Individuals who were physically able had assignments during the day with a rotation of responsibilities. Much like the apostle Paul, Eric possessed the rare ability to remain content in all situations. His assignments were half-time teacher of mathematics and half-time director of athletics. He was also considered “warden” of blocks 23 and 24, two large buildings housing some 230 people. Eric served as a tremendous impromptu mediator between the Japanese guards and several of the hotheaded internees, often using humor to defuse tension.
Two weeks after his arrival at Weihsien, Eric sent a twenty-five-word letter to Florence via the Red Cross, which stated, “Simple hardy life under primitive conditions. Living with Josh and Bear in small room. Good fellowship, good games. Teaching in school, food sufficient, boundless love.”[86]
The Catholic clergy quickly became cherished members of the Weihsien camp as they were the only ones brave and willing enough to deal with the overflowing latrine situation. Armed with shovels, mops, and face masks, they went to work. Members of the engineering and repairs department were then able to develop a rigged system of decent plumbing that alleviated the maddening demand.
Unless an individual possessed a clearly specialized and necessary practical skill, creative solutions were employed. Lawyers baked, businessmen cleaned, and missionaries washed. Annie Buchan served with the medical personnel and brought the hospital back into decent shape. Eric and Cullen established a school and a Sunday school, and Eric managed to develop an active athletic community and Bible study groups. Eric naturally sought to establish rapport with the youth in the camp amid a climate of constant irritation, menial tasks, and general insufficiency. When he wasn’t working with the younger children on their math and science or coaching sports, he aided the young men and women who had completed high school and needed to prepare for university.
The persistent wear and tear on the people showed on their quickly soiled and worn-down outerwear. Such was their adjustment to prison-camp life. Years later, a fellow internee stated in a letter to D. P. Thomson that
I was trudging wearily, laden with two heavy suitcases and feeling desperately hungry and tired after two bad days on a Chinese coastal steamer, down the rough path within the Japanese Internment Camp in Weihsien, North China. We were being shown our dormitory, an empty, barn-like room, and were feeling utterly miserable. Suddenly the person who was helping me along whispered, “Don’t stare now, but the man coming towards you is Eric Liddell.”
I was too limp to connect the oncoming stranger with the “well-known” Olympic athlete of some years before, but I glanced aside to note the man on the path. He was not very tall, rather thin, very bronzed with sun and air. He was wearing the most comical shirt I had ever seen, though I was to get quite accustomed to similar garments in that place. It was made, I learned later, from a pair of Mrs. Liddell’s curtains. But what struck me most about him was his very ordinary appearance. He didn’t look like a famous athlete, or rather he didn’t look as if he thought of himself as one. That, I came to know in time, was one of the secrets of his amazing way. He was surely the most modest man who ever breathed.[87]
Langdon Gilkey had a keen eye for observing human behavior. He wrote years later,
In such a situation, the more basic human virtues suddenly claimed their rightful place. A man’s excellence was revealed by his willingness to work, his skill at his job, his fundamental cheerfulness. On a kitchen shift or kneading dough in the bakery, any sane man would rather have next to him an efficient hard worker who could laugh and be warmly tolerant of his fellows, than to have there the most wealthy and sophisticated slacker or grumbler. After working or living beside a man for months, who cared—or even remembered—whether he was Belgian, British, or Parsee? Thus in a very short time people became to us personalities, pleasant or unpleasant, hard working or lazy, rather than the British, Eurasians, or Americans that they were when we first met them.[88]
Disenchanted by the missionary community in the camp, Gilkey also cited Bertolt Brecht, from The Threepenny Opera: “For even saintly folk will act like sinners, unless they have their customary dinners.”[89] It was painfully obvious to Gilkey that even Christian missionaries were sinners. They struggled at times even more glaringly than numerous others in the daily grind of the camp.
Apathy toward religion spread quickly when it was realized that the Christian missionaries were complaining noticeably louder than the nonbelieving community and that they were occasionally more obstinate toward adaptation.
Eric Liddell, however, didn’t fit in with that crowd.
Mary Taylor Previte, the great-granddaughter of J. Hudson Taylor (who founded the China Inland Mission), had been only nine when the Japanese rounded up her siblings, her teachers, and herself from their boarding school in Chefoo. In her writings about her time in Weihsien, she fondly remembers “Uncle Eric,” saying,
Almost everyone in camp had heard of Eric Liddell. The folklore about him seemed almost bigger than life. . . . But Uncle Eric wasn’t a Big Deal type; he never sought the spotlight. Instead, he made his niche by doing little things other people hardly noticed. You had to do a lot of imagining to think that Liddell had grabbed world headlines almost 20 years earlier, an international star in track and rugby.
When we had a hockey stick that needed mending, Uncle Eric would truss it almost as good as new with strips ripped from his sheets. When the teenagers got bored with the deadening monotony of prison life and turned for relief to the temptations of clandestine sex, he and some missionary teachers organized an evening game room. When the Tientsin boys and girls were struggling with their schoolwork, Uncle Eric coached them in science. And when Kitchen Number One competed in races in the inter-kitchen rivalry, well, who could lose with Eric Liddell on our team?[90]
Eric was gentle above all else. He looked for
