THE GAME IS UP WASNT IT TOLSTOY who said something to the effect that it is the endless variety of mens minds

which prevents a truth from ever presenting itself identically to two persons? Whoever said it, sonovagun, how true! Ask Denis OShea whats the rst thing that strikes him when he thinks back to Pootung, and hell tell you its the specter of hunger. Embedded in his memory is the line of gaunt gures waiting for the days ladle of soupy-thin cracked wheat. Put that same question to me, and Ill tell you that Pootung spells overcrowding. Even now I can see the musty go-downs jam-packed with rough, raw Joseph Conrad characters. And what Tommy Rudland remembers rst and foremost about Lunghua may not necessarily be what springs to my mind that most wondrous concentration of goddesses ever to smite a mortals eye. Likewise I'd be surprised if Dennis Fulton who attended a religious school before joining the Accounts Department of Tientsin's BMC shared my impression of Weihsien, that the complement of internees brought together there comprised a unique mixture of the spiritual and the worldly, of the highbrow and lowbrow. And a unique mixing it surely was. In scouring Mongolia, Manchuria, and Chinas northern provinces for dangerous enemy aliens, the Japanese dragged up a veritable cornucopia of churchmen, academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers, bankers, traders, shopkeepers, clerks, entertainers, vagrants, even a felon or two on the wanted list of half the nations of Europe. Among the churchmen were a good few hundred
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Protestant missionaries who'd been hauled into camp from all over Mongolia, Manchuria, and China's northern provinces. The missions from which they'd been uprooted varied in size from the inuential China Inland Mission to the smaller but no less voluble American Friends of the Bible. Never before had the world been blessed by such a wide spectrum of Protestant persuasions brought together in such close quarters. There were High and Low Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Plymouth Brethren, Jehovah's Witnesses. An unusual collection of churchmen, you might say, but until September 1943 the Roman Catholic clergy in the place easily outnumbered them. The seven bishops, and four hundred priests, nuns, and lay brothers were also of various orders: You bumped into them everywhere in the camp, the Jesuits, Lazarists, Franciscans, Dominicans, Trappists, Passionists, Daughters of Charity, Sisters or the Sacred Heart, Oblates of the Immaculate Conception. However, at the insistence of the Papal Legate in Tokyo, those Catholic clergy, being citizens of the Vatican, therefore neutrals, must be set free. So except for the two or three dozen who stayed
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behind to minister to the Catholics in camp, they were moved out, not to freedom, but to detention centres in and around Peking. Even with most of the Catholic clergy gone, there remained an overly strong presence of religionists in the camp. Yet despite the enforced togetherness in the over-crowded pen there developed an unheard of degree of fraternizing between those perennial rivals, the seekers of souls and the seekers of prot, though it has to be said there were occasions when the disrespect that one side showed for the other did break out into the open. A shipping company executive poured scorn on the medieval practice employed by the Catholics of using a diviner trained in Rome to purify the Assembly Hall before Mass was said in it. And never mind the Fourth Scout Law that A Scout is a friend to all and a brother to every other Scout no matter to what social class he belongs, boys of the Chefoo Missionary Scout troop were forbidden to have any intercourse with boys of the Weihsien troop whose parents were mostly from the business world. Examples of the cooperation that did exist between the various classes of internees are illustrated in the following two pictures.

