After this, slopping in puddles, wet to the bone, angry but intensely curious, we were guided by a guard to our new "permanent" quarters. These were better by far than the wet basement room of the previous night, but still hardly ideal. In three small 9-by-12-foot rooms, dirty beyond description, we eleven bachelors were crammed into a space comfortable for only four or five people. There were the same bare walls and floors, only our suitcases to sit on and our straw mats to lie on—and no sign of any heating. It was messy, bleak, cold, and wet. Until our beds arrived two weeks later, every place in camp was like that.

The wonder is that flu or pneumonia did not decimate this vulnerable population. Fortunately, I was young and had warm clothes. It certainly never occurred to us to take anything off when we slept on the floor. Thus at the end of two or three days we looked just as bedraggled and unkempt as did the internees we had held in scorn upon our entry into camp.

This existence was of the greatest conceivable contrast to all that had gone before in my life, and the same was true for almost everyone there.

Brought up in the comfort of an upper-middle-class professional home at a large Midwestern American university, where my father had been Dean of the Chapel, I had been waited on by maids at home and in the opulence of pre-war Harvard College from which I graduated with an A.B. in 1940 just before coming to China to teach English at Yenching. In twenty-four years I had known little else than steam heat, running hot and cold water, a toilet in the next room, good food, clean clothing, plenty of space, and a quiet, academic existence. Only occasionally, when cruising or camping, had these comforts of civilization been absent. These periods, however, were short, voluntary, and such fun that they made no lasting imprint. Life to me, as to most of the camp, was civilization. Existence on any other terms was almost inconceivable. But at Weihsien all the vast interconnected services of civilization had vanished, and with them had gone every one of our creature comforts.

If this great crowd of people were to survive, much less to live a passable life, a civilization of some sort would have to be created from scratch. Gradually the nature of the problem facing our community dawned on me. As it did so, everything took on an intensity and excitement I had not known before. Thus for a healthy young man those first weeks of camp were an absorbing experience—physically no worse than army life in the field and yet much more interesting. However, for men and women in their late sixties and seventies in the single dorms, for the sick or the incapacitated, and above all, for the babies and children and their troubled mothers, those first weeks, with no heat and no beds, were a nightmare which I am sure none of them can recall to this day without shuddering.

When the last group arrived in camp about a week later, we numbered almost two thousand people. The implications of such a population figure staggered us, crowded as we were into an area hardly larger than a city block, and quite without visible means of caring for ourselves. What was worse, a closer look at the compound in which we found ourselves only increased the sense of anxiety for our survival. The equipment that was there upon our arrival was in such bad condition that it seemed an almost impossible task to get it started again.

With so many people living in such unsanitary conditions and eating dubious food at best, we expected a disaster in public health any day. The greatest need was for a working hospital. The doctors and the nurses among us grasped this at once, and so began the tremendous job of organizing a hospital more or less from scratch. Perhaps because the mission hospital building had contained the most valuable equipment, it was in a worse state than any of the others. The boilers, beds, and pipes had been ripped from their places and thrown about everywhere. The operating table and the dental chair were finally found at the bottom of a heap at the side of the building. None of the other machinery or surgical equipment was left intact. Under these conditions, considering that there was as yet no organization of labor in the camp, it is astounding that these medics and their volunteers were able to do what they did. Inside of eight days they had the hospital cleaned up and functioning so as to feed and care for patients. In two more days they had achieved a working laboratory. At the end of ten days they were operating with success, and even delivering babies. This was, however, not quite quick enough to save a life. Four days after the last group arrived, a member of the jazz band from Tientsin had an acute attack of appendicitis. Since the hospital was not yet ready for an operation, he was sent to Tsingtao six hours away by train, but unfortunately he died on the way.

Another serious matter was the simple problem of going to the toilet. For a population of about two thousand, there was at first only one latrine for women and three for men—the Japanese had expected a great preponderance of men over women. In each of these latrines there were only five or six toilets, none of them flush toilets. Needless to say, the queues for this unavoidable aspect of life were endless. When the poor internee finally reached his goal after a long and nervous wait in line, he found the toilet so overflowing that often he felt sick and to his despair had to leave unrequited. I recall clearly my relief that a providential case of constipation during the first ten days of camp saved me from having to test the strength of my stomach.

The sole contact the average urban Western man has with human excrement consists of a curious look at what he has produced, a swirl of water, and a refreshing bar of soap. Consequently the thought of wading into a pool of his fellow man's excrement in order to clean up a public john not equipped with flush toilets is literally inconceivable. And so the situation grew progressively worse. It would have continued so had not some Catholic priests and nuns, aided by a few of the Protestant missionaries, tied cloths around their faces, borrowed boots and mops, and tackled this horrendous job.

This doughty crew stayed with it until some of the camp engineers, taking hold in a professional way, freed us all from this daily horror. After huddling long hours over this emergency— unrehearsed at M.I.T. or the Royal College for Engineers—they devised a means of hand-flushing the toilets after each use with a half bucket of water.

But of all the basic needs of life whose resolution had to be organized, the most vital and difficult was the problem of eating. The camp had to keep right on feeding itself while it was learning to do so. In the area of health and sanitation we had trained personnel in the camp, but practically none of our two thousand people knew much about quantity cooking in cauldrons for six or seven hundred, or baking in coal ovens for two thousand. Legend has it that a restaurant owner from Tsingtao taught the raw volunteers in their kitchen how to make soups and stews, and that in our Peking group's kitchen, an ex-marine cook introduced our workers to the finer mysteries of the culinary art. Our food those first two weeks certainly substantiated the latter story!

