More and more geese are flying overhead, cackling geese in the half-light, and that organ music in my head will not stop. Off in the distance, past a low farmstead, I see lapwings over the fields; they seem to swirl in the wind like scraps of paper, but there is no wind, not a blade of grass is moving. The morning chill is rising from the ground. Somewhere beside me, I can hear teeth chattering. The vague smell of cow dung invades my nostrils, mingled with the cold sour scent from the dewy beet fields. Our officers have assured us that we shall be home again before winter sets in. My unit will help to guard the borders. That’s all they’ve told us.
—
The day of our conscription we walked down our street single file, ten neighborhood lads in a row. A mood of giggly surprise and excitement soon took hold. Scores of boys were marching into Zuidstatie, thronging together under the high roof. Confusion reigned; everyone was shouting and arguing as if they were just beginning to realize what was happening. As I stood there waiting with the other lads from my street, my aunt Rosa appeared, bobbing through the crowd toward me. She had brought a parcel of stockings and handkerchiefs and a small flask of lukewarm coffee. Her eyes were rimmed with red. That’s from running in the morning chill, she said. Endless processions of railway carriages rolled along the platform, engines hissing, the smell of coal and soot, the swarming of the mass of boys in search of their units—I passed those final moments before departure too unconsciously, everything went too fast. I saw a young fellow weeping at his father’s side. I saw a fallen knapsack that had burst open at the end of the platform. A few sandwiches rolled out and were squashed to a pulp by scurrying feet. I saw a chicken in the distance, a white chicken just crossing the tracks, with a reddish-brown cockerel hot on her heels. The compartments were crammed full of bags and parcels; we were packed together like herrings in a barrel. The train chugged slowly into motion and made countless stops along the way. The heat soon became stifling; we couldn’t open the windows, as the smoke and soot from the engine would blow inside.
Around noon, we arrived in Dendermonde. In the muddle of soldiers shouting over each other, we were arbitrarily divided into groups of twelve. Everyone was pushing and shoving, trying to stay close to at least one or two familiar faces.
Later that day, the army requisitioned sheds, attics, and barns all over town. I ended up in a butcher’s attic, along with a few other lads from my neighborhood. Rays of light seeped through the roof tiles; August was a fine, hot month that year. All around us bugles were sounding, officers were shouting orders, and trucks were honking their horns as they wound their way through the slowly settling chaos. We lay in silence on bales of hay that had been hurriedly tossed into the room.
We spent the whole day waiting. At suppertime, rations were delivered to the billets, just bread and milk for us, too little for twelve men. The butcher had his lanky daughter bring us four fried sausages and some boiled tripe. We gobbled it down in silence, turned onto our sides, and fell asleep before it was quite dark.
For the next three days, nothing happened. Before noon on the fourth day, the whole regiment was called into formation. Long rows of new knapsacks were waiting for us, on top of each one a rifle, bullets, and a packet of biscuits. The officers stood watching and shouted orders.
En avant par quatre! Portez…l’arme!
We left around seven o’clock the next day, in good spirits because we were finally on the move. None of us could have suspected that one month later the peaceful town we had just left would be reduced to ashes by the Germans. We’d been walking for hours by the time the first faint booming noises reached our ranks; we were marching toward Liège, where “the enemy” had already gathered around the forts of Boncelles, Flemalle, Hollogne, Lantin, and Chaudfontaine, and other fortifications near the city. The Germans were intent on breaking through this ring of forts; some men laughed and said that would be impossible. Others said the ring had already been broken; if that was true, then we would be the first to run up against the enemy. Our officers cut off further questions with a snarl.
We marched all day, till the blisters on our heels tore open and the warm fluid ran into our coarse socks. You milksops, one lieutenant growled, you’ve gone soft from all those years of sitting at home with Mama. We marched through Londerzeel and Steenokkerzeel, where we rested for half an hour and filled our canteens from a stream. Then we marched through Oud-Heverlee and straight into Louvain. The main thoroughfare, Statiestraat, was deserted, and the sharp echo of our footsteps from the house fronts filled us with a sense of power. We stopped for another rest in the late afternoon, drenched with sweat, our faces crimson, our collars undone, grimacing in pain as we kicked off our boots for ten minutes or so. Our feet immediately started to swell up, which made it even more painful to put the boots back on.
