The other interest, besides our personal relationships, that fills our human days whether we be in a city, on a farm, or in a camp, is work. Work and life have a strange reciprocal relationship: only if man works can he live, but only if the work he does seems productive and meaningful can he bear the life that his work makes possible. The work in the camp was, then, central to each of us. All of this coordinated activity kept us alive by providing the services and goods necessary for our existence. And however dull it seemed, it gave a focus of interest and energy to a life that otherwise by its confinement and great limitations would have been overwhelmed by boredom. Perhaps the best way to describe what our work was like is to tell my own experience of it.



After six months spent in the wearing and bruising conflicts of the Quarters Committee, both Shields and I felt that we and the camp needed a change, and so in September, 1943, I chose to do manual rather than office work. For a time I was the assistant to the camp mason. He was an American technician from Tientsin —tough, cool, and capable. Masoning was good for the muscles, but in the end I found mixing mortar for this good man boring, and so I applied for a job in the kitchen.

Kitchen III, the one serving the Peking group, was the ideal place to be introduced to camp cooking. This had been the liveliest of the three kitchens. Serving only three hundred people, this kitchen was small enough for its cooks to be teams of women. They were able, for example, to make and fry small hamburgers, a process that was then inconceivable in a kitchen serving eight hundred. Above all, filled as it was by the educational and missionary personnel who had been centered in Peking, this community had a cooperative spirit which was unmatched elsewhere. The cooking teams were thus able to call on ten or fifteen more women to help them when there was extra work to do, and so to pioneer in experimental ways with our strange Chinese equipment. When the American evacuation of August, 1943, took place, however, and most of the Catholic fathers went as well, this community's food standards dropped noticeably, and a British pall seemed to settle over our menus.

It was at this point that I became an assistant cook, hardly knowing then how to boil an egg. My boss was a gay and talented bachelor named Edwin Parker. With graying hair and a round face, he had been a curio and art dealer from Peking. Edwin knew how to cook, but he hated to boss anybody or to organize his meals too carefully. As a result, our life was filled with confusion and laughter, but also with frequent culinary triumphs. My job was to keep the pans and cauldrons clean, to cut up meat, stir soups and stews, fry leeks, and braise meat—in other words, all the routine chores, while Edwin, as chef, planned, directed, and seasoned the menu.

Since we both wanted to live on as good food as possible, we worked hard. Although we were not the best of the three cooking teams in our kitchen (each one worked every third day), ours came to have a growing favorable reputation among our ordinarily disgruntled diners. As the first winter closed in, I liked to come to work before dawn, to watch our stoker (an insurance man from Peking) coax the fires into life under the cauldrons, to start cooking the cereal in the large guo (caldron), and to fry people's black-market eggs on our improvised hot plate. Then, after spending the rest of the day preparing lunch and supper, I would return in the dark to the hospital and an evening with Alice, tired but full of the satisfaction of one who has worked with his muscles all day.

It was, therefore, a severe blow when word came from the Japanese that on January first (1944) we would have to move out of Kitchen III into one of the other two large kitchens. Each of these was filled with what seemed to us to be immense crowds of unfamiliar people, and from all reports, enjoyed a notoriously bad spirit and worse food. But since the Japanese insisted—they intended to house the newly arriving Italians in that section of the camp—we had no choice but to leave Kitchen III.

As luck would have it, my first day of duty in the new place, Kitchen I, came on New Year's morning. I had never been inside the place—so much vaster than our intimate kitchen with two small guos and a team made up of only two cooks—and so I hardly knew my way around its vast interior. What made matters worse was that the night before there had been a very gay dance in the Tientsin kitchen (Kitchen II) to which Alice and I had gone and, reasonably enough, we had not got in until about 4 A.M.

So, sleepy, headachy, and angry, I groped my way, about 6 A.M., into the unknown recesses of Kitchen I. It was a cold, damp morning; the newly made fires created such thick steam that I could only dimly discern the long line of huge guos with many strange figures bending over them. Gradually, as the steam cleared, I became aware that the voice giving sharp orders Belonged to the boss cook, and the feet I kept seeing under the rising steam to the six helpers on the cooking team; also I realized that I was helping to cook cereal and that others were beginning the preparation for lunchtime stew.

It took little longer to grasp that no one there was much concerned about the quality of the food we made, and no one was eager to work more than absolutely necessary. McDaniel, the boss, was a nice enough guy in a rough, indifferent, and lazy way; but we knew that his sharp-tongued wife told him what to cook. He used to run home in the middle of most afternoons because he had forgotten what she had told him about supper! Beyond carrying out these orders, he knew little and cared less about cooking. For my first two months there, I felt frustrated about the job we were doing. There must be some way, thought I, of pepping things up and turning out better food. And so I began to look around for others who might feel the same way, but who, unlike myself, knew how to cook.

Gradually as I worked in that kitchen and learned to know it, its strangeness and size diminished. I even found myself enjoying my hours every third day on duty. There was a sunny courtyard just off the main kitchen, and on good days, when we could prepare the food for stews out there and eat our lunch at the big table, there was an atmosphere of rough, ribald fun that I heartily enjoyed. As this sense of at-homeness grew, I found that the functioning of the kitchen as a complex of coordinated activities came to interest me—for it really was a remarkable organization.

