A community needs ethical people, but does the secular world need religious people? Are the saints really good, is religious piety a requisite for communal virtue, do we need God in order to love our fellow man? These questions occurred to me with increasing frequency as the deep significance of the moral dimension of life came clear to me. I looked around to find enlightenment.

I had to admit to myself that no easy answer to these questions could be found merely by noting the way in which different types of people, religious and irreligious, behaved. It was not possible to study us and say, "There, that proves you must be religious, for only the pious are good." People continually leap out of all the categories we try to put them in, and behave in totally unexpected ways.

The most important lesson I learned is that there are no cut-and-dried categories in human life, no easily recognizable brand names by which we can estimate our fellows. Over and over "respectable people," one of the commonest labels applied in social intercourse, turned out to be uncooperative, irritable, and worse, dishonest. Conversely, many who were neither respectable nor pious were in fact, valiant. At the same time, many obvious bums were just plain bums. It was the mystery, the richness, and the surprise of human beings that struck me the most when I looked round at my fellows.

Perhaps the most surprising of all was Clair Richards. She was a handsome, strong, self-sufficient, and possibly to some tastes hard-looking British woman in her thirties. As she swirled around the camp in her tight skirts and low-cut blouses, you knew the moment you saw her that she enjoyed going to bed with men. But I must say the frank and competent stare that met you when you spoke to her, plus her booming voice and rollicking laugh, tended to make a man, at least a young man, wonder more about his own capacities than about her obvious attractions. Inevitably, stories of a lurid past in Peking and Tientsin, of her having been the intimate of leading industrialists and diplomats, followed in her wake. How true or untrue these were, I shall never know.

Clair, moreover, thoroughly enjoyed her role among the more proper, bespectacled women of this predominantly Anglo-Saxon camp; despite their evident disapproval, she never made any effort to hide her many gifts. It is safe to say that when she swung into view, the words "character" and "moral" were not the first to pop into the minds of the envious, horrified, or interested observer.

Early in 1944, Kitchen II found itself in serious difficulties. The food was sloppily prepared and unimaginative—just when Kitchen I was developing all of its new ideas. The staff of Kitchen II was poorly organized and sullen; new rumors of stealing were heard every day. A meeting, called to name a new manager, appointed Prentiss Row, a tall, elegant English gentleman in his early sixties, wealthy, white-mustached, suave, humorous. I thought him too much the detached aristocrat to weld together this chaotic kitchen, but he did so with amazing shrewdness, toughness and, above all, imagination.

I was even more surprised when I found that it was Clair to whom he had given charge of women's labor in the kitchen. This was a hard, thankless task. It took courage enough to enforce the working rules which had grown lax through the slackest of habits. It took a sense of humor to do this without causing too many conflicts; and it took a rugged and undeviating honesty to stem the mounting tide of stealing. Despite her well-advertised labels, Clair had these virtues and to spare. Clair, with Row, completely changed both the morale and efficiency of that kitchen force. Looked upon by most of the pious as so wicked they were embarrassed to be seen talking with her, she had in fact a higher moral character than they did.

Another equally surprising woman flew an entirely different sort of flag. She was Jane Bright, an intense, scholarly, devout Quaker in her late forties, who had been professor of history at Yenching University. Jane was a kind of slim Margaret Rutherford, with a firm jaw and a long stride, addicted to brown tweed suits. I had often seen her in former days at Yenching, striding through the little village near the university, or bicycling the six miles to the city. She was usually alone except when accompanied by her Chinese friends among the students or in the village.

They would gather at her house for lessons in reading and writing as well as in history or the Bible.

Shortly after Weihsien camp started, a group of us decided to offer a series of lectures on contemporary philosophical and Christian thought. Jane, with no formal theological training, was well-enough informed on the vastly technical subject of modern biblical studies, to deliver two excellent lectures without any books available for review. An ascetic, intellectual missionary, Jane was the last person one would have thought capable of coping with the rough, secular world.

Nevertheless, on two occasions Jane proved herself the most remarkable woman I have ever had the good fortune to know. Probably the hardest single job for a woman was that of director of women's labor for the entire camp. Heaven knows that women are no more selfish or any lazier than men. Among women, however, nervous tensions seem always closer to the surface. In the women's labor office more explosions, if not more real difficulties, occurred than in the men's labor office. To be done well, this job needed the kind of objectivity, balance, and kindness that rarely go with a tough hide and a strong will. Halfway through the internment, this missionary took over the women's labor office and handled crises which, for any ordinary mortal, would have resulted in total disaster.