Meanwhile, the bakery was also struggling to get underway. For the first week we were provided with bread baked in Tsingtao. Since this supply was to stop on a set date, our own bakery operation had to be organized in a hurry, for bread was the only solid food in our life. Our population, luckily, happened to include two aged Persian bakeshop owners from Tientsin. These men spent forty-eight hours straight training two shifts of green recruits to mix, knead, and bake the four hundred daily loaves necessary to feed everyone. Within another week, these amateur bakers had mastered the essentials of their craft. Thereafter, while the good yeast lasted, our camp bakery turned out what we all proudly assumed to be the best bread in China.

Thus it was with all the labor in the camp during those first days. Jobs which had to be done were at first taken in hand by experienced people who alone knew how to handle them, and therefore alone saw the real need. Later, when work was organized and every able person was assigned a task, inexperienced people were trained in the new crafts. Thus bank clerks, professors, salesmen, missionaries, importers, and executives became bakers, stokers, cooks, carpenters, masons, and hospital orderlies. There was also a great deal of heavy unskilled work such as lugging supplies from the gates to the utilities and cleaning up the compound. Work of this sort, while largely voluntary at first, was soon organized so that in a short while everyone had a set job with a routine and regular hours. With such a thoroughgoing organizational plan, the most vital material needs of these two thousand people soon began to be met. The first rude form of our camp's civilization started to appear.

For about the first six months, this sudden dive into the world of manual labor was for the majority of us perhaps the most valuable experience. All manual labor in China, skilled and unskilled, was done by Chinese. Therefore the foreign population in that land included no "working force." The majority of internees were either men accustomed to executive work in offices or women used to the help of innumerable Chinese servants around the house. To be forced to do hard physical labor, often outdoors, was a new experience. We all discovered what it was like to be worn out from work with our muscles and to return black and grimy, our clothing ripped and torn, from a day of hard labor.

In many ways, of course, this regime was good for all concerned, especially for those—and they were many—who had spent the last decade imbibing too many highballs on the club porch. Men with too much fat and sagging jowls soon found themselves lean again, tanned and hardened. At the other end of the scale, a derelict such as Briggs the junkie, lost his green color, put on weight and muscle, and looked a fine figure when he left camp in the repatriation of some Americans in August, 1943. Suddenly we had all become equally workers of the world, and although many of us were not apt to admit it then, most of us enjoyed it. As a Peking student, now a prominent professor of Chinese studies at Yale, said to me, "At least from now on I won't have to wince every time I carry my suitcases in the station!"

A word should be said about how we were housed, although I shall tell about this in greater detail in another chapter. Ironically enough, the spacious houses previously reserved for the foreign missionary staff in a walled-off section of the compound were now "out of bounds" to the Western internees; these were earmarked as the residences of our Oriental captors. The mission compound had, however, possessed three or four classroom buildings and innumerable rows of small rooms for the Chinese students of its boarding school. Here we lived. Families, which made up the bulk of our population, were housed in the 9-by-12foot rooms; single men and women lived dormitory style in the classrooms and offices of the school buildings.

Since the camp was hopelessly overpopulated for its space, and since the Japanese had made the original housing arrangements hurriedly, our first quarters were nearly impossible. In some of the dorms, men were jammed so closely together that they could hardly turn around. In even the best situation, every one of us in a dorm had only 18 inches between his bed and those on either side, and 3 feet at the end of his bed in which to keep all that he owned. In that little world, 9 feet by 54 inches, each single person had to keep intact all his possessions, and at the same time somehow to maintain his own personal being.

The problem of where to put everything was vexing but seldom insoluble. The cramped space meant that each person kept his clothes in suitcases under his bed, hauling them out every time he wanted to change his socks or his shirt. His larger and more precious belongings he usually put in his one trunk. If he could, he kept everything else that he owned in a massive edifice of shelves that rose to precarious heights on the wall above his head. Beds, like their owners, came in all shapes and sizes: some majestic and high, some low and cot like. A fellow named Sas Sloan in our last dorm (we moved three times) had a double bed despite the Japanese orders. As he told them, it was the only one he owned; and as he told us, it meant that come what may, he could have at least that much space to himself. The most clairvoyant internees had crated their beds before they sent them down, and so had a ready-made clothes closet or large shelf case when they stood their crates on end. Add to this the essential mosquito netting strung in summer high over each bed from four poles at the corners, and the water-filled tin cans that each bed leg was carefully placed in to keep out the voracious bedbugs, and the result was a picturesque sight that greeted any visitor to the larger men's dorms. Around the walls, beds of all description rocked like full-rigged sailing ships at anchor, and towering above each one of them, like temples perched on a cliff, rose the precious tiers of shelves.

Most difficult of all for the dorm resident of the single men's or women's dorms was the problem of preserving any sense of personal identity in a society of almost total strangers. While some were in their teens and twenties, most were in middle life—from forty to sixty-five; many were even older. The great majority of these dorm dwellers were middle-class persons accustomed to years of privacy and comfort, and so possessed of ingrained living habits.

