With the advent of spring, a marked change came over the face of the camp. Where there had been rubble and dirt, there were now bright patches of color in the gardens and neat patios. These were only the physical evidences of a change that also occurred on a deeper level. Within a few months this poorly prepared and, indeed, almost desperate group had transformed itself into a coherent civilization, able to cope with its basic material problems and day by day raising the level of its life on all fronts. The food was almost palatable, the baseball league enthralled everyone; and the evenings were now warm enough for a stroll with a girl friend. The camp was almost becoming a pleasant place in which to live.

Not the least among the elements contributing to this general state of well-being were the sources of "extra" supplies. Of course there was always the camp canteen: a small store supplied by the Japanese and manned by a Tientsin department store owner and an elderly importer. In it such necessities of our life could be purchased as cigarettes, soap, peanut oil, toilet paper, and mats— for which goods in great demand ration cards were issued. Also on rare occasions such items as dried fruits, spices, and ginger could be found there. There were never any fresh fruits or sweets available there or in the kitchens during the two and one- half years we were in camp.

It was, however, the black market that added the most to our life during the first six months. Although I enjoyed its fruits as much as the next man, I was never involved in the operation of this flourishing industry. Even the most ingenuous, however, could not long remain unaware of its existence. He had only to saunter past any row of rooms or dorm of a morning to smell eggs frying on a newly made brick stove, or to have a friend casually press upon him some succulent jam for his bread. When he stopped by a neighbor's room, he was likely to be offered a little bacon or chocolate, By-gar (Chinese whisky) or wine.

It was no time at all until the members of our group, too, were buying eggs, jam, and sweets from "those who knew." There were, as I found, a considerable number of the latter. When I inquired whom one might contact for some of this marvelous manna, friends suggested the following: some of the tough ex-army men at the end of our row; several businessmen over near the wall in Block 54; two bachelors in Dorm 49; and so on. But the majority replied: "If you want to get eggs and jam cheap, and in great quantity, see the Catholic fathers."

During the middle of that first summer, at least two-thirds of the internees had an egg to fry each morning. At one point in fact, when the black market was at its height, we had so many that an extra hot plate in the Peking kitchen had to be constructed to handle the long line queued up for a stove. This meant that an average of about 1,300 eggs a day were coming over or through the wall; an equivalent amount of jam, peanuts, and sugar was there for the buying if one knew whom to see. Wherever there was a sheltered spot in the wall, goods seemed to pour over. The Chinese farmers were eager for cash and in summer they had plenty of produce to sell. Many a time I strolled into the Bertram Carters' room in Block 3 to find jam, sugar, and eggs all over the bed, and one or the other of them scurrying to get these goods into boxes before a guard appeared. I remember once our horror when, without warning, a live chicken was tossed over the wall. It got loose from Bertram's clutches, squawking and flapping about over a large part of the block before we managed to retrieve and silence it. As Bertram said with an eloquent sigh after its neck had been wrung, "Not an easy item to explain to a passing guard, what?"

As it was apparent that the fathers were the major source, I decided to find out how they worked it. The three hundred or so priests and monks lived under horribly crowded conditions in the upper floors of the hospital building and one or two adjacent small blocks. This was an area which was next to the wall, and at the beginning quite out of sight of the guardhouses. Each time I had been in their neighborhood, I had felt a slight shock, for I was not used to this monastic world. Early in the morning or late in the afternoon, I found that the yard around the hospital resembled a medieval courtyard. A hundred or so priests in black and monks in brown were there slowly pacing up and down near the wall saying their prayers.

I learned from one Passionist father that the black market began at the hour of evening devotionals a couple of weeks after camp started. Quite without warning, a covey of cabbages flew over the wall into the midst of these praying priests. Immediately, so my friend noted with great amusement, all purely religious concerns receded. The priests closed their prayer books, scooped up the cabbages, and hoisted one another up high enough to talk over the wall to the Chinese beyond it. Regular rendezvous spots and hours were fixed, and if one of them did not work, they tried another.

