The attacks now seemed to be coming from two sides and closing in around us. We hurried on. An infantryman came to meet us, shouting that we were crazy: Are you really so eager to die? Look behind you, he cried. Of my eight men, only three were still following me. Hunched over, we continued on our way. I recognized the officers’ billet—a farm on the horizon—and ran for it. Behind a wall half demolished by gunfire, wounded men sat moaning on wheelbarrows, side by side with frantic refugees from Oplinter and Grimde, mothers with children. Behind me, my friend Rudy called out, Keep going, Urbain, we’re almost there.
When we were a quarter of a mile from the farm, we tried to take cover behind a row of poplars. A strange hissing sound passed over us, like a gust of wind, and felled four trees with a mighty crack. They thundered down on top of each other, forming a pile across the road. One of my remaining three men died instantly. An officer of the 22nd Regiment and his small platoon lay behind a mound of earth thrown up by the bombs. He crept toward me on his hands and knees. I told him that I and my eight trained snipers had been ordered to report to him and that only three of us were left. It seems like madness to me, I said. He looked at me and said, It’s pointless. There’s nothing left to save over there.
All around us it was raining shells and incendiary bombs; our eardrums seemed about to burst; houses and trees were burning everywhere; the smoke drifted toward us, turning the bright daylight into stifling darkness.
We stayed flat on our bellies until late afternoon; the surrounding countryside was swiftly transformed into a kind of wasteland, a primeval landscape where every trace of civilization had been wiped out in just a few short hours. When evening came, and a red glow blazed and billowed in the sky over Tienen, Grimde, and Sint-Margriete-Houtem, we began our retreat, at more of a crawl than a walk. We were a ragged band, like human insects, wailing, sniffling, puking, crying, and broken as we crept through the growing darkness, past craters still fuming with shell-smoke, half-dead.
I was supposed to report to the senior officer who had sent us on ahead—Chief Warrant Officer Dugniolle, a severe man, mounted on a slender dapple gray. He had looked down his nose at us as he gave his orders—in French, of course—and then barked, Mar-shen, translate!
À vos ordres, mon commandant. Je m’appelle Mar-tien, mon commandant.
Mar-shen, je dis, tais-toi, merde!
Well after midnight, we reached the rear lines. The enemy had advanced in a pincer movement, which by some miracle we had escaped. I held a whispered conversation with the officer there. We had a lot to learn from our enemy, I said. They had weaponry that we not only lacked, but had never even seen before, combined with an enormous supply of grenades, ground troops that fired continuously as they advanced—machine-gun fire, another phenomenon previously unknown to us—heavy mortars, their lightning-fast enveloping movement, the deep trenches where they could herd together hundreds of prisoners of war, and their demoralizing psychological tactics: sowing confusion, arbitrarily executing civilians and prisoners of war, and popping up on all sides at once. The officer nodded and told us to come with him at daybreak. We straggled on past Vissenaken, exhausted, and lay down on the still-warm ground for a few hours of sleep, among the other soldiers sprawled behind a few haycocks near Boutersem.
When we tried to report to Chief Warrant Officer Dugniolle, just after six o’clock in the morning, we were told he had snuffed it, along with his aide-de-camp Denoëlle.
I was foolish enough to ask if there’d been many other losses.
Any more stupid questions, Marshen?
Je m’excuse, mon commandant.
The officers gathered in confusion to discuss what we should do. Since our first engagement with the enemy, our troops had been massacred, and our only remaining option was to launch small surprise attacks on the flanks of the opposing army in the hope of demoralizing them and creating the illusion of an unbroken military force. We did that for a week and were fairly successful, dealing some painful blows to the German lines, but we also made our enemies wary, cunning, and resentful. They often killed civilians in blind vengeance. We learned to distrust absolutely everyone; the Germans would send spies in the uniforms of our dead troops. They spoke broken French to the Flemish and broken Dutch to the French, hoping to trick us and extract information. Once, when a soldier shot one of these spies, and the others saw the Belgian uniform, there was a brief outbreak of panic in the ranks. Our officers lambasted us several times a day, blaming the defeat at Sint-Margriete-Houtem on our naïveté. We tried to tell them we had done our very best, but they just growled at us to shut our mouths.