Now suddenly each one found himself or herself thrown into a large room with strangers, most of whom came from radically divergent segments of society. For such a single person there was no hole into which he could crawl, no way to protect his privacy. Spiritually, and often physically, naked before twenty dorm mates, he had to live out the most private moments of his life surrounded by an alien and often prying world. And what was worse, he or she had to keep trying to adjust his own habits to the very different ones of his neighbors. To take the most earthy kind of example: the not unrare need to use a chamber pot at night within eighteen inches of your next neighbor and within nine feet of at least six other men, or women, was by no means easy either on the perpetrator or on those who lay there listening. The adjustment to these trials, not for a week or a month but for years, made tremendous demands on the patience and the nerves of the single people in the dorms. Even if one did not come to hate the people eighteen inches away from his private domain, the loneliness suffered by older persons crowded among diverse strangers and yet isolated from them, was almost worse than their potential enmity.

I recall, for example, as a member of the Quarters Committee, being called in to pacify a dorm of twenty-one single women about a month after camp began.

When I got there the fight was just over. Two groups were huddled at opposite ends of what had been an old classroom, each clustered around their champion and glaring hostilely at the enemy across the dorm. The woman who had greeted me at the door told me that one of them, a missionary from the Iowa farmlands, had roundly bested a rather chic British secretary. The two women were still panting; red, hot, mad, very much ashamed, and each a trifle wounded; they seemed not to know whether to fight, to cry, to apologize—or, as they would both have preferred at the moment, just quietly to die. Somewhat awestruck, I asked what it was all about, and was immediately set upon by ambassadors from each of the groups.

"Those ruddy missionaries," said the representative of the secretaries, "insisted not only on praying aloud at night, but on singing hymns when they awoke each morning, God help them, at six A.M.! We finally got damn well tired of this nonsense, and that is the cause of the fight."

"You know perfectly well it isn't," said an outraged British missionary woman. "They insisted on chattering endlessly at night in loud whispers when we were trying to sleep, as any normal woman should have been. And not only talking, but talking about all the lurid escapades, in their pasts—half of which I'm sure were imagined! [Swipes like that last one, I thought to myself, have not helped the situation!] And that started the fight!"

Quite unable to think of anything useful to say in this maelstrom of intense feelings, I looked around the room for some neutrals who might lend me some support. Over against another wall were four women who did not fit either the "capable business secretary" label or that of the pious missionary. Looking closer I recognized two of them as White Russian nightclub singers a Tientsin friend had pointed out to me a day or so earlier. The other two, I learned later, were rather well-known ladies-about-town. Wondering to myself how on earth three such diverse groups could ever get along inside the same four walls, I muttered something about the committee taking this matter under advisement, and fled. We partially solved the problem a week later by moving the most vociferous of the hymn singers into a predominantly missionary dorm.

In still another dorm, where the women were more homogeneous, I was called in to mark off in chalk on the floor the exact space belonging to each resident. Their reason: territorial aggression was occurring! Apparently someone had been moving trunks and shoving beds an inch at a time, perhaps at night when the rest were asleep or when the dorm was empty. In any event, several women eventually realized they had lost some six of their rightful eighteen inches. Finally one of them had taken a bead on a line from her bed across her trunk to the window and thence to a tree outside. When this line was breached one night, she and four angry mates stormed into our office demanding the return of their rightful territory. My markings on the floor held the boundaries firm for about a month. At that time I had to re-chalk them—such was the hostile pressure. For a middle-aged, unmarried woman to live in such an atmosphere compounded of loneliness and hostility was as close to hell on earth as I could imagine. The families in the camp were at least fortunate in that they lived surrounded by some semblance of affection and concern, whatever their other troubles.

During the first month of camp, explosions occurred continually in the women's dorms. In some cases, single rooms had to be found for the most difficult individuals, which was indeed unfair, since everyone in dorms yearned for such privacy. But no one could live with these two or three temperamental ones, and it solved none of our housing problems to put an easygoing person in a room alone. In general, however, the human ability to adjust is beyond belief. By the end of six months, nearly everyone in the camp had learned to live with almost anybody, and generally speaking existence in the dorms became in some way tolerable for all.

Often in those first months we in the quarter’s office puzzled about why the explosions were always generated in female rather than male dorms. Certainly the men complained as much, they disliked one another as much, and were, if anything, less saintly than the women. But there never occurred among them this sort of personal conflict, this stark inability to get along with another person or kind of person. Eventually, we concluded that at least two factors were at work here: First, in an objective, impersonal situation, such as a dorm, men feel more at home. Women, many of whom are made very nervous when their most basic relations with people are not organically close and personal, do not adjust so well to this objective environment. Consequently, men are likely to accept and even enjoy any large, male society such as a team, an army, or a dorm, more than women do a similar female society.

Second, it seemed evident that when two men disliked each other, as they often did, they tended to let one another alone. Perhaps this may be because with men the stakes are higher—if they needle an adversary, blows will be sure to follow. This is not the case with women—at least middle-class women. Thus to avoid continual and fruitless warfare, men in conflict in our dorms simply ignored each other. Like ships passing in the night, such men by tacit agreement moved through their lives in close proximity, each unaware of the existence of the other, as if they did not inhabit the same world. By contrast, hostile women could never refrain from continually needling and poking at each other, striking with sarcasm, innuendo, or even just with withering looks. At last one or the other would be unable to bear it longer, and would collapse into hysterics.