The most successful and certainly the most intriguing of the clerical egg runners was a small, bespectacled Trappist monk named Father Darby. The strict rules of his order against speaking at any time were temporarily lifted so that these monks could work with the rest of us. Thus Father Darby was able to tell us a good deal about his life as a Trappist. He explained to us that he had been in the same monastery for twenty-five years. For that quarter century prior to coming to camp, he had not spoken more than three or four words to any living soul. A charming, friendly little man, while he was with us he more than made up for lost time. He would talk by the hour with anyone who would listen to him. I am sure he was a devout Trappist, but one summer evening I came to realize he had many other facets to his personality. Passing by one of the camp's more elegant patios, I saw a group sampling By-gar. In their midst was Father Darby, dressed in a "secular" white summer formal,—replete with white jacket, black tie and black trousers—and regaling that fashionable audience with his Irish stories!

Father Darby had a seemingly foolproof method of receiving eggs undetected. In an obscure corner of the wall about a foot above the ground, he had pried loose a few bricks. He would kneel down at this spot and pull the eggs through the hole as a Chinese farmer pushed them from the other side. If a guard happened along, two Trappist friends down the line would begin a Gregorian chant.

At this signal, Darby would quickly cover the eggs with his long monk's robe and, already on his knees, be deep in prayer by the time the guard reached him. He kept up this practice for two or three months without being caught. Some of the guards were apparently more than a little afraid of these "holy men" with their massive beards and long robes. But finally one day a guard lifted Father Darby's robe as he knelt by the wall. To his surprise and the monk's embarrassment, he found one hundred and fifty eggs nestling there. Whatever the guards may have thought of the occult powers of Western holy men, they certainly never gave them credit for being able to lay eggs!

Father Darby was whisked off to the guardhouse. The first trial of camp life began. The camp awaited the outcome of the trial with bated breath; we were all fearful that the charming Trappist might be shot or at best tortured. For two days, the chief of police reviewed all the evidence on the charge of black marketeering, which was, to say the least, conclusive.

At the end of the elaborate trial, the chief announced his stern verdict. First, he said that because he was determined to stamp out the black market, he would have to make an example of Father Darby—adding parenthetically that it pained him "to punish a man of the cloth." The camp heard this pronouncement with a shudder. And so, said the chief, he was going to sentence Father Darby to one and one-half months of solitary confinement! The Japanese looked baffled when the camp greeted this news with a howl of delight, and shook their heads wonderingly as the little Trappist monk was led off to his new cell joyously singing.

From that time on, the black market had a strange and uneven history. During the fall of 1943, the Japanese reduced the flow of goods to a trickle. They managed to catch some more of the internee leaders and put them in "solitary." Since they were not Trappists, that was bad enough. But then they caught two Chinese farmers. To the horror of the internees, they stood the Chinese up before a firing squad within earshot of the camp.

In May, 1944, moreover, a new chief arrived. A man of force, he apparently succeeded in stopping the illegal commerce altogether. So it was with sinking hearts that we looked out over the walls one day to see Chinese laborers at work. They were digging a deep trench and rearing a high embankment fifty yards beyond the walls, and then building wire fences on the farther side. We knew that no Chinese could approach the wall without the greatest risk, and so we sadly contemplated the remainder of the war—eggless, peanutless, and dry.

I can still remember my amazement when, about July of that same year, a friend rushed into our dorm with some raw bacon. Since by no stretch of the imagination was anyone keeping pigs in camp, I knew that the black market must have started up again. In high excitement, we asked where he had got it. Our astonishment doubled, however, when he told us that it came from a friend who had obtained it through the Japanese guards. Short of cash themselves, these guards had agreed to take valuables owned by internees, such as old watches, clothes, jewelry, etc., and to trade them to Chinese merchants in exchange for goods or money. Needless to say the guards, as middlemen, were pocketing a goodly portion of the transactions. They were not interested in carrying on much of what we might call the "grocery trade," that is, the great quantities of eggs and peanuts that had been our earlier delight. They had to confine themselves to small, yet lucrative items, and so it was jam, sugar, Chinese whisky, and above all Chinese money that they brought into camp and sold to the internees.

