Fleeing: what people told us

From November '14 until the end of the war we were refugees in our own country. From Wulvergem to Dranouter, then to Loker and finally to Roesbrugge. We were ruined. We had nothing left. And we always bore the name "refugee". It's such a strange name. It went on for a long time, people saying: he's a refugee. Sometimes I was angry when they said it. You can't help it, you've lost everything and they still go on talking about "refugee". Well, it's all in the past now. The people who could stay at home became rich through the soldiers. That is the difference.

We stayed in Ypres until the fifteenth of May 1915. We saw the Germans enter Ypres. All those big men on horseback with cannons. People didn't dare go outside, everyone stayed indoors. But they did nothing to us. The Germans left Ypres and then came the French. And after that the English, all kinds. For months we lived among the soldiers. At night the French soldiers came to cook in our house to take food to the front. And we were allowed to eat as much of it as we wanted. We had no shortage of food. But every week we had to get an injection against the soldiers' disease. There were also those black soldiers who smelled so bad, Senegalese. A strange sort, and we were in the middle of them. And it was dangerous. We were under shellfire every day. First we sheltered in the cellar of the brewery, but we had to leave there because they brought in French soldiers who had been gassed. Then in the cellars of the casemates. And still we didn't want to leave! A hundred times we went as far as the Market Square with the idea of fleeing, but then the shooting died down again and my mother said: 'It's over,' and we went home again. It's true, you know! But in May 1915 we had to go, by order of the gendarmes. We then walked to Vlamertinge and there boarded the train. My sister and I each had a little package of food, but we lost it on the way in the dark. There was no light anywhere. So we had no food left. I don't know where we ended up, but it was close to a seaport anyway. We were put in a building there, the women on one side and the men on the other. We were going to get food, but we sat there two days without food or drink. It's true, you know! And we had been gone from Ypres only an hour when our house was shot on fire. That just had to happen. Yes, yes, we went through a lot in that war. We didn't want to go on a ship. Ships with refugees had already been sunk and people no longer dared to go on a ship. My aunt left by ship. To La Rochelle. That was a seaport. Two of her children died on that ship. They threw them overboard into the water. Just like that. Splash, into the water. We left on one of those old-fashioned trains, through the Pas de Calais to Normandy. From one place to another. I can no longer remember the names of all those places we passed. For fourteen days on end we slept, ate and shat on that train. Now and then we stopped somewhere in the country, because people had to relieve themselves. And then they threw in those loaves of bread to eat, which were as sour as vinegar. Some people couldn't get them down. Yes, it was bad for us then. In Normandy we had to be "unloaded". We were taken to a little market where all sorts of little carts with donkeys stood. We were picked out there just as if we were being sold. My father and my mother had to go with someone to a farm to work. My father had to drive the horses and he had never had a horse in his hands. My sister and I had to go and work alone in a bakery. Imagine, two children alone with strangers and you don't understand them. In Ypres we had always been among all those English. We knew some English, but we no longer knew any French. After two days we ran away!

In Reningelst, everything was full of refugees. In all those little houses, people from Messines, Wijtschate, Kemmel, Wasten, Hollebeke. Everyone who knew someone here, or thought he knew someone, came. And those who knew no one also had to leave their houses. Everyone had to go. And they all thought it would be only for a fortnight. One stayed here, another stayed there. And it didn't have to be a house, everything that was a hovel or a stable was full.

In those days there was a lot of wood to make a bit of fire, and the English army had food in abundance. So there was also food for the refugees. But at the end of 1914, beginning of 1915, typhus broke out. Several people died of it. That was understandable too. Hygiene left a great deal to be desired and it was overcrowded, overcrowded. It is overcrowding that brings the plague. We can compare it with myxomatosis in wild rabbits. When there are too many rabbits, the plague comes among them. And with people it's the same: too many people crowded together and hygiene that leaves much to be desired. Many people had fled their homes with only the clothes they wore and perhaps a small bundle. Luckily the soldiers, especially the English, were clean and had to change their clothes regularly. There were refugees who went about almost naked when they once washed their shirt or clothes. And two days later they were eaten alive by lice again.

