Eric familiarized himself with the parts of the compound that either he did not remember or had been added since he had left. He visited his brother Robert in the hundred-bed hospital where he worked. He also met Dr. Kenneth McAll, who worked with Robert, and was introduced to Annie Buchan, the hospital matron and a fellow Scot.
Many of the people around Siao Chang remembered Eric as a small boy in the village. They told him stories about his father, whom they had called, Li Mu Shi. (Li was short for Liddell, and Mu Shi was “pastor” in Chinese.) Now they called Eric by the same name.
The London Missionary Society director for the area met with Eric to explain to him his new duties. It was simple, really, but dangerous. There were over ten thousand villages on the Great Plain, and Siao Chang was the center of missionary activity for all of them. Most of these villages were in a terrible situation. The past six years had been very difficult for the people who lived in the villages. A string of massive droughts had been followed by torrential rains and then widespread flooding. In 1937, as a result of the continual cycle of drought and flood, crop yields were less than half what they normally were. Even without any of the political and military problems in the area, people had been finding it hard to survive over the past few years. The war had just made things more intolerable.
Because there were so many villages, neither the Communists, the Nationalists, nor the Japanese had enough soldiers to occupy them all at one time. As a result, one army, for example, the Communists, would take over a village. The soldiers would eat all the food they could find, drag many men off to join their army, kill those who resisted, assault the women, and burn down the houses of anyone they suspected of being a Nationalist or Japanese sympathizer. After several weeks, they would get bored and decide to take over another village. The Communists would then move out, and the Nationalists would move in and do the same things to the village and its people. Eventually, they would move on, and the Japanese army would move in. It was a depressing cycle for those who lived in the villages because they had little power to stop what was happening to them.
Eric’s job was to visit the villages across the plain, encourage the Christian villagers, and hold evangelistic meetings for those who had not yet heard the gospel message. It sounded like a simple enough task, but it was not. The Communists in particular hated Christianity, and a missionary was likely to be shot on the spot. To make it a little safer for Eric, the Red Cross gave him an armband to wear and listed his official title as “Hospital Accountant” rather than missionary. Not only was Eric’s new job dangerous, it was also depressing. No one could crisscross the huge plains without seeing horrible sights. Sometimes Eric could do something to help those he encountered. Sadly though, it was often too late for him to be of any help.
Eric wasted no time getting started in his new job. Because there were so many different dialects spoken across the Great Plain, he took an interpreter, Wang Feng Chou, with him on his travels. The first thing Eric did before they set out was teach Wang Feng to ride a bicycle so that the two of them could get around more quickly than they could walking. Poor Wang Feng did not have nice smooth roads to learn to ride on but encountered potholed tracks that had been bombed over and over. Because of the condition of the roads, at least once a day both Wang and Eric were pitched off their bikes onto the hard ground by potholes. At the end of a trip, Eric’s body was often covered with bruises from all the spills off his bike.
Sometimes Eric and Wang Feng were able to ride to a nearby village, preach, visit the Christians there, and return to Siao Chang all in one day. Other times, they went farther afield and would spend the night wherever they were invited to stay. On these occasions, they normally slept on the dirt floor of a hut and went to bed hungry, just like everyone else in the house. There was usually not enough food for a family to eat, let alone to feed visitors.
The faint flicker of a lamp would light up a small loom at one end of the room. Through the night, family members would take turns weaving cotton thread into fabric. Since the crops had failed so miserably, the only way to make a few pennies was to weave fabric. Thus, it became very important for a family to keep its loom working twenty-four hours a day. The click, click of the loom became a background sound against which the family went about its daily goal of scraping together enough food to survive.
Eric worked closely with the hospital. Since he was always out and about in the countryside, he knew what kinds of injuries people were likely to arrive at the hospital with and from which areas they would be coming. Knowing the kinds of injuries it could expect helped the hospital to respond better to people’s needs.
Until the time Eric arrived, the doctors at the hospital had been reluctant to help Japanese or Communist soldiers wounded in the fighting. Although their grip on power was slipping fast, the Nationalists were still recognized as the legitimate government of China, and the hospital didn’t want to offend the Nationalist forces by treating soldiers from opposing armies. Besides, both the Japanese and the Communists despised and killed Christians. Slowly, though, Eric’s example began to change this reluctance on the part of the doctors. Eric gave help to anyone who needed it, regardless of which side the person was on. Many on the hospital staff asked him how he could help Japanese soldiers when they were killing so many Chinese people. Eric simply pointed out that he saw every human being as someone God loved. His attitude began to spread throughout the hospital, and soon Chinese and Japanese, Communists and Nationalists, found love and help at the London Missionary Society Hospital.
Sometimes Eric would be asked to go and “fetch” a wounded person and bring him or her to the hospital. Often the local people would be too afraid to transport a wounded person because they feared being caught by an opposing army and killed.