It was hard during those last years to get any extra food, and whenever we did manage to get a batch of eggs, it had to last a long time indeed. I remember one two-dozen load that I got in early February, 1944. Being without the luxury of an icebox, I kept them in a basin under my bed. Because the room was generally chilly (50 to 55 degrees), the eggs remained edible a surprisingly long time. Since I ate one for breakfast about once every four days, they began to run out sometime in early April. I usually took them to the kitchen to boil them in one of the many huge cauldrons. On this particular occasion, after the customary three or four minutes, I hauled my egg out of the water and, looking forward to a hearty breakfast, sat down at a table full of kitchen workers. Announcing that this was almost my last egg, I hit it a sharp crack on the edge of my bowl—and then jumped at the explosion that occurred.

The table around me was in chaos. Some men were wiping their faces to get the spattered egg off and cursing me. Others were jamming their handkerchiefs to their noses and pushing themselves away from the table to escape the awful stench. I sat there in utter amazement. My hand was still frozen over my bowl. I gradually became aware that not one piece of shell remained in my fingers! We never found any part of that egg—except for the thin film that had to be scraped off faces, wall, and table! This experience somewhat dampened my enthusiasm for hoarding black-market eggs.

Illegal money was the most important black-market commodity during the latter years of the war. As time wore on, such money became vital to our existence in camp. From a camp canteen stocked by the Japanese, we had to buy many of the necessities of our life: soap, toilet paper, cigarettes, peanuts (for peanut butter), mats used for awnings or for rugs, and peanut oil for any home cooking and for our lamps at night (the electricity failed to work about one-third of the time). For this purpose "comfort money" was provided in Chinese dollars to each of us every month. This was a small sum sent through the Swiss government by our own government, changed by the Swiss into local currency, and brought into camp each month by the local representative of the Swiss state.

While we were at Weihsien camp, a fierce inflation of the Chinese currency had developed. When we came to camp, the Chinese dollar was worth about five cents, or one American dollar bought about twenty Chinese dollars. Accordingly, on the amazingly low scale of Chinese prices, a ration of ten packs of native-brand cigarettes had cost eight Chinese dollars when we went to camp. But in May, 1945—two years later-the same ration cost over five hundred Chinese dollars; which meant a rise of over 6,000 per cent.

Every other price rose proportionally, and the rate of inflationary increase seemed to accelerate all the time. Naturally the amount of "comfort money" given us each month could never keep pace with this galloping inflation, since every increase had to be negotiated between Washington and Tokyo via Geneva. More money than was legally provided was therefore essential for us, if we were to buy such necessities as toilet paper, soap, and cigarettes. From this situation stemmed the real significance of the Japanese black market.

After this commerce began, the amount of illegal money that entered the camp at any one time was enormous. For example, the total "comfort money" received legally in one month's period for one group of fifteen persons in mid-1944 was three thousand Chinese dollars ($200 per head). I learned later from the canteen director that the same group had spent in one week at the canteen over thirty thousand Chinese dollars. At that point in camp, then, each person in this group was receiving illegally on the average about eight thousand Chinese dollars monthly.

Naturally it required an efficient organization, including both important Japanese and reputable internees, to handle all these financial transactions. As I discovered when I went searching for extra cash, there was on the internee side a formal council or syndicate who acted as middlemen between the ordinary internees and the Japanese. To no one's surprise, this financial council was made up mostly of former bankers and stockbrokers.

It worked thus: An internee who wanted more cash might have a gold watch or a piece of jewelry to sell. Naturally, in an inflationary spiral, he would not wish to find himself suddenly loaded down with all the Chinese currency that such a valuable item would bring, amounting, say, to $200,000. Thus he would approach the syndicate, and negotiate with them until a price was agreed upon. The syndicate would sell his valuable to the Japanese, receiving from them in currency the $200,000. Having given the original owner whatever immediate cash he needed, the syndicate would then "sell" the remainder of the $200,000 to other internees in return for promissory notes in American currency. These notes would then be turned over to the seller. Such notes had to be doubly guaranteed, once by the syndicate itself and once by the corporation or concern for which the creditor internee had worked. On several occasions I borrowed about six thousand Chinese dollars on the credit of Yenching University where I had been teaching. By such means, cash was spread around the camp to all those who either had personal possessions which they could sell, or who could guarantee payment after the war. So almost all of us could—and did—avail ourselves of this service.