One victorious accomplishment of hers especially impressed me. Over a period of time, White Russian women had somehow claimed as their prerogative most of the jobs connected with serving food to the long lines in Kitchen I. I had never quite believed that Dostoevsky’s characters were real until I met their counterparts in camp.

"Temperamental" is the wrong word; it connotes the Anglo-Saxon ideal of self-control, for it implies that the dominance of life by intense emotion is somehow abnormal. With these women, one realized that life was emotion. Strong, probably sensual, often warm and as often hostile, these women were living embodiments of powerful feelings. Reason was in them no instrument for the control of feelings. Reason gave feelings wings, carrying their emotions, whether those of affection or those of anger, to heights unimaginable to the British or New England women around them. Thus they were the epitome of friendliness and charm to those whom they liked, vindictive and ruthless to those who had crossed them. A person on good terms with them ate like a king. But by the same token it was fatal if one were not: a mild spat could mean a half cut in servings, and a real fight spelled almost total hunger. Gradually the complaints from the diners about favoritism began to mount, and we had to change our serving teams.

This sort of wholesale shift of labor, involving some twenty serving women, was the kind of nightmare calculated to make an administrator blanch. Other jobs had to be found for these women that they would accept, and replacements for them must be discovered that would satisfy the griping diners. Above all, these people had to be somehow persuaded to leave a job generally regarded as abounding in "perks," as easy, and as prestigious for one that would certainly be less so.

One could look forward to weeks of tantrums, scenes, and even the eventuality of dragging these women from their posts physically. They knew what the complaints were among these thin-lipped Anglo-Saxons, and they were not about to admit that the griping was justified by giving in. I shrank from facing Jane with this horrendous prospect, but I had to do it for I certainly didn't want to tackle the problem myself!

When I explained the situation to her, she merely set her British jaw and said, "But it wants doing, doesn't it?"

A week later, to my utter astonishment, she informed me that the whole move had been arranged. And when I heard what the solution was, I had to admit that it smacked of genius. In our kitchen were some fifteen daughters of fundamentalist missionaries. They were innocent, pretty, well-mannered, and under no stretch of the imagination could they be considered competitive with these potent Russian women; nor could they ever be accused of coveting this position in order to make a good thing of it.

Even the Russians had to admit to Jane that these girls would make ideal servers, and no diner in his right mind could accuse one of these innocent virgins of favoritism. Although they remained unhappy about it, the Russians found themselves stripped of all counterarguments. Jane affected a shift, almost without a murmur, that would have wrecked any lesser soul. In much the same way, she kept the reluctant female labor force functioning and tranquil for the duration.

But this was not all. The greatest achievement of Jane's rare combination of tact, toughness, and compassion, showed itself in connection with a housing problem. In one dorm were some twenty-five women who just could not get along with one an-other. Not only were there the usual factions of missionary vs. businesswoman—this group also contained three middle-aged women who were literally impossible to live with. The conflicts made life almost unbearable for all concerned, and no solution seemed possible.

When we on the Housing Committee were about to despair, a deputation from the dorm made up of representatives of each faction came to the quarters office. To our surprise, they asked that Jane Bright be prevailed upon to move in with them. As one of them said, "She has the respect and affection of all the contestants; she may be able to calm things down a bit."

Without a murmur this doughty Daniel moved into the female lion's den—and there she remained. Jane had both firmness and love; that was her secret. No serious trouble ever arose in that dorm again.

What human eye, deceived by the superficial labels that we like to apply to people in society, could have seen the real worth and ability of these two women? To the pious, Clair was too immoral to be good. To those who were not pious, Jane was too devout to be realistic or effective. Both judgments were wide of the mark.

What is "character"? Its qualities seemed strangely elusive—like the Holy Spirit, they apparently blow where they will. Society usually associates character with breeding, good family, education, religious belief, and the like. These judgments may have some validity in the long run. But in the case of individuals, general categories are seldom dependable.

In the last desperate months of camp, the survival of our kitchens depended almost entirely upon the loyalty and honesty of a handful of people. They were by no means solely the well bred, the well schooled, or the pious. Among this small group there were aristocratic, educated, and religious individuals, to be sure. But just as conspicuous were persons of an altogether different stripe.

