Don’t-Forget-WWI Project: During World War One, exactly 101 years ago today, on Sunday, Dec. 6, 1914, 10 young American students on Christmas break from Oxford University were in Rotterdam preparing for the adventure of a lifetime.
 |
| 1914: Belgians in a food relief line. |
They had been chosen to be the first 10 official “delegates”
in the CRB (Commission for Relief in Belgium), which would ultimately become
the largest food and relief drive the world had ever seen. These early
twenty-somethings (eight of whom were Rhodes scholars) were about to go into
German-occupied Belgium to help organize and supervise the delivery and
distribution of food to 7 million near-starving Belgians.
With all communications cut between Belgium and the outside
world, no one knew what to expect. One of the ten, Emile Hollmann, wrote, “We
had visions of sitting on the top of box cars or sleeping on the decks of small
canal barges in their long journeys from Rotterdam into Belgium. . .We expected
to see German savages prowling around ready at the slightest provocation to
scalp women and children and perhaps provoke a quarrel with us for the same
purpose!”
What they found—and much more—is in my nonfiction book, Behind
the Lines, which was included on the nationally recognized Kirkus
Reviews Best Books of 2014. (More about my book by clicking here.
Here's an excerpt from page 279 of Behind the Lines about the Oxford students on Sunday, Dec. 6, 1914, in Rotterdam, Holland:
Getting
Their Assignments
It’s probably best that no one recorded when the men finally
got back to the hotel, but the next day, even though it was Sunday, they were
up early, dressed appropriately, and ready to find out what all this Belgian
work was about. They walked the short distance from the hotel to the CRB
office, which was on a “tree-bordered Dutch lane lying beside a busy canal
where the schools of herring used to run, and where nowadays market carts and fisherwomen,
motor-cars, delivery wagons, and peasant farmers in whitewashed wooden shoes
clatter leisurely by.” To the east, and nearly within throwing distance, was
the city’s major Maas train station.
The building that the CRB occupied was a 100-year-old
mansion The house still bore some luxurious paneled walls and painted ceilings
that were adorned with allegorical figures. The dining room had been converted
into a waiting room but maintained its “massive fireplace, with long vertical
Dutch mirrors and wall paintings in the style of 1750, showing quiet
landscapes, Ruskin’s ‘fat cattle and ditch-water,’ or violent storms at sea.”
While the house maintained some of its previous
accoutrements, it was no longer a quiet, stately mansion; it was the bustling
business office of the rapidly growing shipping arm of the CRB. A large staff
of Dutch, Belgian, and American clerks were scattered throughout the building,
and Dutch and Flemish barge captains and dock laborers were always waiting in
line for an audience with someone who could either put them to work or solve a
problem they had encountered while employed by the commission. The halls and
various offices were filled with a nearly constant cacophony of ringing phones,
clattering typewriters, and buzzing conversations.
Overseeing it all was forty-year-old Captain Lucey, who
occupied the best office in the building. The large room on the second floor
overlooked the Meuse River and the harbor. From his windows he could see many of the 300 barges
that the CRB had already chartered. Some were being loaded by floating
elevators, others by hand; others waited for their cargoes while still more
were being towed upriver by canal tugs toward Belgium. All were draped with
huge canvas flags bearing the protective inscription “Belgian Relief
Commission.”
Even though it was Sunday, people were working in the
office, and Lucey was there to greet the ten Oxford students. As one CRB
delegate described Lucey, he was a “nervous, big, beardless American . . . who
left his business . . . to organize and direct a great trans-shipping office in an alien land for an alien people.” The captain spent little
time on the preliminaries, getting straight to work on instructing the ten
students as to what he knew of Belgian conditions, what he thought they would
be doing, and what he felt needed to be done.
Nelson wrote his parents that Lucey “gave us a fairly good
idea of what our work would be like, besides telling us in a general way of the
situation in Belgium. You will be surprised when you hear of the magnitude of
this undertaking, and of the extraordinary difficulties under which it must be carried
on.”