We were continually amused by the strangeness of this situation—with our captors subverting their own order. One day I swung around the corner near the kitchen and saw two of the guards going at each other angrily until one finally laid the other out cold with a large club. When a man who saw the incident asked another guard what had been the cause of the quarrel, the latter replied in effect: "Oh, they were just arguing about the black market. One of them had muscled in on the other's customers. It happens all the time!"

Shortly after this, I heard that a guard had been in Dormitory 49 consummating a private deal with an internee. When he had finished his business, he said calmly to his client, "Would you look out the door for me to see if there are any guards about? We are not supposed to be caught doing this work for our bosses!"

It had now become clear why the new chief had so firmly and quickly stopped the old black market when he came into camp. He wanted to get this lucrative business into his own—or at least into Japanese—hands.

I was continually surprised at the relatively minor role our Japanese rulers played in our lives. We were, of course, always conscious that they were there. Military guards strolled through the compound at regular intervals to take up their positions on the walls. Any young man, out with his girl friend after 10 P.M. when the lights were turned off, had to dodge guards on his way home in the dark. Men in committee work had daily to deal with the Japanese civilian officials, for all our supplies and equipment came from them, and most of our major decisions had to be discussed with them. But on the whole, they left us alone to do our work and solve our problems in our own way. Except for the 7 A.M. roll call, and later on, one in the afternoon as well, the average internee, unless he were a black marketeer, seldom had any contact with the Japanese.

We were fortunate also in the kind of officials and soldiers who had charge of our camp. Strictly speaking, we were neither in Japan nor in "enemy" territory—we were in that part of China which was an occupied or "puppet" territory, held by the Japanese since 1937, and so maintaining at least nominal diplomatic relations with Japan. Thus we were under the Consular Service rather than the army or the military police. As a result, civilian diplomatic officials were in charge of us. Our guards were a part of the consular guard rather than soldiers in the regular army. These guards were men who for one reason or another had been given this "easy duty" far from the front, so that most of them were quite happy with their assignment. While we were, of course, enemies to them, they had not captured us in hard combat nor had they seen us shoot down their mates. Our situation was therefore, quite different from that of captured folk in the Philippines, the East Indies, or Singapore, where internee camps were maintained by an army in the field and where inmates were brutally treated by soldiers against whom they had just fought. With the exception of a few cases where black marketeers were beaten up, generally decorum and good discipline marked their relations with us. Some of the guards were gruff or cruel, arrogant or mean. But no one was tortured or killed in our camp. Indeed many of the guards were courteous and kind to us.

For this reason, my own experience of five years under varied Japanese rule fails to substantiate the sweeping statements often made about the Japanese by others. I do not and cannot doubt the truth of their reports of endless and brutal atrocities—all I can say is that for whatever reason this was not my experience with them.

When the war first started in December, 1941, the faculty at Yenching University was imprisoned in one of the residential compounds on the campus. We were guarded by the dread Hsien Ping Twei, the military police. Knowing their reputation for cruelty to prisoners, we were wary of any contact with them as they marched up and down the small compound.

It was, therefore, with great apprehension that we saw one afternoon at teatime one of their soldiers, loaded down with every kind of portable weapon, approach a house where, among others, an American family with a baby were housed. I was the only male present at the time. Gingerly I opened the door at the guard's brisk knock. He bowed, and sucked air in sharply through his teeth. Then, unloading his extensive armor, to my utter amazement he opened his great coat and pulled out a small bottle of milk.

"Please," said he haltingly, "take for baby." After we had recovered from our surprise sufficiently to invite him to come in, we asked whether there was anything we could do for him in return.

"May I hear classical records?" he asked. Again, we gasped and said, "Who are you?" He answered, "I second flutist in Tokyo orchestra—miss good music!"

During the first few months of camp, I was on the Quarters Committee with Shields, the aggressive Englishman whom I have already mentioned and with whom I had now become good friends. He and I came to know quite well the Japanese official in charge of housing and engineering, since we shared an office with him. His name was Izu; he was an intelligent, courteous man who never lost his decorum even when he became angry with us.

We must have put his Oriental aplomb to the ultimate test with our camp census. In the beginning, the Japanese government apparently had no more notion than we did how many persons the camp was supposed to contain or what their names were. The first order that Izu gave to the Quarters Committee was to take a census. Such a measure would be very helpful to us, too, for what we needed to do first was to find out where the worst conditions of housing were and then determine where we might find any extra space. Almost as soon as our committee was formed, a house-to-house count began. Gradually we filled in with names and numbers the great map of the compound that hung in the office.

