The passengers sat on deck for three hours before the captain gave the all clear signal. They were then allowed to enter the dining room for lunch. No sooner had Eric lifted Heather into her highchair than the ship’s horn blared out again. Someone yelled that the radio officer had received a message that another ship had been hit by a torpedo, and everyone rushed out to the lifeboats again. Eric and Flo tried to keep their children calm. Since everything about the ship and its routine was new to the girls, they did not find it strange at all to be sitting on the deck in rows. Eric smiled as he played with Patricia; for all she knew, this could be what people always did aboard ship!
By this time, it seemed to Eric that the ships were in more danger bunched up in a convoy than they would be as lone ships on a big ocean. Apparently the captains of the ships agreed, because at about 3 p.m., the word was given for the ships to fall out of formation and each one to make her own way to Canada.
The Liddell family sat with the other passengers and watched the ships steam away that had flanked them port and starboard for two-and-a-half days. Soon not a single ship was in sight. Everyone was still sitting on deck at 6 p.m. when another message came over the ship’s radio. The ship that had been sailing parallel to theirs on the port side in the convoy had been torpedoed and was sinking. Flo squeezed Eric’s hand when the passengers heard the news. She and Eric both knew it could just as easily have been their ship that was hit and was sinking.
Ten minutes later, they received almost the same message, only this time it was a different ship that had been torpedoed and sunk. Eric began to wonder whether he and his family would all die at sea. Their ship steamed on hour after hour, straining for every bit of speed. The captain hoped that he had outrun the last U-boat, but he couldn’t be sure. That night, the passengers were told to sleep on the deck fully dressed and wearing their lifejackets. They were each given a few minutes to run below to get blankets and pillows from their cabin. It was a long night. The seas were still rough, and the ship lurched from side to side as she continued to maintain a zigzag pattern.
The next morning, the sea was calmer, and everyone felt a little safer. The ship was well out of U-boat range. Only a large seagoing submarine could torpedo her now, but such ships did not prowl that far north in the Atlantic Ocean.
Three days later was Canadian Thanksgiving Day. That morning, the captain asked Eric to conduct a special service. Everyone aboard had a lot to be thankful for. The ship was still afloat and now not far from her destination.
Also that morning, Patricia and Heather awoke with red dots on their faces. They had measles. This meant more complications for the Liddells, since people arriving in Canada from a foreign country had to go into quarantine if they were sick. When the ship finally docked in Nova Scotia, the family was ordered into a Red Cross center instead of traveling on to Flo’s parents’ home. Since there was no bedding at the center, once again everyone slept in his or her clothes. The following morning the family was released and allowed to travel on to Toronto.
The Liddells had a short visit with Flo’s parents in Toronto. They would like to have stayed longer, but they were due back in China by the end of October. Mr. and Mrs. McKenzie did not try to dissuade their daughter and son-in-law from returning to China, but they did worry about their safety. From what they had heard from their missionary friends still living there, China was becoming a more dangerous place with each passing day.
Chapter 14
Enemies
The Siao Chang to which Eric returned at the end of October 1940 was not the same place he had left a year before. A high wall now surrounded the entire town, which was patrolled day and night by guards. The Japanese had decided to occupy Siao Chang and turn it into a garrison town and command center for road building in the area.
Until that time, the roads that linked the villages on the Great Plain were narrow, winding, and unpaved. They wound carefully around gardens and ancient cemeteries. Cemeteries were very important to the Chinese people of the Great Plain. The people carefully tended and protected them, that is, until the Japanese decided that straight, paved roads across the plain would help them get their troops and provisions from one place to another faster. Such new roads would be wide enough and flat enough for motor vehicles instead of the customary carts and mules. Motor vehicles and tanks, the Japanese hoped, would help them win the war. All able-bodied men, women, and children in Siao Chang were forced to help build the new roads. They shoveled dirt and moved huge rocks by hand. The work was both backbreaking, and heartbreaking. While the Japanese guards played cards and told each other jokes, their Chinese forced laborers were made to hack roads through the most sacred thing in their lives: their ancestors’ graves.
Eric felt sick when he heard what the Japanese had done. He was glad he had come back. The Chinese people now more than ever needed some good news. Somehow they had to find meaning in their lives in the midst of such cruelty and hatred. Eric knew that the truth of the gospel message could give them that meaning.
Some things did go on as “normal,” though. Couples were married, babies were born, and funeral services were held. Soon after he had returned, Eric was invited to a nearby village to attend the wedding of a couple he knew well. The ceremony went fine, and the wedding party paid no attention to the blast of heavy artillery less than a mile away. In the joy of the wedding, the outside world was ignored for a few hours.