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The Game Is Up was the theme of the guest speaker (a missionary doctor with a Harvard PhD) at one of the regular Friday night businessmens discussion groups I attended. From the start he had the group on edge. At the conclusion he had them bristling. First thing you people ought to do when the war comes to an end is sell out and head back to the States, the UK, Australia, Canada. Its not too late to start life anew. Doctor, youve been stuck too long at Yenching University. You know nothing of the business world. Dont you realize the treaty ports will simply collapse without us? The Chinese dont have the foggiest idea how to run our businesses. Tientsin and Shanghai will go the way of Hankow. Have you been to Hankow? Have you seen how the place has gone to the dogs? By your colonial standards that might well be the case. But if thats what the Chinese want, thats what theyre going to get. Youll simply have to face the fact that they now call the shots. The unequal treaties have been abolished. The British Concession in Tientsin and
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the International Settlement in Shanghai have been handed back to their rightful owners. You are obviously referring to that silly masquerade when the Japanese authorities presented our concessions title deeds to those scalawag puppets. Not at all. I am referring to the joint abrogation of our special rights in China by Roosevelt and Churchill. Ask you own camp leader Ted McLaren. He knows all about the agreement signed last year. He got the details from the Swiss representative Egger on his last visit. I cant believe it, snorted the pudding-faced Yorkshireman, Albert Pym. I built up my wool packing business by the sweat of my brow. The equipment, the stock, the warehouses, theyre all mine. As for the land, I hold title to the crown lease which the BMC is obliged to honor. Besides, just before Pearl Harbor, our Consul General insisted that we stay to protect Britains assets. He never would have done so had the intention been to sell out. Your Consul led you down the garden path, and Ill warrant that wasn't the rst time he did that. The normally reserved Jock Mackay of Mackay Imports broke out of his shell. With all due respect, Doctor, you dont know Tientsin. Tientsin is not your academic Peking. From the turn of the century Tientsins concessions have been the driving force behind North Chinas robust international trade. The Chinese dont have a clue how to run things. They cant do without us. They most certainly can do without you. They can do without your Jardines, your Sasoons, your machinery, your opium. Every last one of you will have to pull up stakes. But its not the end of the world. After all, youve had a good innings all milk and honey. Why, even here in this camp youre a lot better off than most Chinese. And a lot happier, I suppose you are going to say, than we ever were at the Country Club . . . You may not know it, but you really are. Ill wager youve never been so contented, so fullled. You all yearn to be free. You talk of nothing much else. Yet, ironically, once outside this place you are going to miss it. You are going to experience a strange let-down, a vague disquiet. You will feel as if youve lost something
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vital. You will grope for that something. You wont nd it because you wont know what youre looking for. So Ill tell you right here and now what that something is. It is the deep-rooted instinct latent in all human beings the instinct of the tribe, working for the common good, standing shoulder to shoulder in the face of danger. It is the ame which ignites brothers-in-arms, which inspires pilgrims. It breathed life into the early Christian communes. It is the driving force behind the modern-day kibbutz. But alas, dear friends, alas, we never seem to realize that it has touched us until we have moved on to other things. So I earnestly encourage you to savor this moment. Make the most of it. You may never experience it again in your lifetime . . . Next youll be telling us its a privilege to be locked up here. Yes, thats exactly my point! Shouts of derision, hoots of laughter. And I was one of the hooters. But then, boy oh boy, didnt it hit home, the professors message, when peace eventually came, and we were thrust into the dog-eat-dog world? Why had it eluded us during our imprisonment? The signs were all there. Where we should have experienced that souldestroying scourge of prison life, the slow-slow creep of time nothing of the kind. The opposite in fact. I can remember vividly my twenty-rst birthday; I have no recollection of my twenty-second. The twelve months simply ashed by. Nevertheless, those months were not without their moments of excitement. There was an escape. Laurance Tipton (British) and Arthur Hummel (American) went over the wall one dark and moonless night. And didnt that send our Nagasaki gaolers into hysterics! Then, completely out of the blue, Brian Clarke arrived in camp, transferred as I was from Lunghua. He brought news of a second Lunghua escape which, unlike the one on New Years Eve 1944, was successful the ve men involved getting clean away to Kunming in free China. The fact that I knew four of the ve added spice to the news. One was Reggie Uhlich, Brians buddy who helped settle me down in Lunghua, two were fellow Pootung transferees Tommy Huxley and Mike Levy,
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and the fourth, Roy Scott, crossed paths with me at the Columbia Country Club following the Kamakura Maru asco. Only Lewis Murray-Kidd, the escape leader, was a total stranger. Why the urry of escapes? For one thing the food situation was going from bad to worse. In Weihsien our rations were so reduced that camp leader Mr Ted McLaren picked out six of the skinniest inmates and had them parade bare-chested before Commandant Izu. I was one of the six. Mr McLaren gave an impassioned speech. He pointed at our corrugated ribcages, our jutting cheek bones. He quoted the Geneva Convention. The Commandants response was equally impassioned. You people are luckier than you think. You are better off than the citizens of our home islands. You have more to eat than our soldiers in the eld. Even so, I have managed to postpone a reduction of your vegetable marrow allocation. But I wont be able to do that again. You must expect cuts. And you wont be the only ones affected. Ive already told my chief of police that the guards rations are to be reduced. Its a bad time for everybody. You must remember theres a war on. And as long as the war continues, I can do no more for you. So we were left to lining up for our watery squash soup, and surviving on the coarse bread turned out by the camp's heroic bakery team.