Sometimes we were ordered to march ten miles or more at top speed to provoke a skirmish with the Germans, who were invariably ready and waiting. That always cost us lots of men and led to more grumbling.
—
After a week of this we were dog-tired, underfed, and demoralized. We were relentlessly driven back, past Aarschot, Werchter, Haacht, Boortmeerbeek. There we rested for a few days and finally got decent rations. A few of the lads had diarrhea and gallstones; they had drunk water from canals with corpses in them.
My knapsack was encrusted with mud and dirt; we rinsed off our things at a deserted farmhouse. I found my drawing materials, which I had almost forgotten—charcoal and a pencil. The few sheets of paper I had brought from home were full of mud stains. With a painful lump in my throat, I sat down by a stump and drew the devastated landscape, the piles of debris, the shell craters, the bodies, the blasted stumps, the dead horse I had seen hanging from a broken elm, perfectly straight, its bloody, half-severed head gruesomely twisted against the cool morning sky, its legs tangled in the remains of the tree like strange branches. Under its torn, stinking belly crawling with flies, a few boards from a splintered cart still hung from a length of rope. I thought back to the calm, soothing sound of my father’s hands brushing over the paper as he sketched in the peace and quiet of a distant Sunday afternoon, and my eyes were full of tears, so damn hot and full that I crumpled the paper into a ball, chucked it away, and cursed.
Eh bien, ça va, Marshen?
That same day, the king gave the order for the Belgian troops around the forts of Antwerp to retreat, but we stayed put for the time being in our encampment near Boortmeerbeek. Frantic refugees told us that the Germans had subjected the people of Aarschot to still more reprisals, in the form of summary executions. They would round up the entire population of a village chosen at random, make the trembling men line up in rows, announce that they had calculated the resistance to be one-third, shoot one in three men in the neck, and force the women and children to haul away and bury the corpses of their husbands and fathers. Women who lost control of themselves were beaten to death with a rifle barrel as their children clung to their skirts. The atrocities in Wallonia were said to be even larger in scale; as evidence, one man showed us a sickly smelling cap with his brother’s spattered brains still cleaving to the inside. The losses among the Belgian troops were so catastrophic that their full scale took time to comprehend. The two large regiments had lost so many men that the survivors had been merged into a single regiment, which was not much larger than one ordinary one. This confirmed our suspicion that, within a week, our army had been reduced to half its size.
Then, a few days later, in the last week of that wretched month of August, came the nightmare of Schiplaken.
2
These days, it is almost impossible to imagine the desolation of the landscape through which I marched with my eight new comrades from the third battalion of the 2nd Regiment of the Line. Near Boortmeerbeek, the two gendarmes who were escorting us slunk away, one after the other. The first one came to me and said with a smirk that he had sprained his foot, and a mile farther on, the second one frankly admitted that he was scared, because a man on horseback makes an easier target than an infantryman. I didn’t waste any words on them, but made it clear with a wave of my hand that they could do as they liked. We continued our cautious advance. I had to rem
ind my men to keep zigzagging, like hares in an open field. German scouts had been spotted near our advance posts. My mind was racing, and I had to make split-second decisions that could mean the difference between life and death. We crossed Leuvensesteenweg and struck out toward Kampenhout in the southwest. From the discarded objects that littered the ground, I could see that our troops had marched past in the wrong direction. Confusion and panic reigned. In the woods of Schiplaken, where the beauty of the summer trees and bushes made me wish I could stop and sketch them, we passed a pool with a lancer’s blue coat beside it, thrown off next to a yellow sandbank. From a distance, I thought at first that it was a soldier with his gun raised. Instinctively, I aimed my rifle, but it was only a sleeve outstretched on the ground. The image leaped to mind of the heap of blue-and-white clothes next to the pool at Port Arthur, barely a month earlier. It seemed like ages ago, a scene from another world that had slipped away from us in only a few days.