This organization began outside the kitchen when food supplies were brought into camp on carts by Chinese. They were distributed by the Supplies Committee proportionally to each of the two main kitchens. Then the supplies gang carried them in wooden crates to the kitchens—vegetables to the vegetable room and meat to the butchery. At this point the two cooks for the following day looked glumly over the meager supplies they had been given for their eight hundred customers, racked their brains for some new ideas for a menu, and then told the vegetable captains and the butchers what they wanted in the raw preparation of these supplies.

That same afternoon and into the next morning, the two butchers sliced, cubed, or ground the meat (this would be the winter procedure; they boiled it in summer in order to ensure its keeping at least over night without refrigeration). Teams of some fifteen to twenty women diced carrots, peeled potatoes, and chopped cabbage, while middle-aged men helped them by carrying the vegetable baskets around and by cleaning the produce in a pair of old bathtubs taken from the residences in the "out of bounds" section of the compound.

The next day the two cooks and five helpers came on duty about 5 A.M. They prepared breakfast cereal if there was any, and then lunch and supper for that day. A pan washer on my shift (actually a scholar of Chinese literature, and now a professor at Cornell University) washed the containers we used in preparing the food and from which we ladled out the dinner. Then women servers distributed the food to the waiting lines collecting food for our eight hundred people. They were checked and watched over by elderly men counters who made sure no one came in twice, and kept tabs on how fast the food was running out.

Girls then passed tea—if there was any—around the tables in the dining room. Men tea servers poured it into flasks for the majority who, being families preferred to collect their food in covered containers and to eat it en famille in their rooms. Near the serving tables was the bread room where five or six older men sliced two hundred loaves of bread daily and distributed to each his ration. And finally, two teams of women dishwashers cleaned up the dishes after the meal of those who ate in the dining hall. All of these groups got time off depending on the hours and heaviness of their work.

Cooking food and boiling water, however, required heat. For this purpose, coal and wood were brought to the kitchen yard from the supply house in carts. In our yard two men were always chopping wood while others molded bricks out of the coal dust that made up most of our usual coal issue. Two stokers got up the fires and tended them, one in the cooking area and the other where water was boiled for drinking. Stoking was a job which called for great skill since the coal was poor and the cooks extremely demanding about the level of heat they had to have under their precious stews.

To keep this intricate organization running smoothly, there was at first only an informal structure, headed by the manager of the kitchen, who seemed to do everything, and two women storekeepers. The latter kept an eye on our small stores of sugar and oil; also they purchased raw ginger, spices, and dried fruits when they were available in the canteen; and generally functioned as advisers of the manager on his many problems.

One morning my career as a kitchen helper was rudely interrupted by a fairly serious accident. It was a raw February day in 1944. Since there was nothing much to do in the cooking line, some of us, spurred on by the complaints of our more sensitive diners, decided to clean up the south kitchen where water was boiled for drinking. Our kitchens were terribly dirty; soot from the fires covered ceiling and walls; grease was inevitably added to this layer on the cauldron tops; and the floor combined all this with its own tracked-in mud. Cleaning meant trying, with brooms and cloths, to get as much of this dirt and soot off the walls, ceiling, and pipes as possible.

Along the wall above the top of the cauldrons was a chimney ledge that protruded about five inches. Thinking that it was wide enough to stand on, I clambered up. I had not been there twenty seconds when I felt myself losing my balance, and instinctively I stepped back—into a cauldron of boiling water. "Boy, that's hot," I half-said to myself, and in the same instant I was across the room. I can recall no conscious mental command telling me to jump as I found myself leaping out of that cauldron. In fact, I catapulted out so fast that my working mate only saw me crashing into the wall opposite and thought, he admitted later, that I had simply gone mad. Next I found myself hopping up and down as fast as I could. Then I sat down and eased off my shoes and socks to see what had happened to my feet.

I had no idea I was badly burned until, taking the sock off my right ankle and foot, I found the skin coming off with it. By that time the boss cook had come over from the north kitchen. With one look at my now skinless ankles, he gave quick orders to take me to the hospital immediately. Two burly fellows on the shift made a chair with their arms and trundled me off. It was not until we got out in the air that I became conscious of real pain. To be sure, when I was hopping up and down, my feet stung; but this was worse. From that time on for about five hours, my burns hurt a lot.

The doctors in the hospital did a wonderful job. A British doctor for the Kailon Mining Company put picric acid on the bandages and did not take them off for about ten days. Due to the sulphanilamide that was smuggled into camp through the guerrillas, I was able to avoid infection. When the bandages finally came off, new skin had grown almost everywhere. Within three weeks, I was hobbling around. In six months all that was left to show of the burn was a rather grim abstract color effect of yellow and magenta.

I learned through my experience that ours was a remarkable hospital. Devoid of running water or central heating, it managed to be not only efficient but personal. It seemed to me a far better place in which to be sick than many "modern" hospitals, equipped with the latest gadgets but run on impersonal terms. It is this negation of the individual person, this sense of being "the bladder case in Room 304," or "that terminal heart case down the hall"—not its food or even its service—that makes many an American hospital, despite its vast efficiency, a dreaded place in which to be sick.

The nurses and doctors, who formed the backbone of the staff of our hospital, had, of course, to work for long hours since no one could replace them at their tasks. But as I soon came to realize, a lot more than their skill was needed. Among the essential services provided were a pharmacy where medicines (bought with a camp fund derived from a tax on comfort money) were given out and a lab where urinalyses, blood and other tests could be performed. There was also a diet kitchen with its own staff of cooks and vegetable preparers (all women), a butcher, a supplies gang, a stoker, and a wood chopper. The hospital also had a hand laundry; there five women and one man washed the many sheets, towels, and bandages that were needed for the thirty or so in-patients. To keep the building itself clean, a crew of moppers, dusters, and window cleaners daily made the rounds of the rooms and wards. And finally, there was a staff of men orderlies and girl servers who helped the nurses to wash the patients and make them comfortable.

