Van den Grooten Oorlog: fragments

After the Uhlans came other German soldiers. In swarms they passed over the Zwarteberg. Father watched and said: 'Still. Still.' For two days – if it wasn't three – day and night they passed, mostly cavalrymen, always onward, from one side of the street to the other, nose to tail. 'Just take a look,' said Father, 'nose to tail, nose to tail, how are we ever going to win against that…' Later we heard that they went as far as the Katsberg and that a certain Prince of Hesse was shot dead there, and that this was why they withdrew. In any case, some fourteen days after they had passed here, we saw them coming back. But certainly not as many as when they came in. Which way the rest went, we never knew. And after that we saw no more Germans here.

I lost my parents early. My father died when I was ten, and my mother died eight years later. I still had a brother, who was two years younger than me. When the war broke out I was nineteen. We farmed a farmstead in Wulvergem, my younger brother, an uncle who had never married, and I.

The three of us stayed together the whole war. I had three older brothers, but all three had to be soldiers. At the beginning of the war we saw all kinds of soldiers pass: German, French, English. Belgians too. We had many hens, but we could no longer sell the eggs or get rid of them to a dealer.

Many people fled when the shelling began. I scrambled eggs for the soldiers. They had to eat. It was better to give the food away than to let it rot. I scrambled eggs for the Belgians and for the French and the English. And also for the Germans.

They were our enemy, but what could you do? In your heart you wanted nothing to do with them, but if you had said no, they would simply have taken it themselves. You could not stand up to them. Some who were defiant were taken away by the Germans. Put on a train. Where to? And then, what are you then?

I was sixteen when the war began. English soldiers slept on our farmstead. In the barns, in the stables, and in little pointed tents in the meadow. Naturally I was always around the soldiers, at the field kitchen, at the drills. It's unbelievable how quickly you picked up a bit of English. Chips and eggs, that was fries with eggs. Our hens laid eggs in the barn and gathering those eggs was my job. Those barns were built of loam and the rats made holes in them. One day I go to gather eggs in the barn. At the moment I reach out my hand to take eggs, another hand comes through a rat hole… also to gather eggs. I peer through another rat hole, and I recognise one of the English soldiers. He had taken four eggs. I drop my work and go inside, to Father. 'Father,' I said, 'the soldiers are stealing eggs, maybe they steal other things too… Should I tell an officer?' 'No,' says Father, 'no, you mustn't say that.' 'Lad,' he said, 'you don't yet know what it is to be a soldier. A soldier is a man like you and anyone else. If he takes eggs, it's because he would like to eat an egg and has no money to buy any. Let him go.' My father was a good man. He had done the war of 1870. He knew what it was. In the year '17 I too had to become a soldier. Three months at the Marne. We lay on a farmstead there too. In a barn. Then I understood what Father meant.

The officers' cooks were in the kitchen. I can still see them standing there in the bakehouse. My mother and I were inside the inn. We only had the inn left to live in. All the other rooms they used.

We were sewing and darning. Father was busy with the English in the bakehouse. And it was 'yes' and 'no' and 'dad'. They called Father 'dad'. 'Yes dad'. Suddenly Father says – we heard it – 'You compris?' 'Yes, dad', and he hadn't said anything yet. 'Germans itchecos,' the Germans are lice. 'English kan kraken. You compris?' 'Say it again, dad.' Say it once more. He always said "kraken". The rest they understood, but kraken…

Suddenly he calls. 'Marie, come here a moment. You say it, they'll never understand.' I say: 'Will I be able to?' 'Yes, yes,' he says, 'whatever you like to say, you can say. Say it once.'

So there they stand, three or four around me in the bakehouse. And I explain it and I said that the English could "kill" the Germans. Kill meant to do to death. 'Germans are itchecos and English can kill them.' Suddenly they understood. And how they laughed! Yes, dad, we can kill 'em. Yes, just wait. They said, just wait. In the evening in the inn, when the other soldiers came in, it went round the whole room. 'Tell it again, dad.' Tell it once more.

We were in the trenches near Diksmuide. We on this side of the Yser and the Germans on the other bank. You had to be very careful at the loopholes. Day and night. If you fire at night, it makes a little jet of fire and they see that on the other side. And by day, especially in clear weather, they see it when you put your head in front of the hole. When you pull back, the daylight shines through. By day we looked through periscopes. They would shoot your periscope to pieces, but the worst you could get was glass in your face. They saw it from us, but we also saw it when they fired. There were unheard-of numbers of rats in the trenches. A real plague. One morning there was a rat that kept running in and out of our trench along a loophole. The Germans probably thought one of us was sticking his head out in front of the hole and pulling it back again. They fire and that rat falls dead in our trench. We had a boy from Koolskamp and he was a master at throwing hand grenades: he could always throw ten metres further than anybody. The rat rolls in front of his feet, he picks it up by its tail and looks at it. 'You shot it, you get it back,' he says, 'hop!' and he throws it back. It arrives at the Germans', but a little later it was back again. And so the rat made the trip back and forth a good ten times. Suddenly that boy said: 'Let's give them a different rat for once!' He threw a grenade. Then it began. From grenades it became bombs and from bombs it became torpedoes. At the end of the game we had nine dead… And how it was on the other side, that I don't know. What I do remember is that a whole stretch of our trench had been blown away.

