WAR OVERTOOK HIM

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 439, 21 November 1947, Page 12

WAR OVERTOOK HIM

JADE ENGRAVED. By E. G. Jansen. Presbyterian Book Room, Christchurch. F\ Mr. Jansen were a journalist he ‘ would have streamlined the earlier parts of this book a little and highlighted throughout what one reviewer has called his "almost incredible" adventures. Being, however, merely "poet and philosopher’-as the Introduction (without exaggeration) claims of himhe has produced a much more solidly real and "inside" account of life within Japan’s war time "co-prosperity sphere’ than any journalist, however acute, is likely to make. For his deliberate refusal to use journalism’s yellow magic in order that he may set out the exact way in which everything happened (both in external details and in inner spirit) gradually accumulates in his reader a conviction that the man who is at such pains to convey events so truthfully must have experienced them in the first instance with similar thoughtful objectivity. What happened to Mr. Jansen is mutatis mutandis what happened to the (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) other members of the New Zealand Presbyterian Mission centred around the "Hospital of Universal Love" at Kong Chuen on the Canton Plainsand what happened to most missionaries inside Japanese-occupied China. Before invasion they had long months of bombing, food shortages, transport dislocations. During and after invasion they had isolation, pin-pricking surveillance, a weight of refugees (300 in this case) to support, recurrent attacks of bandits to beat off with no weapons except faith and courage, their own food to grow, and medical supplies to be maintained by the strangest and most devious stratagems. After Pearl Harbour came personal internment, slow starvation, and the leaving of their hospital to be carried on by already exhausted Chinese colleagues under added difficulties. After release they faced the re-starting of their life work, materially almost from scratch, among political confusion and economic need and with themselves eight years older and half a century wearier. All this is told as the day’s work. And when the more regulation sort of "adventures" turn up they, too, appear as part of that work-from a holiday in a guerrilla camp to the regular carrying of supplies through the Japanese lines to the Mission’s Branch Hospital in Free China. And what they reveal is not the European and Chinese staffs’ pluck and fortitude (for that appears in every event), but the standing and affection they must have had among the local Chinese, both leaders and masses, who helped them through one tight place after another. The Canton guerrillas had even a complete: plan ready to rescue the entire body of missionary internees when the war unexpectedly ended. Mr. Jansen has written throughout with Presbyterian readers and not the general public in mind. This was too modest. But the lack of propagandist intent ves the general reader a chance to see how missionaries really think and feel among the comparative privacy of their supporters.