We marched deeper into the sheltering woods. Night fell. In the dusk, it was harder for us to advance. We would have to stop before Kampenhout. The earth all around us was covered with what looked like lead marbles, the remains of fragments from a high-explosive shell, which told us that these woods had seen combat. Now and then, a shell hit the ground less than one hundred yards away. The earth shook; we saw soil spurt into the air, trees fall groaning to the ground. Sometimes we heard distant cries. We crept on through the darkening twilight. The gunfire seemed to grow louder and closer. We halted at the prearranged spot. There was our regiment’s wagon—God knows where it had come from. I ordered my men to set up their rifles in bundles, with two sentries to the east. I made my report. A few officers arrived in silence, leading their horses by the reins. We all got bread and cheese for supper. A little later, another commando unit arrived. To my surprise, I recognized my cousin René among the soldiers—the second son of my uncle Evarist, whose first son I had seen die in the flames of the furnace. René was pale and exhausted. We had no time to talk. The officers had bundles of hay from the wagon to sleep on; we infantrymen slept on the ground. We were ordered not to light a flame under any circumstances; the only light came from a lantern hung under the wagon, which cast a feeble glow on our regimental colors, carelessly flung down among the bayonets. I could not get to sleep. I saw the faces of the sleeping soldiers glowing like copper in the soft light, with the warm hue you find in some Goya paintings; the shadowed sides of their sleeping faces were as black as Africans. I quietly took my pad out of my knapsack and made a few quick sketches. That calmed me a little. Later, after the war, I used the head of one of the lads as the model for an oil painting of the head of Christ.
I must have drifted off right after that, because I was jolted awake by a tremendous bang. A bomb had made a crater right next to the wagon; the bayonets were scattered all over the place. A few musical instruments had flown out of the wagon and broken to splinters. The golden lion had been blown off our regimental colors. We made sure that no one had been hurt and then lay down again; the moss was soft and cool. Because there were constant rustling noises, one of our officers decided around midnight to put a few soldiers on sentry in the treetops. We didn’t get much more sleep after that. At two in the morning, we started to break camp, as quietly as possible. By then the regiment was assembling from all sides; the marching soldiers converged in great, silent waves, advancing through the woods with a soft crackle. In the distance, beyond the trees, we saw a blazing farmhouse. Sparks fanned out in fireworks from the towering yellow flames.
We formed two fronts, one facing Louvain and the other facing Brussels. A while later, a scout reported that we were less than three hundred feet from a German position. Our regiment began digging feverishly to create cover. Occasional bullets flew through the morning twilight. Our spades hit the roots of trees, the work went slowly, and we made too much noise. With growing apprehension, we slogged on. The soil we dug up was used to raise parapets. Next to the farmhouse, we saw the diabolical silhouettes of German soldiers wandering in and out of the firelight. Theo Carlier, a boy I knew from the iron foundry, raised his rifle as soon as he saw them, but a furious officer pounced on him and slapped down his arm, asking if he was really such an idiot that he didn’t understand the Jerries were there as decoys, to trick us into betraying our position with gunfire? In the dim light, we saw a few German ambulances pass on the nearby road. Then a deathly silence fell. It was raining; the stench of smoldering ashes drifted toward us. Our pits were not deep enough; we sat uncomfortably, with our legs folded to one side in the wet earth, and awaited further orders.
After an hour, I’d had enough of the boredom and inactivity. I crept over to the lieutenant and asked him if I could go on a reconnaissance mission; there was a thick beech tree a hundred yards away, blown over by a shell. The officer nodded and whispered, Listen, if you make one mistake, we’ll all pay with our lives. Theo Carlier joined me. We crawled over to the felled tree on our elbows, with our rifles at the ready. Lying behind the log, we were alarmed by the sight of two camouflaged machine-gun slits in the German position. We counted to three and then quickly shot three bullets into each slit. A long silence followed, but when I stuck my head up over the log, all hell broke loose. The Germans deliberately grazed us with their bullets, not shooting straight at us, but trying to drive us away from the fallen tree. We were trapped. Bullets whistled all around us, hitting the log; wood chips flew past our ears. We had no choice but to leap up and run for our lives, jumping from tree to tree between the bullets. We dropped down into the closest pit. The water in the pits was rising swiftly in the rain; most of the soldiers were already up to their knees in mud. The Germans kept firing systematically—first a few bullets to provoke a response, and then, as soon as they saw a head move, they let fly with their machine guns.