The two women who ran the storeroom in our kitchen, for example, could not have been more diverse. One was Mrs. W. T. Roxby-Jones, wife of a courtly gentleman, important in the Kailon Mining Company. She was a handsome, gracious, middle-aged lady, charming, intelligent and well bred. Mrs. Roxby-Jones worked day in and day out, keeping account of our oil, our sugar, and other specially prized stocks, and advising the cooks. She was beloved by all.

Her partner in this central work at the vitals of the kitchen was Mrs. Neal, the wife of a salty British tar. They had been the keepers of a lighthouse off the China coast. They came to camp late because he could not be replaced immediately. Both were unschooled, rough, and earthy; what she said and the way she said it were as different from the cultivated manner of Mrs. Roxby-Jones as could be imagined. But the same undeviating honesty, sense of cooperation, and responsibility were there—as well as the same capacity to laugh heartily with a group of men. It was impossible to say who contributed the more to our common life.

The most remarkable male in the kitchen was a former British army man, Dick Rogers. Dick was a rough-looking fellow, with a heavy chest and bulging muscles. He was slow of speech and unsubtle of thought. But in the life of the kitchen, he was a giant among men. He was so honest he was asked regularly to sleep among the stores—the hunks of meat, piles of coal and sacks of sugar—so that they would not be stolen at night. He was so hard-working that, besides his own steady work, there was no job in the kitchen he did not perform whenever anyone fell sick or quit.

It never occurred to Dick to take time off as everyone else did. When he finished one job, he merely looked around for another that had to be done. Yet this tower of strength in our community, whose integrity strengthened and inspired that of many weaker persons, was, in the context of life outside the camp, a man always wrestling with the problem of drink. The irony was that many a pious diner, whose regular ration of good food depended on Dick's strength of character, still thought of him as immoral because he drank. One diner observed sadly, "Pity, a man like that; looks so strong, but too weak to resist temptation!"

If justice is to be done in human affairs, it is truly fortunate that we are in the end judged by the Lord and not by one another!

Considering the difficulty of cataloging people in neat pigeon-holes, it was not strange that there were also innumerable surprises in the behavior of the religious ones among us. These formed a large and easily identifiable segment of the camp; there were about four hundred Roman Catholic priests and nuns, at least during the first six months—and about the same number of British and American Protestant missionaries and their families. In this large group of "professional" Christian workers were all sorts of people.

Among the priests, for example, was every type, from tough ex-barflies, cowpunchers, and professional ballplayers to sensitive scholars, artists, and saints. The Protestants embraced every variety, from simple, poorly educated Pentecostal and Holiness missionaries to the liberal products of private colleges and sub-urban churches.

Understandably, in this large group of humans were a few whose morals and whose honesty could be validly questioned; there were others who were unable to cooperate with camp policy, where that step involved some personal sacrifice. Missionaries seldom stole goods; but on occasion they could be as lazy as the next fellow, and they were often as unwilling as anyone else to give up space for those who had less.

To be fair, however, such cases were the exception. It seems to me that on the whole the missionaries were more honest and cooperative than any parallel secular group. But the missionary community did have its own characteristic weaknesses as well as its own unique strengths. We continually pondered and talked about these characteristics in Weihsien.

The Catholic was the most intriguing group, by far. A heterogeneous collection of Belgian, Dutch, American, and Canadian priests, monks, and nuns, from about every order and vocation, they had been herded into our camp from monasteries, convents, mission stations, and schools all over Mongolia and North China. Reared as I had been in a non-Catholic culture, it was an experience to live next to these bearded men with their long robes and frequent prayers, their gruff masculine heartiness and ready humor. They seemed a strange mixture of worldliness and saintliness; perhaps that was what made them so fascinating. What was more relevant, they were, especially in the early days, invaluable.

Unlike us laymen, the fathers had long been disciplined to cooperative, manual work. They had baked, cooked, gardened, and stoked in their monasteries and in their chapter houses. There they had become accustomed to the rigors of an austere life. Camp existence with its discomforts, its hard labor, its demand for cheerfulness and a cooperative spirit was merely a continuation of the life to which they were already committed, but one with more variety and excitement. With their rules relaxed, new faces to see, and above all with the added zest of the continual presence of women, their life in camp was perhaps not less but more happy than that one they had left behind. Consequently, the natural good cheer of these men increased rather than waned. The younger ones frankly loved their life there—"in the world" as they often quaintly put it. Many told us they did not look forward to a return to the relative quiet and seclusion of their monastic existence.

