain that left the pathways slushy and muddy. But the morning of the funeral was wind-whipped and shivery, and wispy flakes of snow came from black-angry clouds that smothered out the sun, its light escaping only in slender blades too weak to cast a shadow. The sky seemed abnormally low, as if it were about to sink into the flat farmland beyond the walls. The pall-bearers sometimes glanced down nervously at their own feet to avoid slipping. Metcalf, wearing the running shoes Liddell had given him, was particularly cautious about each pace he took.

  Some of the mourners bowed their heads or made the sign of the cross. Others were weeping, their faces streaked with tears. At one point the camp was so still that the only sound to be heard was the rattle and clatter of a faraway train, the faint noise carried on the wind.

  Of course, the congregation sang ‘Be Still, My Soul’. Of course, there were readings from the Sermon on the Mount. Of course, his friends spoke eulogies to him. ‘In his presence I felt it was impossible to speak or do anything less than the best, the purest, the noblest,’ said one. Weihsien gave Liddell all the finery it could muster.

  It is impossible to think of the service and the funeral procession without thinking also of the opening lines of A. E. Housman’s poem ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’.

  The time you won your town the race

  We chaired you through the market-place;

  Man and boy stood cheering by,

  And home we brought you shoulder-high.

  Today, the road all runners come,

  Shoulder-high we bring you home . . .

  Man and boy had stood to cheer Liddell, watching him run along the same rain-slick roads where the pall-bearers now carried his coffin ‘shoulder-high’ and then across that part of the camp the internees christened ‘Market Square’. Housman’s rhyme seemed to have been composed for him.

  The internees finally realized that Liddell had run in front of them only six months earlier while suffering from a terminal illness. ‘It said everything about his will,’ said Metcalf, who was profoundly affected by the funeral. Metcalf knew the details of the day would stay with him for ever.54 He’d always feel the weight of the coffin on his shoulder and Liddell’s shoes on his feet. These would remain, fixed in his mind, because a prince had been buried like a pauper. After the grave had been filled in, Metcalf looked at the wooden cross laid on top of it. The cross was as plain and as makeshift as the coffin. Liddell’s name was written across the middle bar in black boot polish. Metcalf stood to consider the man beneath it – an Olympic champion, a missionary, a friend. He looked again at the mound of freshly turned earth, the crude cross with its scrawled name and also the dingy surroundings of the camp; and then he asked himself one question: Is this all that happens to honour such a Great Man? ‘He deserves much more than we were able to give him,’ he thought.

  There was the cruellest of sequels to Liddell’s death.

  Three weeks later a crate appeared unexpectedly in Weihsien, addressed to the hospital.55 The X-ray equipment that would have detected his brain tumour – possibly before it became inoperable – had arrived at last.

  For almost three months, Florence Liddell lived her life without knowing that her husband was dead. She didn’t discover the cause of his death for a further five months.

  Florence and the children were living in a bay-windowed, brown-bricked Victorian house with gabled peaks.56 It was spread over three floors on Toronto’s Gloucester Street. The house was furnished in Victorian style too. There was heavy, dark wood furniture, a piano, a coat rack in the hall, oriental rugs and glass lamps and photographs on the mantel. The paintings on the wall had ornate frames and gleaming gold-coloured rods fastened the emerald carpet to the stairs.

  A month before the shattering news reached her, Florence experienced what she’d later recall as ‘the strangest feeling’.57 Standing beside the stove in the kitchen, she said to herself, ‘If you turn around, Eric is standing there.’ Florence said she could ‘feel’ his presence and swore she heard him speak too. ‘Everything is going to be all right,’ he’d told her
. For three weeks Florence said she was ‘conscious of his presence in this way’. She also began to dream ‘vividly’ about him. In these dreams, she explained, ‘we were all terribly happy’. She interpreted them as a sure sign that Liddell would soon be home; though, when Florence attempted to plan for that, she encountered what she described as a ‘stone wall’. Later she’d admit: ‘I don’t know when I have been so conscious of a restraining hand and I simply couldn’t understand it. I felt sure there was going to be some change in plans . . . I couldn’t see what.’ She felt she had ‘grown up a lot’ since Liddell had last seen her. ‘I wanted to show him that,’ she explained.

