by Tom Blass
Feigning in the twilight to have missed another finger-wagging sign (DO NOT WALK BEYOND THIS POINT), I walked out ginger-toed to the very edge of this strip of land, borrowed from the sea. In the shingle’s dips and hollows grew fat and juicy clumps of scarlet-hued glasswort, or ‘chicken legs’, and other curious botanical inhabitants of the intertidal netherworld. Towards dusk groups of birds staked their claims to parcels of beach. A flock of golden plover moved in from the sea, flying low with the sound of rustling skirts. Ivory-white egrets colonised the sluices; a hysterical crescendo of oystercatchers startled the low horizon. And most spectacular – the sky was by now violet and the shadow of St Peter’s dark and austere – a hare cantering heavily across the salt marsh, with each turn kicking up cockle shells or a brackish puddle, attempting to elude whatever it imagined pursued it.
Soon the tide would turn and re-embrace the land with its frothy caress, bidding and beckoning it to return to the sea.
3
The Question of the Scheldt
Through the flats that bound the North Sea and shelve into it imperceptibly, merging at last with the shallow flood, and re-emerging in distant sandbanks and less conspicuous shoals, run facing each other two waterways far inland, which are funnels and entries, as it were, scoured by the tide. Each has at the end of the tideway a narrow, placid, inland stream, from whence the broader, noisier sea part also takes its name. Each has been and will always be famous in the arms and commerce of Europe. Each forms a sort of long street of ships crowded in a traffic to and fro. For each has its great port.
Hilaire Belloc, The River of London
Belloc saw the Scheldt as the Thames’s twin. They do possess similarities, and their mouths are roughly latitudinous. But the Thames is old, and the sinuous, serpentine Scheldt a mere upstart by comparison. Only a thousand years ago it was one of a litter of many nascent waterways wriggling like kittens in a maelstrom of riverine change. Now it rolls into the basin of the North Sea with youth-belying stately grace.
Its apparent peacefulness is also a lie. The history of the Scheldt is one of squabbling and blood, smashed timbers, flooded dykes, blasted spars and lingering deaths from aguey vapours. It is true that one brief skirmish – fought in 1781 between the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II and the Dutch state – resulted only in the denting of a kettle hit by the ricochet of a musket ball. Few of the others were so Gilbert and Sullivan-esque. However – and it must be the sea air – the scars have healed well. Things change quickly on the Scheldt. The stretch of coast from north of Bruges to the Hook of Holland is as geologically mercurial as any around the North Sea. The very name of Zeeland (Sealand), the province that lies to the north of the Scheldt, boldly and breezily grasps the dualism of this land and seascape: a hodgepodge of islands, a concertinaed archipelago in a near-constant state of bunching and unbunching.
What floods take away with one hand, silt gives with the other. The quiet fields are always only a broken dyke away from a disaster which in time will heal. Two millennia ago a great flood submerged the entire coast of the southern North Sea. The local warrior-hunter Frisii were accustomed to occasional inundations of their low-lying reed-bedded landscape (rich in eels, carp and fowl), and in times of flood would retreat to their terpen, settlements built upon mounds protruding above even the highest flood waters. A landscape of plains became a mosaic of islands like a patchwork quilt come unstitched.
Over the following centuries the early Netherlanders began to claw land back beyond the limits of their terpen, building successive dykes in expanding rings first to defend against the sea, and then to push it further and further outward, the dykes becoming longer and straighter, the terpen broadening into polders – larger areas of reclaimed pasturage and meadows. And they learned to shore up the banks of the rivers to counter their erratic seasonal variations. The tides too pitched into this permanent revolution. The unsteady ensemble of all these forces resulted, by the thirteenth century, in the Scheldt emerging as a navigable river worth the price of a good fight.
The chance arrival of a spice-laden caravel from the Indies was all it took to transform the Scheldt-side city of Antwerp. Though she was by no means unaccustomed to wealth, a ship’s hold groaning with pepper, cinnamon and cloves enthused and infused her with a new lust for sensual, distinctly foreign delights. Baggage trains arrived from Trieste, Genoa and Zaragoza. New connections with Lisbon and Cadiz brought the Americas within reach of the Flemish. Spanish silver mined in Mexico and Argentina stoked an appetite for speculation, conspicuous consumption and architectural testaments to the accumulation of wealth.