In a confident tone that marked so many Americans of the time, Nelson stated, “The Americans have been hampered so far by lack of
men and lack of supplies, but when our men get established throughout the
country, and the organization is perfected, we will be able to handle the
situation, for we already have some thirty or forty ships on the way to
Holland.”
Nelson was so impressed with the operation and with Lucey
that he wrote, “One feels prouder of being an American after meeting and
talking with him.” The young first-year Rhodes scholar already knew, before he had
started doing any relief work, that “our work goes on day and night,
seven days a week.” He even predicted that for the Oxford
students this would not be a six-week jaunt, as they had signed up for: “This
job is not a three month’s or six month’s job; it is a one or two year’s job,
for even if the war should stop today, the Belgians must be fed until they can
gather in the next harvest.” And he was already clear on his intentions, even
before experiencing one day in occupied Belgium: “I shall very likely stay by
this work for six months or longer, if I can arrange matters at Oxford.” He had
become a convert to the cause and even ended one of his letters to his parents
by stating, “I hope North Dakota, which is prospering because of this war, will
be generous in her aid to the Belgians.”
End of Excerpt
My Post: In my last post way back
in early October, I wrote about the Antwerp part of our incredible visit to
Belgium in September. After a wonderful day exploring Antwerp, and a great day of
meeting with local historians Raymond Roelands, Roger Van den Bleeken, and
Andre De Vleeschouwer (see my previous post for details), my wife and I moved
south to spend a half day and night in Brussels.
When we arrived, we immediately pulled out my
1914 Brussels map. As I explained in my last post, back during my research
stage I had taken a tiny Baedeker’s city map from 1914 and blown it up to 3
feet by 3 feet so I could see every detail of the map. Then, as I found place
names and street mentions in my research, I’ll jot down the significant ones in
red on the map. By the time I was finished writing Behind the Lines, the map
was covered with red notations of where people had walked, worked, lived, or
hidden during the German bombardment and occupation.
Armed with my 1914 blown up Brussels map, I
wanted to find two places:
*
66 Rue des Colonies, which had been home to the main CRB office, and where my
grandfather,
Milton M. Brown, had worked during his days as a CRB delegate.
* Galeries Royales St. Hubert, a beautiful late
1800s metal-and-glass-covered shopping
arcade.
This was the location, during WWI, of a bookshop whose owner had been
a
distributor of the underground newspaper, La
Libre Belgique.
For a while, my search for 66 Rue des
Colonies, wasn’t going so well. I couldn’t seem to find the right streets on my
map and match them to where we were walking. Just when I was the most
frustrated, and I was hot and tired and hungry and my wife was a few paces
behind me, something magical happened. I swear I heard my long-dead grandfather
whisper in my ear, “You’re almost there, boy.” A moment later, I turned the
corner and the building and number were right there.
A sense of relief and wonder overtook me. I had
the strangest – but nicest! – sensation that my grandfather and some other CRB
delegates and Belgians in my book, Behind the Lines, were walking with me. It was a great feeling.
And that feeling continued as we made our way
to the lovely Galeries Royales St. Hubert, which is still standing and is
magnificent to see. My wife loved the shopping and I loved the sense of walking
in the footsteps of people I had come to admire. We both marveled at the
workmanship and artistry that had created such an arcade back in the late 1800s.
I was also happily surprised to see that there was a bookshop in the arcade,
although I was not able to find out if it was in the same location, or had any ties, to the WWI
bookshop.
Later that afternoon, local historian Marc
Brans met us at our hotel and we three went out to an early dinner. What a
wonderful evening it was! I truly enjoyed finally meeting the man who I had been
emailing for more than a year about WWI, Belgium, the underground, and my book.
In our email correspondences, Marc had always been a kind and generous person,
freely sharing his knowledge and resources. In person he continued to be so as
we shared some good Belgian beers and seafood and talked about our various
research projects. My wife sat back and enjoyed the wine and seafood!
I have now been home months since the Belgium
trip, but the images and memories are still strong in my mind. They will help
me, no doubt, as I move forward in writing Book Two, which I am now earnestly
working on.
End of Post.
No comments:
Post a Comment