Eric pulled the collar of his woolen coat around his face and braced himself against the cutting wind. The snow whipped into his eyes, making it hard to see. Eric and the other passengers formed a line and followed the bumps of the railroad ties that were visible in the snow. They walked on and on, mile after mile.
Finally, six miles from where they had started walking, they reached the end of the torn-up section of tracks. They soon realized, however, that they would have to walk on until they came to a station. If they waited for a train to come to the end of the tracks it might be derailed and wrecked just like the freight train had been. They kept walking until they would reach a station where the train would stop and they could tell the engineer to back up. It was another three miles to the station. It was getting colder, and night was falling when they arrived at the station. It was not the type of station Eric had hoped for. There was no building to shelter in—just a sign and a platform.
Eric and his fellow travelers slumped onto the platform. They huddled together to keep warm and constantly glanced down the railroad tracks, hoping to see a train. They had to wait through the night until around noon the following day before they finally heard the unmistakable rumble of a steam engine through the silence of the snow-draped countryside.
The train stopped beside the station platform. The engineer was surprised to see a group of snow-covered people huddling together for warmth. He was not surprised, though, to hear about the torn-up railroad tracks. An army needs supplies, and destroying the tracks to prevent trains from getting through to the front lines was an easy way to hurt the Japanese.
Eric climbed onto the train and collapsed into a seat. He just wanted to get back to the hospital so that he could sleep. The train began to back up, and three hours later, Eric recognized the station at Siao Chang. He had made it back safely, and with all the money. From the station he hired a cart to take him to the hospital compound.
At the hospital, Eric reached into his knapsack and pulled out the loaf of French bread. He ripped it open, and a bundle of money fell out. After counting it, he proudly handed it over to the hospital director. It had been a difficult mission, but he had succeeded.
In fact, he had done such a good job he was asked to do it again. Two days later, Eric was sitting on a mule cart headed back to Tientsin. This time his assignment was to collect desperately needed medical supplies for the hospital.
Although still exhausted from the stress of the previous trip, Eric was excited. He could hardly wait to get to Tientsin. Before he set out, the hospital director had released him to take a long-awaited furlough with Flo and the girls as soon as the supplies had been safely delivered to the hospital. Eric was eager to tell Flo the good news. How wonderful it would be to spend a year away from the constant stress of war.
Eric made plans in his head for the furlough as he rumbled along on the mule cart. But he had no way of knowing then that far from leaving war behind when he and Flo and the two girls took their furlough, they would be headed into another war, a different war, a war that would nearly cost all four of them their lives.
Chapter 13
Across the Ocean
Is the whole world at war?” Florence Liddell asked her husband as they sat on the doorstep of her parents’ home in Toronto, Canada.
“It certainly seems like it,” replied Eric, reaching to put his arm around his wife. They both looked down at their two little daughters playing happily in their grandmother’s garden.
Eric sighed deeply. He had arrived in Canada just in time to hear the worst possible news. On September 3, 1939, Britain and France had declared war on Germany, starting what would become the Second World War. Seven days later, Canada also declared war on Germany. It felt to Eric, as he sat on the doorstep in the hot afternoon sun, that his whole life had been punctuated by war. The Boxer Rebellion was in progress when he was born, World War I occurred while he was attending high school, and the Sino-Japanese War had been in progress most of his married life. And now there was a new war in Europe.
At least there was no threat of fighting in Canada, so Eric decided to leave Flo and the girls in Toronto for several months while he went on to the United Kingdom. There he would give a full report of his work in China at the London Missionary Society headquarters in London and then do the expected public speaking in churches and at clubs. When this was all done, Flo, Patricia, and Heather would join Eric in Scotland, where they would have five months to rest and spend time with Eric’s mother, Jenny, and Ernest.
All went as planned. Before heading for London, Eric visited his mother in Edinburgh. They both thought the other had changed. Eric was shocked to see that his mother, whom he had not seen for nine years, had aged considerably. His mother now had white hair and seemed to be shorter than ever. She was glad to see Eric and hear all about his family. Even though Eric had written to her every week and told her most things in his letters, there was something about sharing family news in person. She told Eric he looked balder than ever and joked that his baldness probably wasn’t due to too many hot showers after all. She also said that he was quieter than he had been on his last furlough. After she had heard some of the things he had experienced in Siao Chang, she understood why. Living in a war zone was very sobering. She herself had lived through the ravages of the Boxer Rebellion in China.
The time passed quickly for Eric. He was just as popular as ever, but the crowds that gathered to hear him speak as he toured Scotland, England, and Wales behaved differently from those of nine years before. They listened carefully as he spoke about his war experiences, and they asked him what it was like to live under occupation and how the enemy had treated him. Eric answered their questions as best he could, sensing they were searching for answers about what their own futures might hold. No one could be sure what Adolf Hitler, fuhrer from Nazi Germany, would do next. Already Hitler’s troops had overrun and occupied large portions of Europe, and people in Great Britain were wondering whether it might be the next country to be captured.
