The Final Race

by Eric T. Eichinger

  In his book Disciplines of the Christian Life, Eric articulates his own views on baptism:

  In the Epistles baptism is regarded as the sacrament by which people entered into the new life which Paul describes as “in Christ.” . . .

  The apostles are told to baptize “in” or “into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” These words, into the Name, are of great significance. . . .

  Christian baptism thus becomes not only the representation of the spiritual cleansing that God gives to us in Jesus Christ, but also the means by which that blessing is conveyed to us in response to our profession of faith.[100]

  Eric’s writings make clear that he believed and instructed teaching toward baptizing (sharing the faith with adults, leading to baptism) as well as baptizing toward teaching (baptizing an infant and raising them up in the faith). He also connected salvation to baptism in his specificity of infant baptism:

  The practice of infant baptism rests also upon the revelation of God given us in Jesus Christ. That revelation makes clear to us that, in the matter of our salvation, God always acts first. God does not wait for our repentance; he sends his Son to bring about that repentance. He comes to meet us, and our experience of his love creates the spirit of new obedience. Everywhere and always it is God who takes the initiative.[101]

  And so it was that one more heart—that of Eileen Campbell—was kindled to faith.

  While the heart of one mother in the camp rejoiced, another’s was torn in half. Separated from her husband during the war, a mother and her teenage son stood in their usual lines at roll call. The teenager discussed with another boy whether the perimeter fence was indeed electrified. To prove he was right, the teenager grabbed the fence and was electrocuted in front of everyone, including his horrified mother. Eric ministered to the heartbroken woman as best he could.

  Later, the mother said of Eric,

  I recollect the comfort he brought to me in one of our meetings, when he taught us that lovely hymn—

  Be still my soul; the Lord is on thy side;

  Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain;

  Leave to thy God to order and provide;

  In every change He faithful will remain.

  Be still, my soul, thy best, thy Heavenly Friend

  Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

  Then again, as he spoke from the text, “Be ye reconciled to God,” he questioned if we were reconciled to God in all His dealings with us—not only in the initial step of salvation, but day by day in our sorrows and trials were we reconciled to God. So my memories of Eric are of one who was quietly and victoriously reconciled to God.[102]

  Eric’s head ached over tragic events such as these, as anyone’s would. For a while, he chalked up his dull but constant headaches to the gloomy circumstances they all faced together. Grief, depression, and malnutrition tag-teamed, preying on the minds of many. But for some reason, Eric’s headaches kept worsening—more than normal annoyances.

  Something, he feared, was just not right.

  [97] David McCasland, Eric Liddell: Pure Gold: A New Biography of the Olympic Champion Who Inspired Chariots of Fire (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House, 2001), 268.

  [98] “The Story of Eric Liddell: Olympic Champion—Man of Courage,” Day of Discovery, season 32, episode 22, aired December 5, 1999 (Grand Rapids, MI: Day of Discovery, 2008), DVD.

  [99] Lisa Adams, “Scots Olympic Great Eric Liddell Helped Me Survive Concentration Camp Horror,” Daily Record, July 1, 2012, http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/real-life/scots-olympic-great-eric-liddell-989642.

  [100] Eric Liddell, The Disciplines of the Christian Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), 114–15.

  [101] Ibid., 128.

  [102] D. P. Thomson, Scotland’s Greatest Athlete: The Eric Liddell Story (Barnoak, Crieff, Perthshire, Scotland: Research Unit, 1970), 198.

  CHAPTER 25

  GOOD NIGHT, SWEET PRINCE

  Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

  Matthew 11:28

  Early Winter 1944

  Temperatures dropped dramatically within the camp as Christmas loomed, the camp half in anticipation, half in dread. One more week and Eric and his fellow detainees would celebrate yet another holiday within the interior of a barbed-wire prison camp.

  Or was Christmas two weeks away? Eric couldn’t remember.

  It seemed lately that the days—holy or not—slipped one into the other, each arriving with a deeper level of pain behind his eyes. He could do only half the work he had typically accomplished, and his precious time in God’s Word each morning had become difficult. Lines of Scripture blurred on the pages or made little sense at all.