I had my first eyeful of the Scheldt from this city. A broad steel-blue ribbon mirrored the evening sky, the horizon pockmarked by a low constellation of lights and the gas-flaring chimneys of the chemical works on the other side of the river. I was promenading on a raised walkway built at the height of Belgium’s imperial ambitions as a platform from which young men waved goodbye to home before heading off to brutalise the Congo.
The esplanade was empty aside from its ghosts, a squabbling couple and a lonesome girl. The ‘long street’ Belloc described was almost devoid of ships. But a solitary barge made its way seaward, hugging the slack channel close to the shore. Through binoculars I could see the bargee sitting louchely at the wheel, his wife (I supposed) making coffee on a gimballed stove as their long bluff-bowed hull ploughed through the flood tide. They may have come through the filigree mesh of waterways that stretches deeply east, linking the North Sea with the heart of Europe. According to a river pilot I met in Vlissingen the bargees not only refuse the services of pilots, but take dangerous short cuts, playing fast and loose with the tides and banks, or at least as fast and loose as a barge is able to play. But in that protracted moment, between the barge chugging into and out of view, riding those slow strong currents seemed a noble calling.
By morning the river, dubiously lit by an overcast sky, appeared to have shrunk and lost some of its sheen. Still it was fine-flowing and broad, and Antwerp’s winding old streets and hobbled houses and chiming bell tower were scarcely less charming – so much more so than the diamond quarter, not glittering and exclusive but careworn and low rent, though Hassidim hurrying by on their bicycles lent a carat of Levantine charm, and the red-light district appeared not to burn too bright.
It is Antwerp’s docks, though, not diamonds and doxies, that have been the casus belli of most if not all of the Scheldt’s woes.
However easily it may flow, a river shared by nations invariably gives rise to friction. The Scheldt has the mixed fortune to be embanked by three countries. Rising near Aisne in France, it broadens considerably in Belgium and debouches into the North Sea in what is now the Netherlands. From at least the fourteenth century almost until today a muddle of dynasties, dictators and powers (the Habsburgs, Napoleon, Dutch stadtholders, dukes of Orange, duchesses of Parma) have squeezed, blocked or haggled over the river to maximise their own or restrict others’ access to North Sea trade. The Scheldt question was once a staple of billiard-room debate in diplomatic circles. It may conceivably rear its head again. An academic called S. T. Bindoff, writing as recently as 1945, confessed to having misgivings about ‘raking over the embers of the past’ by researching the Scheldt. And, he said, he had been warned by a Belgian archivist that ‘as many scholars had been drowned in the Scheldt – figuratively speaking – as sailors’.
In the late sixteenth century the Dutch led by William the Silent had sloughed off the yoke of Spanish rule, seizing towns and forts on both sides of the Scheldt including Antwerp. William’s nemesis, the haughty Duke of Parma, responded with Castilian vigour, retaking Antwerp but leaving the territory further down the Scheldt in rebel hands. To consolidate his gains he built a bridge of ships across the river to prevent waterborne traffic from reaching the North Sea. The Dutch responded with their own blockade, starving Antwerp of the oxygen of trade.
The more Antwerp wilted, the more glorious grew Amsterdam. Merchants, artists
and intellectuals moved north, and Antwerp quite literally became a backwater. North Sea traders also suffered, denied access to lucrative upriver markets. Whether the Dutch were in breach of international law – such as it was – was a difficult question to answer. The river, after all, flowed through their country. Did other riparian states possess an inalienable right to access the sea? Napoleon ‘solved’ the question by taking possession of both countries, although as continental Europe was now under blockade by Britain, it was something of an anticlimactic gesture.
France’s ambitions for Antwerp were less about the restoration of her former glories than about transforming the city into ‘a pistol loaded, cocked, and pointing straight at the heart of England’, by which Napoleon meant that it would be his launch pad for the conquest of his perfidious enemy across the North Sea. It was an aspiration that would have terrible consequences for those who dwelt on the banks of the Scheldt, particularly the inhabitants of pretty, steep-pitched copper-orange-roofed Vlissingen downriver from Antwerp and across the Dutch border. Sitting on the southern tip of the island of Walcheren where the river meets the sea, this diminutive sometime fortress town and sometime fishing port has for centuries found itself an unwilling watchman at the mouth of the Scheldt.
