Bethune went to aid the wounded in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, where he pioneered the mobile medical unit, which we now call MASH units. He brought blood transfusion units to the war front to avoid the wounded bleeding to death instead of moving them to hospitals away from the war zone. It seems, however, he ran afoul of the authorities in Spain and had to leave under a cloud, having at one time been arrested. In the spring of 1938 he went to China, where he headed a medical team intend on assisting the Communist forces under Mao Zedong fighting the Japanese. When he joined the Eighth Route Army in northern China, Bethune was already 48 years old, and a survivor of tuberculosis. He became know to the Chinese by the name of Bai Qiu-en, and was called an Internationalist, never a Canadian by the Chinese hierarchy.

Bock's novel, The Communist's Daughter, written as a series of long letters to a daughter left behind in Spain, is fiction based on some elemental truths. As far as anyone knows Bethune had no children. He had a stormy marriage that ended in divorce, and many romantic encounters, none of which lasted. In Spain he did have an affair with a Swedish entertainer turned journalist, Kajsa Rothman, whom Bock calls 'von Rothman' in his books. She was apparently accused of aiding the Fascist side by her Communist comrades, but this seems nonsense as she fled Spain to Mexico once the Fascist won, as any Swede familiar with the Spanish Civil War will tell you.

Just exactly what happened in China to Bethune we will never really know because most of the letters he had written home to his family in Gravenhurst, ON, have not survived. It seemed the family felt it imprudent to keep letters from a known Communist, and destroyed his correspondence, which is one of those sins committed against history by people who don't want to air their family dirty linen in public.

Bock's choice of writing his novel in epistolary form, often written with touching lyricism, is well chosen. Bethune, despite claiming non-belief, never was able to shed his Presbyterian background, just as Mao never was able to get rid of the influence of Confucius on the way he acted despite his every effort to rid China of Confucian thought. So, like St. Paul, Bethune reveals not only much about himself in his epistles, but also attempts to teach his unknown daughter about the meaning of life, and about responsibility. It is beautifully done. Bock has a way of capturing the essence of the man, restless, brilliant, yet never sure he has contributed much to society, a vain man, yet humble, a man capable of great sensitivity toward his patients, and yet cruel toward those whom he should have loved most.

When I came to the passage where he describes his journey to Hong Kong on the Empress of Asia, it seemed a strange coincidence that I had just finished another book, The Empress of Asia, in which this very vessel had lost all of its luster after having been turned into a troop ship at the beginning of WWII. Bethune's thoughts to his daughter written in China about his journey is about a very different ship. "I recall standing on the deck of that magnificent ship, the Empress of Asia, and feeling the reality of what I was doing. I was leaving you. The full force of my decision came to me that morning as an almost physical pain."

Bock here captures, for me at least, the inner Bethune, the doctor who wrote poetry and painted, hence a man of considerable sensitivity and capable of feeling a pain that came from the premonition that he most likely would never see Canada again. He must have known that as bad as Spain was, China would be worse.

While teaching in northern China, my students and I talked about Bethune, the man so revered in their country, and for whom countless hospitals, big and small, have been named there. As my husband and I traveled throughout China as part of our teaching assignment, we were always introduced as coming from "the land of Dr. Bethune." The name Canada (Jiānįdą in Mandarin-China's main language of communication) seldom came up unless someone asked us directly. So, the questione raised was, 'Did Bethune really sacrifice himself by giving the last medication that could have saved him to one of his soldier patients instead?' To them it seemed that he could have saved more lives if he had taken the medication. Hence, they saw it as the doctor having committed suicide because he could bear the strain no longer.

If Bethune died, as was stated, from blood poisoning, it would have been the result of these many converging circumstances and, most likely, there was no medication anyway by this time because WWII had erupted and supplies no longer came in from Hong Kong.

In Mao's Little Red Book, there is an excerpt from an essay, a kind of eulogy to Bethune Mao wrote following the doctor's death and had published on December 21, 1939: "What kind of spirit is this that makes a foreigner selflessly adopt the cause of the Chinese people's liberation as his own? It is the spirit of internationalism, the spirit of communism, from which every Chinese must learn . . . ." The full essay became required reading for every Chinese in an effort to bring them closer to the self-sacrificing ideals that were needed to keep Communism alive in China. Of course, we know, Mao himself never lived up to this ideal. It was always the little people, who had to do the sacrificing.

In some ways, Bock has amplified Bethune's efforts, and made the all too human man almost a saint. Yet, he also showed us that he was not, for which we are grateful. There is only one instance with which I have great problems in this book. It is the description of the meeting with Mao and Bethune on the doctor's arrival in Yan'an. According to accounts heard in China, Mao treated Bethune with the same kind of arrogance that Stalin inflicted on Mao. Let him wait! The meeting described in the book simply does not hold up to what one heard tell in China. At the same time, knowing Bethune's quirk of nature that did not allow him to look up to those above him, I doubt very much that he would have expressed himself as telling anyone that "The great man's passion had taken hold of me." Still, it makes a good line.

The book as a whole is a wonderful read, full of beautiful descriptions, not just of China, but also of Spain, of his relationship to Kajsa Rothman, to his Chinese 'boy' Ho. This is where Bock is at his best. The 'letters' also reveal the dirty undercurrents that undermined Bethune both in Spain and China. Bock had a good feel for the intrigues—even paranoia—that plagued the Communists in both countries. The nurse Jean Ewen, who came with him to Yan'an, but soon left him, died in 1987. Bock manages to captured some of the antagonism between the two with a kind of rawness that grows out of this paranoia. According to Ewen's family, the nurse disliked Bethune, especially his apparent male chauvinism, they also claim she never was a Communist sympathizer. The way Bock sees it, there was a little more politics to it than is being admitted to. Ewen's family took her ashes to China in 1988, where they were buried in the same Mausoleum of Martyrs (Lieshi Lingyuan) in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, where Bethune rests.

If she was not a Communist than it seems strange that she was allowed to be buried in the mausoleum, not just alongside Bethune but two other heroes of the 'Chinese struggle', Scottish missionary Eric Liddle (made famous through the film Chariot of Fire) and Dr. Dwarkanath Kotnis, an Indian sent by Nehru in a show of solidarity from one developing country to another. Both men died before 1945, Liddle in a Japanese concentration camp, and Kotnis from seeming sheer exhaustion, causing an epileptic fit, while serving with the army.