On February 19, 1938, the hospital received word that a wounded Communist soldier was lying in a temple in a village about twenty miles from the hospital. Eric was asked to find the wounded man and bring him back to the hospital for treatment. A Chinese man volunteered to go along because he felt nothing bad would happen to him if he traveled with Eric.
The Chinese man set out alone with a cart on which to transport the wounded soldier. Several hours later, Eric caught up to him on his bike. When they reached the village of Pei Lin Tyu, Eric spoke to one of the village elders. “I understand you have an injured soldier here,” he said.
“Yes,” replied the elder. “He’s in the temple. I know it is cold and damp in there, but we could not do anything else. If any of us took him into our home and the Japanese found him there, our whole family would be killed.” The elder shrugged his shoulders in frustration at the events that had overtaken his village.
Eric nodded understandingly. “These are difficult times. Please show me where he is.”
The village elder led Eric to a small temple and stopped at the bottom of the steps that led up to it. “He is in there,” he said pointing up the steps. “He has received food each day, and someone gave him some straw to sleep on. He has been in there for five days. But with the Japanese only a mile away in the next village, we dare not do more. It would be foolish.”
The elder turned and left, and Eric climbed the steps and entered the temple alone. In the dim light inside he could make out a figure lying on a thin pile of straw. The sleeping man had a torn blanket pulled up over him, hardly enough to ward off the subzero winter temperatures. Eric walked over and knelt down beside him. The man awoke. Panic spread across his face. The man shielded his eyes with his hand.
“No, No! Don’t kill me,” he pleaded.
Eric calmed him down and explained why he was there. Since it was nearly nightfall, much too late to start the trip back, Eric promised the soldier he would return first thing in the morning and transport him to the hospital.
That night, as Eric lay on the cold floor of a Chinese Christian’s home, he wondered what he would say if he met any Japanese soldiers the next day. How would he explain transporting a wounded Chinese soldier? Unable to sleep, he opened the Chinese New Testament that he always carried with him. He angled it toward the moonlight that streamed in through the one window in the room and read Luke 16:10: “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.” Eric felt better. He knew that he was being faithful to God in getting the wounded man to the hospital, and he would trust God to watch over him as he did so.
The next morning, Eric’s Chinese companion pulled the cart to the front of the temple. How different it was from the silent place it had been the night before. Now it was bustling with activity. It was Chinese New Year, and all the villagers were dressed in their best clothes, chanting and burning incense in the temple.
Eric rushed up the steps, wondering where the people might have put the wounded soldier while they held their celebration. Was he lying out back in the icy cold wind? Eric didn’t have to look far for his answer. The villagers hadn’t moved the man at all! The soldier was lying on his pile of straw right where Eric had left him. The temple worshipers just ignored him and moved around him as if he were not there. The air was thick with the smoke from incense, causing Eric to cough. This was no place for a weak and wounded man to be. Quickly, Eric ordered the worshipers and their incense outside. Too surprised to refuse, they all filed out the door. Eric followed them.
The people all stared at the blue-eyed, blond-haired man who had spoken in their dialect and ordered them outside. Eric raised his hand and began to speak. He told them how difficult it was for a sick person to breathe in such a smoke-laden place. Then he recited some Bible verses to them about how God does not want burnt offerings but instead wants people who are just and merciful and who walk humbly with Him. Then he motioned for his traveling companion, and together the two of them went back into the temple and carried out the wounded soldier. They laid the man on the cart and headed for the hospital. Eric rode alongside on his bicycle to make sure the man was comfortable.
When they reached the next village, Huo Chu, two local men ran out to meet them. “Stop! Are you the ones with the wounded man?” they asked.
Eric nodded.
“There is another man here at our village. He is nearly dead. Will you take him to the hospital also?” they pleaded.
Eric climbed from his bike. “What’s wrong with him?” he asked.
“It was last week,” blurted the taller of the two men who had stopped them. “The Japanese came through the village. They rounded up six men they said were spying against them. One by one they told each man to kneel down, and then they chopped off his head with a sword. The first five obeyed, but the sixth man would not kneel. The Japanese soldier lunged at his neck, slashing it with his sword. The man fell to the ground, and the Japanese thought he was dead. When they left, we found he was still alive, but he had been very badly cut. We hid him in a house, but there is nothing else we can do for him now. Will you help?”
Eric looked at the cart. It was big enough for only one man to lie on. But it seemed unlikely that this other man could wait while Eric took the wounded soldier to the hospital and then came back for him the following day.
“Yes, we will do what we can. Take us to him,” he finally said.
For the second time in two days, Eric found himself in a dimly lit room staring at a severely injured man. The man looked to be about forty years old and was rather stout. A dirty bandage encrusted with dried blood was coiled around his neck and the lower half of his face. The man could not talk, but he watched every move Eric made.