  Eric Liddell’s wooden cross and overgrown grave in Weihsien. The photograph was taken after the camp’s liberation in 1945.

  The Red Cross received notification of Liddell’s death on 1 May and immediately cabled the news to Florence’s local church. The following day two friends arrived on her doorstep. Seeing such stony faces, she instantly thought one of her brothers – in combat overseas – had been killed in action. ‘It’s one of the boys, is it?’ she asked. ‘It never crossed my mind that Eric had died,’58 said Florence, who explained that her first thought after hearing of her husband’s death was: ‘That is why he has been so near to me lately.’

  The house began to fill with family and friends.59 Patricia, the last home, was used to seeing a crowd: the hospitable Liddells had a wide social circle. But she registered straight away that the mood was sombre and hushed. She asked for her mother and dashed upstairs to find her. That afternoon she’d won a sprint race on the school fields and had wanted to talk about it proudly. In the front bedroom Florence was holding Heather on her knee; both were crying. Patricia refused to believe her father had died. She was convinced either a clerical mistake or a doctor’s misidentification had taken place. Every night she and her sister had stared at the big gold moon over the city, knowing the time difference between Canada and China meant he would be watching it rise as the two of them awoke. In this way his daughters had felt close to him. No, he couldn’t be dead. A week later Florence received official confirmation, his death certificate containing only date and place.

  In a war where death knocks daily on front doors, a single passing can slip by unnoticed among a million others. That week two words dominated the newspaper agenda and appeared on the front pages and advertising boards in gigantic type: HITLER DEAD. Liddell’s death was still reported across the continents. From the New York Times to The Times of London – and all points in between both eastwards and westwards – the ‘reverend in running shoes’ who became an Olympic champion was written about, his loss lamented and mourned.

  The Liddell home in Toronto after Eric sent his family back to Canada in 1941.

  Florence said that even after the shock had left her, she was ‘vividly conscious of Eric being happy’, seeing only ‘his sunny smile and twinkling eyes’, which she called ‘a strange and wonderful experience’.60 She went on: ‘At times I have been numbed and overwhelmed by a sense of unreality – of pain – [and] of fear for the future, and then there has come welling up from within that power of faith, which has carried me through.’

  Florence would always insist that she had not imagined either his presence or his voice in her kitchen that day. ‘I am sure that somehow or other he was allowed to come back,’ she said.

  There is a tightly cropped, upright photograph of the bell tower in Weihsien. The Stars and Stripes is strung between two flag poles like a sheet on a washing line. Above it is the black shape of an aeroplane and nine white-silk parachutes, which are at the mid-point of their descent. The photograph marks a scene from the liberation Eric Liddell never lived to see.

  Freedom came to the camp on 17 August – eleven days after the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay dropped ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima and saw the city below it all but vanish after a flash of intense light filled the cockpit. Only seventy-two hours later, ‘Fat Man’ incinerated Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered within a week. In Singapore, the general who oversaw those document signatures was Philip Christison – the man behind the Cameron Highlanders’ rendition of ‘Scotland The Brave’ before Liddell’s Olympic triumph in Paris.

  Throughout the year, the Japanese had been pressurized and pressed back. The Burma Road reopened. Bataan, Iwo Jima, Manila, Mandalay, Okinawa were reclaimed. A 15-square-mile swathe of Tokyo was bombed. Through the usual channels, the internees heard about each incident. Word of the atomic bomb, however, seemed like an invention from science fiction. Weihsien became afraid the Japanese would be ruthless in reply to it, never caring who perished in retribution. Instead what came to them was the distant hum of a plane and then a sweeping roar as it passed low over them. A silver B-24 Liberator glinted like a mirror in a sky of perfect blue. This was Weihsien’s ‘Flying Angel’. ‘I could feel the drop of my jaw,’ said Langdon Gilkey. There were internees who screamed, who yelped, who leapt upwards, arms outstretched, as if attempting to catch its wings. ‘Everyone seemed utterly unconscious of what others were doing,’ recalled Mary Scott. ‘Some were laughing hysterically. Others were crying like babies.’ The plane flew beyond the camp before banking westwards and turning back towards it. En masse the internees rushed for the gate, forcing it open with the press and weight of their bodies. The guards scarcely made a move to stop them before stepping aside, resigned to the pointlessness of the gesture. Gilkey watched one guard raise his rifle and then lower it again. The internees frantically brought out flags – American and British – and spread them across the tall fields of kao liang and corn encircling the camp walls.61

