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PARTISAN REVIEW
would defend
his
fortress. He knew that upon his vigilance and his
Mauser would hang the lives of so many refugees who, believers and
non-believers alike, peaceful citizens of many villages, had moved
into the church for protection. The church was strongly built, with
space enough to house all of them, and provisions had been made
against a siege. He was stationed in the priest's study, the room in
which he was to spend many hours reading and meditating during
the later years when he himself became the priest. But then he was
only there to stand ready for the enemy. But for many days he saw
not an enemy, but only the vast green fields of sorghum spread out
under the blue summer sky and huge masses of white cloud. Some–
times a fire and wreaths of dark smoke would rise on the horizon,
and then he knew that another of his parishioners' houses was burn–
ing. But there was no sign of a battle. The sorghum covered miles
and miles of land like a forest, monotonously green, mysteriously
quiet, but its tall stalks and dense long leaves could well hide a whole
regiment. Any day, any moment, the enemy might appear in force;
then the peaceful sorghum fields would be bristling with arms and
the defender might be caught unprepared. So for many vigilant hours,
the youthful defender was keeping his watch over the sorghum fields
and they became in his imagination a symbol of the people among
whom he had just come to stay to prepare his work as their pastor:
in appearance vast, simple, and peaceful, yet so dense as to be almost
impenetrable, so unstable that they would rise and fall in big waves
at the touch of a little breath of wind, and hostile and dangerous
in the sense that the enemy was just lurking anywhere and you
could never tell when he would jump at your throat.
"This, regrettably, was my first impression of your noble country,
and as first impressions often do, it hardened into a prejudice, and
I have ever afterwards been biased as regards your national char–
acter. I was always wondering, even after the Boxers were beaten
back, with the help of firearms and at the cost of many human lives,
whether hostility had really been removed from your hearts. For
years our work went on peacefully, almost prosperously, so that some–
times I would say to myself that peace and good will had at last
been established in your country. But such a complacent mood did
not last long. I began painfully to witness the growth of a new
enemy .: Communism. Its threat became more and more real until
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