Eric unwound the bandage. A deep crimson gash ran from the side of the man’s mouth all the way to the back of his neck. Eric gently replaced the bandage. The man obviously needed to get to a hospital, but it wasn’t going to be an easy trip for him.
Eric spoke quietly to the wounded man. “We can get you to a hospital. Unfortunately, we have only a small cart. It fits a single man lying down, and we already have a wounded soldier we’re transporting. We can take you, but you will have to sit on the shaft of the cart. Do you think you are strong enough to do that?”
The man waved his hand as if to say yes and tried to get up from the bed. Eric hooked his arm under the man’s and gently led him outside. It would be a bumpy ride across the bomb-scarred roads, but Eric knew getting to the hospital was the only hope of recovery for both of his passengers.
The normal three-hour trip back to Siao Chang seemed to take forever. Eric and his companion pulling the cart had to constantly stop to adjust the positions of the patients they were transporting. Japanese bombers circled menacingly in the sky only a mile or so away, where they were most likely escorting Japanese troops marching to their next village of victims. Eric knew that the pilots could spot him and his wounded cargo at any time. Their mercy mission went unnoticed, though, and they finally reached the hospital at four in the afternoon, just as the winter sun was beginning to set.
The hospital staff were waiting to operate. Two days later, despite their best efforts, the Communist soldier Eric had retrieved from the temple died. The man with the slashed neck, however, was stitched up and began to make a full recovery. Eric visited the man in the hospital often and discovered that he was an artist. Eric then asked for some paints and paper from one of the nurses, and over the next few weeks the man painted many beautiful pictures of flowers which he insisted on giving to Eric. The paintings were the only thing the man had with which to say thank you to the person who had helped save his life.
While Eric was thankful that the man’s life had been saved, he was also a little frustrated. While he had helped save one man’s life, everyday across the Great Plain, people were dying from the fighting and the harsh conditions they were forced to endure. Eric wished he could do more. He wished the fighting would stop and everything would get better. However, things would get a lot worse in China before they would get any better.
Chapter 12
More Coal
Slowly the Japanese began to get the upper hand on the Great Plain. They showed some respect for the work of the London Missionary Society hospital, but not a lot. One night, not too long after Eric had rescued the man with the slashed neck, a huge commotion broke out in the men’s ward of the hospital. Eric awoke with a start. Hearing the noise, he leapt out of bed, pulled his clothes on over his pajamas, and rushed off to see what was happening. When he reached the ward, he was met by a grim-faced Dr. McAll.
“What’s happened?” he asked.
“As far as we can make out, the Communists jumped the hospital compound wall and kidnapped one of the Japanese soldiers we were treating, the one with the bullet wound in his leg,” said Dr. McAll.
Eric gave a low whistle. “How long ago?”
“Not more than five minutes. It gave the night nurse a terrible scare. They dragged him off like a sack of rice. I wish they wouldn’t use the hospital as a combat zone.” Dr. McAll sighed and shook his head as he spoke.
“I wonder what the Japanese will do when they find out one of their men has been captured,” Eric mused.
As if to answer his question, a hail of machine-gun bullets hit the hospital wall, and Eric could hear the whistle of mortar bombs. Eric and Dr. McAll looked at each other, their eyes wide with disbelief.
“It’s got to be the Japanese,” Eric blurted. “They must think the Communists are still inside the hospital compound somewhere.”
Dr. McAll turned quickly towards the door. “I’ll try to reach them and convince the commander they’ve made a mistake. You see what you can do for the patients. Move the ones by the windows if you can,” he yelled back over his shoulder at Eric.
Much to Eric’s relief, ten minutes later, the attack ended as abruptly as it had begun. Several minutes after that, Dr. McAll strolled back into the hospital with a smile on his face. “Everything’s all right here, I take it?” he said, looking at Eric.
Eric nodded and then replied, “Yes, but some of the patients are pretty shaken up. How did it go with the commander?”
“Quite extraordinary really. Let’s go outside and check up on the damage, and I’ll tell you all about it,” he said.
When he had shut the door behind them, Dr. McAll told his story. He had been taken to a small hut just outside the compound where a Japanese colonel was lying on a couch.
“At first he would not even turn around to look at me,” said the doctor, “so I started talking to him in Chinese, hoping to get his attention. That didn’t work, so I started in on pidgin English. He let me go on for a minute or two, and then all at once he jumped off the couch and yelled something in Japanese. The two guards who had brought me to see him hurried out of the room and shut the door behind them. Then the colonel turned to me and said with an American accent, ‘Forget it buddy!’
“‘So you speak English?’ I asked. He nodded and hung his head. He told me his parents were from Japan but he had been born and raised in California. Although he was born in the United States, he decided to help the Japanese win the war in China. He was most unhappy, though. He said, ‘Now all I ever do is kill. I don’t know how to get out of this mess.’”
Eric shook his head wearily. “There are so many people trapped in this war, on both sides. I wish it were over.”
