I have said that Abbot occupied the western cell of the two which joined the northern wall of my damp kitchen. To my surprise, shortly after entering my new cell, I heard the Padre’s voice coming from the other one. He had been arrested some time after me: this was his second or third day in jail.
The floor of my cell was much lower than his and, without having to move from the position in which the guard commander had placed me, I could talk to the Padre by turning my head to speak through a small gap in the wall. He began to tell me what had happened; but of course, his troubles went back much further than this recent event.
I know of only two priests being captured in Korea. One was an American Roman Catholic chaplain, a splendid man who had died at Pyoktong of dysentery that was never treated because the Chinese did not want him to live. The other was our own Padre. In both cases, their presence was an embarrassment to our captors. They consistently reiterated that they permitted absolute freedom of religion, but they had not expected to be called upon to prove their words with deeds. The other camps, having no chaplain, were permitted to hold short services at Easter and Christmas and, later, in a very few camps, every Sunday. But the Padre felt strongly that he must continue his ministry and, consequently, made greater demands. He wanted to hold confirmation classes for those who desired it; to give instruction in theology; to hold services on special weekdays in the Christian year. To a lesser extent, the Roman Catholics wished to do the same tiling under the leadership of the American officer that the Roman Catholic chaplain had instructed prior to his death. I know of no occasion when any religious activity of ours, in prospect or event, was directed against the authority of our captors: yet, at every turn, in every way, they frustrated our religious activities. “Religion,” said Chen Chung Hwei, “shall be centralized on Sundays. There is no need for you to worship on any other day.” In the early days, they sought to dissuade us from attending church services; but, seeing that this merely hardened us all the more against them, they turned to other means to thwart the Padre. Material was not available to make hymn or psalm sheets, a cross or candlesticks. We had to improvise for everything. All religious meetings—theological classes, confirmation groups—were absolutely forbidden. Permission for each Sunday service had to be obtained and the exact words to be used in prayers, psalms, hymns, as well as addresses, had to be submitted five or six days in advance, when the Padre would be subjected to a rigorous cross-examination as to the meaning of each phrase. If it was possible to impose a labour detail on the compound at service times, this was done. On other occasions, the loud-speaker system would broadcast gramophone records at the times appointed for service. At the end of each month, the Padre had to submit a report headed “Religious Activities for the month of. …”
These reports were used to harass him. The Chinese would fabricate evidence of clandestine meetings and then ask him why he had not reported the details of the meetings in his monthly report. Naturally he had no reply, and they would exploit their position to scorn and mock his Faith.
It hurt the Padre to hear words and phrases that were sacred to him discussed and sneered at by Chen, Tien, and others of the compound staff. They knew this, and hurt him in this way as often as possible. What they had failed to appreciate was that no effort of theirs would discourage him from performing his duty.
For many weeks, the choir had met regularly to practise in the Library for the service on the following Sunday; an event the Chinese had known of and permitted. In the second week in August, they suddenly pretended that it was a clandestine activity, a subtle plot against them organized by the Padre. They arrested him after giving him the opportunity to sign a “confession” to this effect, which they promised would save him from imprisonment—and, as he declined their offer, brought him over to the jail. When he was searched, Tien threw his Bible and devotional book to the floor and kicked them into a heap of filth in the corner. They were too stupid to realize that this merely strengthened the Padre’s determination to resist them.
His companionship was a source of great comfort to me; at night, and in the daytime when the sentry was not paying us too much attention, we had whispered conversations through the wall. On the Sunday after his arrest, and the Sunday that followed, we were delighted to hear the distant sound of hymns being sung in the Library.
They released the Padre after about three weeks, having failed completely in their purpose: the church service continued under lay leadership and there was much hard feeling about his arrest. The attempt to obtain a “confession” concerning a plot with the choir was dropped; Tien saved face by getting the Padre to agree that he would hold choir practices on Sunday mornings only, before the service. I missed him a great deal when he left; but soon had another companion in Alan, formerly Spike’s second-in-command, who had quarrelled with one of the Chinese administering his platoon.
Sometimes the days passed swiftly in meditation; sometimes they dragged intolerably. I would follow the sun’s arc, its traverse of the sky, and its setting, by watching the movement of the few thin shafts of sunlight on the walls. I scratched off the days one after another on my calendar: August passed, then September. Another winter was coming and I had wasted a whole escape season.
