Like college campuses all across the United States in the fall of 1942, campuses in 1950 also bore mute testimony to the fact that our country had been drawn into yet another war. Whereas the women’s dormitories were filled to capacity, the men’s dormitories were almost empty. Only the lower floors were occupied. The shades were pulled down and the curtains were drawn together on the upper floors. The nations of the Free World were rushing to the aid of the beleaguered South Koreans, aware that Moscow was the force behind the aggression of North Korea. Once again all able-bodied American young men had been summoned to fight the enemy on foreign soil, spilling their blood and the blood of the enemy for the imperiled cause of freedom. The world was tense, watching its two opposing nuclear giants spar at each other from behind the thin masks of the United Nations and North Korea. Mortal fear gripped everyone. What would happen if these giants threw off their masks and faced off against each other directly? Gory as this war had become, it had so far remained within the arbitrary bounds of conventional weaponry. Would it at some point break loose and engulf the whole world in a nuclear holocaust with unthinkable consequences?
But this unwanted interruption in normal scholastic activities seemed short-lived. Already in November the United Nations’ forces had routed the aggressor. Our boys would be home for Christmas, ready to resume their education after a six-month hiatus that had added years to their stature. Soon the musty rooms would be aired out and life would be back to normal. No one anticipated the enemy’s next move that would result in the return of the Korean peninsula to much the same state it had been in before the conflict began and would prolong the bloodshed fruitlessly for another two-and-a-half years.
Shortly before Christmas, a scrambling torrent of ill-equipped Chinese soldiers poured into Korea from Manchuria, sending the UN forces reeling backwards. The human avalanche kept coming and coming, overrunning the very men whose gunfire was mowing it down in waves. It rampaged onward until it ran up against a line deep in South Korean territory where UN troops had had time to dig in their superior equipment. From there, at great cost in terms of time and lives lost, our men fought their way back to the thirty-eighth parallel.
There were no boys home for Christmas that year.
Nor the next, except for a trickle of wounded veterans.
The peace talks dragged on and on. The Communists were waiting for a withdrawal of Western troops, much as had happened in Europe after World War II, and were poised to capitalize on it to recoup their losses. Not until July of 1953 was an Armistice finally signed, and even then it created a frontier and a no-man’s-land which American soldiers are still obliged to guard.
In the fall of 1953, life at Christiania took up pretty much where it had left off. But it was a much-altered lot of male students that filled its classrooms. In some ways they were serious about making up for lost time and moving ahead with their lives, and in some ways all they wanted to do was have fun, fun which had been denied them for some three years. They wanted to lay the groundwork for a successful life, but they decidedly wanted to have a good time in the process.
Dr. Harold Thorsheim passed away late that fall. An old chest injury of his was blamed for giving rise to complications from a cold that lingered for several weeks and then suddenly brought on the end. His death left an emptiness in Dr. Pearson’s soul that nothing else seemed quite able to fill.