At the beginning, the camp gave the impression of an immense crowd of utter strangers. Certain uniquely interesting people, such as the three or four pretty girls who had caught my eye the first day, would stick in the memory. But most of the people I saw seemed no more than parts of an inchoate mass. Gradually, however, over the weeks, these people took on character. In such a small space, in two or three days' time one passed by everyone, and so the unfamiliar became familiar. In a few months, we came to know who everyone was and where he had come from.

It became evident that the whole anti-Axis population of North China, with the exception, of course, of the Chinese themselves, was here. It was as if a great dragnet had swept across the treaty ports of China—those coastal cities where concentrations of Europeans had long resided for commercial purposes and which, since at least World War I, had been ruled by British authorities, British law, and British police. This dragnet in 1943 scooped up all the rich variety of Western humanity that these cities then held—and dumped them in Weihsien camp. If the very sick stayed behind for a bit, when they got well, they came too.

Westerners had been coming to the Orient since, roughly, 1800. They came for every conceivable reason and in every conceivable role: as merchants, evangelists, teachers, tourists, adventurers; as members of an army corps, of an entertainment troupe, of an athletic team. Many of them came to escape something—revolution, bankruptcy, scandal, the police—and to disappear. This total conglomeration, chosen solely on the basis that they were there at the moment in time when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, constituted the camp population.

We were, in the words of the Britisher, "a ruddy mixed bag." We were almost equally divided in numbers between men and women. We had roughly four hundred who were over sixty years of age, and another four hundred under fifteen. Our oldest citizen, so I discovered, was in his middle nineties; our youngest was the latest baby born in the camp hospital.

We were equally diverse in our national and racial origins. At the start of camp, our population comprised about 800 Britons, 600 Americans, 250 Netherlanders and 250 Belgians (the major portion of the last two groups were Roman Catholic clerics of various sorts). In late August, 1943, however, six months after camp began; about two hundred Americans were repatriated on the Swedish ship Gripsholm via Goa in Portugese India. Two weeks later the majority of the Catholic clergy departed as well.

The cosmopolitan character of the camp was still maintained, however. After these departures and a large British contingent from Cheefoo had arrived, we were 1,490 persons, made up mainly of British (1,000) and Americans (200). Then, in December, 1943, to our great surprise, about one hundred Italians from Shanghai joined us, and were placed in a separate compound. Interspersed throughout were eight Belgian and two Dutch families, four Parsee families, two Cuban families—they had made up a touring jai alai team—a Negro and Hawaiian jazz band, a few Palestinian Jews, an Indian translator and interpreter, and about sixty White Russian women and their children. Most of these women were there because they had married British or American men. Among the British population were many Eurasians, since everyone born in Tientsin was automatically able to receive a British passport if he wished to identify himself with that community.

The most obvious diversity lay in the differences in the social status which each of us had enjoyed in the outside world. As we could see from the first moment, our group ranged up and down the entire social ladder. Our members included some from the well-to-do leaders of Asia's colonial business world and the genteel products of English "public school" life. More were from the Anglo-Saxon middle classes (represented by small-business men, customs officials, engineers, exporters, lawyers, doctors, and shopkeepers), and not a few from among the dopers, barflies, and raffish characters of the port cities. Mingling with this secular pot pourri were some four hundred Protestant missionaries. They embraced almost all denominations, theologies, and ways of life. Also, for the first six months, there were the four hundred Roman priests, monks, and nuns.

In taking the camp census for the Quarters Committee, I found, for example, in one row of eight 9-by-12 rooms the following divergent backgrounds. In Room 1, a rough volatile Russian woman and her daughter (she was a widow of a British soldier and so had British papers). In Room 2, the wealthy vice- president of a British mining company, who was slow of wit, honest, and hard-working; also his attractive red-haired wife and their two small children. Room 3 held a Mrs. Johnson and her three children. She was half Portuguese and half Chinese, barely able to speak English. She had married an American army man, and had tried to manage for her children after he abandoned her long before in Tientsin. She told me that the 9-by-12 room in which the four of them lived was the best she'd had since her husband's disappearance. In Room 4 was a well-to-do, elegant, retired British couple with a hyphenated name, the W. T. RoxbyJoneses. He was a wonderful man and cut an extraordinary figure. A kind of tattered and aging William Powell sporting a White Guard's mustache, he was suave, urbane, humorous, coolheaded, and yet very warm. He was also a capable artist and, when he was not on duty managing the bakery, taught painting classes to all of us who were interested. Rooms 5 and 6 contained an orthodox but completely lovable Australian Salvation Army Colonel, his round wife, and their three bright children. In Room 7 was another British business family of four in one room. And finally at the end of the row was an American, formerly of the 15th Infantry, a very tough and bitter character—though a very good softball player—and his rather sullen, slatternly but probably once sensual Russian wife.

In Row No. 47, where some of the single men were first housed, the following trios of bachelors were crowded next to each other in 9-by-12 rooms. In the first were three Britishers in their forties, one a vice-president of a Tientsin bank, another the Lloyd's insurance representative, the third a shipping executive. In the next room came the ballplayer, Karl Bauer, an American dentist, and our friend Briggs the sea-green junkie. Beyond them was Jacob Strauss, the immensely wealthy head of the largest British mining company. Strauss had left two Rolls-Royces and several mansions in Tientsin, and was living in one room with two aging bankers. Next came two jazz musicians (a Polynesian and a negro) housed with a Belgian dope addict; and beyond them were a British banker, an engineer, and the China head of the Asiatic Petroleum Company—and so on down the line for twenty rooms more. It seemed almost as if a ruthless but whimsical fate had sought to bring the mighty of the treaty ports low and to mingle them with those of lesser degree. No one's social ideas could remain the same after living there. All the social grooves of the outside world were here rudely flattened out. People who would have had no contact in normal life found themselves thrown together under conditions of extreme intimacy.