All went well until we came to the hospital. There on the upper floors lived about 250 Dutch and Belgian monks. To our dismay, we discovered that apparently not even the Catholic leaders had any idea how many monks lived there or who they were. They were so jammed into each dorm that no man in a given room knew how many it held. Thus we almost had to buttonhole them one by one in order to make our list.

A census of monks, moreover, presents endless difficulties because each monk has two names. One is his given family name which is on his passport and all official lists; the other is his "religious name" acquired at ordination or induction into his order and identifying him to all his Catholic brethren. No Catholic leader would necessarily know that a certain American priest had been Michael O'Malley, nor would any Japanese list indicate that O'Malley was, indeed, now Father Paulinus. Sorting out accurately these two kinds of names was bad enough. If one were to add that these monks all looked more or less alike to a lay observer because of their identical robes and great flowing beards, and that few of the Dutch or Belgian fathers spoke English, one can understand how impossible it was to make a reliable count. For days on end we could not get those lists to check. Finally, after a great deal of checking and rechecking, we were satisfied that our census was reasonably accurate, and so we handed it in one morning to Izu at the quarters office. At once he asked us with the greatest seriousness, "Is your count correct?"

Not realizing the importance of his question, and sick to death of the whole business, we replied, "Sure, as good as makes no matter."

He nodded and scurried out of the office to cable his report to some "higher up."

We thought little more of this matter until two days later when a leader among the nuns—a most attractive American sister—appeared in our office. Deeply apologetic, she confessed that the day before she had come upon two elderly Dutch sisters buried somewhere in their dorms. She had had no idea of their existence when she gave us her list. We assured her that this slip was not fatal and told Izu, when he came into the office, to raise the camp total by two.

The reaction of this invariably calm gentlemen took us completely by surprise. He blanched snow white, began to tremble, and even uttered a few rasping oaths at us in Japanese. He so far forgot himself as to slam the table in front of him and to lift his hand as if to strike us. But he lowered it—and tore from the room, clearly in even greater terror than anger. We went into the supplies office next door to ask Brown, the chairman there, to find out from his "boss" Koga what on earth had gone wrong with Izu. Koga was a tall Japanese who had been reared in California. A victim of discrimination in college, Koga as a result was a dedicated hater of everything and everyone Western. Half an hour later he returned and said angrily, "You damn fools, Izu had sent that figure off to Tokyo as an official report and signed it. Now you've forced him to send another cable saying a mistake has been made. Heaven knows what will happen to him!"

The terror with which a Japanese in that era regarded those sacred beings in authority over him was plainly manifest, not alone in Izu's stricken flight from our office, but in Koga's awestruck recital of his friend's predicament.

By a stroke of good fortune—for we did not want the courteous Mr. Izu to lose his head through our error—a leader among the priests came around the next morning and said apologetically that they had made a mistake in his dorm of seventy-five Dutch fathers. Two men had appeared twice on the list! Sadly he realized that through his mistake we would have to reduce our total count by two!

Almost before the words were out of his mouth, we split up and went looking for Izu to prevent his sending off the fatal second cable. Happily he had procrastinated out of fear and was telling himself, as he admitted later, that he would send it that afternoon. When we told him the good news, he almost fainted from relief. He laughed nervously, sucked his breath through his teeth, and bowed very low to each of us—signs, as we well knew, of intense Japanese pleasure.

For the next six months, until we left quarters work, we got along remarkably well with Izu. He seemed to trust us in the management of camp housing, and we found we could trust him. On two occasions we had to appeal to him to deal firmly with uncooperative internees. He not only promised to do nothing to them without consulting us, but did, in fact, only what we had recommended to him.

There were always, of course, three or four Japanese in the camp who were roundly disliked by all. The usual causes for this seemed to me to be twofold. First, some Japanese often showed an almost compulsive need to assert their dominance and authority. They would rant and bark, slap and kick, as if the person in front of them were a hideous spider that had sent them into a panic and must be crushed. Second, anyone under their authority apparently inspired in them a streak of meanness, the desire to prevent another from doing whatever appeared fun, and on the contrary, to make him do what was unpleasant.