What made this small hospital unique in my experience was the unusual relationship between staff and patients, and among the patients themselves. The workers, who came every day to the wards, sweeping under a patient's bed or bringing him tea, were not strangers moving impersonally in and out of his area. Rather, they were friends or, at least, acquaintances who entered the patient's life and communicated with him there. They had known him as a person in camp before he became a case in the hospital, and thus, greeted by them as a person, the patient never felt himself to be merely a rundown organism whose end might well be the disposal in the basement.

And, of course, the patients in the ward knew each other, too. For example, when old Watkins in the bed at the far end reached the "crisis" of his serious case of pneumonia, we were all aware of it, and waited in concern for him to ride it out. When the ex-marine bartender, the foreman of a "go-down" in Tientsin, and the Anglican priest—all of whom were the orderlies in the ward I was in—made up our beds and carried out our slops, they would find time to ask me about my feet, kidding me for thinking I could walk on water. Thus, quite unconsciously, because this was so normal among friends, they created a sense of personal community that for the sick is one of the few real guards against inner emptiness and despair. I left the hospital refreshed and sorry to return to normal internment life.

One of the hospital's greatest trials was keeping up its stock of medicine. We had each brought into camp quantities of medicines in our trunks, as our doctors had directed, but this supply ran out before the end of 1943. The Japanese supplied only a fraction of the medicines we needed. The Swiss representative in Tsingtao, who came to camp once a month with the comfort money, was able to buy for us in local pharmacies only the most commonplace drugs. What in the end saved our health was the happy collaboration between American logistics and the Swiss consul's ingenuity. The solution of this problem, when finally found, was so unusual we came to regard it as one of the best stories in the camp.

The two men who escaped from camp in June, 1944, were able to report via radio to Chungking that we were in desperate need of medicines. In answer, the American Air Force "dropped" a quantity of the latest sulfa drugs to the nationalist guerrillas in our immediate neighborhood. But how were these supplies, obviously of Allied origin, to be smuggled into the camp past the Japanese guards?

The only man from the outside world permitted access was the Swiss consul in Tsingtao. During a war, while other nations draft civilians into their armies, Switzerland, the perennial neutral, drafts civilians into its diplomatic corps—and with equally strange results. I remember, for example, dear old Duval, whom we had known as the nearsighted, brilliant, charming, ever courteous, but utterly unorganized, professor of history at Yenching University. Duval was a man with great popping eyes, a large, bald dome of a head, and an enormous black mustache. To our surprise and mild dismay we found that he had been made the assistant Swiss consul in Peking charged with extracting concessions for us from the Japanese military police! No man at the university was more respected and loved. But it was hardly for his practical competence, his wily ingenuity, or his crushing dominance of will that we held him in such high esteem.

An even more unlikely selection—if possible—was Laubscher of Tsingtao, the temporary Swiss consul for Shantung Province. Laubscher was, therefore, the man slated by the vagaries of fate to visit us regularly at Weihsien camp and to represent us and our governments to the Japanese. According to those who knew him in Tsingtao, he had formerly been a small importer. He seemed formal, stiff, and somewhat reticent in his old-world ways, and certainly he was red-nosed and rheumy of eye—probably, so the report ran, from years of silent sipping while he sat on the club porch or while playing a quiet game of bridge in the men's bar.

To look at Laubscher was to know that he would be quite incapable of pounding a table, even if he dared to, without hurting his hand. He seemed far too vacant of eye and unreal of being, too much inclined to try hard for a time but to effect nothing in the end. To be sure, we did not expect him to free us with a wave of his umbrella or even to force anything out of the Japanese against their wishes. We were, however, aware that a firm will, steady and unrelenting pressure, and an ability to appear loudly outraged and genuinely angry while keeping a cool head could work wonders. No one gave Laubscher the slightest chance of producing these traits out of his seemingly flabby ego. We waited, without much hope, to see what he could do for us.

What he did in fact accomplish, he explained to a group of us shortly before the end of the war.

"You see, friends," said he in his soft, old-world voice, "it all started when a Chinese dressed like a coolie rang the Swiss consulate bell in Tsingtao late one night and asked for me. Since he would allow no one else in the room when he spoke to me—he said he did not trust my servants!—I was a trifle nervous. However, I tried—ahem!—to keep a walking stick near me!"

A small chuckle went round his group of listeners at the picture of the 120-pound Laubscher defending himself in single combat!

"He told me," Laubscher continued, "he had sneaked into town that night from the guerrilla band in the hills. The day before the American Air Force from West China had made one of its usual 'drops' to the guerrillas. Among the packages were four large crates. It said in an attached letter—fortunately, friends, the Yanks had enough sense not to mark the crates!— these were designated for the camp at Weihsien. The letter also said the crates were full of medicines. The next night, said the coolie, four of their band would come to the consulate at two A.M. to give the crates to me. I was to receive them quite alone and to tell no one. It was up to me to get those crates into the camp to the internees.

"With these abrupt words the coolie left me. I must admit, friends, I was dazed and worried by all this. Not only was it risky; it was baffling—how could I carry off the role of fearless and omnicompetent secret agent? For the first, but not the last, time during this episode, I allowed myself a little drink to calm my nerves!