What was revealed there defied the validity of our usual social judgments. The ordinarily accepted symbols of status—money, family, education, sophistication—were totally irrelevant here. Neither blue blood nor advanced education could raise a man above his neighbor. No one had any cash to speak of—nor more than a minimal use for what he did have; money could not buy any fundamental changes in our status.

Since no one could buy new clothes, since everyone had to do his own laundry, and do it with little water and less soap—how I hated that chore—after a few months every tweed looked threadbare, every shirt was equally tattered and dirty. All trousers looked alike, unpressed and baggy. There were some men with girl friends who laundered their shirts and hand-pressed their army shorts. These had an edge over the rest—but such romantic aids knew neither class lines nor old school ties. Everyone was entitled to the same basic rations and the same amount of living space. And above all, everyone was required to do the same sort of work, according to his physical abilities. If a British banker and a Eurasian waiter were weak and sickly, both washed vegetables or were cutters of bread. If an American professor and a cockney were sturdy and able, both had to bake or stoke.

In such a situation, the more basic human virtues suddenly claimed their rightful place. A man's excellence was revealed by his willingness to work, his skill at his job, his fundamental cheerfulness. On a kitchen shift or kneading dough in the bakery, any sane man would rather have next to him an efficient hard worker who could laugh and be warmly tolerant of his fellows, than to have there the most wealthy and sophisticated slacker or grumbler. After working or living beside a man for months, who cared—or even remembered—whether he was Belgian, British, or Parsee? Thus in a very short time people became to us personalities, pleasant or unpleasant, hard working or lazy, rather than the British, Eurasians, or Americans that they were when we first met them.

The three hardest-working and most valuable men in our kitchen were two ex-British seamen—one from a Yorkshire farm and the other a cockney—and an American tobacco-leaf expert raised on a North Carolina farm and, as he used to say of himself, "barely able to read the funnies." Correspondingly, the laziest man on my cooking shift was an executive from a shipping company with "fine blood" and a privileged education. Bored with everything about his life in camp, he was neither cooperative nor charming and so of little use to anyone. Perhaps the greatest value of this experience, as of almost all war experiences, was that we worked our way through the false barriers of the world at large to reach our common humanity. In time, we were able to see our neighbors for what they were rather than for what they had.

At this point, then, we were an uncoordinate mass of humanity. We had to tackle together certain basic problems if we were merely to survive. Such a community, therefore, needed organized leadership as much as it needed anything. But the finding of leaders constitutes the first act of the drama of politics. During our stay there, this problem of politics, of our own self- government and self-direction, remained to me the most subtle, the most frustrating and baffling issue we had to face. It was also the most fascinating, as I discovered very early.

The initial meeting of the "leaders," held that first night we arrived, took place in a large room in the old school building reserved for administrative offices. When Montague and I arrived together, the room was filled with important looking strangers. Most of them seemed to be British businessmen, with some Americans thrown in. There was a scattering of missionaries, and in one corner a small contingent of Catholic priests. Partly by surmise, partly by asking, I found that they were, like ourselves, the temporary representatives of what were clearly the four main groups of the camp: Tientsin, Tsingtao, the Catholics, and the newly arrived Peking contingents. Probably picked hastily and arbitrarily much the way we were, these men represented the informal leadership that had been established in each city before coming to camp. And as each of them sensed, if anybody was to solve these early problems of the camp, it must be these representatives. Hence immediately they agreed to meet there every night in order to plan an organized attack on our difficulties, and to ask the Japanese rulers of the camp to come in to discuss with them whatever needed to be done.

My first sight of how men behave in relation to power came in those sessions when our political structure was being born. What became apparent at once to my fascinated gaze was the serious way in which these Titans of North China's business world began jockeying among themselves for leadership.

With the exception of the priests and a few of us who sat in the back rows, most of those in that large room represented some large European, British, or American business in China fully as much as he did his group in camp. These men were "Stone of Standard Oil," "Robinson of National City," "Jameson of British and American Tobacco," "Campbell of Butterfield and Swire," "Brewster of Lloyd's," "Johns of the Kailon Mining Company," and so on.

In the course of these early stages, each saw himself and the others in terms of the image created by the power of his company, and by the prestige of his own role in that business. Each brought with him, therefore, not only long habits of personal authority, but the expectation—indeed the need—to exercise the same dominating role here that he enjoyed in the treaty ports. As a professor needs recognition when he delivers a paper, or a minister needs gratitude when he has preached a sermon, so these men needed authority—even if realistically it was the paltry power of an official position among a gang of internees in the hinterland of China.

This struggle for leadership made itself evident in many subtle ways. Ostensibly, when each man spoke in those informal meetings, he was concerned that the problem under discussion— whether sanitation, food, or leaky roofs—be solved, and he would carefully address himself to that problem. But it was evident from his tone of voice, his manner, the emphasis of his speech, and above all from the way he handled the alternative suggestions of others, that he was also anxious that his be the germinating mind that provided the resolution, and that his be the voice that ended the discussion.

