"Hellish Treatment"

The vice consul's Irish setter was first up the gangway. Then fur-hatted Consul General Angus Ward loomed over the side of the U.S. freighter Lakeland Victory, at anchor off Taku Bar, a deep-water port downriver from Tientsin, China. He squinted cheerfully through his steel-rimmed spectacles as he came on board, his famous reddish beard now partly white, his fur-collared canvas coat and breeches bagging around his undernourished, 6-ft. frame.

Nearly two hours later, after long haggling with heavily armed Chinese Communists over the signing of release papers, Mrs. Ward and 18 others of the American Mukden consular family (four, besides Ward, had been jailed by the Communists) were transferred from a sloshing tug to the Lakeland Victory this week to begin the long voyage home.

Angus Ward puffed on a stubby little pipe as he told of living for a month on bread and hot water, two weeks of it in unheated solitary confinement at freezing temperatures. One afternoon, after this "hellish treatment," he was hauled before a Communist court, charged with and convicted of beating a Chinese messenger in a scuffle over pay, and ordered out of China. Red broadcasts to the contrary, Ward said, he had "confessed" nothing.

Reporters on the ship asked the inevitable question: How does it feel to be back? "Imagine," said Angus Ward, "how you'll feel on the day after Saint Peter lets you in."

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