I am sure that in their own way all people illustrate these same unlovely traits, and most of us probably repress them only with difficulty in our daily contacts with others. It also seems plain that these particular urges are strongest in those people long humiliated by more powerful competitors. When they are finally able to strike back, they do so in this fanatical manner. Add to this the unfortunate but inescapable difference in size between, say, the average Japanese soldier and a towering Scot, German, or American—and there is additional reason for this bluster and feigned arrogance. Thus I would seek to understand it when some Japanese guard or official would suddenly break into almost mad ravings, stamp his feet, kick at the available furniture, flail his arms threateningly—all for no apparent reason.

One petty officer, who was for a period in charge of the guards, seemed to us perfectly to incarnate these unlovely traits. Short, powerful, with a square head and a heavily whiskered chin, he was the Japanese equivalent of the classic Western drill sergeant. Seemingly every time anyone in camp was doing something that looked as if it might be fun, like sunning himself in a bathing suit or holding some lady's hand, this officer would appear on the scene and bellow out the familiar Chinese words, "Bo-shing-de," which means "You can't do it!" "It isn't allowed!" or "Verboten!"

The result was that everyone came to call this pompous little man "Sergeant Bo-shing-de." Often you could see his squat form strutting along a camp street, surrounded, like a horse with gnats, by a dancing throng of small children. They would hop up and down and yell at the top of their lungs, "Sergeant Bo-shing-de, Sergeant Bo-shing-de!" Needless to say, he did not appreciate this regular reception, and so apparently, in what must have been an interesting scene, he asked the commandant to do something about it. But how does one get children to stop yelling a name—short of shooting them? And how can the soldier concerned be identified to the public if none of them knows his real name? I can well imagine the head office spending tedious hours pondering those puzzles! Apparently deciding there was no other way out of this thicket, the commandant put up the following notice on the camp bulletin boards:

HENCEFORTH IN THE WEIHSIEN INTERNMENT CENTER, BY SPECIAL ORDER OF HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY, THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN, "SERGEANT BO-SHING-DE" IS NOT TO BE KNOWN AS SERGEANT BO-SHING-DE BUT AS SERGEANT YOMIARA.

That notice in the classical military style almost carried our sagging spirits through the last winter! Another incident, however, cast an entirely different light on Bo-shing-de's character. My bunkmate and friend, Lawrence Turner of Yenching University, at sixty-five, was scholar, hard worker, and iron-muscled athlete. Lawrence had come to know some of the guards very well. He had asked for and received permission to sleep outdoors in his camp cot, as was his wont at home. There, dressed in his Chinese gown and sipping his tea, he frequently chatted with the guards as they made their evening and predawn rounds. Also Lawrence liked, as he always had, to run his daily mile around the inside of the camp wall early in the morning. This feat so much impressed the age-venerating Japanese that they frequently told others they respected him more than they did any other internee.

Much to his surprise, Lawrence was invited to have tea one day in Bo-shing-de's quarters, a large bedroom in one of the old mission houses in the walled-off section of the compound. When he entered this drill sergeant's room, Lawrence could hardly believe his eyes.

Decorated by the sergeant himself, it was furnished in the most artistic Japanese taste, illustrating utter simplicity, a remarkable sense of the harmonious use of space, and a painstaking attention to detail. At the focal point of the room, complemented by a pair of classical flower arrangements, was an exquisite little home shrine to the sergeant's samurai war god. It was true, Lawrence remarked later, that this diety, with his grimacing face and bowlegged stance, was hardly a thing of beauty. Yet the harmonious and artistic effect was in such striking contrast to the American soldier's gallery of mother, assorted pin-ups, and model airplanes that the sight of it made Lawrence gasp.

The horrible war god, expressing all the barbaric cruelty of one side of Japanese culture, yet honored in the delicate, sensitive taste of this cruel soldier, seemed a perfect symbol for the mystery of the Japanese character as I knew it during the war.