This zest for life and for work had a tonic effect on the disheartened layman, unaccustomed to manual labor, and cut off now both from his usual comforts and from the possibility of achieving through his daily work at the office his normal goals of new wealth and success. The high spirits, the songs and jokes of the younger fathers, like those of boys released from boarding school, helped immensely to get things going.

Life was much more than daily chores, fun, and games for these men, however. They had a strange power as a group when they wanted to exert it. In the early days, when the black market was flourishing mightily, the guards caught two Chinese farmers and shot them. Using them as an example, they tried to frighten us out of trading over the wall. The day after the incident—the whole camp had heard those fatal shots, and was pretty fearful of what might happen next—the Japanese lined us up outside our rooms for a special roll call. For an hour we were kept waiting, wondering what the next move would be. I looked up and down the row of about a hundred men standing there with me. I thought to myself that it would be hard to find a tougher-looking bunch anywhere. Many of them were ex-British army men and ex-American marines; they looked as ready as any to have it out with the guards if need be.

At last a Japanese officer appeared. He walked up and down in front of us screaming, stamping his foot, waving his sword—and then coming right up within six inches of one immobile internee's face and screaming all the louder. Quite frightened, the internee translator, a likable half-Japanese, half-British boy from Tientsin, said that the officer was telling us that if anyone was caught on the wall, he would be shot like the farmer. During this harangue, not one of these tough men moved a muscle or uttered a sound. We were impressed that the officer meant what he said.

No one fancied himself looking down the barrel of that officer's revolver by reacting in any unseemly way to his outburst.

After five minutes of this torrent of howls, yells, and shrieks, we were all dismissed. The officer and his two guards moved off to the hospital to give the same lecture to the Catholic fathers assembled there.

For about fifteen minutes we sat on our beds talking quietly and soberly about this new turn. Suddenly we heard a deep roar from over near the hospital. It had a sound like laughter—laughter from hundreds of male throats. As we ran out the door, the cascade of sound mounted steadily in volume. Then, to our complete puzzlement, we saw the officer and his guards fleeing past us in obvious panic.

Consumed with curiosity, we ran over to learn what had transpired. We found the fathers stretched out on the ground, literally holding their sides, gasping and weak from laughter. Soon one of the American fathers got enough breath to tell us about it.

"That squirt was yelling and carrying on," he said, "when suddenly we noticed that the Belgian Dominicans over to the right were slowly moving toward him. So, as though it was a signal, we all started slowly to surround him. Before the little guy realized it, he was enveloped by a crowd of big, bearded monks. We were all staring down at him with popping eyes and laughing. We kept moving closer and closer in massed ranks, laughing louder than ever. We must have frightened the daylights out of him—you know the way they are about 'holy men.' Anyway, just about the time he was engulfed to the point where he could hardly see the sky any more, he lost his nerve. I saw him push his way out frantically, and flee in your direction. It was beautiful!"

After this event, even the most anticlerical looked on the fathers with new respect. What difference a deep sense of unity, a sort of subconscious common consent, can make! Had any one of our line of "single men" started to move toward the officer or to laugh, we others would merely have looked at him admiringly. With a pang of sympathy, we would no doubt have asked ourselves, "What will the Japs do to him?" When the same thought crossed a father's mind and he began to act on it, every one of the others acted with him in concert—and the enemy was routed!

It was difficult to say just what it was about the fathers that so completely won our hearts. In part, it was their cheerfulness and their personal selflessness, a kind of noncompetitive character that was at the same time strong and masculine. In part, it was their accomplishments in the black market, which delighted as well as fed most of us. Their unbeatable baseball team may also have contributed. But probably primarily it was the remarkable way they manifested strength of character without some of the weaknesses that often accompany piety.

The Catholic fathers possessed a religious and moral seriousness free of spiritual pride, they communicated to others not how holy they were but their inexhaustible acceptance and warmth toward the more worldly and wayward laymen. Nothing and no one seemed to offend them, or shock them; no person outraged their moral sense. A person could count on their accepting him, as he could count on their integrity—and such acceptance of others is sadly rare on the part of "moral" people. Consequently, no one felt uncomfortable with them, or sensed that sharpest of all hostilities of one human being to another—that non-acceptance which springs from moral disapproval and so from a feeling of moral superiority.