Eric had planned to return to Siao Chang later that night after the wedding. However, when he heard that the Communist army was out in force, he decided to spend the night. The next morning he set out for home on his bicycle. A friend who had also attended the wedding rode with him. They were about halfway to Siao Chang when Eric heard the ping of bullets around him. Immediately, he slammed on his brakes and yelled for his friend to do the same. Both men jumped off their bicycles, and as they did so, more bullets whizzed around them. Then suddenly the hail of bullets abruptly stopped. Eric and his friend heard a rustle in the bushes at the side off the road, and several Chinese men sheepishly crawled out of the undergrowth. They immediately began apologizing to Eric and his friend. Apparently, they had mistaken the two of them on their bicycles for members of the Japanese army. As Eric and his friend leapt from their bikes, the Chinese men were able to get a good look at them, realized their mistake, and stopped firing. After they had apologized, Eric and his friend rode on. As he rode, Eric thought about what had happened. No one was safe anymore. Something as simple as riding back from a wedding could get a person killed. Eric was just glad the Chinese men had been such poor shots!
Eric wrote often to Flo in Tientsin. In his letters he tried to explain to her how things had changed in Siao Chang and how important he felt his missionary work was. “I now go to the southwest to a part I never visited before. When I am out it is giving, giving, giving all the time, and trying to get to know the people, and trying to leave them a message of encouragement and peace in a time when there is no external peace at all,” he wrote in one letter to Flo.
The closer the Japanese forces got to completing their roads, the worse their behavior got. Officers no longer seemed to care about keeping their troops in order. Drunken soldiers would lurch into the hospital looking for patients or nurses to harass, their long swords gleaming menacingly at their sides. Many villages around Siao Chang were bombed to the ground, and a constant stream of injured and dying people entered the hospital. So many people needed medical help that Eric was pressed into service in the hospital as a nursing assistant. He learned to boil surgical instruments to sterilize them and to change dressings like an expert. He enjoyed his work in the hospital; it gave him time to share his faith with the patients. But there were dangers, too.
One day Annie Buchan, hospital matron, walked into the operating theater looking for a doctor. She found him pinned against a wall with a Japanese soldier beating him over the head with a baton. Annie sprang forward without thinking. “I want this doctor,” she demanded loudly.
Startled to be spoken to in such a way by a short, white woman, the soldier stepped back and then stormed out of the room. Annie tended to the doctor’s wounds. Although the situation ended “happily,” the hospital staff, including Eric, began to wonder about their long-term safety as the situation around them continued to worsen.
Finally, five months after Eric returned to Siao Chang, the Japanese ordered all foreigners out of the area. The hospital that had treated anyone in need, including Japanese soldiers, had to be evacuated. The missionaries were given two weeks to get out and told they could take nothing with them. As the missionaries left, they handed the keys of the hospital over to the Japanese, wondering what would happen to the sick and wounded people of the district now that there was no one to take care of them. It was obvious that the Japanese would not open the building up as a hospital again. In fact, it was never used again. Several months later, the building was burned to the ground.
The London Missionary Society staff from Siao Chang scattered. Some, like Eric’s brother Robert and his family, took long overdue furloughs while others went to work in different hospitals and clinics. Some, like Eric, went to Tientsin. Back in Tientsin, Eric had a long talk with Flo. It was obvious that the Japanese were becoming more hostile towards Europeans, and Eric did not feel that it was safe for Flo to stay in China any longer, especially now that she was expecting their third child. There were also rumors that the Japanese were considering ordering all foreigners into internment camps. Eric could not bear the thought of his wife giving birth under such conditions. At first Flo was reluctant to leave, but in the end, she came to agree with Eric. It would be much safer for her and the girls back in Canada. When the war was finally over, she would return to China.
Escorting Flo and his daughters to the ship that would take them to Canada was probably the most difficult thing Eric Liddell ever had to do in his life. Five-year-old Patricia skipped along beside him as they climbed the gangway to board the ship, and Heather gave him a big grin when he lifted her onto the top bunk in their cabin. Before Eric and Flo had time to say everything they wanted to say to each other, the ship’s whistle sounded. It was the signal for all visitors to disembark so that the gangway could be lowered and the ship made ready to sail.
Eric sat on the bottom bunk and pulled Patricia onto his knee. He looked into her big blue eyes, which were almost identical to his own. “Now, Tricia,” he said, choking back tears. “I want you to look after Mummy and help her with Heather and the new baby.”
Patricia gave him a big hug. “Yes, Daddy, I’ll take care of Mummy until you come back,” she said bravely.
Flo turned away so that the children would not see her tears.
Hand in hand, the family finally walked back out onto deck, where Eric kissed his wife good-bye. He gave her one last hug and whispered in her ear, “Those who love God never meet for the last time.”
Flo nodded as she fought back her tears. She knew she had to be strong, both for Eric and for the children.
After the ship had sailed, Eric returned to Tientsin with a heavy heart. He was sure he had done the right thing sending his family away to safety, but it had been so difficult to say good-bye, not knowing exactly when he would see them again. Since he could not go back to Siao Chang, Eric stayed with a teacher from the Anglo-Chinese college. Once again he was living in the French concession, where he had spent so many happy times with his parents and family when he had first returned to China.