  On some mornings, he managed to open his eyes—blessedly—to no headache at all. Or, at the very least, to only a mild one. Other mornings, however, the pain was agonizing, penetrating to the back of his head. He tried to ignore it, but those days made the denial impossible.

  He had told Nurse Annie—and only her—that he feared something was wrong inside his head. But maybe, he hoped—he prayed—the headaches were the result of too little nutrition. Too much physical labor. Too much hot and too much cold. Too much time behind prison walls.

  Earlier that morning he’d woken somewhere in between. Not quite miserable. Not quite pain-free. He rose, had his morning devotions with Joe, then set about his chores. But by early afternoon, the throbbing had returned, and he retreated to his bunk, lay flat on his back, and attempted to sleep.

  Or to dream of his reunion with Flossie and the girls.

  Only moments after he closed his eyes—or had it been hours?—the door opened quietly, and the sound of shuffling feet near his bed roused him. Whoever had come in moved about the room quietly. Eric attempted to open his eyes to see which of his roommates had joined him, but the light became a piercing sword.

  The whiff of something putrid reached his nostrils. “What is that smell?” he asked without moving, then winced. His words had been too harsh—something his roommate didn’t deserve.

  “Eric?” Joe Cotterill’s voice eased across the room, questioning the tone.

  “Are you . . . cooking something?” Eric asked, attempting to smooth out his voice.

  “I’m frying bread in a little peanut oil,” Joe answered. “Nothing different than usual.”

  But it was different. Horribly different. Why couldn’t Joe detect that? “Whatever it is,” he mumbled, “it smells terrible.”

  Eric’s harsher-than-intended confrontation of his roommate lay between them, unmentioned, for days until Eric—feeling better than he had in weeks—spotted Joe along the dusty streets of Weihsien. He called out, crossed over, and immediately apologized for his previous behavior. “I’ve had the most awful headaches lately,” he told Joe. “When they come on, I just need a quiet place to rest.”

  “Probably just fatigue,” Joe said, which would make sense to anyone within the camp. Eric did the work of three men, counseled and coached the youth, and taught school from complex books he had personally written.

  The two men smiled in reconciliation, shook hands, and then Eric went on to his next assignment. But Joe watched Eric as he ambled away. There was something odd in his gait. The usual pep was missing. He didn’t walk; he plodded.

  * * *

  IN JANUARY 1945, Eric—along with many others—came down with the flu and a painful case of sinusitis. Although treatment brought relief to the rest, Eric didn’t seem to improve.

  Still, he continued without complaining, although he spent hours in bed with a cool cloth over his eyes and often missed roll call. Finally, his headaches plagued him so much that he again sought out Annie, who insisted he check himself into the camp hospital.

  Eric was miserable, but he patiently endured while he rested. Fellow detainees grew more and more concerned as the days passed without seeing Eric exuberantly strolling out and about, holding class, or attending prayer meetings. Out of the approxima
te fifteen hundred prisoners, this one man’s light shone so brightly that when it dimmed, the entire camp felt the effects. While Eric suffered, Weihsien camp was put to one of its greatest tests.

  One snowy day in mid-January, as eighteen-year-old internee Norman Cliff stood in filthy overalls working in Kitchen I, a young American rushed in and said to him and the others who stood at their assigned cauldrons, “Come have a look at what’s coming through the prison gates!”

  Norman and the kitchen workers rushed out, following the American to the main road in time to witness countless donkeys pulling carts stacked high with boxes marked “American Red Cross.”

  As the internees followed the caravan to the church, visions of the treasures inside danced like the sugarplums they’d dreamed of only a month earlier at Christmastime. During a holiday when, before internment, they had celebrated with more than enough delicacies and joyous celebrations around roaring fires, the past December had seen the prisoners with meager rations and only a few festivities. The winter weather, with its dramatically dropping temperatures, had been met without the coal dust necessary to make briquettes for burning. The prisoners were starving and freezing.