This struggle for the authoritative voice, for the dominance which others not only respect but give way to in will and opinion was both evident and fascinating because prior to these meetings no one had such authority. It all had to be generated right then and there and, so to speak, out of the sole materials of human will and brains. There was no camp chairman, no government, not even a chairman of the meeting; all such posts of authority were still "up for grabs." Nor were there any of the outward supports and symbols of personal authority: transparent wealth, support of powerful groups and forces—or guns. The only external authority possessed by anyone was that steadily fading aura of the prestige he had once enjoyed in the world outside. Whatever dominance a man achieved in that group, he gained through inherent personal capacity for power. Such capacity is composed of those intangible but basic qualities that cause the outward signs and symbols of authority to gravitate to and remain with a particular man. These qualities are the ability to think quickly and relevantly, the crucial force of great self-confidence and iron firmness of will, and boundless personal energy. The man who had these inherent qualities, like the man with a rapier among those armed only with clubs, could in a short time stand alone over his fellows.

To those of us who watched this developing political struggle, it was soon evident that by the end of the first week these intangibles had done their work; the men with rapiers were already victorious. The character of the discussions had gradually changed. At the beginning any one of the twenty or so men in the room might have felt he could compete on an equal footing with any other man and, if he thought it prudent, challenge the opinion of even the most potent. This was soon no longer the case.

A hierarchy of power had appeared as a few men attained a subtle but real dominance. Now, before committing themselves to an opinion, most of the twenty waited to hear what these few would say; and when these men had made their statements or suggestions, the others would quickly fall into line. At this point, only the great dared challenge the great; the rest had given up the fight. They would rather now be secure on the side of the winner than reach for the glory of power, only to find themselves defeated, isolated, and humiliated. So, without any external force, even without a hint of a ballot, but only by the quiet processes of self-elimination, the list of contenders had been reduced to two or three giants who were still able to contend for the role of Caesar.

In these nightly meetings I also recognized for the first time the unique character and value of the business mind. The core of its strength was what I might call the "mentality of decision." One or two of these men seated around the table had taken part in academic discussion groups in Peking. There we pondered such abstract issues as peace, international justice, and the relations of ethics or theology to the world of affairs. I had noted then how strangely silent, though observant, polite, and respectful, these men had been. By contrast, we academicians had fairly flowed with verbiage. And as hour after hour went by with no comment from these business types, I thought to myself in some disappointment and not a little disdain, "nice, responsible men, but hardly bright—surely not able to think."

Here, however, all was different. The minds of these men, accustomed to practical problems, which called for both know-how and decisiveness, clamped onto our situation and dealt with it creatively. What was needed here were concrete answers to technical and organizational problems. Here general principles and ultimate ends—their interrelations and connections with life—could not have been more irrelevant. To be facile in the area of abstractions or of general truths was of no help when the oven walls were cracked, when the yeast wouldn't raise the bread dough, when slightly smelly meat was delivered in hot weather. Now it was the professional mentality that was proving useless, and the academic voices that were strangely silent. I could see the concrete need only after they had pointed it out to the Japanese; I could recognize the neatness of their solution only after they had explained it to us.

These political and organizational sessions continued for about ten days after our arrival. Then, one evening, a Japanese interrupted our meeting. To everyone's surprise, he announced that committees to represent the whole camp must be formed within forty-eight hours. There were, he said, to be nine such committees, and he listed them: General Affairs, Discipline, Labor, Education, Supplies, Quarters, Medicine, Engineering, and Finance.

A Japanese would be in charge of each of these departments of camp life; under him would work one internee who would be the chairman of the committee concerned. The internal governing body of the camp, he continued, was to consist of a council of the nine chairmen of these committees. This council, as a body, would represent the camp to the ruling Japanese authorities. For their own reasons, the Japanese did not wish to have to deal with one powerful man in whom could be embodied the will of the camp. At the time we resented this idea as being against our interests. We wanted a strong leader to represent our needs to the Japanese. But long before the end of our sojourn, most of us agreed that the Japanese had been quite right, although for different reasons. No one among us was big enough for that enormous job.

This Japanese order, abruptly laid down without further discussion, tossed into our laps a ticklish political problem: How could the nine-man council be chosen?

An election by the whole camp was out of the question. In the first place, such a complex matter as a democratic election could never be organized within forty-eight hours. Next, the ordinary voter could not at this point have any idea for whom or for what he was voting. Almost no one was as yet known to more than a few of his intimates; and little about the projected political structure would be understood by anyone outside that room.

It was decided that initially, at least, this ruling committee would be formed by appointment. The method was to be as follows: the present informal leaders of each of the four groups (Peking, Tientsin, Tsingtao, and Catholic) should nominate a slate of nine men from their outfits—one for each of the nine committees. Each sector of the camp would thus be represented on each committee, the several committees to consist of these four men, one from each group. For example, I was the man chosen by the Peking leaders to be on the Quarters Committee, and so I would presumably join the representatives from Tientsin, Tsingtao, and the Catholics. Then, each of these committees would meet together the next evening to choose one from among the four to be chairman, to sit on the council of nine, and to represent the entire camp to the Japanese in all matters under his jurisdiction. This was a roundabout method at best, but it seemed to make sense considering the situation.

The next night we all met to pick our leaders, and a strange sort of session it was. I felt fairly excited, for I knew that if there had been political pulling and hauling, attack and defense, before in our ordinary sessions, it would be doubled now. The political prizes had now been clarified; and they had been increased in number. The result was that many would-be leaders who had given up the fight to be Caesar could now return to the lists in competition for lesser spots on the ruling council.

