At first Eric laughed when Annie told him he was working too hard, but before long, his body seemed to be telling him the same thing. He began to get bad headaches, and even the smell of food made him sick. He would lie for hours on his bed with a wet cloth over his eyes. The children who came to ask Uncle Eric to referee a game of cricket or mend a broken hockey stick yet again were stunned when they were told he was too sick to help them. It sounded impossible. Uncle Eric was always the one helping sick people.
Christmas 1944 came and went, and Eric felt a little better, but he never fully recovered. Then in January, just after his forty-third birthday, he came down with what the doctors thought was a case of the flu, which many other people had at that time. More internees were getting sick than ever before, partly because the tide of the war was turning against the Japanese. As a result, the Japanese were less organized and had less money and resources to keep their foreign prisoners alive and well fed.
By February, most of the internees at Weihsien Internment Camp were malnourished, and the doctors were constantly trying new ideas to get vitamins and minerals, especially for the children. Nothing was wasted. Many of the children had little enamel left on their teeth because of the lack of calcium in their diet. To help with this situation, eggshells were crushed into a powder and spooned into the mouths of unwilling children. Peanut shells were ground up, too, and used as flour to make bread. If this bread was eaten hot, it was digestible, but if it was left to cool, it became as hard as a rock!
In February, Red Cross parcels were delivered to the camp. After devouring the food contained in them, for the first time in weeks, most of the internees felt stronger and were able to work again, but not Eric. The good food seemed to make no difference to him at all. Then, after several weeks in the hospital, Eric had a small stroke. The doctors began to suspect that there was something seriously wrong with him, but they did not have the equipment to diagnose the problem.
After the stroke, Eric started to feel a little better. The doctor gave him permission to get out of bed and go for short walks around the compound. The next day, Eric wrote a letter to Flo. He told her he had been working too hard and the doctors suggested he do something less stressful. In the letter he sent his love to Flo, Patricia, Heather, and Maureen, whom he had not yet seen. Very slowly, he walked to the camp post office and mailed the letter, which was postmarked February 21, 1945.
Later that day, a little girl whose parents were London Missionary Society missionaries came to visit Eric. She sat and chattered to Uncle Eric for a while. Suddenly, Eric began to cough and couldn’t stop. The girl got scared and raced into the hallway to find a nurse or doctor. Annie Buchan came running to her old friend’s side. She held Eric’s hand. Eric looked up at her and said, “Annie, it is surrender.” Somehow Annie knew what he meant. Eric was about to die. Soon after, he fell into a coma. At half past nine that night, Eric Liddell “surrendered” and died.
The next morning the camp was covered with a beautiful dusting of snow. As the internees gathered for morning roll call, the news of Eric’s death spread throughout the camp. After roll call, many people stood in small groups, too stunned at the news to even go inside out of the cold. For days, the camp mourned.
Eric Liddell’s funeral service was held on Saturday, February 24, 1945, three days after his death. A. P. Cullen led the service. Perhaps no one outside of the Liddell family knew Eric as well or for as long as he had. He had been a teacher at Eltham College in London and had known Eric as a ten-year-old schoolboy there. Later in life, the two of them had served together as teachers at the Anglo-Chinese college. They had also shared an apartment after Flo and the girls had left for Canada. Years before, Eric had told A. P. Cullen that he wanted “Be Still My Soul” sung at his funeral. The congregation sang the hymn softly as the schoolchildren formed an honor guard for the pallbearers carrying Eric’s coffin to walk through.
About thirty funerals were held in Weihsien Internment Camp. Eric Liddell’s was the largest by far. It seemed that everyone had a special reason to remember this exceptional man.
Chapter 17
A Very Special Person
Two months later, Florence Liddell was standing in the kitchen of her parents’ home in Toronto, where she was staying. Two family friends knocked at the door, and Flo invited them in. From the expression on their faces, Flo guessed something was wrong. As she dried her hands on a dish towel, she tired to imagine what it could be. She never thought for a single moment that her friends had come to tell her about her husband’s death.