By dusk, after a grueling march of almost fifty miles, we arrived in Hakendover, a hamlet just past Tienen. The air was so clear and quiet that the trees seemed caught in a kind of half-molten glass. Swallows circled in the sky, mosquitoes danced over the canals. I was no longer thinking about anything. We were billeted in a large farmstead. Cows were wandering loose in the courtyard, milling around the sheds. We asked the farmer’s wife for milk; she shook her head no, mumbling that the milk was for the next day. One by one, we scrambled up a rickety ladder to the hayloft assigned to us. Gnawing hunger, confusion, and quarrels in French between the officers in the courtyard. The rations had been held up somewhere, no one knew where. One Walloon soldier had the nerve to stick his head out of a window and shout, Armée bête! Stupid army! He was put in solitary immediately. Later on, we heard him in one of the barns, shouting and wailing.
An hour later, our commander tried a more polite approach: Mon capitaine, don’t you have any food for my boys? They’re starving.
Taisez-vous, Facherol, the officer said. Shut up. He spat in the sand.
That night we lowered the rickety ladder, crept outside, plundered the orchards in the darkness, ate as much fruit as we could stomach, returned to the hayloft dog-tired, heard the rustle of rats underneath us and dormice in the roof tiles. The monotonous hum of a gnat right by my ear.
—
But now we have been lying here for days, behind a wheat field that blocks our view. We carry out periodic field exercises, which serve mainly to keep us busy and tire us out. Along potential attack routes they had us cut down trees; the logs now lie scattered across the roads to prevent a surprise attack, a prospect that seems unimaginable to us. In the cool quiet of the summer morning, farmers are out in the fields here and there, reaping grain, the slow slash of their scythes approaching and drawing back again—the lonely rustle of the countless falling stalks along the scythe’s keen blade interrupted only by the cough of a cow at pasture, the bark of a dog in the distance. In the warm air, the swallows are swirling again, and high in the sky I think I see a lark ascending.
Above that, the blue, the spotless blue that reminds me of my late father’s frescoes. There is nothing to confirm what we hear again and again: that war has come. Only the peace of this splendid August, month of harvest, of yellow pears and wasps, of cooler mornings, sluggish flies and weightless spots of sunlight drifting peacefully over the leaves.
—
As I lie dozing and daydreaming in the sun, the porte-parole—as the officers call the messenger—sidles up to the commander. He whispers something in his ear and points at me.
Marshen!
I jump to my feet with a start and stand to attention.
Oui, mon commandant. Je m’appelle Mar-tien, pas Mar-shen.
Taisez-vous, Marshen, you idiot!
They resume their mumbling, with glances in my direction.
Then, looking me up and down with a vaguely hostile expression, he says, slowly, in French, Madame votre maman has come to say bonjour to you, Marshen.
He taps his boot with his whip and shoots me a nasty grin.
I walk out of the courtyard, and there she stands: my mother, as proud and s
tatuesque as ever, her black hair in a lustrous knot, in her best black dress and her worn black shoes. A basket dangles from her arm.
We are sent off behind a hedgerow where the other soldiers cannot see us.
Sit down, Urbain, she says, we have fifteen minutes.
She throws her arms around me and looks at me long and hard. Then she laughs.
I walked straight through the tents, she says, nobody stopped me. I asked if I could speak to the lieutenant. And just look.
She gives me a broad smile.
What? I said. You walked the whole sixty—
Hush now, little man. I stopped for the night in Grimbergen.
But Mother, today’s your birthday….
She nods and laughs, producing milk and cookies.
I wolf it all down, while she sits next to me, beaming. I throw the empty milk bottle into the canal. We sit together in silence.
After fifteen minutes the commander returns. He mumbles at my mother, telling her time’s up. Then, turning his head, he snarls at me to rejoin my platoon. For my mother, he has another nasty grin.