In the second half of October '14 many refugees arrived in Westouter, from Passendale, Moorslede, Zonnebeke, Ypres. Many moved on, into France. On Saturday 31 October there was tremendous shooting. The next day, All Saints', a whole procession of refugees from Dikkebus, my father's brother and his whole family with horse and cart, my mother's sisters, who had already fled to them with their families, from Langemark, people from Wijtschate who had also already fled, also with horse and wagon. There were forty-five of us together for the night. On the twenty-eighth of November a girl was born among those refugees and she was baptised in the church on the first of December, on St Eligius' day. I went with them to the church. Three weeks later a fifth little son was born in another family that was also staying with us. It was cold. They were bad winter months.

On the eighteenth or nineteenth of April of the year '18 I had to flee. From Nieuwkerke to Loker, then to Watou. And then all the way to the Calvados, in Normandy. On foot, with the horses. Charity, it says so in the catechism. But on the run, that did not exist. Sleeping outside in the open air, from the first night we were gone. First in Loker, then in Watou. I was on the road for twenty-nine days. And in those twenty-nine days not once was I offered a sip of something warm to drink or a bit of food. Yes man, once you're outside, you're outside. As long as you were on the road, a refugee, nobody could do anything for you. When we were over there in the Calvados, those people thought we had left for fun, for our own pleasure. 'Ce sont des émigrés,' they said. Once two or three men came up. I heard them at it again with those émigrés. I signal to my brother Henri that he should stop. I say to them: 'Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire un émigré?' I say, I'm going to see what they will say now, and they didn't know what to answer. They thought we were wandering around as a hobby. Damn it.

In October 1917 I went to the college in Veurne. I say the college in Veurne, but it was no longer in Veurne. We had lessons a little outside Bulskamp, in huts. I was the only one there who lived so far away and I could not come home, like the others who went home at the end of the week.

In April 1918 the great offensive at the Kemmelberg was under way. The college had already sent everyone home. On the fourteenth of April, around eleven o'clock, I am standing all alone in the yard of the college. The teachers were gone. I think they had run to the cellars of the old men's home. I stand there and I don't know what to do. I was almost fourteen then. I knew how to go from Bulskamp to the Brezende, along the Veurne–Ypres road. We had once taken a walk there with the college. And I also knew from mates at the college how they went home from the Brezende, first to Oost-Vleteren and then to West-Vleteren. I left around eleven, with my hood on. That was a kind of cape. We had no overcoats then, they didn't exist. In winter we wore a woollen jumper and a hood. From the Brezende to Oost-Vleteren I jumped into the ditch at least seven or eight times because of the bombs. And, damn it, they whistled and they rustled, you know. I no longer dared go on. In a ditch you're not so quickly thrown dead.

I arrive in West-Vleteren at my mate's. He says: 'Eat a sandwich here.' It was already around three o'clock. I left again. I was allowed to sit a little way on a dog cart and then on foot to Poperinge. I come into the Veurnestraat and there is an old woman. 'Little man,' she says, 'you mustn't go any further. Just listen to how they're shooting at the town.' I stayed with her another half an hour to three quarters. She says: 'Lad, are you scared?' I say: 'It's still all right.' 'You must run fast,' she says, 'I can't hear anything now.' I run off and when I come onto the Market Square at "Oud Vlaanderen", I want to go along that little street. A bomb falls and the whole roof of a house collapses. I had only just got to the Sint-Bertinus church when – crack – another bomb falls. At the college another one. I shook on the ground.

When I got to my street here in Reningelst, I couldn't go on. So I sat down in the ditch to get my breath back a little. When I got home around seven o'clock they said: 'What? Is that you?' 'Well yes, what was I supposed to do over there alone? The whole way I was in the bombs.'

Then it never stopped, and two days later, on the sixteenth of April, we all fled together to France.

Trams with refugees, with soldiers, with people who wanted to go back, with ammunition and equipment of the army. At night we heard one steam whistle after another from those trams. My mother lay awake whole nights because of that noise. She was frightened to death and she wanted to leave too. I still remember that Belgian soldiers also slept at our place, one of them had terrible toothache.

Mother said: 'I don't want to be with the German in any case. He's going to massacre us.' 'Woman,' said that soldier, 'where would you run with such a gang of children. However bad it gets, it can never get worse than when you flee. Stay where you are.' We stayed on the Veld the whole war.

