[excerpts] ...

Why the flurry of escapes? For one thing, the food situation was going from bad to worse. In Weihsien our rations were so reduced that camp leader McLaren picked out six of the skinniest inmates and had them parade bare-chested before the Commandant. 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 Commandant’s 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 field. Even so, I have managed to postpone a reduction of your vegetable marrow allocation. But I won’t be able to do that again. You must expect cuts. And you won’t be the only ones affected. I’ve already told my chief of police that the guards’ rations are to be reduced. It’s a bad time for everybody. You must remember there’s a war on. And as long as the war continues, I can do no more for you.”

But he did do more, a lot more — for us Limies, that is. I am referring here to the episode that kicked off with a breathtaking 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, field 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 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 didn’t omit the alien Italians, the elegant set I travelled with from Shanghai, who, for reasons best known to Tokyo, were walled off together with their Peking, Tientsin, and Tsingtao compatriots 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.)

[further reading] ...

http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/books/ForeignDevil/Power-143-pages.pdf

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