Friday, October 2, 2015
The Don’t-Forget-WWI Project: An
excerpt from page 99 of my nonfiction book, Behind the Lines,
www.WWIBehindTheLines.com
"We Shall Never Forgive!”
As
September [1914] came to a close, Max [the mayor of Brussels] was not the only
Belgian in jail. All Belgians under
German occupation rule had become “prisoners in their own land,”
according to reporter Arthur L. Humphreys in the Times of London. “They
may not go from one town to another; they may not use the telephone or the
telegraph; they may write letters only through the German military post; they
may not use their own railroad system as passengers or for parcel transport.
Belgians seen walking across the fields are hailed by a Landsturm guard. They
may walk only in the streets and go to their shops and offices within the
radius of their own communities. The psychological effect of this is
appreciable only after it is endured.”
Humphreys
also recorded a conversation he had had with a Belgian: “We know how to suffer
in Belgium. . . . Our ability to suffer and to hold fast to our hearths has
kept us going through the centuries. Now a ruffian has come into our house and
taken us by the throat. He can choke us to death, or he can slowly starve us to
death, but he cannot make us yield. No, we shall never forgive!”
When
asked if the Belgian hated the Germans, he replied: “Of course I hate. For the
first time in my life I know what it is to hate; and so do my countrymen. I
begin to enjoy my hate. It is one of the privileges of our present existence.
We cannot stand on chairs and tables as
they do in Berlin cafes and sing our hate, but no one can stop our hating in
secret.”
That
hate would grow stronger through four long years and become less and less
secret.
End of
Excerpt
My Post: In my last post in
August, I said I was going to Belgium and was going to search out some WWI
places to see if they still existed. I’m happy to report that my wife and I had
an incredible time in Belgium, made more so by four wonderful local historians:
Raymond Roelands, Roger Van den Bleeken, Andre De Vleeschouwer, and Marc Brans.
More on them later in this post.
My wife and I flew into Brussels and
immediately grabbed the airport express bus to Antwerp and checked into the
charming Hotel Rubens, right behind the city’s main old town square, Grote
Markt. We then dropped our bags and took off in search of 1914 Antwerp.
To aid us, we had my 1914 city map that I had
used for the writing of Behind the Lines. 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.
On this modern-day trip to Antwerp, I wanted
to see what still might be there.
One obstacle to this quest I discovered before
I had even left home. The 1914 map was in French, while all modern maps of
Antwerp are in Flemish. Unfortunately, a surprisingly amount of street and
place names do not look the same in French as they do in Flemish. In many cases
I had to use the shapes of streets to match the 1914 map to the 2015 map.
When we got to Antwerp, I had a general idea
of where the sites were that I wanted to see, but because we didn’t have much
time in Antwerp, I identified only three places I wanted to track down:
Hotel
Saint Antonie on Place Verte (now called Groenplaats), where E. E. Hunt and a
group
of American and British war correspondents stayed in 1914. Hunt also said
the
hotel was British HQ in Antwerp before the Germans took the city.
Rue
Leys (now Leystraat), on the eastern end of Place de Meir, the main shopping
street
then
and now. Back in 1914, the U.S. Consulate overlooked Rue Leys and is
where
the photo of German soldiers marching into Antwerp was taken that I used
in
Behind
the Lines on page 130.
21
Avenue Marie Therese, the Bunge house, at the tip of the park with the Quinten
Metseys (aka Matsys) statue (famous artist) nearby.
My search wasn’t very successful.
The Hotel Saint Antonie is, to the best of my
understanding, a Hilton Hotel today. I’ll have to compare 1914 photos of the
hotel with the photos I took to see it’s the same building. I think it is.
 |
| The photo I wanted to recreate in modern-day Antwerp. |
I could find Rue Leys, but I couldn’t
replicate the exact look of the 1914 photo. The next day, when I told the three
local historians about my search, Roger explained that I had been looking at the
scene from the wrong perspective and direction. Once he explained that, I
believe I understood where the shot had been taken from.
And, finally, I had hoped to see my great
grandfather’s townhouse at 21 Avenue Marie Therese. I’m sad to report that it is no longer there. A
modern apartment building has taken its place.
The next day (Thursday) it rained off and on
throughout the day. Raymond, Roger and Andre were kind enough to give us their
entire day to show us around Kapellen (approximately 20 minutes northeast of
Antwerp), where my great grandfather, Edouard Bunge, his daughter Erica Bunge
had lived at the Chateau Oude Gracht.
Raymond picked us up at our hotel at 9:30 a.m.
and took us out to the Kapellen churchyard where many of my family members are
buried. We met Roger and Andre in the church parking lot and then proceeded to
the burial spots.
The three explained that non-Catholics are not
allowed to be buried in a Catholic graveyard. Because the Bunges were not (and
still not) Catholic, Edouard Bunge had donated a small piece of his property
that touched the edge of the graveyard to the Church so that the family could
be buried there. A beautiful female statue and an underground crypt (now
covered over) are surrounded by multiple headstones that mark many of my family.
It was a surprisingly emotional reunion with those who I had written about in Behind
the Lines, and with those who I hadn’t written about but loved very
much.
Raymond had also arranged for a reporter from
an Antwerp Flemish newspaper to come out and interview me about my trip. She
even took a photo and the photo and the article appeared in the Saturday
newspaper! Anyone who’s interested can see the photo and article by clicking here.
Susan and I ended up having a wonderful day
with Raymond, Roger and Andre, who were so kind and knowledgeable. We saw two
different local historical society offices, a creative display of the 1914
electrical fence that the Germans had erected between neutral Holland and
occupied Belgium, heard parts of a major speech on Edouard Burnge and Chateau
Oude Gracht that Raymond has given many times to local groups, and we shared a
wonderful lunch at a stylish restaurant, Brassierie De Hoge Boom. From Raymond’s speech, I learned that at the
end of war Edouard Bunge had been taken to court and accused of being a
collaborator with the Germans. He successfully defended himself, but I had
never heard that story before.
As a small token of our great appreciation for
all they did, I presented each of them with numerous documents that they had
not seen before.
After we left the three at 6:30 p.m., we then
spent a fun evening at the home of my mother’s dearest friend, Francoise.
Guests also included her daughter, Therese, and my distant cousins Karin and
Werner. It was a wonderful evening of Belgian cuisine and great conversation.
Altogether, the day was one of the highlights
of our entire two-week trip.
In the next post, I’ll tell you about the last
day of our Belgium trip, when we wandered around Brussels and had a great visit
with local historian Marc Brans.
End of Post.
No comments:
Post a Comment