But the war was far from over. In fact, it was growing by the day as more cities fell to the Japanese. Eric got regular letters from Flo, and the news was not good. Despite the local government’s best efforts, Tientsin was now firmly under Japanese occupation. Newspapers were told what they could and could not print, and most means of transportation, including the railways, and even the post office were controlled by the Japanese. To pay for their war, the Japanese were importing into China huge quantities of heroin, a highly addictive and dangerous drug; in Tientsin, and other Chinese cities, many people had become addicted.
Despite what was happening in Tientsin, Eric continually reminded himself that Flo and the girls were much safer there than out in Siao Chang with him.
In January 1939, the hospital was in crisis. It was the middle of a particularly harsh winter, and the hospital was heated by coal-fired hot-water heaters. The Japanese in the surrounding countryside decided to steal the hospital’s supply of coal to keep themselves warm. On the Great Plain of North China in winter, a hospital can’t function for long without heat. Something had to be done about the situation at once.
Eric volunteered to return to the London Missionary Society headquarters in Tientsin to get the money needed to buy more coal to replace what the Japanese had stolen. He knew it would be a dangerous journey that would take him through territory controlled by different armies. In one particular place, he would have to travel over a tract of land that was held by the Communists. In addition, the railway lines that ran along both sides of the land were controlled by the Japanese.
Eric set out early on a Monday morning and got into difficulty almost immediately. He was confronted by a group of Japanese soldiers who demanded to know what a foreigner was doing roaming the Chinese countryside in the dead of winter. Eric explained who he was, and the soldiers all laughed at him. They told him to take off his shoes and jacket so they could search them. They found nothing that interested them and finally let him go. But the same situation soon repeated itself, this time with Communist soldiers. It happened several more times with different patrols before Eric reached Tientsin. Eric began to wonder how he would ever make it back to Siao Chang with a large sum of money. The first men to search him would surely steal it.
After several days of train rides, cart rides, and boat rides, Eric finally made it the four hundred miles to Tientsin. Once safely there, he hurried to visit Flo and the children. It was a wonderful reunion. They had not seen each other for eight months. Four-year-old Patricia proudly showed her daddy how she could write her name, and three-year-old Heather sang every song she had learned at Sunday school. Eric loved being home again with his family.
The next day, Eric went to the London Missionary Society headquarters to report on the situation at the hospital and the need for money to buy more coal. The director told Eric that rather than take the money back to Siao Chang to buy coal, he should take a ferryboat south to Tehchow to buy coal there. Then he should hire a barge and have it towed through the rivers and canals back to Siao Chang. That way he would be able to get much more coal for the money.
Eric spent the next two days with his family. At first Heather was shy, but soon she was calling him Daddy and cuddling up on his knee. At the end of the two days, it broke Eric’s heart to leave his family again, but he had no choice. The hospital had to have coal to provide heat, or many patients could die.
Eric’s journey back started well. The ferryboat trip was uneventful, and Eric was able to buy a good amount of coal in Tehchow and still have some money left over. He hired a barge onto which the coal was loaded, and then he hopped aboard for the journey inland. The land alongside the river was occupied by the various armies, each of which demanded a toll from the river traffic that passed by their location. The remainder of Eric’s money started to disappear as fast as it was handed over to pay tolls. Then, during the first night on the barge, something else disappeared: half the coal! Bandits had made off with it while Eric slept. Eric was discouraged but not ready to give up. The following day, though, bandits attacked again. This time Eric was held at gunpoint while the bandits took the rest of the coal from the barge. Before they left, the bandits also took the last of Eric’s money. Eric had no choice. He left the barge and headed back to Tientsin to try again.
This time, Eric decided not to bring any coal back with him. It would be better to buy less coal for the money when he got back to the hospital than to arrive with a barge and no coal. Eric was also determined not to be robbed again, so he hid the money in a hollowed-out loaf of French bread that poked innocently from the top of his knapsack. The trip turned out to be uneventful until about seventy miles from Siao Chang. The train Eric was riding on suddenly shuddered to a halt. Eric and the other passengers climbed out to see what the problem was, hoping it was nothing serious, as it was snowing outside and they did not want to be stopped for long. Eric couldn’t see very far in front of him because of the snow, but news filtered back to where he stood stomping his feet to keep warm. It was bad news. Some Chinese peasants had sabotaged the railroad tracks as a way to get back at the Japanese. They had torn up a large section of the rails, and a freight train had run off the end of the tracks and lay in a crumpled heap directly in front of them.
Soon the conductor confirmed that this was indeed what had happened. He then told the passengers that the train would back up to the last station they had passed and wait for the tracks to be repaired, though no one seemed to know how long that would be. If any of the passengers wanted to continue with their journey, they would have to walk along the torn-up tracks and wait at the other end for another train, which would then back up in the direction they were headed. Eric knew he had to keep going; the need for coal at the hospital was serious by now, so he swung his knapsack with the French bread still sticking out of it onto his back and headed up the tracks with a dozen other passengers.