In September I was informed by Chen that, in addition to the charges arising from organizing and attempting an escape, there were others. He produced an indifferent forgery of Spike’s handwriting, accusing me of persuading him to stay in bed late in the mornings! Later, another obvious forgery was produced, ostensibly made by a British officer who had been in jail for a very long time and who, I was told, had decided to confess all his faults! At last, circumstances permitted me to tell the deception story we had planned. By good fortune, I managed to communicate secretly with Gallagher and Morton, so that we were ready to tell our story simultaneously. The Chinese released us to the compound within a few days of one another, which left Sam as the only one out of the original four still in prison. They had tried very hard to get us to incriminate Sam, against whom they had absolutely no evidence.About this time they must have begun to suspect, rightly, that they had one of the most resolute officers in the British Army in their jail.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
T HERE had been more escape attempts in my absence: Walt, a young American fighter pilot, and Sergeant Brock had been the last to go, bringing the total number of men who had attempted it in the year to forty-one. Walt’s departure had been executed so skilfully that old Yang, who administered our platoon, did not discover his absence for two days. I was very pleased to hear this story of a clean getaway at Yang’s expense as he had been one of those principally concerned in arresting Sergeant-Major Gallagher by the stream. Poor Walt and Brock had already been brought back to the village after covering well over a hundred miles. They were lodged together in a foul, dark, rat-infested cellar almost opposite the North Korean police station.
Not long after my return, the Marine Colonel was arrested. Unquestionably, the Chinese had been preparing a case against him for a considerable time, knowing that he was the senior United Nations Officer in the compound and thus the officer whom we considered the commander. He was actually arrested on a minor charge of “stealing” his own boots from a store where all our own uniforms were kept impounded, and ordered to go down to answer this charge at Camp Headquarters. There, after a long spell in solitary confinement, he had other, more serious charges, brought again him.
The chief change in the routine life inside the compound that I noticed was that many of the British had taken up the American game of softball. We still played cricket twice a week on the square with our home-made gear, but the ranks of the cricket snobs were thinner. James and Sergeant-Major Ridlington had earned places in the top league of the three that were running. Paul captained a strong British team competing in the middle league. The Americans had made some marvellous equipment out of barbed wire, leather from old boots, and firewood, and the cries of players and spectators rang through Pyn-chong-ni w
hen a game was in progress. The North Korean children would assemble on the hill above to watch whenever they got the chance.
I had just settled back into the routine of compound life when the Camp Headquarters made a change that constituted a major event in our lives. The prisoners in the compound were divided into two groups, and one group was withdrawn from the village.
Prior to my joining the Camp, a Chinese had said to me:
“You think you are going to a camp where there are watch-towers and high, barbed-wire fences. You are wrong. We do not send you to be a prisoner but to be a student at a sort of university. There are no fences to keep you in.”
Though he was wrong about the university, he was right about the fences, generally speaking. Our camp was not surrounded by high fences until mid-1952. Before that, in Pyn-chong-ni, the compound was enclosed by a single barbed wire fence; but the Chinese principle of guarding their captives was entirely different from that adopted in western Europe or America. Instead of establishing compounds containing upwards of five hundred men, enclosed by the customary fences and watch-towers, they kept us in comparatively small groups, breaking these down, whenever possible, to as few as ten men. For, at the outset, their principle concern had been political subversion, and they realized speedily that this was proportionately more difficult as the numbers in each group increased. Later, when the indoctrination programme had failed, they feared plots against them and sought to prevent these by the same principles as before: small groups under close surveillance. Even as late as the summer of 1952, when they established an annexe to our Camp—Camp 2—they kept prisoners in several groups of eight and ten, and one larger group of about thirty, for many months. It was only the excessively heavy guard commitment that caused them to keep larger compounds—even in Pyn-chong-ni there was one soldier in the guard company for every two prisoners in the compound. We were never left completely alone. Though we secured the right to cook our own food, our doctors were not officially permitted to practice, for they were “bourgeois” trained, “un-Marxian”, “undemocratic”, “incapable of adopting a correct scientific attitude”. Our labour details were supervised for many months by Chinese who demonstrated their ability to muddle even the simplest of tasks. Nor were we permitted to gather in groups for instruction in matters of general, non-political interest such as photography, architecture, motor or air-craft engineering. Carl tried for months to obtain permission to run a class in higher mathematics but was refused. Having failed to subvert us, our captors would not let us make our own regular diversions and entertainments. Even the bridge fours were inspected, when cards became available, by Chinese who wandered from room to room to see who was talking to whom, and what they were saying. Day and night, they roamed through the compound, watching us. Now, with the split into two compounds, there were less of us to watch in each.
Immediately after breakfast one morning at the end of October, the whole of our platoon was told to pack up for a move. We were given no details but merely told that we should leave nothing behind. I was packing my kit when Chang approached me to say:
“You are not going with the others. Pack your kit and go below to the schoolhouse.”
One never knew what an order of this sort presaged. I said goodbye to my friends and descended the hill. The schoolhouse had been cleared and men were standing about on the square, falling out as their names were called and moving to join a growing body of men by the main gate. This was the remainder of No. 2 Company, of which my former platoon, already departed by another route, had formed a part. I was left with No I Company, who were now fitted back into the schoolhouse complete. The gate opening on the path to the hilltop where I had lived formerly was closed and locked.
Spike, Bill, Sergeant-Major Gallagher and I managed to find bed-spaces together in our new room. Sitting there, that first evening, I was surprised to see Graham, our Mortar Officer, come in. He had been taken out of the compound immediately after the evening meal on the orders of Camp Headquarters.
“It isn’t me they want,” he said in answer to my query, “it’s you.”