In March 1940, Florence and the girls joined Eric. They spent five wonderful months in Scotland. Grannie Liddell finally got to meet her two granddaughters. She loved to read to them and fuss over them. Meanwhile, Aunt Jenny took her two nieces shopping for fabric and made them each new dresses for the trip back to China.
While home, the family also attended Elsa McKechnie’s wedding. It was a wonderful day filled with memories for Eric. The schoolgirl who had started the Official Eric Liddell Fan Club was now a married woman.
Finally, the time came for the four of them to return to China. It was the hardest parting ever for Eric. His mother was getting old, and he had a strange feeling he would never see her again. The girls had also loved the attention of their extended family, and no one was sure what kind of country they might return to on their next furlough.
To return to China, the Liddells planned to sail across the Atlantic Ocean to Nova Scotia, Canada, then take a train to Toronto to say good-bye to Flo’s parents. From there they would continue on by train across Canada to the Pacific Coast, where they would board another ship for the trip across the Pacific Ocean to China. There was just one problem. Now that Great Britain was at war with Germany, no vessel crossing the Atlantic Ocean was safe. German submarines, or U-boats, as they were called, had orders to sink any ship flying the British flag. It made no difference whether it was a navy ship or a privately owned merchant vessel. German U-boats had already sunk many British ships.
Since crossing the Atlantic Ocean by ship had become such a risky business, two important safety measures had been put in place. First, all ships now traveled in convoys, that is, large groups of vessels all sailing together. In so doing, ships were able to help each other keep a lookout for U-boats and rescue survivors from any ship unlucky enough to be torpedoed. Second, all convoys were escorted by battleships from the Royal Navy until they were two days out from the coast of Great Britain. The U-boats did not have the equipment on board for long voyages, and so most of the time they stayed within two days’ sailing of the coast.
The Liddells traveled to Liverpool, where they boarded the small ship that would take them across the Atlantic Ocean. Three hundred other passengers and crew were aboard. Eric studied the ship carefully as he climbed the gangway to board her. The ship looked seaworthy enough, and perhaps being so small, she would be hard to hit with a torpedo from a U-boat.
Fifty ships were in the convoy, and it took a little coordinating to get them all collected into a flotilla. The ships formed five lines of ten ships each. The Liddells’ ship was near the back of the middle line of ships. In formation, the ships all sailed through the Irish Sea, around the south coast of Ireland, and out into the Atlantic. Their escort of Royal Navy warships steamed along beside the two outside rows of ships.
As they sat outside after dinner on their first night, Eric marveled at how strange it was to be sailing in a convoy. Every time he’d made a trip on a ship before, the vessel had been sailing alone on a large ocean. On several occasions, Eric had completed an entire voyage without seeing another ship. But now, here he was on a ship surrounded by many other ships. It felt like they were part of a floating city.
Eric and Flo had just finished tucking the girls into their bunks that night when they felt an enormous jolt, and the whole ship shuddered. Eric told Flo to stay with the girls while he sprinted up on deck to see what had happened, although he already had a good idea. The deck was swarming with passengers, all asking the same question. Eventually, they gathered in the dining room, where the first officer joined them. The officer announced that the captain was sure that the ship had been struck by a torpedo, but for some reason the weapon had not exploded. The captain did not think it had done any structural damage to the ship, but they had gone to red alert just in case. All of the ships in the convoy were going to start zigzag maneuvers. Eric knew that ships under attack zigzagged to make them harder targets. He raced below deck to tell Flo the news.
Nothing further happened that night, but two mornings later, they awoke to bad news. One of the ships at the back of the convoy had been sunk during the night. Later that morning, everyone aboard watched quietly as the Royal Navy warships that had escorted them out into the Atlantic Ocean left the convoy and headed back towards England. They were now forty-nine ships alone in a hostile ocean. They were hopeful, though, that they were now out of range of German U-boats.
Nervously, the convoy moved forward. The sea had become rough, which everyone aboard knew make it difficult to spot submarines. At 11 a.m., the passengers and crew heard a loud boom. Looking in the direction of the sound, they saw a cloud of black smoke rising above the waves. The ship’s horn began to sound, and everyone on deck knew what the signal meant. The passengers hurried to grab their lifejackets. Eric and Flo struggled to get Patricia and Heather into theirs. Even though the ship had children’s sized lifejackets, the jackets were still much too big for Patricia and Heather, causing their arms to stick straight out from their sides.
Half an hour later, the passengers were all sitting in neat rows on deck in front of the lifeboats, ready to abandon ship at a moment’s notice. The entire convoy was zigzagging trying to outwit the U-boat that was patrolling farther out in the Atlantic Ocean than expected. News soon spread among the passengers and crew that the ship at the back of their line had been sunk. The torpedo had probably hit the ship in the boiler, because the ship had exploded and gone down in less than two minutes, too quickly for anyone to be saved.