  But now . . . who could begin to imagine what lay nestled within those boxes! Since the day the gates closed behind them years earlier—and especially since Father Scanlan’s arrest—the internees had not tasted sugar or milk, fruit or butter. Their clothes became more threadbare, they walked in shoes without soles, and children—in need of more calcium than egg shells could provide—grew teeth without enamel. With the war raging across the globe, supplies became scarcer, and severe malnutrition knocked at every door. Whatever lay within the boxes was nothing short of a godsend.

  When the cart wheels rolled to a stop, the prisoners of Weihsien camp swallowed hard, wide-eyed in anticipation. A crew of men unloaded the carts, carrying the boxes into the church where they would be inspected and counted by the Japanese. Two hours later, a man with a tally sheet emerged and announced that there were more than enough for each person in the camp to receive one box each.

  Joy on top of joy!

  But the next morning a jagged shard deflated the enthusiasm when one of the Japanese officers posted a notice informing the prisoners that a group of Americans had decided that because the American Red Cross had sent the supplies, the provisions should go to their countrymen only. At that time, a mere two hundred Americans dwelled in the camp. Based on their reasoning, that ratio said that each American should receive seven and a half parcels and everyone else none.

  Arguing commenced, not only within the rest of the camp but between the ranks of the Americans as well, specifically some who argued that, in the Spirit of Christ, the bounty should be shared with all. But others, despite being missionaries, declared it immoral to segment the boxes if they had been intended only for the Americans.

  The Japanese, perplexed by the attitudes and apparent civil war, posted a sign for all to see:

  DUE TO PROTESTS FROM THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY, THE PARCELS WILL NOT BE DISTRIBUTED TODAY AS ANNOUNCED.

  THE COMMANDANT

  The Japanese continued to stand guard over the boxes, which remained stacked in the church where they’d been unloaded. Meanwhile, the commandant contacted his superiors for direction. As he waited, the Americans came back with a new idea: Everyone in the camp gets a box, they proposed. The total would cover one and a half boxes for each American, with the other internees receiving the leftovers.

  But the Japanese said no. They would wait to hear from headquarters.

  Finally, Tokyo wired back, stating that each internee was to receive one parcel. What was left over was to be sent to other camps. The greed of a few meant that the extra provisions would now go somewhere else. This was a hard lesson for the Weihsien camp but a blessing for those who suffered elsewhere.

  Two weeks after the boxes had arrived, the Japanese set a date for distribution. After roll call and breakfast, the internees lined up, skinny arms stretched outward. Then, loaded down with a three-foot by one-foot by one-and-a-half-foot box, they stumbled back to their individual rooms to open their belated Christmas gifts.

  The boxes all had “four small sections, each with powdered milk, cigarettes, tinned butter, spam, cheese, concentrated chocolate, sugar, coffee, jam, salmon and raisins.”[103]

  Meals could now be followed by desserts. Tea, formerly drunk only black, could now be enjoyed with sugar and milk. Bread could be slathered with jam or butter or sandwiched with Spam and cheese.

  As the camp set up a system of exchange—a pack of cigarettes for two bars of chocolate; two tins of Spam for one of coffee—adults calculated how to make the provisions last as long as possible. According to Norman Cliff, once these packages were distributed, “physical hunger and exhaustion were less acute, and with this the general morale was clearly lifted.”[104]

  And a great lesson had been learned. As Langdon Gilkey later wrote in his book, “The irony of this was not lost on the gleeful camp: the demand by the Americans for seven and one-half parcels had effected in the end the loss to each of them of an extra half parcel! Thus, as Stan and I grimly agreed, even an enemy authority can mediate the divine justice in human affairs.”[105]

  Perhaps a larger life lesson came from the two South Africans who were also detained at Weihsien.