As the rest of the men arrived in the committee room, I realized that many new faces had been added to the original twenty or so. Consequently most of us were probably unknown to each other. Then I found myself sent to a corner of the room designated "Quarters," to which three others had been dispatched, a Britisher from Tsingtao, another from Tientsin, and an American Catholic priest. We eyed one another warily for a moment; then we all laughed sheepishly over the fact that we four strangers were to pick from among ourselves a chairman for the camp Quarters Committee.

The first move was made by the priest. He was a quiet, pale, bland, but quite firm American professor of philosophy. He spoke easily but with precise formality.

"It has been settled authoritatively and finally by our presiding bishop that we of the Catholic clergy are not to take any ruling or leading roles in the camp; rather we are to leave the political direction of things entirely in secular or lay hands. Thus, by order as well as preference, I remove myself at once from competition for this post—although I shall be glad to cooperate with the committee in all matters relevant to the housing of our priests and nuns. Thank you."

Thus was exorcized the brief but unreal specter of Catholic rule among us.

I was about to make the same sort of statement, pleading youth and inexperience, when the lively looking Britisher from Tientsin began speaking. He had introduced himself as Shields, "Far East Shipping, you know." He was a handsome man with a small, neat mustache, sprucely dressed for an internee in a tweed jacket and ascot, with matching silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. He had a pleasant, frequent smile and intelligent, alert eyes. But the way in which his remarks seemed to beat one to the gun could signal a lot of ambition—or at least so I thought as I looked at him.

"That seems to me a very wise move on the part of you fathers," he remarked briskly, "I want you to convey to your bishop for me my personal appreciation for it."

Fie then turned to me, obviously expecting my similar withdrawal from competition. I did not disappoint him, which left the two Britishers to work it out between themselves. At this, the alert Shields grabbed the ball again, and turning to the other Britisher, he asked, "And what sort of experience have you had in this kind of work? Robbins—did you say your name was?"

The moment I looked carefully at the man from Tsingtao I realized somewhat sadly that this would be no contest. A genial, portly, middle-aged Englishman, comfortable with his pipe and heavy tweeds, with a round, fleshy, kind face and heavy-rimmed glasses, he was obviously no match for the aggressive Shields.

"Yes, my name is Robbins," he said modestly, "and I'm just an engineer from Tsingtao. I can't say I've had too much experience in housing people—for that has never been my line. I certainly don't want to shirk and will be glad to cooperate with any chap, but actually I can't lay claim to any particular qualifications for this job, you know."

We all turned back to Shields, expecting out of deference for the formalities, if nothing else, much the same modest disclaimer —at least in the first round.

Things had developed so well for him, however, that Shields was not interested in form; he struck while we were all off balance.

"As a matter of fact, chaps," he said, "I happen to have had a good deal of firsthand experience in Tientsin—head of quarters there, you know—and so I'm not altogether ignorant of the sort of problems we'll run into. Actually, in my business I've had to deal quite often with top Japanese, invaluable experience for this sort of job, you know. Also I do speak rather passable Chinese. [Later I found even I could speak the language better than he.] Therefore chaps, since none of you seems to feel like doing this, I suggest that I be appointed, shall we say, temporary chairman. Then when we all get to know one another better, we can choose a permanent one."

We were hardly in a position, since we had all backed out of the door, to prevent his locking it from the inside. So we weakly assented to his proposal, and presto—our chairman had been chosen!

This small political gust over the chairmanship of the Quarters Committee increased into gale force among the four nominees for the General Affairs Committee, considered by all to be the central directing agency of camp life. Ever since we had arrived, the question "Who will run the camp?" had been bruited back and forth by politically minded internees. All the serious candidates for local Caesar had been nominated for the General Affairs Committee: Montague, the British American Tobacco man from Peking; the reigning bishop of the Catholics; Harrison, the leading importer from Tsingtao; and finally Chesterton from Tientsin, the solemn British chairman of the massive Kailon Mining Company. Already everyone knew the real battle would be between Montague and Chesterton, representing as they did the significant social and commercial forces in camp life: American vs. British, Peking vs. Tientsin, tobacco vs. mining. Both men, as had become obvious in our nightly sessions, had the capacities needed for power, however different they were in character.

As I have already hinted, Montague was the American extrovert. Round of face and body but handsome, always clad in a polo coat, he looked among us like a refugee from a country club. He was cheerful, friendly, immensely talkative, quick in repartee, and full of lively stories. He was seldom unkind, never arrogant, and always the embodiment of charm itself—but like most of us, he was never averse to accepting the best room or the favored treatment his importance deserved.

I remember seeing his stout form running down a street the day we were being housed by the Japanese. Out of curiosity as to whither he was bound, I followed. Soon I saw him grab a slight, elegant gentleman by the elbow. Immediately I recognized Dr. Charles Foster, the immensely respected and modest American surgeon. Montague propelled that puzzled but ever dignified gentleman at great speed over to a marvelously private room for two that Montague had just spied. When the Japanese arrived a moment later, Montague assured them that "the overburdened doctor must have quiet and privacy, and has asked me to join him in here." I think he really believed it himself when he said it. But Montague was, more than most of us, lovable as well as sharp, and I never doubted that his heart was in the right place. Certainly he was more than usually intelligent as well as decisive, and when pressed had a very strong sense of responsibility to his community.