The fathers mixed amiably with anybody and everybody; with men accustomed to drinking, gambling, swearing, wrenching, even taking dope, men replete with all the major and minor vices. Yet they remained unchanged in their own character by this intimate, personal contact with "the world." Somehow they seemed able to accept and even to love the world as it was, and in this acceptance the presence of their own strength gave new strength to our wayward world.

How much less creative, I thought—and how far from the Gospels—is the frequent Protestant reaction of moral disapproval, and of spiritual if not physical withdrawal.

Although they did try to be friendly, the Protestants nevertheless typically huddled together in a compact "Christian remnant." Not unlike the Pharisees in the New Testament, they kept to their own flock of saved souls, evidently because they feared to be contaminated in some way by this sinful world which they inwardly abhorred. In contrast, the Catholic fathers mixed. They made friends with anyone in camp, helped out, played cards, smoked, and joked with them. They were a means of grace to the whole community.

Looking at them, I knew then that one man could help another man inwardly not so much by his holiness as by his love. Only if his own moral integrity is more than balanced by his acceptance of a wayward brother can he be of any service at all to him. Honest Protestants, I thought, could well admire and seek to emulate this ability of much of the Catholic clergy to relate creatively to the world. How ironic it is that Protestantism, which was established to free the gospel of God's unconditional love for sinners from the rigors of the law, should in its latter-day life have to look so often to its Catholic brothers to see manifested God's love for sinful men.

All in all, therefore, the Catholic fathers played a most creative role in our camp life, and the internees responded with genuine affection. It is true that many of the peculiar and difficult problems of traditional Catholicism and its relations to non-Catholics were not evident in our situation. Wisely at the start, the "bishop" in charge determined not to try to control in any way the political or the moral life of the camp as a whole. As a minority group, they carefully refrained from any action against the freedom of expression of other faiths.

The one Achilles' heel which I saw in their relations with the rest of the camp concerned the problem of intellectual honesty, one which every authoritarian form of religion must finally face. Among the Protestant missionaries, diversity of opinion was so prevalent that at first it seemed embarrassing when compared to the clear unity enjoyed by our Catholic friends. The fundamentalists and the liberals among us could work together, to be sure, when it came to services in the church and other common activities. But still their frequent bitter disagreements were painfully obvious and damaging. This was especially clear one night when a liberal British missionary gave a learned lecture on Christianity and evolution. The next night a leader among the fundamentalists responded with a blistering attack on "this atheistic doctrine" because it did not agree with the account of creation in Genesis.

A day later I happened to be sitting in the dining room next to a scholarly Belgian Jesuit. We had often talked together about theology and its relation to science. The Jesuit thoroughly agreed that the lecture by the fundamentalist had been stuff and nonsense. He said that the quicker the church realized that she does not have in her revelation a mass of scientific information and so allows science to go on about its business without interference, the better for both the church and the world.

Two nights later, however, the leader and temporary "bishop" of the Catholic group gave his lecture on the same topic. He was a big, jovial, American priest, large of heart but not overburdened with education, either in science or in theology. As he declared, he was only "going to give the doctrine I learned in seminary." Apparently the series so far had sown confusion (as well it might) in the minds of his flock, and so he had "to tell them what the truth is." I gathered that to him truth was equivalent to what he had "learned in seminary." Knowing him, we were not surprised that his lecture, although based on dogmatic ecclesiastical statements of various sorts rather than on particular verses of Genesis, repeated idea for idea the fundamentalist's position of a few nights before.

From that time on my Jesuit friend sedulously avoided the subject of science and religion. Nor would he criticize in his temporary "bishop" the very concepts he had ridiculed in the Protestant. Both critical faculties and independence of thought seemed to wither, once a matter had been officially stated, even on such a low level of ecclesiastical authority as we had.

Over a year later, this same priest to my great surprise revealed again the difficulty an authoritarian religion has with intellectual honesty. There was in camp a good-hearted but not intellectually very sophisticated British woman—divorced and with two small children—who was increasingly unhappy with her Protestant faith. As she explained to me once, her Anglican religion was so vacillating and ambiguous that she found no comfort in it. It seemed to say Yes and then No to almost every question she asked. Such vagueness on matters of great concern to her failed, apparently, to provide needed inner security for a lone woman in that crumbling colonial world. So she was searching for something "more solid," she said, to hang on to.