This went on for a whole day, while we sat and waited. The officers kept telling us to keep calm and use our heads. There were no rations; our bellies cramped with hunger. We scooped the dirty water out of the pits, since there was nothing else to drink. When darkness came, a few soldiers made the rounds of the pits to hand out bullets, and others brought packets of damp biscuits. We knew we were surrounded, like rats in a trap. The woods that should have sheltered us had turned into a quagmire.
By morning both sides had started shooting again, but farther away we heard much heavier artillery. By midday, a few of our boys lay dead beside the pits they had begun to stand up in. One boy, who had planned to fetch his bayonet from behind the wagon, lay with his eyes open where everyone could see. A bullet had passed through his open mouth, blowing out the back of his skull. His blood gushed into the wet moss.
Night fell again, and nothing changed. The officers were pale as death and whispered anxiously to each other in French. I crept over to them and asked if I could go out on reconnaissance again. They said it was a bad idea; they saw traps everywhere, said the net had closed around us. That night there was rifle fire in the distance, the rumble of the mortars, thunder rolling over the woods, startled pigeons flapping blindly through the branches in the dark, the pale reflection of fire in the distance, the rat-a-tat-tat of the machine guns. In the second half of the night, this all fell silent. Somewhere in the woods, an owl cried. A half-moon slipped out from behind the clouds, casting a perilous light on the sleeping men.
In the early hours of the third day, a morning mist hung over the fields and pastures around the woods; the Germans seemed to have withdrawn. In the hazy distance, we saw the church and houses of Elewijt catching fire under the German shelling. We heard the call to muster in the depths of the woods. Men far and wide struggled to their feet, like golems freeing themselves from the clay, clambering over the corpses of their dead comrades. Shivering, numb, rigid with backache, in mud-caked uniforms, we fell into ragged ranks, half-leaning on our rifles. The circle of enemy troops had been broken, we had no idea how. Apparently the Germans had bigger fish to fry than our 2nd Line Regiment. We cautiously left the woods in rank
s of five, one battalion at a time. In the village, we saw the hissing ruins of houses in the rain, the people and animals killed by mortar fire, and the burned-out church, consecrated just seven years earlier by Cardinal Mercier. That was all we saw of the grisly battle of Schiplaken.
—
We trudged on in our damp, smelly uniforms. Women would come to the roadside with bread, a jug of milk, sometimes a piece of ham. They told us the names of their sons, asked if we had any news. Between the villages, the countryside was stunning. Summer clouds drifted over the waving grain in the distance, the stands of trees in the pastures shaded the grazing cattle, swallows and larks darted through the air, sticklebacks glinted in the clear brooks, lines of willows swayed their branches in the warm breeze. It reminded me of the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painters, of their peaceful pictures, of treetops painted by the English artist Constable, dappled with patches of light and shadow, of the tranquil existence he had captured on canvas. Our battalion was encamped near Mechelen, in Sint-Katelijne-Waver. We received rations and a fresh supply of ammunition. I passed the days sketching and drawing. Since I no longer had a pencil, I sharpened small pieces of charcoal from the extinguished fires and drew with them. I liked it even better than graphite; the lines were fuller, and I could crosshatch the shadows with greater subtlety. Some soldiers asked me to draw their portraits so that they could send them to their sweethearts. But as I had no way of fixing the charcoal, the paintings quickly smudged. Some soldiers threw them away; I found my blurred portraits crumpled by the roadside.
