[Excerpts] ...

[...]

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.

[excerpt]

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

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

With such centralized organization, our community began to show the first signs of a dawning civilization; it was slowly becoming capable of that degree of coordinated work necessary to supply services essential to life and to provide at least a bearable level of comfort. By the middle of April, moreover, the camp cleaning force had cleared away all the rubble and debris. Most of the dismal ugliness that had greeted us in March disappeared.

At this transformation, the garden-loving British began to spring to action.

You could see them everywhere—in front of their dorms or along their row of rooms; around the church or the ball field, turning up soil wherever they could establish a claim to a plot of ground, planting the seeds which they had brought from Peking and Tientsin, and then lovingly watering the first signs of new life. In the same spirit, other families would begin to survey the small plot of ground in front of their rooms, planning patios made of scrounged bricks, and experimenting with awnings fashioned from mats purchased in the canteen—all of this, apparently, spurred on by the prospect of summer “teas”. I could feel a new warmth in the wind and see a new brightness in the air wherever I went.

About the same time, evening lecture programs for adults sprouted in every available empty room.

These talks touched on a wide variety of subjects, from sailing and woodwork, art and market research to theology and Russian, on which there were unemployed experts both willing and eager to speak.

Concurrently, our weekly entertainments began. These took place in the church, starting with simple song fests and amateur vaudeville skits. The culmination of these early forms of “culture” came, surely, when a baseball league (e.g. the Peking Panthers vs. the Tientsin Tigers) started in earnest on the small ball field, exciting the whole population two or three afternoons a week.

[excerpt]

We began to write, plan, and practise 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 reviews of their own.

After the rather heavy dose of Barrie, this earthier 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.

[excerpt]

The clearest illustration of the relation of space to human intractability came with the problem of families of four in one room. Apparently when they housed the camp at the beginning, the Japanese treated the families with two children in two very different ways.

They gave two rooms to the twenty-four families with two teenaged children. But to the twenty or so families with smaller children they gave only one room.

For the latter, therefore, life was intolerable. It meant that in a space only 9 by 12 feet—about the size of a dining-room rug—two adults, used to a large house, had to live with their entire family.

There they had to find room for two more bunks or beds for the children, and provide space for them to play during the long, wet, cold months of North China’s winter—not to mention doing the extra cooking and washing that any mother must do for infants.

As one of these mothers bitterly accused us in the Housing Committee office shortly after the camp began: “By doing nothing, you are making us bear the main burden of the war!” We could only agree. Something had to be done.

When we began searching for extra space into which these crowded families might overflow, we naturally eyed the twenty-four families of four who had two rooms. Here, obviously, was the only real “Gold Coast” living in the camp, for in each of these twenty-four cases, two teenagers shared one entire room.

Clearly, our best hope involved getting these teenagers to squeeze up a little in some way in order that the embattled mothers of two infants might have a little more space. And as always, I was hopeful of not too difficult a time. When Shields and I looked over the list of twenty-four families with two rooms,

I felt optimistic.

[...]

[excerpt]

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 suburban 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.

[...]

[excerpts]

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.”

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[further reading]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/books/Gilkey/p_Gilkey.htm

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