[excerpts] ...

I have often searched my own mind with some amusement to discover if my eternal craving for bread, never satisfied during my life in An Kwo, was what made me an eager volunteer kitchen helper in camp right from the start.

I knew nothing of baking, but many of the fathers did, men with whom I shared this detail; and very few of the other foreigners, who had been waited on all their lives in China, knew much if anything about cooking either.

We had to learn as we went, and there were plenty of errors. One day soon after we arrived I put a great lump of salt in the soup, to my sorrow and chagrin, and I feared no one could eat it. But everyone did, for we had nothing else. Sometimes the food was burned or the soup was too diluted. But since we had to eat our mistakes or go hungry, everyone who went on the kitchen detail soon learned how to make palatable food out of what we had.

The food the Japanese gave us, however, was not adequate or varied enough, and the mothers, particularly, began to fret about their children. They knew they could get eggs and other produce of the countryside if they could establish some kind of communication and liaison with the Chinese. I made the contacts between the Chinese workers in the camp and their trustworthy friends outside, and we began to plan carefully.

Five Trappist monks were housed in one room in a section of the camp nearest the wall, a most fortuitous location for black-market operations. One of them, an Australian of Irish descent named Scanlan, was quite willing to act as head of our smuggling ring.

Father Scanlan was a big round-faced, red-haired man, going bald. He spoke with a soft, slow voice; all his movements were slow and measured. But his mind was fast and good and resourceful, and for this reason, chiefly, the camp chose him to head the ring.

His egg-smuggling operations constituted an interfaith movement, you might say; Father Scanlan’s outside operative who delivered the eggs was Mrs. K’ang, a Protestant Chinese, and equally resourceful and spunky.

The Trappists’ room was located near a drain, which carried off the overflow of water from heavy rains. The drain was built underground to the road that ran outside the camp, by the outer wall, where it was covered with iron bars. Father Scanlan used this drain for his delivery route for eggs, cigarettes, and produce. He would crawl through it as far as he could, and Mrs. K’ang or one of her small boys would push the eggs and small packages through the bars to Father Scanlan inside the drain. I often went along to help, especially when we had big orders coming in. The rendezvous was always at night, and that meant working in pitch-darkness. Father Scanlan kept his accounts in what he called quite aptly The Book of Life. He entered the date of the transaction, the number and description of the purchases, and the prices paid, all in the most regular fashion, as if he were a storekeeper in Sydney or Melbourne.

He kept the eggs in a trunk, and we did business on a big scale, with many Chinese supplying us regularly. We carried the eggs around camp in our pockets, delivering them as we went, exercising reasonable caution, of course. We had so many people in camp buying eggs that we had to establish queues in the kitchen to accommodate all the campers who wanted to fry them. Oddly enough, the Japanese guards at first didn’t know that eggs were not a part of our regular legal supplies, but one day they caught on and then they began to search for the black market. By this time everyone in camp was in it, and many particularly daring Chinese were scaling the wall, doing business right inside the camp, not just delivering through the drain.

It seemed that Father Scanlan operated under a special dispensation from Providence, for he seemed to sense the times that were safe for these over-the-wall operations and the times when it was best to lie low. One evening he put all his provisions in our room nearby and suspended all his operations for a while. He was sure the Japanese were aware that he was the ringleader, and he was particularly careful.

Then one night he had to go out into the grounds, near the wall, to talk to a Chinese supplier who had dropped over the wall to discuss some special business. Suddenly, as they were conferring in whispers, Father Scanlan’s ears heard footsteps and he knew the guards were nearby. He barely had time to boost the agent over the wall when the guards flashed their light on him.

It was a black, moonless night; nevertheless, Father Scanlan had his breviary open in his hand and he was reading from it.

“What are you doing here, outside your room?” the guard asked.
“I’m just saying my prayers,” Father Scanlan replied amiably.

The Japanese scoffed at this, naturally, since no one could read in the dark.

Father Scanlan had an explanation. He had begun to read while it was still daylight and he had just kept on, turning pages to have something to do, pretending to read. He knew all the prayers in this book by heart, he added blandly.

The explanation was pretty weak and it didn’t satisfy the Japanese, so they took Father Scanlan off and put him in solitary confinement for fifteen days.