Désolé, madame.
My mother rises to her feet and makes the sign of the cross on my forehead.
Gobbleskipya, Urbain.
She hands me a basket covered with a towel, sweeps past the commander as if he were air, and vanishes behind the line of trees, while I return to the courtyard. In the basket I find a stack of sandwiches, a smaller stack of underwear, a few freshly ironed shirts, and a tiny figurine of Bernadette Soubirous, which I put in my trouser pocket. It will remain there until the day a bullet bores through both the figurine and my thighbone.
For the rest of the day, I am out of sorts. It’s August 9, a Wednesday, my mother’s birthday, the sun is shining. I walk back to the sheds in the rear of the farmyard and find everyone staring at the sky in terror. To the east a Zeppelin, huge and unreal as an image in a dream, floats slowly past us through the weightless blue; a moment later, it glides majestically over the sun, casting its shadow on our upturned faces. My heart skips a beat; this dream-fish drifting silently over our heads is larger, more impressive, and more menacing than the battles I had imagined. Fall in! the officers bark. As we grope for our rifles and knapsacks, we hear thunder in the distance, explosions, the thud of dropping shells, an indistinct rumble booming and growling through the air, bearing down on us like a steamroller, biting into our guts, making the walls shake. In the distance, the unearthly apparition slides noiselessly out of sight; black plumes of smoke rise in the east, we hear tremendous explosions, birds wheel down out of the sky as if shot, farm animals pound their hooves in fear and rattle the chains in the barns, and, for the first time, our hearts stand still in shock and horror.
An hour later a runner arrives, collapsing in breathless exhaustion in the middle of the yard. He brings the news that the forts around Liège have fallen, along with reports of the Germans torching buildings and murdering innocent civilians. Apparently, there are already many stories of senseless retributory killings like these. We march another twenty miles to the east.
We’ll later learn that General von Emmich had launched the attack on the forts around Liège four days earlier, advancing from both the north and the south in an attempt to besiege them, and trying to penetrate gaps like the one between Fort Boncelles and Fort Ourthe. Since we were to the west of the city, we did not see any of that. Apparently, the third division was attacked at Fort Evegnée.
Now an utterly unfamiliar sound is booming through the air with clocklike regularity, and the ground beneath our feet is quaking, making us feel slighter than leaves in the wind. We almost shit our trousers then and there. Not until much later will I realize that we were among the first to hear the sound of the great gun, the famous Big Bertha. In combination with the air raid—a completely new phenomenon, which reduced the massive forts to ridiculous open wounds—this gun annihilated the Belgian defenses in Liège, previously thought indestructible, in just a few days. Fort Loncin was destroyed in August when the Germans made a direct hit on the powder magazine. The concrete had not been reinforced with iron; that was the Achilles heel of the old mastodons, the last vestiges of an unsuspecting age. I cannot help recalling the words on the shed near Port Arthur, on that day—it now seems so far away—when I saw the girl in the pool: Béton armé.
—
We are now in battle array, bayonets at the ready. The senior officers are roaring orders in French. After they have shouted themselves hoarse, the junior officers translate. Our orders are to march back westward. Along the way, we hear that resistance has become impossible. The Germans are using enormous 42-centimeter guns, unlike anything our military has seen before, and have managed to breach all the forts around Liège. Those outdated bulwarks could not stand up to calibers larger than 21 centimeters.
The enemy is approaching, our commander shouts. Show your valor.
My heart pounds in my throat. I feel sick as a dog.
Chickenshits! That’s what we are, chickenshits! says cross-eyed Rudy from Lossystraat. We should march east to support the bloody third division.
No one says anything back; it’s dreary, this westward retreat over desolate, lonely country roads in dry August—worn-out, sluggish August. Near Waremme, a woman runs past us, gesticulating wildly and shouting something we can’t make out. Behind us, we see dwindling clouds of black smoke.
By early evening, we arrive in Tienen. The officers requisition buildings; we lie down on the cool tiles of a school’s empty corridors. I take my mother’s sandwiches out of my knapsack and share them with the lads beside me. No one says another word; before long, you can hear the snoring of the first exhausted soldiers.