"Sure enough, the next night at two, the bell rang at the gate. Having cleared the residence of servants, I opened the gates myself. Without a word four coolies marched in, each with a large wooden crate on his shoulder. At my order they piled them in my private office—I had planned to stow them away myself afterward in the consulate strong room adjoining it. Then they left.

"I stared at this treasure: four boxes of medicines! How wonderful for the camp, I said to myself—but then I stopped dead, paralyzed by my next thought. How the hell—pardon me!—was I going to get those crates into the camp? The Japanese knew well that bicarb and aspirin were the principal medications I could buy in Tsingtao. Where would I have run across all of this? For three hours I sat there on one of the crates almost in despair, trying to think of an answer—and again friends, I cheered myself a very great deal with a nip now and then!

"I kept asking myself: `What will I say when I try to get approval for this list at the consular police office here in Tsingtao?' Discouraged there, I would then ask, `What can I tell the Japanese at the camp one hundred miles away when I arrive with all of these crates?' And friends, it came like a flash! Suddenly my brain focused on the distinction between these two authorities, one in Tsingtao and the other at Weihsien, and my plan began to form.

"The next morning I told my Swiss secretary—I could, I decided, trust her—to type me out a list of all the drugs I could buy in Tsingtao. There were about twenty-five to thirty such items, I should think. Most important, I told her, she was to leave four spaces in her list between each item. Puzzled, but obedient to my command—ahem!—she did this and gave me a list about four pages long.

"Then I rushed with this list to the office of the Japanese consular police for their approval—everything I bring into camp must, you know, be okayed first by them. I must admit that the official looked at the open spaces on my list with some amazement; then he looked at me curiously, as if to ask, `What the hell is this little fool up to?' I tried not to notice his look or to seem nervous, so I hummed a little tune to myself, tapped my umbrella impatiently on the floor, and gazed out the window. Hopefully, so I told myself, this official cannot figure out anything wrong or dangerous about all those spaces. How could he, I thought, even form a sensible question to me about it? If I wanted to use up the consulate stationery in such a scandalously wasteful way, then that was my funeral! I almost chuckled at this thought, as I stared out the window. At last, with a skeptical sigh, the Japanese reached in his drawer, pulled out his little seal, and gave the list his official chop.

"Elated I sped back to the consulate. I told my secretary to use the same typewriter and now to fill in the vacant spaces on the list with the names of all the drugs in the crates. I must say, gentlemen, she did look at me then with new eyes!

"The next day I caught the early morning train to Weihsien, and was at the camp gates with the crates by mid-afternoon. Again the Japanese officials were puzzled. Where had this little foreign fool gotten all these drugs? Had a shipment come from Japan that they didn't know about? Again they looked curiously first at my list and then at me—and again I hummed my little tune and gazed in the other direction. Apparently they decided it must be all right since there was no doubt about the consular chop at the bottom of the list. The official said, `Okay'; at last the gates swung open; and my cart filled with the crates rolled into camp and up to the hospital door. I shall never forget the look on the faces of you doctors when I took you out to show you the crates and then gave you that list with their contents!

"Again, friends, I must tell you that I had myself quite a nightcap when I got home again to Tsingtao!"

When Laubscher had finished and stepped down, everyone looked at him with as much amazement and curiosity as had the Japanese officials he had so completely outwitted. From then on he was greeted whenever he came to camp with a new affection and certainly a new respect. I often thought that he deserved at the least a small statue placed somewhere near the hospital, complete with battered homburg, rolled umbrella, stiff collar, and rheumy—but cagey—eye!

'When I returned to the kitchen after my stay in the hospital, I found that there had been some changes. McDaniel had quit his cooking job; and I, being for various reasons the only one available, was asked to take his place as boss cook.

I was totally inexperienced in the real art of cooking. But the ablest of the helpers on the shift promised that I could ask him to check the amount of seasoning to be used, the timing of foods, and other matters. So I agreed to boss a shift, and that remained my job until the winter following. I had been grumbling a good deal that no one wanted to make the food better, and that nothing more was needed than a little energy and ingenuity. Now I had the chance to show what I could do.

Things got underway when Taffy Griffiths joined us about a month later. Taffy was a handsome, bony, blond Welshman, an executive for Kailon, with plenty of energy and brains, and a wild temper. No cooking project, however grandiose or complicated, daunted him. No plan involved too much work.

As the youngest of seven in his family, he had been responsible for helping his mother in the kitchen in Aberdare. There, as he often said, he learned a great deal about cooking; he had a feeling for what would work and how to fashion a dish so that it would taste good. Taffy became the brains of our team. I tried to maintain diplomatic relations with the helpers, the management, and the public, which was no simple task, for Taffy would go right through the roof if any stupid, lazy, or irrational person got too near him! Later we were joined by another inventive person, Laura Holcomb, an American from the Y.W.C.A. These two were largely responsible for the virtual revolution in camp cooking that took place during that spring and summer

Weihsien food was not only meager and lacking in nutrition; it suffered from being monotonously liquid. All we seemed able to cook—given our great cauldrons and the numbers to be served—were soups, stews and, for an occasional dessert, a rather sloppy vanilla or caramel custard.

A cook's greatest challenge, then, was to prepare the small issue of beef and potatoes, our basic foods, so that they could be served "dry"—that is, put on a plate rather than in a bowl. Our first effort was to braise the cubed meat, fry the potatoes—no easy task in a great iron cauldron over a temperamental fire—and serve them on the side with a separate gravy. This sort of dry stew with its elements separated involved a lot more work, but it delighted everyone.