I was not surprised when she told me this same Jesuit priest had begun to interest her in Roman Catholicism, nor even when a month or so later she said she had been confirmed. But I was surprised when she showed me with great pride the booklets the priest had given her to explain certain doctrines. Among them was one she especially liked. It described in great detail—and with pictures of Adam, Eve, and all the animals—the six days of creation and all the stirring events of the historical Fall. Here were statements clear and definite enough for anyone looking for absolute certainty. But whether she would have found that certainty had she heard the priest talk to me of science and theology, I was not so sure.

One thing I learned from this incident was that a mind needing security will make a good many compromises with what it once knew to be false. When these same views—now expounded by the priest—had been expressed by the fundamentalist, she had felt them to be absurd. Clearly, the fundamentalist's faith did not offer her the certainty she yearned for. With the Jesuit, she was willing to pay the price of her own independence of thought, which she had formerly prized, in return for the greater gain of religious assurance. The same price, of course, was paid by the priest. For the sake of the authority and growth of his church, he paid heavily in the good coin of his own independence and honesty of mind. Perhaps she, as a lonely woman in need, gained from her bargain. But I concluded—although no Catholic would agree with this—that he, as a highly educated and intelligent man, was quite possibly a loser with his.

Certainly the most troublesome, if also exciting, aspect of our life for the younger Catholic fathers was their continual proximity to women—women of all ages, sizes, and shapes. With their rules relaxed so that they could work, they found themselves mixing with women to an extent which they had not known for years.

In the Peking kitchen at the start of camp this created a touching but also touchy situation. Among our group were some ten to fifteen very conservative missionary families, all of whom had teenaged daughters. There were also a number of boys their own age in the camp—sons of families in the Tientsin business world. But these girls were too unsophisticated and far too "moral" to enjoy their company. To these girls, therefore, the American and Canadian priests in their early and middle twenties were an absolute Godsend. Neither party wanted anything serious to develop in their relationship, both had strictly honorable intentions, and heaven knew none of them courted trouble. Thus, trusting completely the other's non-serious intentions, and realizing subconsciously their immense need for one another, young Roman priests could be seen taking the air of a fine evening with Protestant daughters, both enjoying this companionship to the utmost. Soon they had paired off into "steady" couples. Only after several months did any of them realize to what extent their real affections had become involved.

Almost everyone in camp rejoiced over this situation as by far the best answer to the inevitable needs of each group. The only exceptions to this general approval were, needless to say, the rather strongly anti-Papal fundamentalist parents of the girls, on the one hand, and the Catholic authorities, on the other, both of whom regarded the whole development as one of the major calamities of church history!

Perhaps the most astounding ecumenical gathering ever to take place was the meeting in the kitchen one night of the outraged fathers of the girls and the stony, embarrassed, and inwardly furious Catholic prelate and his staff. Knowing they had problems in common, they got along well enough and spent the evening trying to find means to break off these "courtships." Actually, there was little that either side could do while the summer air remained heavy with romance. But apparently there was agreement on one thing: the quicker the division of Christendom between Catholic and Protestant was enlarged, the happier all would be!

The transfer of the priests, monks, and nuns back to Peking in September, 1943, six months after camp began, ended this idyll as well as all the other benefits that this interesting group brought to our lives. To their dismay, all but ten or so of them were called back to their monastic and chapter establishments. Apparently the papal legate to Tokyo had convinced the Japanese government that these men were neutral "citizens" of the Vatican state, instead of the Americans, Canadians, Belgians, and Dutch that the Japanese had thought them to be. Therefore they were no longer considered to be "enemy nationals." We chuckled over this interpretation in our dorm, remembering the many times that the Catholic hierarchy at home has paraded its stanch "Americanism."

The day of their departure was for each of us one of the saddest days in camp. As the four hundred of them climbed reluctantly into their trucks, there was hardly a dry eye anywhere.

Men, women, and children lined the streets to wave forlornly and fondly to these good friends who had loved and helped them time and again. The missionary girls wept openly, without embarrassment, as they saw their trusted and trustworthy companions leaving them. Both priest and girl friend looked glumly into a future bereft of such friendship. As a British banker standing near me said when the trucks had driven away, "I wish to God the Protestants had gone off instead." So deep had been the imprint which these Catholic fathers made upon us.

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