The area to which he was taken was the best part of the compound, the former residential section for the mission teachers, doctors, and their families. It was out of bounds for all the “enemy foreigners” now, however, because the Japanese officers were housed there, and their administrative offices were in this section too.

Of course the word of his confinement went through the camp immediately, and for a week Father Scanlan never had it so good, as the saying goes. All the mothers who remembered how he had managed to get eggs for their children through the drainpipe, giving up one night’s rest after another to take advantage of the darkness, began to bake cakes and cookies and special goodies for him. They secreted these on the children, who were adept at snaking through the guard lines to the out-of-bounds area, where they passed them along via their own relay system to the popular jolly Trappist. Father Scanlan gained weight and had a fine rest in that week, but he was lonesome for his fellow prisoners from the beginning and he spent only eight days in his well-fed solitary confinement. His quick mind had found a way out almost at once.

Shortly before midnight the Japanese officers were awakened by the rich stentorian tones of a baritone voice chanting:

“Deus, in adjutorium meum intende,
Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina.”
It was Father Scanlan, singing his office at the top of his voice, yelling in Latin:

“Lord, come to my aid.
Lord, come quickly to my aid.”

The officers did not approach him at first. They were too curious to do more than listen.

Father Scanlan went on from the matins, continuing in his loudest tones:

“Domine, quam multi sunt qui tribulant!
Me multi insurgunt adversum me!”

This part of the office might have annoyed the Japanese had they understood Latin. They were all so hypersensitive and weighted down with inferiority complexes, they might have wondered why this foreigner complained to the Lord, “How many there are who trouble me! How many are there who are against me!”

On and on Father Scanlan went, putting all his heart and soul and voice into his office:

“In te, Domine, speravi:
Non confundar in aeternum.”

Giving voice to his own great faith as he sang “In you, Lord, I have hoped: I will not be deceived forever.”

An hour had gone by now, and the Japanese were getting restless. At first they had been sure this was only a momentary aberration on the part of this great red-faced, red-haired foreigner, but now, after an hour, when he showed no signs of letdown, either in volume or enthusiasm they began to send for aides and orderlies and ordered them to find out what was going on.

Father Scanlan wore a guileless face when they questioned him.

“I am obliged to do this,” he said, which was quite true, as every Catholic priest must recite his office daily. What he didn’t feel obliged to add, however, was that he could have chosen another time to do it and that he could have read it silently to himself.

The Japanese had a superstitions fear of interfering with religious practices, and when the guards reported back to their officers what Father Scanlan had said, they all shrugged and decided not to do anything further that night.

Father Scanlan continued to chant his office for another hour or so, and he kept this up all week, making his starting time later each night. Finally, in desperation, the officers whose sleep had been wrecked every night for eight days ordered Father Scanlan out of solitary confinement and back to camp.

The news went through camp immediately, and Brigadier Strang, a fellow prisoner, assembled his Salvation Army band of twenty pieces to welcome Father Scanlan back. The band fell in line directly behind Father Scanlan as the Japanese brought him into our area, and with him at their head, and all the shouting, laughing children following, and as many adults as could fall in step quickly, the procession marched in triumph around the camp, tootling and blowing and blaring away, banging on drums and cymbals. Cheers resounded from one end of the compound to the other, with everyone laughing and joining in, Father Scanlan smiling and bowing to all his friends like a conquering hero, as indeed he was.

The Japanese were nonplussed by this, but they did nothing then to stop the parade, and the incident allowed everyone to blow off steam and relieve tension. The next day, however, the Japanese posted a notice forbidding the camp to hold any meetings “without permission of the chief of police.”

We all did what we could in that close communal living to keep things on an even keel. We were cut off from the outside world completely at first and we had no means of knowing how the war was going, whether we were winning or losing. We were allowed to write letters, and the Japanese collected them regularly to censor and mail. They imposed restrictions on this correspondence, however, limiting the number of letters any one person could write in a month and insisting that the letters contain no more than twenty-five words -what they called “Red Cross” letters written on paper supplied by the International Red Cross and sent through them to the addressees. This was highly, unsatisfactory, and when we learned that even these skeleton epistles were held by the Japanese for a year before they bothered to send them on, the indignation of the camp was intense.

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