Chesterton was as different from Montague as night from day.

A small, thin man with an immensely ugly and sad face, he was as deliberate, both in physical movement and in speech, as Montague was fast. In our meetings, when Montague spoke, he would have the whole room in gales of laughter through his sparkling wit. Chesterton would sit there glumly silent until he was ready to pronounce. Finally, when he did speak, his surprisingly deep voice came out so slowly he was inclined to make me feel impatient and bored in the waits between the carefully deliberated words. And yet, there was no question of his inherent power. Except in those instances when Montague disagreed with him, the men seemed instinctively to follow Chesterton's lead. I observed that the discussion of any subject almost always terminated after one of Chesterton's authoritative pronouncements.

These two very diverse men were evidently those most liberally supplied with whatever it is that produces personal power and the leadership that is its consequence. It was they who gradually came completely to dominate our sessions. Which of the two would ultimately become the more potent figure was endlessly debated among us. Thus, although all of us in that room were immersed in our own little dramas, each of us would look regularly over to the corner where the tussle for General Affairs was proceeding to see who would, in the end, be Caesar.

It turned out to be the sad-faced Englishman who arose and called the meeting to order. Speaking in his leaden-paced drawl, Chesterton announced his own "chairmanship of the internment center," and then apparently felt he must say a few further words on the attitude he intended to manifest as our leader.

"Colleagues in leadership," he began, "I wish to impress upon you how honored and touched I am to be designated for this significant work. I realize that now responsibility for the health and well-being, not to say the lives, of ourselves and our loved ones rests directly upon my shoulders. I shall not disappoint your expectations and hopes; I have shouldered heavy burdens before, and am happy to bear this load for you. And I promise that whatever the temptations that beset a man in high office, I shall rule the camp in strict accordance with our great British tradition of justice and fair play!"

The room rang with muffled "Hear, hears!" as on this solemn (and carefully prepared!) note, our political life began.

As an admirer of Montague's unique abilities to get whatever he wanted in almost any situation, and somewhat shaken by the heavy pomposity of the acceptance oration, I could only conclude as I left that night, that Montague had decided to let Chesterton become top dog because of the preponderance of British in the camp—but of that I will never be sure.

The next morning the first real joke of camp life broke.

When the names were handed in and the Japanese explained further what the duties of each committee would be, it became plain that the General Affairs Committee, far from being the coordinating center for general camp policy, was merely to be caretaker of certain leftover items. As the astonished Japanese said, "This man is not to be 'boss'! He is to rule over such things as sports, the sewing room, the barber shop, the library, and the canteen!"

Poor Chesterton had been wrecked on a semantic reef: "Miscellaneous Affairs" had been mistranslated "General Affairs."

When this coveted prize, over which our giants had fought, turned out to be miniscule, the camp hooted with derisive delight. Chesterton, the victor, was not merely embarrassed but downright sulky about it. He promptly announced his resignation, indicating that now that he understood what the job involved, he saw that it was too small for a man of his stature. At this the camp hooted once more; Chesterton never acquired political prominence again. Needless to say, Montague, holding his sides and weak from laughter, thanked his lucky stars that he had not been tapped for the honor!

Thenceforth the General Affairs Committee was run by another Britisher, a modest, younger vice president of one of the Tientsin banks. The vision of a single political leader of the camp vanished never to appear again.

In this bumbling way, the official camp organization was formed. From that time on, there were nine internee committees, each with a chairman and one or two assistants who negotiated directly with the Japanese. The job of each committee was, on the one hand, to press the Japanese for better equipment and supplies and, on the other, to manage the life of the camp in its area. Thus the needs of the camp began to be dealt with by designated men. The amorphous labor force was organized; the problems of equipment and of sanitation were handled by the engineers; supplies were distributed more fairly and efficiently; the complex problems of housing began to be tackled; and schools were started for our three hundred or more children.

With such centralized organization, our community began to show the first signs of a dawning civilization; it was slowly becoming capable of that degree of coordinated work necessary to supply services essential to life and to provide at least a bearable level of comfort.

By the middle of April, moreover, the camp cleaning force had cleared away all the rubble and debris. Most of the dismal ugliness that had greeted us in March disappeared. At this transformation, the garden-loving British began to spring to action. You could see them everywhere—in front of their dorms or along their row of rooms; around the church or the ballfield, turning up soil wherever they could establish claim to a plot of ground, planting the seeds which they had brought from Peking and Tientsin, and then lovingly watering the first signs of new life. In the same spirit, other families would begin to survey the small plot of ground in front of their rooms, planning patios made of scrounged bricks, and experimenting with awnings fashioned from mats purchased in the canteen—all of this, apparently, spurred on by the prospect of summer "teas." I could feel a new warmth in the wind and see a new brightness in the air wherever I went.

About the same time, evening lecture programs for adults sprouted in every available empty room. These talks touched on a wide variety of subjects, from sailing and woodwork, art and market research to theology and Russian, on which there were unemployed experts both willing and eager to speak. Concurrently, our weekly entertainments began. These took place in the church, starting with simple song fests and amateur vaudeville skits. The culmination of these early forms of "culture" came, surely, when a baseball league (e.g., the Peking Panthers vs. the Tientsin Tigers) started in earnest on the small ballfield, exciting the whole population two or three afternoons a week.

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