As soon as she heard the news, Flo began to shudder. She felt as though something had grabbed her stomach and was squeezing it. As she slumped into a chair, huge sobs began to erupt. Flo wept bitterly, trying to come to terms in her heart and her mind with what she had just heard. How could it be? The last time she had seen Eric he was a strong, healthy thirty-eight-year-old man. Now she had to accept the fact that he’d died in a Japanese internment camp. It hardly seemed possible. Flo’s visitors explained that the doctors in Weihsien had performed an autopsy on Eric’s body and had found a massive tumor on the left side of Eric’s brain. Flo took some comfort in this. As a nurse, she knew that in 1945 there was nothing that could have been done to save Eric’s life, not even in the most modern hospital in the world.
“The Flying Scotsman, Dead at 43.” These words, printed in large black type, stopped many Scottish men and women in their tracks as they walked past newspaper stands from Edinburgh to Glasgow. The newspapers rushed to outdo each other in praise for their departed national hero.
“Scotland has lost a son who did her proud every hour of his life,” reported the Glasgow Evening News. “One of the best known and most admired men who ever took part in sport, whose devotion to his principles won him the highest esteem,” declared the Edinburgh Evening News.
Just as the whole of Weihsien Internment Camp had mourned Eric’s death, so, it seemed, did all of Scotland. Memorial services were held in every city and village in the nation.
A national committee was formed to launch the Eric Liddell Memorial Fund. Collections were taken up at rugby games, foot races, school fairs, and church picnics. The money soon mounted up. Many people, both rich and poor, wanted to honor the memory of a man they were proud of. The money from the fund was for two things. First, money was given to Flo to help her raise the three daughters Eric had left behind. Second, a yearly prize was set up in Eric’s name: The Eric Liddell Challenge Trophy was awarded to the best performance of the year at the Scottish Schools Athletic Association Championship track meet.
Eltham College in London added an extension to one of its buildings and named it Liddell House.
On August 17, 1945, six months after Eric had been buried, the internees at Weihsien heard an airplane buzzing overhead. The schoolchildren raced outside and were soon joined by the cooks, clothes washers, and everyone else who was not in a hospital bed. The plane turned and swept low over the camp. It was a B-24 bomber, an American plane. The internees went wild with joy. They waved shirts and towels and yelled until they were hoarse. The plane turned again and this time came even closer. They people on the ground could see the pilot waving back to them. They could also read the name painted on the side of the plane: “Armored Angel.”
Suddenly the plane veered to the north and climbed steeply, as it if were going to fly off. But then a door on the side of the plane opened, and seven paratroopers jumped out.
The internees could not be stopped. They forgot all about the Japanese guards as they surged towards the massive gates that had held them captive for two years. The Japanese guards stepped back as the gates were pushed open. The prisoners ran towards the paratroopers. Within minutes, they found the GIs and hoisted them onto their shoulders. Amidst cheers and shouts, the GIs were paraded triumphantly back to camp. Everyone knew they were free. It was only a matter of time before they would see their families and their homelands again.
Over the next month, Weihsien Internment Camp was closed down. First the sick and elderly were shipped out, and then unaccompanied children, followed by families and single men and women. As they left, many people made one last trip to the graveyard where a simple wooden cross marked the grave of a man who had been too good of a friend to ever forget.
In the years to come, many of the internees at Weihsien would write books and magazine articles about their experiences. Even though there had been up to eighteen hundred people in the camp, every single written account of life at Weihsien includes memories of Eric Liddell. In A Boy’s War, David Mitchell tells how Uncle Eric would organize their sports meetings. In Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure, Gilkey Langdon writes that Eric Liddell was one of the few people in camp everyone trusted to be fair. In another book, Courtyard of the Happy Way, Norman Cliff writes of Eric: “The most outstanding Weihsien personality…in his early forties, quiet-spoken and with a permanent smile. Eric was the finest Christian man I have ever had the privilege of meeting.”
Finally, the famous British filmmaker Sir David Puttnam heard about the modest Scotsman who had impacted so many lives. He decided to make a movie about Eric which he called Chariots of Fire. In 1981, the movie won the Academy Award for best picture.
Eric would probably have laughed if he had known a movie would be made about him. He never considered himself anything special. He was just a man who tried to honor God and help people in need. In the end, achieving those two simple goals made him a very special person to countless people around the world.