He was right. One of the Chinese came in behind him to tell me to pack my belongings.
Chen Chung Hwei was waiting for me at Camp Headquarters.
“You were given a warning when you were released from jail that you should obey the regulations. You have not taken any notice of the warning. The Commander Ding has decided that you shall go to another place.”
After waiting in a cold little room in the Headquarters for about two hours, I was collected by a non-commissioned officer and two men, all dressed for travelling, and carrying thin, individual sacks of rice. I had had experience of this before: it looked as if we were going at least one night’s travel from Pyng-Chong-ni. I wondered if we were off to some penal institution or to the new annexe, and whether Sam would be coming with me.
The Camp truck was waiting in the courtyard by the police station, its engine idling. We climbed aboard, except for the non-commissioned officer. After waiting for more than half an hour in the cold night, one of those incidents occurred which almost every prisoner in Korea must have experienced if he made a journey by motor vehicle: the trip was cancelled. An orderly came running down the path from the Headquarters shouting something to the driver, who promptly turned off his engine, climbed out saying “Ta malega—” and began to pull the tarpaulin over the engine and driver’s cab. By this time the orderly and the guard non-commissioned officer were engaged in speech, as the result of which I was told to get down and return to Camp Headquarters, where Chen was standing in the entrance to the courtyard. It was bad enough seeing him again; it was worse when he removed all my kit and locked me up for the night without any bedding. I spent a very cold night saying even ruder things about Chen than I had ever said before.
Seven days after the departure of my friends in No. 2 Company from the main compound, I was still in a room at Camp Headquarters, awaiting movement to whatever destination Ding had in mind. I had managed to get my kit back on the fourth day, when Chen informed me that there was a further delay in moving me. At dusk on the seventh day, I was taken down to his office and given another warning.
“The Commander Ding has decided to send you back to your company,” said Chen. “You will not go away to Another Place; but I warn you that if you disobey the regulations in future, you will receive very severe punishment. We know everything that goes on in the Camp. You can never deceive the Chinese Volunteers!”
A guard and an orderly took me down the road that led to Pyoktong. About a mile west of the village, we turned off the road by another schoolhouse—still employed as such by the Koreans—and made our way up a long valley. On the eastern slope was a long building constructed in the Chinese style; the new No. 2 Company Headquarters. Inside, Chang and the company commander were waiting to receive me.
Chang was a short, plump individual, who, on his own statement, was a graduate of St. John’s University, Shanghai. He had a fine ear for an accent and modified his English to suit his audience; to the Americans, he spoke with an American accent; to the British element, he spoke straightforward English. But more than this: at Pyoktong, where he had been stationed with captives in Camp No. 5, he had learned to assume a Cockney accent, and he tried this out on Sergeants-Major Morton and Strong—both Londoners—from time to time. He was very anxious to improve his English and spent a great deal of time studying and asking us to explain phrases that he did not understand. He was probably the only Chinese in North Korea who could recite the greater portion of Spenser’s Faërie Queen and Fitzgerald’s original translation of Omar’s Rubáiyát. But for all these accomplishments and a suave manner, Chang was the most dangerous man on the Chinese staff of the company—an unprincipled opportunist, who had readily lent himself to the beating-up of members of the escape party, including the Australian pilots, Vance and Bruce, on their recapture in April 1952. Yet, strangely, Chang was the only Chinese in the Camp with sufficient intelligence to see tha
t the best way to approach us as a group was with politeness, and amity. Though he was rebuffed again and again, he never gave up; and, unquestionably, he saved his masters a great deal of trouble by this policy, which, coupled with his considerable ability as an interpreter, made our relationship with the Company Headquarters less irksome than it might have been.
“So you’ve come to join us after all?” said Chang, in greeting. He interpreted the remarks of the company commander, a stocky Chinese we called Eleanor, who said that I must bear in mind all the rules and regulations and look after my health so that I could return to my dear ones, eventually. After a happy reunion with my friends, I found that I was allocated a bed on a raised kang (a sleeping platform heated on the hypocaust system) which was occupied by the Turks.
I was lucky to be billeted with the Turks: they were exceptionally polite as a group and very pleasant to live with. Of the eleven members of their squad, there was not one who was not a remarkable character—from Hamid, the senior Turkish officer, to Nafi, a private soldier who had been such a powerful influence amongst his compatriots in the Turkish soldiers’ company at Pyoktong, that the Chinese had believed him to be an officer. Fortunately, they were still not sure about his rank; they had no efficient Turkish interpreter in Korea.
Although the nights were really cold, the day temperatures were still pleasant as we passed into November 1952; and this was fortunate because an inter-camp athletics meeting had been arranged which the Chinese styled the “Prisoner-of-War Command Olympics”. We had already had a certain amount of propaganda about the International Olympic Games at Helsinki—the early Chinese reports insisted, for example, that America had tied with Russia for First Place. When the final scoresheets were published, however, it was seen that Russia was, in fact, placed below the United States, but this was explained without embarrassment as follows:
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