  When the parcels were finally distributed, the people discovered that two hundred pairs of boots from the South African Red Cross had been included. Upon this discovery, the two men posted the following notice:

  DUE TO THE PRECEDENT THAT HAS BEEN SET, THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNITY IS LAYING CLAIM TO ALL 200 OF THE BOOTS DONATED BY THEIR RED CROSS. WE SHALL WEAR EACH PAIR FOR THREE DAYS TO SIGNAL OUR RIGHT TO WHAT IS OUR OWN PROPERTY, AND THEN SHALL BE GLAD TO LEND SOME OUT WHEN NOT IN USE TO ANY NON-SOUTH AFRICANS WHO REQUEST OUR GENEROUS HELP.[106]

  Perhaps their morality play helped ease the tensions. Perhaps their post brought laughter and healing. Either way, Eric had not been engrossed in any of this drama. Eric’s light, which had shone so brilliantly in the camp, grew dimmer by the hour. The strain of missing his family began to show in Eric’s demeanor as he grew weaker. Eric’s deepening depression did not escape Annie’s acute eyes or ears. One afternoon he said to her, “My biggest worry, Annie, is that I didn’t give Flo enough of my time.”

  Annie assured him that Florence, the daughter of a missionary, understood their time apart better than most women might. “And remember, the reason you were separated was your work for God.”

  Initially, doctors diagnosed Eric’s condition as a “nervous breakdown,” brought about by his intense workload coupled with his deepening need to see his family again. This news distressed Eric greatly.

  “There is one thing that bothers me,” he told a China Inland Mission missionary couple who lived on the top floor of the hospital. “I should have been able to cast all this on the Lord and not buckled down under it.”[107]

  Those closest to Eric knew something was more seriously wrong with him than a weakened body brought about by camp-life stressors. Eric had grown quieter—revealing less of his typical wit and regular repartee—and his speech became slower.

  Both youth and adults visited Eric whenever he felt up to the visits. One day, in the earliest days of February, eighteen-year-old Stephen Metcalf, who had shown signs of being a good runner, stopped by.

  “Steve,” Eric said, looking toward the young man’s feet, “I see your shoes are worn out. It’s winter now and . . .” Eric pressed his running shoes, held together by string and strips of linen, into Stephen’s hands.

  He gave Stephen a nod and, with a pat on the hand, released his shoes to the much younger runner.

  “It wasn’t until much later,” Stephen said in remembering Eric, “that I realized that those shoes had meant something to him and that he had gone to a lot of work to patch them up for me.”[108]

  Better than the gift of a pair of ratty running shoes, however, were the lessons Eric had taught Ste
phen and the young people who lived alongside him in Weihsien. “Love your enemies,” he’d told them. “Pray for the Japanese guards . . . pray for them who persecute you.”

  Stephen Metcalf would later become a lifelong missionary to Japan and would never forget the gift of Eric Liddell’s running shoes or his lessons of “the baton of forgiveness.”[109]

  On Sunday, February 11, 1945, Eric suffered a mild stroke. He fought to rally back to health, even to the point of walking with aid up and down the hospital corridors. Annie Buchan fought for her patient to get undisturbed rest, but his loved ones always managed to sneak in to see him . . . or he snuck out. He even managed to climb four flights of stairs to the little room where the CIM missionary couple lived to enjoy afternoon tea with them.

  Annie and the doctors began to speculate that their initial diagnosis of a nervous breakdown had been incorrect and that Eric was suffering from an inoperable brain tumor. They knew there was little they could do about it, even without the privations of the internment camp.

  Still, Eric held out optimism, especially for the youth who came to see him.

  One of the young girls, Joyce Stranks, often popped in to visit, to wish him well, and to continue to learn what “Uncle Eric” had to teach. Those sessions—with Joyce and the other young people—took a great amount of energy, but Eric couldn’t resist. Nurse Annie, however, always knew when to shoo the youth away.

  On Sunday, February 18, the Salvation Army Band, which included Norman Cliff and Peter Bazire, who played trumpet, gathered on the hospital grounds as they did each Sunday and Wednesday afternoon to play for the sick inside the infirmary. After playing a few favorite hymns, a note came to the band leader from Nurse Annie.