We had not been long in camp before it seemed an ordinary thing to wake up in a room with twenty men, to hear Joe Jones talking to Maitland about his lumbago, or Sas Sloan griping at the extra long line at the hot-water boiler where we took turns to get our shaving water in a pail. Then we would stand yawning and sleepy for a half hour to an hour waiting for roll call, talking together about our girl friends, the dance coming up next week, or the baseball game that afternoon. And soon I would go to the kitchen for breakfast and hear another man saying, "The old lady was sick last night, but a spot of hot tea fixed her up," or another complaining that, "It's always those people next door that give us the most trouble." And when I would arrive at the quarters office about 9 A.M., I might hear Shields sighing as he came in, clean shaven for the day and natty in his army khakis, "If only this bloody weather would stop and the sun would come out again, I would feel a hundred per cent better about life—

God, did we have a bunch of lousy hands at bridge last night!"

I remember thinking with a laugh as I went out on a quarters job that morning, that you could have heard these same remarks in Manchester or Chicago. It was obvious that the interests of the people in the camp were really very much like those of people everywhere: their health, where and how they lived, the weather, their work, the neighbors, the inconveniences of life and, of course, sex. And I suddenly stopped short wondering at this strange fact. How quickly man makes his life—whatever its character may be—into what he can call "normal." What would have seemed a fantastic deprivation to a man comfortable, well fed, and serene in an easy chair at home, had by the end of a few short months become just "life" for us.

We recognized Weihsien as the accepted framework of our existence, and so the familiar context within which we reacted emotionally to things. It no longer represented a new horror against which we reacted. We would now gripe if a queue was slow, but not at the fact of the queue—for this aspect of life was "normal" to us now. Yet realistically, here we were, crowded into a ridiculously small space, shut off from the outside world, living a most uncomfortable life, and one that was radically insecure. What possible certainty did we have that the relative well-being of this moment in camp would continue; that it would not be replaced by a turn to brutality, by starvation, or even by extermination? And soberly I had to admit that when I looked facts in the face, there was no ground for certainty here—these things might easily happen to us. To be sure, we talked about such things now and then, but the threat of them remained unreal to us and we did not feel insecure. Usually we got quickly back to familiar gripes, to girls, and to food we liked. No, I concluded, camp life was now normal to us; we have accepted it and accustomed our emotions to it, and as always, we humans expect the normal to continue to be the case.

Musing further on this tendency of man to "normalize" whatever may come his way, I decided this was, after all, a fortunate trait. How much better that we were able to accept emotionally what would have horrified us three months ago; to forget most of the conveniences that we now lacked; and above all, to pretend that this life which we had learned to bear was certain to continue! Only thus, I decided, can mankind live with any serenity amid so much social misery, through such unsettled periods in history in which wars have been far from abnormal. Only thus can he stand the stark insecurity that the next moment may bring to any vulnerable creature!*

* These meandering thoughts in camp received confirmation when I heard later of Reinhold Niebuhr's famous prayer: "Oh Lord, help us to accept those things we cannot change, to be dissatisfied with what we can change, and to be able to discern the difference."

Altogether, then, the normal interests of life were uppermost in our consciousness. Thus, as in the ordinary life of man, personal relations took the center of the stage. Man is primarily a sexual and communal being, and he can exist sanely and happily only in and through the various sorts of relationships he has with his fellow men and women.

Immediately after we arrived in camp, those of us younger men from Peking—and there were several—were delighted to notice attractive girls of our own age here and there in the crowds. It did not take long for us to get to know one another. We ran into each other at the small informal dances in the Tientsin kitchen where the jazz band played, at the early baseball games between the groups, or organizing some weekend entertainment.

The latter was the way I met Alice, the British girl with whom I spent some of the best hours in camp. Her good company did more than I can say to make camp life not only bearable but often gay and pleasant.

Soon we began excitedly to pair off more or less permanently. Few of these relations were real "love affairs," and only one or two resulted in marriages either in the camp or later. Most of our younger group were still too much adrift in the world to consider marriage, and many had deeper obligations to persons outside the camp.

For this reason many of us, brought up to believe that any form of sexuality is immoral unless it leads to marriage, felt guilty about these relationships, however dependent we were on the affection, the loving, and the security they brought to us. But looking back, I find them very natural and good, bringing to us in a rather dreary and uncertain life at least hints and brushes of the deep joys of loving and being loved, which are surely primary among the basic values of life.