In the days that follow, I notice a change in attitude among my superiors. The officers watch me a little more attentively, and the commanders show me a little more respect, now and then telling me what they’re thinking of doing, or asking me which men I’d like in my group of snipers. I know it’s not just because I went to military school for four years, and not even because I keep my men under control. It’s mainly because the officers were impressed by my statuesque, self-confident mother.
—
On August 15, we are just north of Tienen, in Sint-Margriete-Houtem. Before nightfall, I am given command of eight men of my own choosing. Our orders are to stand guard at the far left wing of the regiment and establish an eastern sentry position. Somewhere along the road from Vissenaken to Tienen, we pitch a tent against the high wall of a house, so that everyone coming by has to pass us. We carry out rough-and-ready identity checks but look mainly at people’s features and how they carry themselves—anyone could be a spy, our commanders warned us. The Germans are offering a reward to soldiers who betray their country. A handful of Belgians have committed high treason, and a few traitors have already been executed.
Today is the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin. A mass is held in the open air. I see refugees on their knees, weeping, or staring rigidly at the makeshift tabernacle in the field. The chaplain tries to offer words of comfort, incantations borne away on the summer wind. We also see the first of the wounded limp into camp today. A boy sits under a tree and vomits blood.
Since the terrain here is slightly hilly, we can see the artillery lines in the field below. Soldiers are coming and going.
We spend the next few days waiting in confusion. From the village of Haelen, we hear shocking news of reprisals against ordinary civilians who were baselessly accused of resisting the occupation and topped off with a shot to the neck in the streets, barns, cellars, and sitting rooms. Wounded soldiers are carried in; a field hospital is set up. The boys are made to drink themselves into a stupor so the doctors can amputate their wounded limbs, using strangely primitive-looking surgical equipment. In just a few days, our peaceful August has filled with screams and shouts. We hear the thunder of mortar fire near Haelen; in the evening, the smell of charred flesh spreads over the dewy field. On August 17, we are told about the destructi
on of Fort Loncin two days earlier. We hardly sleep, instead falling into a kind of feverish trance. Many soldiers are ordered to march toward Tienen. We do not see anyone return.
—
On the afternoon of August 18, the earth suddenly began to tremble. Cross-eyed Rudy from Lossystraat pressed his ear to the ground, leaped up, and shouted, They’re coming! They’re coming! We reached for our rifles and saw incendiary bombs in the distance, raining down on the city of Tienen. Suddenly a mob of screaming, wailing people literally flooded over us, shouting Save us! Save us! and knocking down our checkpoint in their panic. A nurse in black ran after them, calling out, Couchez-vous! Couchez-vous! She tried to make it clear that they should all throw themselves on the ground. But as most of them did not speak French, they paid no attention and kept running—to their deaths.
The German attack was like a blitzkrieg. Less than an hour later, we saw a moving wall of metal, smoke, and gunfire rise ahead of us; their numbers were overwhelming, and they approached with a dull rumble that seemed to herald the last judgment. The men from our forward posts came barreling straight into us, wild with fear, yelling that we had to run. A few of them were stopped by a lieutenant and led away. We knew they would be punished severely for deserting their posts.
In the field below, we saw three of our big guns blown to smithereens, all at once. The shards of metal flew as far as our ranks. One of the lads in my group started whirling like a madman, screeching and sobbing. His lower left arm had been torn off by falling shrapnel. The chief warrant officer came rushing into my post and ordered me to assemble my men and advance without delay to the command post of the 22nd Regiment of the Line, about two miles ahead of us. That’s suicide! one boy cried. He was pulled out of the ranks and slammed to the ground. We set off, marching along hedgerows and canal sides and now and then dropping to the earth as the shells landed closer and closer. After about a mile, on the road to Grimde, we truly found ourselves in hell. Soldiers with their heads swathed in blood-soaked bandages lay by the roadside, calling out for help; one boy with a shot-off leg howled that he was bleeding to death. No one had time to spare them a glance.
War and Turpentine Page 15