A considerable variety of dishes followed this first "breakthrough." We began to use the bakery ovens after the bread was finished. Soon we were turning out shepherd's pies (meat pies with a biscuit-dough crust) or peroshki (large dough balls with meat fillings) made by the Russian women. Such undertakings involved a large crowd of women volunteers working with us, filling the two hundred bread tins while we carted them to and from the bakery. Sometimes when we had a sufficient supply of cooking oil, we could fry in deep fat; once in a great while, when we received an unusually large issue of meat, we could roast the pieces of meat in the ovens and serve them sliced. This was luxury indeed.

Perhaps we were proudest of our very occasional desserts. Desserts, such as cakes and tarts, were not easy to make in the large quantities we required even when we had saved up the needed supplies. But with Laura's help, we developed a way of making them that involved a kind of assembly line along which several large bowls were passed successively. One woman would work in the oil and sugar; another would add the flour to each bowl; a third the flavoring and soda, and the last one the water. After eight or nine bowls had thus passed down the line, there would be a batter for one hundred cakes, a shortbread dough for eight hundred pieces, or even—when we could buy dried fruit in the canteen—individual tarts for everyone. In such cases, the bakers would volunteer their help. Not a little of our shift's ability to cook extras came from the help of an American veterinarian from Tientsin. Unable to practice his profession in the camp, he became the camp's master baker. He would turn out two hundred tins of shortbread in touchy and often uncontrollable ovens without scorching a single piece.

Looking back at it I am sure that this sort of development of new and better techniques—at first slow but gradually gaining momentum—took place in every area of camp work. I was a part of it in the kitchen and I found it very exciting. I hated, therefore, to give up being a cook. But during the last winter of the war (1944-1945) our able manager tired of his thankless job, and persuaded me to run for the office in his place. Since I had the backing of most of the kitchen staff and, thanks entirely to Taffy and Laura, a reputation as a cook, I was elected. For the last nine months of camp, therefore, as manager I was not so much involved in the creative problems of how to devise new dishes as I was in the political and organizational crises that such a large institution as a kitchen for eight hundred diners inevitably generated.

There were many other sorts of heavy work besides kitchen cooking and stoking. But once in the kitchen I was never seriously tempted by them. Our most serious rival—that is, work for which men were apt to leave the kitchen—was the bakery. This seemed at first strange to me because baking was almost the hardest physical labor we had, and in summer certainly the most unpleasant. There men had to set, knead, shape, and bake four hundred loaves a day in a crude, hot bakery.

Apparently, however, the job held satisfaction all its own and one peculiarly male. Baking required of each man a regular routine of exacting hard physical labor as a member of a closely coordinated team. In this effort there was no "boss" forever giving directions; rather each exercised his own well-learned skill in oft-rehearsed coordination with the others. At the end of his day, a baker felt he had worked both hard and productively; he had never been bothered by the complaints of a howling public; and he had done this demanding yet serene work in a tight and very familiar community of his fellows.

By contrast, kitchen work, while equally a team operation, was always varied and hence always had to be directed by the boss cook who alone knew what was planned and how he meant to produce it. Thus the "helper" was no more than that, a skilled man but one working always under someone else's direction. If the stew was tasteless or ran short, the public let a man know quickly enough that his shift had "done a lousy job that day." Whereas if the bread turned out poorly, the public commiserated with the bakers over their poor yeast!

Besides stoking at the ovens, working in the kitchens, tending the boilers, pumping water into the water towers at kitchens and showers, and hauling supplies to and fro, the other heavy work was carried on in the carpenter and fitter's shop. Surprisingly, a crew of some thirty men was kept busy continually, repairing utensils, supply crates, rooms, windows, etc., which hard usage had rendered unusable. The men in the shop also rebuilt much of the hospital, one of the kitchens, and redid the boilers that gave us hot water. They did this work wholly with materials "scrounged" here and there in the compound, and refashioned for this new use. The equipment with which the camp was originally furnished consisted of next to nothing.

Besides kitchens, bakery, hospital, and shop—what we called our "utilities"—there were many other forms of work necessary for our common life. There was the leisurely, comradely, but otherwise unappealing task of keeping the three men's latrines clean. The two-man crew in charge of the one near our dorm consisted of a middle-aged American missionary and a retired British banker. The casual naturalness with which they went about their job showed the radical changes camp life had wrought in attitudes. Instead of being horrified at their work, these men made the most of its friendly, social possibilities. They laughed and joked with each client—and everyone was their client!

Often that retired banker with his white mustache and twinkling eyes would complain to me that we cooks had given them more business than they really wanted that day—or to the baker that the bread had been unusually heavy. As a result, he and his partner had seen no one at all after breakfast—and "How the hell am I to get the news of the world if no one comes in?"

Interestingly enough, for whatever reason, no women in camp would take on as a steady job the cleaning of their latrines. All the able-bodied ones had to take it in turn, therefore, each one doing her bit of cleaning about one week during the year. Although it was admittedly an unpleasant enough job, most of the men suspected they relished its opportunity for conspicuous martyrdom, for without fail, one could always tell who was on that week.

And the gayer ones had a fine time with it. Clad in long boots and carrying a large mop—symbols of their trade—they would greet every male they met with a cheery wave and ask, "Guess what job I've got this week! Why not come along and give me a hand with the heavy work?"

Most fascinating of all about these strange (to men) female arrangements was the fact that the only women in camp who deliberately avoided this latrine duty were two Russian women married, respectively, to a wealthy American and a wealthy Briton.