It was not always easy, however, to carry on a relation of whatever sort with a girl in camp. Single people all lived in dorms so that opportunities for love-making were minimal, and the lack of modern contraceptives made intercourse too risky for most of the unmarrieds. The only chances for any modicum of privacy came in the spring, summer, and early fall when it was warm enough to walk in the open parts of the compound in the evening. Even then those sections were usually so teeming with people taking the night air that, as in a park in Manhattan on a warm night, it was not easy to get more than twenty feet from anyone else. Only after the lights were turned out at the 10 P.M. curfew could the "dating" at Weihsien begin. Each of us who were young came to know all the available secluded corners of our small space, how to be quiet when a guard came by, and above all how to tiptoe back to our dorm at the end of the evening so as not to be caught.

As a young man in my middle twenties, it literally never occurred to me that "old folks" in their late thirties and forties had the same urges I felt so strongly. Thus I never even wondered how that great crowd of single men in the dorms, men between thirty-five and fifty-five, most of whom had been married for years, not to mention the equal number of single women, resolved the problem of their sexual life. We assumed that young people alone had such problems, and went about finding our own solutions. All I knew, as a relative expert on who was and who was not out dating after curfew, was that none of these older persons in the dorms were to be encountered there.

The most significant changes in our love life came with the changes in our dorms. At the end of the first six months the camp became much less crowded, owing to the repatriation of some two hundred Americans, and many single people were moved out of inadequate dorms into the upper floors of the hospital. Our group from Yenching University fell heir to a gorgeous room on the top floor. We could look out across the flat, dry farmland to two small Chinese villages a few miles away, and watch the donkey carts, peddlers, and old women with their bundles plodding their way past the camp to Weihsien city. Best of all, for my roommate Arthur Howell and me, was the fact that on the floor below, our girl friends had a room with two other British girls their own age. Joined by another American boy and a Britisher, we would go down there after work. The eight of us would laugh and talk on the room's four beds until curfew time, and then later sneak upstairs in our stocking feet.

This arrangement, idyllic alike for housing and for young love, came to a rude end in June, 1944. Two young men managed to escape from the camp to join the guerrillas in the hills nearby. As a reprisal, or perhaps to prevent contact with the outside from the upper floors of the hospital, the Japanese moved all of us who had been their roommates into large dorms in the center of the camp. In the same move, the girls were put in a similar room in the women's building, Block 24. The cheery evenings we four couples had so enjoyed vanished. We had again sadly to content ourselves in the summer with late walks around the camp, and in winter with intermittent evenings together baby-sitting in some friends' family room.

The much more serious consequence of this escape was that roll call was henceforth a serious matter. Instead of being a perfunctory check in our rooms in the early morning, as it was before the escape, it was now held both morning and afternoon. The camp was divided into four "roll call groups," and twice a day each group had to line up on its designated parade ground. Since each mustering required from forty minutes to an hour of patient standing while the entire camp was counted, roll call became a crushing bore for us younger folk and a source of real discomfort for the families and the elderly.

One other personal relationship was perhaps the warmest and closest of all for me. This was with Matthew and Edith Read, British Methodist missionaries from Tientsin. Matt was a most unusual man. Lean and handsome, humorous, intelligent and warm, he had the rare gift of getting on with all sorts of people, and was regularly elected to the Labor Committee. He loved to ponder and analyze the complexities and humors of our life by the hour, holding his pipe carefully in his hand—and Edith had many of the same gifts. Thus we were all delighted to find that invaluable addition to a quiet life: conversational partners with whom one's experiences can be shared and enriched. For through such conversations not only was I able to learn my own mind by talking out my thoughts; even more it was possible for me to see things anew through the wiser eyes of that unusual couple.

Soon I found myself going there frequently, two and even three times a week, and thrashing out with them all the issues that our life was bringing to us: the development of the war outside, the future complexion of British and American politics, our own internal problems of organization and morals, the latest crisis or scandal in the camp, and so on indefinitely. By the end of our sojourn, I was eating most of my suppers there and every Sunday breakfast. Their warm hearts made me a member of their family, along with their lively little girl, and the difference that that made for my life in Weihsien cannot be imagined.

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