Just after Pearl Harbor, Dorothy Day had reaffirmed the Catholic Worker movement’s commitment to pacifism: “Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers . . . . We will not participate in armed warfare or in making munitions, or by buying government bonds to prosecute the war, or in urging others to those efforts.” Now, in New York City, she writes in her newsletter, with some satisfaction, that she and her colleagues had been at their work of maintaining “houses of hospitality where the works of mercy can be practiced through voluntary poverty” for a full decade. She is grateful for what has been achieved, but pleads for more help. She quotes Eric Gill, the English Catholic artist who had died in 1940, claiming Gill’s goal as her own: “to make a cell of good living in the chaos of our world.”1
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In Sumter County, Georgia, two couples—Clarence and Florence Jordan, Mabel and Martin England—are in the first full month of their experiment in intentional interracial community, Koinonia Farm. (Koinonia is a New Testament Greek word meaning “fellowship.”) By living with people of all races, growing their own food, and bearing daily witness to the possibility of living according to the teachings of Jesus, they hope to build a “demonstration plot for the kingdom of God.”2
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In Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is spending the Christmas season with his parents and other family members. He too commemorates a one-decade anniversary: the rise of Hitler to power in Germany. He sits down to write a summary of what he and his fellow German Christians have learned in that decade: he calls it, “After Ten Years: A Reckoning Made at New Year’s 1943.” In it he says, “We have been the silent witnesses of evil deeds. We have become cunning and learned the arts of obfuscation and equivocation.” But though “the huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion,” some things have been seen clearly: “that evil [appears] in the form of bright, good deeds, historical necessity, social justice”; and, above all, “the failure of ‘the reasonable ones’—those who think with the best of intentions and in their naive misreading of reality, that with a bit of reason they can patch up the structure that has come out of joint.” In such circumstances, “Who stands firm?” His answer: “Only the one whose ultimate standard is not his reason, his principles, conscience, freedom, or virtue; only the one who is prepared to sacrifice all of these when, in faith and in relationship to God alone, he is called to obedient and responsible action.” Soon after he writes these words, the Gestapo begin to prepare a case against him for his role in plots against Hitler. In April they will arrest him and take him to prison; in a different prison, two years later, he will be shot.3
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In Freetown, Sierra Leone, in the middle of 1942, Graham Greene had found enough free time from his work in military intelligence—his boss back in London is Kim Philby, later to be notorious as one of the “Cambridge Spies” for the Soviet Union—to write an “entertainment” centered on the experience of the Blitz. Fearing that the typescript might not make it safely to London, he had sent it off in three parts between September and November. By January, Ministry of Fear is out, reviews are appearing, and movie rights are assigned. (The movie, directed by the German émigré Fritz Lang and starring Ray Milland, will appear in 1944.) Greene is languishing in Freetown, hoping for a quick return to London. “I felt sick in the stomach when I heard the Germans had started on London again,” he writes to his mother on January 19, as the Casablanca Conference was proceeding father up the West African coast. “I feel I’d be of much more use back [serving as an air warden]. One feels out of it in this colony of escapists with their huge drinking parties and their complete unconsciousness of what war is like.”4
In Ministry of Fear, the protagonist, a man named Rowe, finds himself in a London auction room scanning a row of books:
Just on the level of his eyes was a Roman missal of no particular value . . . . The missal was ornamented with ugly colored capitals; oddly enough, it was the only thing that spoke of war in the old quiet room. Open it where you would, you came on prayers for deliverance, the angry nations, the unjust, the wicked, the adversary like a roaring lion . . . . The words stuck out between the decorated borders like a cannon out of a flower bed. “Let not man prevail,” he read—and the truth of the appeal chimed like music. For in all the world outside that room man had indeed prevailed; he had himself prevailed. It wasn’t only evil men who did these things. Courage smashes a cathedral, endurance lets a city starve, pity kills . . . . We are trapped and betrayed by our virtues.5
Later in the story, Rowe opens a suitcase with a bomb inside it. He survives, but loses his memory. He no longer remembers that he had killed—a “mercy killing”—his own wife. He does not know who Hitler is, or that his country is in the midst of a war. The section of the book describing Rowe’s amnesiac experience is entitled “The Happy Man.”
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In the northern Chinese city then known as Tientsin (now Tianjin), a Scottish missionary mulls over the ever-spreading gossip: people say the occupying army of Japan will soon round up all foreign nationals in the city and place them in an internment camp. He realizes that he has already missed his chance to return to the West, to his wife and daughters, then living in Toronto. This Scotsman had been born in Tientsin in 1902 and had returned there to serve after being educated in England and Scotland, and after having won a gold medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics in the 400-meter run and a bronze in the 200 meters. His name is Eric Liddell, and in March he will be taken to the Weihsien internment camp, and will die there, of a brain tumor, in February 1945. Decades later, Langdon Gilkey, an American interned with Liddell, will offer a recollection: “Often in an evening I would see him bent over a chessboard or a model boat, or directing some sort of square dance—absorbed, weary and interested, pouring all of himself into this effort to capture the imagination of these penned-up youths. He was overflowing with good humour and love for life, and with enthusiasm and charm. It is rare indeed that a person has the good fortune to meet a saint, but he came as close to it as anyone I have ever known.”6