We were lying at the Landegem canal. I was sitting in a doctor's cellar. I have never had a better firing position. The cellar window was a little higher up and I could see the whole canal. And the bank on the other side, where the Germans were. Suddenly the bugles began to blow on all sides. We said: 'What is that? What does it mean?' And it was… the end. For us it came so unexpectedly. Yes, there were perhaps high-ups who knew, but for us it was totally unexpected. At first we were bewildered. Until we saw Germans come up diagonally in front of us. They were blowing along their side of the canal too. Until they had all come up. It's indescribable! It was over! We had survived it! We had already said: 'That's for the rest of our lives, this slog.' Misery, suffering hunger and suffering cold and death before your eyes every day. More than four years. And then it was over so abruptly.' Our joy was unbelievably great. But we couldn't drink. We had nothing. And when the first rush of joy was over, there hung a certain sadness because even in those last days, up to the last hours and even the last minute, boys had still been killed or wounded. My cousin Jules Callewaert of Boezinge was killed on the 11th of November at 11 o'clock. On the bridge at Balgerhoeke. He was the eldest son of my mother's sister.

My father and I were cleaning up a house not far from the Zevekote. There were Chinese there too. One of those Chinese had tamed a sparrow. With a little stick. But we didn't know that. We often heard that fellow whistle and then the sparrow would come. After four days or so we were used to it. Suddenly – we were loading our things onto a little cart to leave – that sparrow came out of it. 'Look,' says my father, but there were no Chinese to be seen. When we got to the Zevekote, my father said: 'That damned dirty sparrow,' and it let itself be grabbed. 'We have no use for it,' he says, and he throws it dead. But good heavens, we had to cut things short there. When the Chinese man saw that his sparrow was dead, he was so angry. And we were sorry too, but we couldn't explain anything to him. We didn't understand each other, you see. Yes, we were sorry about that for a long time! If only we had known it was such a tame little creature! We thought it was an ordinary sparrow. But after three days or so that Chinese man was back. With a new sparrow! They could keep themselves busy with it for a whole day.

When the war was over, we wanted to return to Kemmel. We came first to have a look at everything. But you should have seen it! So many corpses still lying there, and dead horses. Once I stood still and counted how many dead soldiers I could see lying there. There were twenty-five.

People arrived one after another and put up a bit here and a bit there. People who had lived here before the war and people who came from further away, like us. Farmers from here who had fled to France and who returned to their farms, and farmers from elsewhere. Some arrived with nothing. They looked for stakes and sheets and nailed them together, and after two, three days they had a shack to live in. Two sticks in the ground and a plank on top and they could sit. They had a bucket and a pot to cook food in. And when there was room to put a bed, they went and bought a bed. How they slept the nights before, I don't know either. But luckily it wasn't cold when they arrived here. People helped each other. If they had seen something somewhere, wood for building or sheets, they told others who were looking: 'Go over there, there are still sheets lying there and over there huts used to stand. You'll still find fine pieces of wood there.' And those others fetched it and carried it on their backs to where they wanted it. It was pulling off and breaking and cracking. Near the Vierstraat and near De Linde stood fine huts in which foreign soldiers – Chinese, I believe – had been housed. One pulled out a window, another broke off a door, and the huts were quite ruined. If only people had taken them as they were, whole. That would have been better.

In 1919 we moved from Aartrijke to the front region, to Kemmel. At home we were a whole gang of young lads and there was work for everyone. Everything lay flat in the front region. It all had to be rebuilt. They needed a lot of bricks. We found work in a brickworks as brickmakers. It was heavy work. On contract. When the contract ended in the summer of 1920, we were all glad. Those who had to fill shell holes left at eight in the morning and at four o'clock they went home. We worked from five in the morning to nine at night and had earned only half as much as they did. We could never have believed that Mother would like living here so much. Father had been a seasonal labourer in France, he was used to moving about, but Mother… She had never been away from her village. But she could work here, chopping and hoeing. And she liked doing that. She was a hard worker. It was all levelling and digging. But one thing is a pity: when we had been here six weeks, my youngest little sister died of croup. First another sister of mine had the croup. We didn't go to the doctor – there was already a doctor in Kemmel by then – we thought it was a sore throat. She couldn't go to school. The priest came in and said: 'Is it going to be like this with these brickmakers, that they don't send their children to school?' Brickmakers had no good name. My mother says: 'She is ill, look at her sitting there.' 'Well,' says the priest, 'have you been to the doctor? She has croup.' And the priest went out and to the doctor. The doctor came, it was croup, but he had no medicine. My brother had to go and fetch it in Poperinge. Really, seven of us should have had an injection, but they only had two. The doctor said my sister had to go to the hospital in Houtem near Veurne, but there they said: 'We already have enough with bad diseases.' They didn't want her. The Sunday after, my little sister had it too, and on Friday evening she died of it. My mother grieved over that for the rest of her days. She died in 1932.