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But the Commandant did do more for us, a whole lot more for us Limeys, that is. I am referring here to the episode that kicked off with a breath-taking spectacle, a biblical caravan (if you can visualize Shantung mules as the camels of Araby) trundling through the ceremonial gateway and up the incline towards the main road, heavily laden with cardboard cartons, stamped triumphantly with the universal symbol of the Red Cross. Camp interpreter Al Voyce, who was present when the Commandant inspected three of the cartons, got himself all tongue-tied describing their fabulous contents: Klim, Spam, Hershey Bars, cheese-spread, coffee, sugar. And clothing too: shirts, pants, sweaters, eld jackets, boots. But it was all too good to be true for those of us who did not hail from the Sweet Land of Liberty. We were dealt a gut-wrenching blow by a group of Americans (missionaries predominantly) who raised a great big stink with the Commandant. They demanded that he hand over the cartons to Americans only. They stated that it was both illegal and immoral to do otherwise because stamped on the outside of each and every carton were the words: GIFT OF THE AMERICAN RED CROSS For a week the cartons remained stacked in the church while the Commandant pondered the issue. In the end his Buddhist principles prevailed over the claimants Christian ones. He saw to it that those nationalities considered alien by the American Red Cross (as the claimants had led him to believe), alien Britons, alien Hollanders, alien Belgians, all got a share of the prize. And he didnt omit the alien Italians, the group I traveled with from Shanghai who, for reasons best known to Tokyo, were walled off with their Peking and Tientsin counterparts in a camp of their own, a camp within a camp so to speak. (Though I was never more than 150 yards from them the whole time I was in Weihsien, not once did I catch sight of my travel companions, not Signor Piscatelli, not Signorina Mazzini, my dusky Sardinian Cleopatra.) What grand parties we had, decked out in our spanking new khaki nery, savoring the long-forgotten
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aroma of coffee, gorging on Spam and cheese and chocolate! What a bonanza for us! What a bitter pill for the Japanese who were more and more feeling the pinch! For weeks their invincible army had been at the point of crushing British resistance at the gateway to India and snatching up for their own Emperor the vast sub-continent, the jewel in the British crown. But something must have gone awry in their plans. Peking Chronicles repeated headline: IRON RING AROUND IMPHALwent from front to middle to back page before disappearing altogether. A little while later there was brief mention of such and such Imperial Japanese division putting up a gallant last ditch stand against overwhelming odds near Mandalay. Mandalay! By golly, they must have been chased right back across Burma. And then there were those Domei News reports openly admitting the immense devastation and loss of life caused by the non-stop re bombing of Tokyo by massed B29s. Where were all those Japanese victories which only half a year ago had been our daily fare? The scant few reported were so spiced with statistics as to border on the ridiculous. There was that front page piece (the American landing at Okinawa was squished into three lines on page 5) about Japanese invincibility which went something like this: In a brilliant frontal attack, shock troops of the Seventeenth Field Regiment, Watanabe Brigade, smashed through Chinese defenses at Changsha, killing 1,827 and capturing 2,132, together with 76 machine guns, 3,002 ries, 129,837 rounds of ammunition, 126 bicycles, 31 trucks, 59 mule carts, and 116 wheelbarrows. Japanese casualties: 3 killed, 14 wounded 5 seriously, 9 walking cases. . . . Good for a laugh? Yes, if we could but for a moment forget our captors ruthless side, which we could not. We were, after all, hostages held at their mercy. It didnt take much to put two and two together: the ten foot ditch that had been dug outside the southeast wall, and Field Marshall Terauchis public threat that the moment the Americans attempted a landing on Honshiu all Allied prisoners were to be butchered. But it was curtains anyway if a stray Yankee thousand-pound bomb landed smack on the Imperial Palace. Fortunately, nothing of the kind no landing, no errant bomb. What did occur
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though was entirely unforeseen our captors iron hard discipline began coming apart at the seams. At rst it titillated us, the crazy night-time drinking bouts sounding in their compound. Not so funny when the weird yells and demented chants turned into blood-curdling screams followed by volleys of shots as they turned on each other. And it got downright dangerous when their gunghts spilled over onto our side of the wire. Block monitors went from dormitory to dormitory warning everyone to stay indoors after lights out. What if I have to have a pee? Vincy Murray asked our block monitor, the amboyant academic, Doctor Lucius Porter. Try to hold on till morning. What if I cant? Then use a tin can like I do. Even during daylight hours we had to be on the alert. Saki, we were told, had delayed action; some of the guards might still be sozzled. One certainly was. He mislaid his Mauser, and a young mother found her four-year-old playing with it outside her hut it was loaded and cocked. No good Mr McLaren protesting to Commandant Izu. The man had lost what little inuence he had over his chief of police, and the chief was fast losing control of his men. Where they had been operating the black market strictly on the q.t. (after snafing it from our own racketeers), a guard would approach us openly now, offering eggs or baigar (local rewater), in exchange for a watch, a ring, gold teeth. If another guard happened by. theyd be hollering at each other as only the Japanese can holler. When they reached for their holsters, it was time to cut and run. They werent playing games; they could have taught Capones hit men a thing or two. One morning the camp was presented with the horric spectacle of a corpse draped over the electried barbed wire. The peasant, poor soul, had apparently arrived late with his delivery of eggs, there had been a change of guard, and the replacement, a man from a rival black market gang, ipped on the switch. It was clear to one and all we were living through the most dangerous period of our internment. The af261

fable, worldly-wise American, Gerald Detring Lucker, summed it up best when he said: We are in a race against time. The longer it takes warring Japan to come to terms with the warring Allies, the more certain our chances of running afoul of the warring guards. And theres not a damned thing we can do about it except sit tight and hope for the best.

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