The point certainly was not that they were Russian. They hired other Russian women to do these chores for them, paying them in coffee sent in to them by relatives in Tientsin. And it was a wonderful Russian woman, married to the British Professor of English at Yenching, who voluntarily took on the odorous and bruising task of running this cleanup crew for the women's latrines.

Obviously the cause of their refusal was that they were both hoping to move up socially into colonial society and out of the nothingness of refugee society. They had, one could not but guess, married these well-to-do men for their wealth and their prestige. They did not intend to lose all this newly gained social status by falling back into the kind of life they had left behind them. For them, if there was any one symbol of that old life, it was the job of taking care of women's conveniences!

The irony of this was intensified by the fact that the socially prominent wives of high-ranking British business officials would never have dreamed of refusing to do this work, once it became a recognized form of community service. While the two women who aspired to grandeur were too proud and too insecure to do it, the British possessors of status were too proud and too secure to refuse.

The mind of the refugee Russian woman, working her way up, was dominated by precisely those values lacking in the social milieu she had just quitted. Refugee society in the Orient was dismal: abysmally poor and protected by no government of their own, they were the most vulnerable of any foreign group to every economic or political upheaval. They had been badly misused by the Japanese, who had forced them into all sorts of unwelcome labor. Anyone with energy would do almost anything to leave that society.

Among the values idolized by this group were, therefore, material security, personal cleanliness, escape from lower-class life and its humiliating chores, and so on. To do this work of cleaning toilets was to repudiate every value of one's new existence. A woman dare not do it for fear of falling back and so losing her one hope of being a lady. In her own mind, she was still a poor refugee. Work like this, so perfectly fitting her inward assessment of her status, frightened her.

To the secure British woman of the colonial upper class, on the other hand, who had been placed at the top by birth and breeding, this job held no social threat at all. Even in dirty, refuse-covered boots, she felt and knew herself to be a "lady." This job was merely a role adopted for the moment; it did not fit either her inward assessment of herself or the way she thought others would assess her and so it held no terrors. Moreover, she was also conforming to the subtler standards and requirements of that upper class, namely to be a sport, to do your share, to cooperate willingly even though it was distasteful. These standards she dare not ignore, however uncomfortable the job might prove to be to her. Only such a person well within an upper-class group would even be aware of those standards—not someone looking longingly up from below. The Russian women had no idea at all that they had broken those rules. In this situation, a lack of "breeding" did seem to hurt, but it did hurt only those women desperately wanting to be considered well born, and in their very desperation proving to all and sundry that they had not been.

There were innumerable other jobs, although none of them so unusual. One of them was in the shoe repair shop. No new shoes were available in Weihsien. Since many people had arrived with only the well-worn pairs bought on the last trip home years before, four men were kept continually busy rescuing dilapidated shoes from nonexistence. Finally, next door to the watch repair and barber shops, was the sewing room where a crew of women tried to patch together the tattered garments of the camp's bachelors.

One pair of undershorts of mine brewed up quite a metaphysical storm in our dormitory. Since the shorts were so covered with patches that only the band around the middle contained some of the original cloth, a nice philosophical point was raised: was it now the same old pair of shorts, and if not, at what point had it become another pair?

Day in and day out, the camp was a small hive of activity, most of it manual and vigorous. Everyone became more efficient in dealing with the practical problems of life than he had been when he came in. Men who had never used a hammer put up shelves on their walls. Others who had never seen a mason's trowel built clever brick stoves in their rooms; these stoves had an oven inside so that they not only heated the room, but also baked a modest cake or cookies. In summer everyone constructed elaborate awnings of mats bought in the canteen, and thus provided pleasant shade for the patio in front of their room.

After we had been there a year or so, an exhibit was held of the artifacts that ingenious people from all professions had made. They were almost unbelievable to one not blessed with technical or inventive gifts. They included the fanciest of brick stoves, sliding screen doors and windows, homemade cooling systems, elegantly fitted cabinets, and beautifully wrought oil lamps. Most fascinating to me was an intricate and finely balanced system of shelves that would, at the mere touch of a finger, disappear on ropes to the ceiling and thus free half the floor space of a small room.

The display drove home to me the truth that no practical situation, however unwieldy or difficult, was too much for human ingenuity. This group of humans had been faced with the total lack of all the comforts to which they had been accustomed, and for once they were unable to purchase gadgets ready made. Thus all the intense technical creativity that resides in any group of men became active. Each in his own way embarked with energy and skill on the task of raising ever higher our level of material comfort.

We came to realize, however, that a community of people needs more to keep them going than the bare necessities. We all felt this as early as the first dreary week, when we crowded into the church on Saturday night and sang our throats out, as a talented monk and a Salvation Army captain led us in familiar songs. Encouraged by this visceral response to even the simplest form of entertainment, some of us from Yenching University started to work up a few topical skits.

The missionary and educational community in North China, happily, on the whole, as long on brains and talent as on piety, had for many years been putting on an annual summer revue at their common vacation spot at Peitaiho. Almost all of them were accustomed to writing or to singing silly lyrics to old songs, and to cavorting in kilts, togas, or what have you about a stage while some elderly professor solemnly intoned "Lochinvar" or "Hiawatha."

We began to write, plan, and practice a small revue. We were sure we liked this kind of nonsense. But would this conglomerate community find it funny?