  A confusion of memory slightly mists up the next picture. Some swore the parachutes that came from the plane’s underside doors were white. Others saw blue, yellow or red, a kaleidoscopic swirl of colour. No matter. Attached to them were the seven men of Duck Mission – muscled, tanned, fit. ‘How immense, how strong, how striking, how alive these American paratroopers looked in comparison to our shrunken shanks and drawn faces,’ said Gilkey. The internees saw them as superheroes. Women clipped off locks of the paratroopers’ hair as souvenirs. The Salvation Army band had been surreptitiously practising a medley of national anthems and began to play it like party music. The next celebratory tune was ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’, struck up and repeated so often that the lyrics were finally shouted aloud rather than sung.

  No bomb or bullet was needed to liberate Weihsien that summer afternoon. The commandant handed over his sword to the paratroopers, the camp passing peacefully into new ownership. Other planes followed the ‘Flying Angel’. B-29s flung out drums containing tinned peaches and pineapple, meat and tomato soup, fruit juices and chocolate. Some of the cans and packages split on impact, scattering or spilling the contents around the countryside. The internees ran into the fields again to find the drums, gorging themselves on the spot. After years of eating next to nothing, the stomach of the average internee was too delicate to take the richness of these foods. Most were retching or vomiting within a few hours.

  The camp settled into a fresh routine.62 The Americans arranged for the song ‘Oh What A Beautiful Morning’ to be piped through loudspeakers to wake the internees each day. It became as irritating as the clang of an alarm clock. Prisoners no more, but restless for home, the internees now came and went as the mood took them. Steve Metcalf relished the chance to explore the countryside. ‘The air seemed so sweet,’ he said. ‘With every stride you felt the freedom you’d been given. I wanted to know a little of the landscape I’d been confined in.’ He did his walking in a pair of sturdy black army boots, traded for Liddell’s running shoes.

  One anonymous afternoon those boots took him into the cemetery. He paused beside Liddell’s grave, finding the cross slightly askew and weeds sprouting in big clumps around it. The question Metcalf had asked himself at the funeral came back to him again; and still he had no answer to it. In that moment the untidiness of the grave made Liddell’s story seem more sorrowful than ever to him. He’d given
so much and had got back only this – neglect.

  The man born in China would always remain in it; and there was no one to tend the soil around him.

  It was late October when the envelope, emblazoned with the crest of the Red Cross, arrived without warning on the mat at Gloucester Street.63 Florence Liddell presumed the contents related to her husband’s pension or his insurance policy. Inside she found an accompanying letter, so brief it was barely worth typing. It contained only thirty-eight words, which were spread over six lines.

  Dear Mrs. Liddell,

  We are enclosing three Red Cross messages which have just been received in this office.

  We felt sure that you would want to have these messages in spite of the distress they would cause you.

  The letter ended with a ‘yours sincerely’. There wasn’t even an offer to contact the Red Cross to talk about the ‘distress’ it had forecast on her behalf.

  The organization ought to have hand-delivered these messages. The fact that it didn’t suggested those in charge of it were one or a combination of the following: dumb or dumber, insensitive and indifferent or downright cowardly, not wanting to witness a widow grieve all over again. The Toronto office, responsible for mailing the envelope, was only half a mile from her front door.

  What the postman delivered were words from Weihsien. For the rest of her life Florence cherished them. The messages, written on familiar Red Cross forms, were among those the Japanese could never be bothered to send on. The American soldiers discovered them – plus hundreds of others from the internees – discarded in a room in the guards’ quarters.

  Her husband, dead for eight months, spoke to her from the page.

  The first message was dated 27 August 1944. ‘I have received some of your letters and have news up to January,’ wrote Liddell. ‘I constantly picture you all. I see Tricia, cycling, swimming and skating and Heather following fast in her footsteps. I wish I could hear them read to me! Maureen – I long to see her . . . I long for you dearest – and the time when we shall start a home together again. May it be soon!’