We had heard that the Germans had set their sights on Brussels and, after a week in the Mechelen area, were headed southwest again, toward Vilvoorde. By this time we had also heard more than enough about the true scale of the catastrophe in Schiplaken, and our bitterness fueled our fighting spirit. Under a steadily approaching drumfire of shells and mortar bombs, we neared the banks of the Senne River near Eppegem. The Germans had dug in deep on the other side and were guarding the bridge with machine guns. While we were setting up our own machine guns, none other than our own Captain Maréchal was felled by a bullet to the stomach. A soldier who tried to help was struck blind by flying shrapnel. We left the captain for dead, along with the wailing soldier, and dived down in the grass, cursing, trying to creep closer. The bridge had to be retaken as soon as possible and destroyed if necessary to stop the enemy’s advance. The Germans fired deadly salvos three feet above ground level at ever-changing intervals, making it impossible for us to advance. We saw the bullets spark as they glanced off the iron railing of the bridge; earth sprayed up into the air around us. A wide strip of pastureland opened up ahead, strewn with horse carcasses. Their abdomens were torn open, and in the guts that had oozed out of the swollen bellies, crows were scavenging, hopping in fright whenever the volleys moved in their direction. That stretch of the Senne twists sharply, and we hoped the bends in the bare dike would hide our approach. But the Germans were on to us immediately, and again, the bullets whistled past our ears. Dozens of us ducked behind the dike. A couple of lads tried to figure out where the shots were coming from, but as soon as they lifted their heads they were gunned down. The fatal shock sent their bodies flying through the air, to fall with a dull thud. We scrambled over them, keeping as flat as we could, and between salvos I could hear the constant fuck fuck fuck. There was no escape now. An eighteen-year-old boy lay in the grass, loudly blubbering. I snapped at him to shut his mouth and keep still until further notice. Then I told the troops near me to fire once every ten seconds, holding their guns over their heads, just above the dike, first the leftmost and rightmost men and the one in the middle, then the others, and then the first group again. The commander nodded his approval and passed on these orders to the ranks farther along. Through this tactic, we apparently managed to give the impression that we were in large numbers. To our surprise, about twenty Germans emerged from the woods on the far side of the pastures with their hands over their heads, shouting, Nicht schiessen! In their gray uniforms, the spikes of their dreadful helmets gleaming, they approached with dreamlike slowness, grim and menacing even in surrender. They were the first Germans we’d seen up close. Our mouths dropped open in surprise. We could take prisoners of war, seize their up-to-date machine guns—it was an unexpected stroke of luck. The first rank of our regiment jumped up and went out to meet them. Straightaway, the first rank of Germans pitched forward onto their faces, and machine guns rattled in the woods behind them. About a dozen of our boys were mown down; the others dropped into the grass, quick as a wink. The line of fire was about one foot off the ground, but slanted downward, which told us that at least one machine gun was installed higher up. Now I too started cursing, boiling with rage at the cowardly trick and the dead bodies all around. My rifle at the ready, I crept closer. A bullet pierced the mess tin on my back; I could hear my spoon and fork rattle. A few minutes later, by following the line of fire, I spotted the gunner’s nest in a treetop. I crawled behind one of the foul-smelling horse cadavers and took my time to aim; I would not have the luxury of a second shot. The stench made me gag. After fighting back my urge to retch, I carefully pointed the rifle at the face barely visible through the leaves, and fired. I saw the German keel over backward; his machine gun fell to the ground. I shouted, Fire! Fire! Fire! All the soldiers in the pasture started shooting at the same time, using up much of their ammunition. There was a commotion in the woods, snapping branches, loud cries—it sounded as if they were in retreat. Our commanding officer asked for a few volunteers to go to the riverbank and find out what was happening on the other side; this gave us new hope of escaping the German death trap. Nobody stepped forward. He asked again. I thought to myself: It shouldn’t always be the same people, let someone else do it for a change, I’ve had enough. But again, there was silence. The commander swore and asked again. Finally, in a gesture of scorn for my comrades, I raised my hand.
War and Turpentine Page 16