We were a somewhat apprehensive foursome as we strode to the front of the stage, dressed in camp working clothes and looking as grimy as possible. Then we pantomimed and sang a song about camp labor to the tune of "Solomon Levi." To our relief and delight, the audience shook the building with their roars, and stamped for us to return and sing it again and again. The reason, of course, was not that either song or singers were good, but that after that trying first month, this was the best— almost the only—laugh the internees had had.

For the first time, they were able to get out of their miserable selves and to rise for the moment above their troubles by laughing at them and at themselves—a kind of reverse "catharsis" in which the tragedy in an audience's real life is relieved by an analogous comedy on stage.

This was the beginning. From that point on, it was just a matter of time until the large number who were interested in drama and music went to work and eventually developed our Saturday night entertainments in the church to a high level. Later that spring we were treated to our first real theater. This took the form of two one-act plays; I had a part in the second, a very funny thing by A. P. Herbert. There was no attempt to make sets for these; one or two simple articles of furniture sufficed.

By summer, full-length plays began to appear, each developing its dramatic art and its sets to a little higher point than the last. Among the dozen or so plays produced, I recall having small parts in Noel Coward's Hayfever and James Barrie's Mr. Pim Passes By, and enjoying thoroughly a hair-raising production of Night Must Fall and a most hilarious Private Lives. Two British couples in their thirties took the four roles in that latter play and did not need, it might be noted, too much coaching for those parts. These couples were our most talented dramatists, and were able to write and produce two very funny comedy-and-song revues of their own. After the rather heavy dose of Barrie, this more earthy sort of humor in which they excelled came as a great relief. The culmination of this dramatic development was reached in June, 1945, when a full-scale performance of Shaw's Androcles and the Lion was staged with three complete stage sets, a full-sized lion made of cloth and cardboard, and armor and helmets for ten Roman guards soldered together out of tin cans from the Red Cross parcels.

We had musicians among us as well as actors, so two musical Saturday evenings were provided during each "season." There was a choral society which sang Handel's Messiah, Stainer's The Crucifixion, Mendelssohn's Elijah, and others. The camp boasted a more than passable symphonette of some twenty-two pieces, whose last concert included a full performance (minus bass violins and tuba) of Mozart's Concerto in D Minor. Unlike the other instruments, most of which had been brought from Peking or Tientsin in a trunk or by hand, the piano had been found in a most dilapidated state in the church basement. It had been banged up by the soldiers quartered there, but it was speedily renovated by camp musicians and used to great effect in all our concerts.

Except in the worst heat of summer and cold of winter when the church was not habitable, there was a remarkably good entertainment each weekend: a play, a revue, a choral program— all calculated to take the edge off our otherwise monotonous life. As we often said to one another, when one is immersed in a play or listening to a symphony, the mind is most easily transported beyond the walls of the camp. For two hours each week that rather ragged group of people were enabled to make a brief return to London's West End or to an off-Broadway haunt. Hence every person in camp, many old hands and many who had never been to a play or a concert before, jammed into our entertainments; for the last year and a half we had to run shows on both Friday and Saturday nights to accommodate the crowds.

A person could not live through this vivid experience of the dynamic and progressive development of a small civilization without having his ideas profoundly affected—and I found my own changing right before my eyes, so to speak. First of all, I was deeply impressed not only by the courage and tenacity of my fellow humans but also by their inventiveness. However strange the world in which they may be set down, they will adapt themselves to it bravely, I was finding. Then gradually their ingenuity will find means to improve their situation. No problem of sanitation, cooking, or drama was so difficult that some means can not be devised to cope with it. Soon that means itself will be improved, and so on in a progressive spiral of development.

I rapidly concluded that the capacity of men to develop the technical aspects of civilization—know-how—is limitless. I knew I would never again despair of man's ability to progress in both knowledge and practical techniques.

Along with this new faith in man's inherent capabilities to make himself increasingly comfortable and secure, I gained a fresh appreciation of the basic character of these material problems. As I became involved in the day-to-day crises of housing, toilets, and food production, I could not deny, whatever my philosophy or my faith seemed to tell me, that these were the problems that must be solved first of all. I felt this because they are the essential base on which the rest of life might be built later. Our concerts, lectures, and library were, to be sure, important to our life. But whatever else happened, we had to eat, to be warm, to be dry.

Given sufficient food and water by a well-oiled civilization, those of us of the so-called intelligentsia are apt to undervalue the importance of material values in favor of the life of the mind Consequently they come to regard the world's producers of food, shoes, blankets, or medicines as somehow less worthy, less meritorious, than the artist, the philosopher, the poet, and the preacher, all of whom may feed men's souls.

This view is possible, I discovered, only when material needs are so completely satisfied that they can be safely forgotten. I found that whenever this satisfaction was endangered, the importance of physical needs immediately became apparent to everyone. In the beginning, the men who made our camp civilization possible were the practical men who could learn quickly and efficiently to cook and bake our food, to repair our equipment, and to cleanse our latrines.

When the full impact of this important truth bore in on me, I found myself facing a crisis in belief. In my own life I had already experienced some profound changes with respect to religion and its place. I had been brought up in a tolerant but strongly dedicated liberal religious home. I had early imbibed its ethical idealism and its de-emphasis of the material and sensual sides of life. Then, as a college philosophy major, seduced by the beguilements of Santayana, I had found the religion of my youthful environment uninteresting, naïve, and somewhat sentimental. Because of this I took from my early environment only its ethical emphasis and left the religion aside. "Why," I asked myself, "add religious frills to the ethical commitments any unbelieving naturalist can easily avow? Cannot the modern agnostic intellectual be capable by himself of leading a creative and upright life devoted to the moral absolutes of peace in the world and justice in society?"