I was nearly eighteen when we had to flee from Ardooie. I had been in service for two years with the notary's wife, madame. Really I was more a "companion" than that I "served". Madame went away a lot and I was allowed to go with her, to Ostend, to the great World Exhibition in Ghent in 1913. Madame was also very musical. She played a big organ, one with pedals and two keyboards. And she wrote music herself too, and had it corrected by Edgar Tinel. He was very well known in those days, well, of course not as well known as Bach or so, but still, he was a very good musician. I think he came from somewhere around Ghent. Madame wrote mainly church music, for mass and benediction and so on. She taught me and a few other girls to play the violin too, and in church we had to sing. That music had to be simple, because we had to be able to play along on the violin and we were still only 16, 17 years old. At a certain moment in '14 refugees arrived from Dinant, many refugees. My madame had also taken in a girl who was on the run. One day we saw German soldiers at the church of Ardooie, five or six of them, with a helmet with a spike on it. The first thing the soldiers did was take horses in the big meadow behind the notary's house. Where those Uhlans suddenly came from, we don't know. It seems they came from the direction of "'t Veld" in Ardooie, from Meulebeke or somewhere that way. Suddenly they were standing in the middle of the village. The people were all very frightened, and many left. My madame was also very scared. She wanted to leave. From Ardooie we left by tram to Bruges, from there to Knokke. First we stayed in a bakery for a few days. We left there. In the meantime madame and I had gone and bought a wheelbarrow for a lot of money. We loaded all our belongings on it. There was also a doctor's wife from Ardooie who came along with the children, who now and then sat on the wheelbarrow too. And then all those music scores. I could have flung it all into the ditch, those sheets of music weighed so much, and then madame also had three or four fur coats with her. All that had to be carted to Sluis. That was a nuisance, but yes, when you're seventeen or eighteen you don't feel it like that. Then we were put on a beet wagon. They grow a lot of beet up in Holland. Those go to Breskens, you see. From Sluis we were driven to Breskens on those big wagons that otherwise carry beet. Our shoes were full of the mud that was lying on the wagon. We then went back from Breskens – because we had gone an hour too far – to Schoondijke. There we stayed until the year '15.

In the spring of '18 everything became much harder. The Germans had to have the Kemmelberg, they simply had to. I don't know how many times in one night they took the Kemmelberg and lost it again. In front of our door the English were making trenches for the infantry and the cannons were already firing over our house from half an hour away. One day an officer came. 'Father,' he says in English, 'not fled yet? You're going to have to flee. I would leave.' But yes, we had animals, we had goats and rabbits. And the whole loft was full of grain. And Mother – yes, we were expecting that we might have to flee – Mother had baked a whole oven of bread, thirteen loaves of four pounds each. Thirteen times two kilos. Twenty-six kilos… All those loaves in a blanket and I with that on foot from Reningelst to Proven. Don't ask about the road. You couldn't. The English were retreating and the French were advancing to Kemmel and in the middle of the road the wounded from the Kemmelberg. On the first of April we fled to France, to the Puy de Dôme – that is a big volcano – up near Clermont-Ferrand, with our whole gang, father, mother and ten children. Only the eldest, our Maurice, not. He was a soldier. They said: 'The fools are leaving. It's the first of April.' In Poperinge you could no longer leave by train, that was over. We had to go to Proven. On foot. In Proven we slept one night in the school. Straw all over and refugees who were there. The next day, we got on the train. I can't say what time any more, but the train ran without lights, and now and then it had to stop, we were driving too close to the front. Where exactly we passed, I don't know. We ended up in Rouen and there we slept on a big unloading quay where the soldiers slept too. That was by the railway. We didn't have to pay for our journey to Rouen. Refugees, you see. Father would gladly have gone to the Calvados because it was a farming region. You could get to the Calvados, but you had to pay for your train yourself, from Rouen to there. Then you were allowed on a passenger train. But we couldn't pay for that, with our whole gang. We travelled in cattle wagons, and that was actually the best, you could lie and sleep there; in a passenger train you couldn't sleep, there are too many of you. We slept on the things we had with us.

When you arrive somewhere as a refugee, the first year everything is wonderful. People have compassion. They know you had to leave everything behind. But then they get too used to you and the love keeps dwindling. And in the end, at the end of the war, they said: 'Go back now.' We had a good time there, but still… You always remain a stranger. Wherever you go, you are a stranger.