One might call this a collegiate idealism, resting uneasily on a naturalistic base. It "came a cropper" under the hammer blows of the years 1939 and 1940. Hitler's rise to power revealed such naturalistic idealism to be itself not only naïve but ineffectual. To support justice in that time was to relinquish peace, for Hitler could be overcome only with force. On the other hand, to support peace through noninvolvement was to acquiesce in the injustice of a Nazi-dominated world. It seemed that if a man were to devote himself to either of the two great ideals and work wholeheartedly for peace or for justice, he had to be unrealistic about the real world. While if he tried to be realistic, and saw the ambiguity of the true historical situation, inevitably he became cynical about the relevance of these great ideals to practical life. An ethical existence based on devotion to ideals seemed to have run aground.

Like most of my college generation, I sat miserable and confused as France fell, unable to take a stand anywhere. Should we enter the war and disrupt our peace? Should we remain in neutrality and so allow a tyranny to rule the rest of the world? I knew in this experience that loyalty to something deeper than these now conflicting moral ideals would be necessary if I were going to live creatively in the real world.

This deeper framework for life came to me rather suddenly, as to many in those years, through the speaking and writing of Reinhold Niebuhr. Here was a searching realism that was willing to face all the ambiguity and squalor of any human social situation. At the same time, it was intensely moral, for it had a deep commitment to human good. The difference was that this commitment was not based either on a belief in the overriding goodness of men or even on the possibility of establishing ideal solutions in social history—both of which seemed contradicted by the obvious facts. It was based on faith in God, and it resulted in a call to serve one's fellows however ambiguous the situation in which man might find himself. It was now possible for me to face the war with a realism that was not cynical and an idealism that was not naïve.

I was intensely interested in this new "realistic theology" when, just out of college, I went out in 1940 to China to teach English at Yenching. Although I had had no seminary training, I devoured theological tomes every moment of my free time from then until I went to camp in 1943. By that time my whole orientation had changed: from the naturalistic humanist of my college days, I became what I felt to be a "convinced Christian." My new faith, however, was not so much the result of any personal religious experience as it was the intellectual conviction that only in terms of the Christian view of things could I make sense out of the social history in which we live and the ethical decisions we humans have to make. And so to camp I went, replete with theological jargon, many secondhand concepts, and a conviction that mine was the only way in which to view life.

For a person thus encumbered, those first months of camp raised the most urgent and devastating of questions: What's so important anyway about the way a person looks at life? Isn't this a typically intellectualist way of looking at our crises? Are these "big problems of life" really problems at all? Surely the issues of our existence are not these intellectual points of naturalism vs. Christian faith, or even of idealism vs. psychoanalysis. Such are all right for the philosophically minded collegian; but are they basic? The real issues of life are surely material and political: how we can eat and keep warm, be clothed and protected from the weather, and organize our common efforts. These matters are resolved by practical experience and by techniques, not by this or that philosophy or religious faith, however convincing an expression of that faith may be to the cool observer of the scene.

It was not that I thought religion wrong; I simply thought it irrelevant. What real function in actual life does it perform under conditions where basic problems are dealt with by techniques and organizational skill?

I was quite willing to admit that there are people who are interested in the nature of man and the universe; and that apparently there are others who enjoy religion and going to church. But, unlike food and sanitation which one must have in order to live, is not religion merely a matter of personal taste, of temperament, essential only if someone wants it but useless if one does not happen to be the type that likes it? Is there any "secular" use for religion; does it have any value for the common life of mankind? Or is it there useless, because secularity with its techniques, its courage, and its idealism is quite able to create a full human life without religion? As I asked myself these questions over and over throughout those first months of camp, I became what we might call "secular." That is, I was a man convinced that while religion might help those who liked it, it was a waste of time for others. Certainly "the others" now included myself.

Wherever I turned, everything I saw reinforced this view. Of what use to our life were the vocations of teaching philosophy or preaching Christianity? Those of us who had performed these tasks in the outside world now carried our weight of camp work; yes—but not in those roles. We were useful only insofar as teacher or evangelist became able stoker or competent baker.

No one on the Labor Committee ever ventured to suggest that philosophizing or preaching be regarded as valid camp jobs. That fact alone appeared to me to be an adequate commentary on their social usefulness. Apparently our intellectual, and especially our "religious," vocations were so unrelated to the real needs of life that they had to become "avocations." They were relegated to the categories of leisure-time and Sunday activities The engineer, the doctor, the laborer, the producer, on the other hand, were asked to modulate, but not to abandon, their vocations when they entered our community. Each of their calling proved its worth by the necessity for it in the support of our material existence, and by the fact that those of us in "spiritual' vocations had to learn other skills if we were to take part in the daily work.

For these reasons, after I arrived at camp, I quickly lost my former interest both in religious activities and in theological reflection. The missionaries were, it is true, achieving a unity and accord hitherto unknown, both among the various groups of Protestants and between the Protestants as a whole and the Catholics. Numerous joint enterprises consisting of lectures, services, and the like were planned and initiated. In all of this I took only the mildest interest, and soon found myself dropping out altogether.

My feelings found full expression one Sunday when, rushing by the church bent on some errand for the Housing Committee, I heard a familiar hymn ringing out through the open windows. I asked myself irritably, "What for—when there are so many important things to be done?" And shaking my head in disbelieving wonder, I went on about my business.

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