Wilbert Weber, the curator of the town museum, had warned that the train journey between the two towns was time-consuming, considering that they are so close: ‘You are still crossing a frontier remember. These things take time.’ And it was true. It seemed that, because the line marking the Dutch and Belgian border had so frequently shifted, the driver lavished ceremonial lack of celerity upon his engine’s progress.
Little evidence of this Byzantine political geography was visible from the window of the train as it stopped and started on its way through Zeeland and across the island of Walcheren, a latticework of parallel lines and right angles, the land protected from the sea by the clever construction of drainage channels and dykes, with small copses of beech and poplar at their interstices.
Here, geometry cleaves sea from land. I remember walking the top of a dyke listening with one ear to the gentle cymballing of waves, and the other to a choir of songbirds. In the fields hares lay out in the sun’s last gold, worn out with their antics and nearly invisible in furrows of chocolate-rich soil. As if fanning the remaining warmth of the dying day, a crane flapped slowly by with melancholic reptilian grace.
Functional as they are, there’s poetry in the polders. Those closest to the sea and possessing the greatest responsibility are called wakende dykes – waking dykes. The next are sleeping (slapende) dykes, and in the event that these both fail only a dromende (dreaming) dyke stands between the sea and oblivion. The Dutch response to the North Sea is one of guile and negotiation, proportionate response in place of counter-attack. But it can fail, and when a tidal surge breaches the dykes only the elevated roads and the roofs of buildings sit clear of the brine.
The British have had a long-standing relationship with Vlissingen – which they call Flushing. During the interminable war between the Dutch rebels and the Spanish Habsburgs the rebels offered Elizabeth I sovereignty over the United Provinces in return for her guardianship. Elizabeth baulked at the responsibility – and at the danger of goading Spain – but eventually the Earl of Leicester was sent to Flushing in the capacity of governor. Then England had Walcheren thrust upon it. But in 1809 the British would hurl themselves upon its shores in a surge of anti-Bonapartist passion, retreating as a ragtag army haunted by failure and sickness.
When the Dutch decided to throw in their lot with Napoleon, England determined that the ‘pistol’ must be made safe, its armaments and shipyards destroyed and the Scheldt rendered unnavigable to North Sea traffic. The mission would also assist beleaguered Austria by diverting French forces from the campaigns in the east. The first stop would be Walcheren.
It was, in the beginning, a bold affair that began in July with the mustering of some thirty ships of the line, forty frigates and transport ships for 40,000 men – the largest British expeditionary force that had ever been assembled. Command was given to the Earl of Chatham, the elder brother of Prime Minister William Pitt and a man known for the pains he took to ensure the comfort and welfare of the collection of tortoises that he liked to fondle in stressful situations. Then and ever since his appointment has been regarded as inexplicable, settling ‘a pall of sloth’ over the expedition, according to the naval historian N. A. M. Rodger. Indeed his choice of animal friend seems also to have had an overt influence on his punctuality (his nickname was the ‘late Earl’ for his inability to get out of bed), a fault which would be compounded in months to come as critics rounded on the planners of the campaign as ‘imbecilic and accident prone’.
Though handicapped by their leader, the British had to their advantage the fact that Napoleon was convinced that Walcheren, and Flushing in particular, were almost impregnable. ‘Write and tell everyone,’ Napoleon told his brother Lucien, ‘that Flushing cannot be taken, unless by the cowardice of the commandants . . . and that the English will go off without having it. The bombs are nothing – absolutely nothing; they will destroy a few houses, but that has no effect upon the surrender of a place.’
In response to the British threat, Napoleon’s commanders opened the dykes, but the island refused to flood. On 2 August 1809 Chatham wrote breathily that despite a westerly gale forcing a ‘huge swell upon the sands’ at their intended landing spot at West Kapelle, they had succeeded in landing further south, bagging some early triumphs. The island’s capital of Middelburg shuddered beneath British rockets that looked like bonfire-night fireworks, but were larger, steel-barrelled and packed with explosives. Its citizens, wholly unused to modern warfare and agnostic as to the relative merits of British or Bonapartist justice, sent a deputation to secure terms, among them that ‘security is to be granted to every person . . . whatever their political opinions may be or now are’.
Next the British captured a fort, taking 516 prisoners, including ten drummers, three pipers, four farriers, one boy and five ‘artificers’, all of whom, Chatham congratulated himself, were permitted to keep their knapsacks. Flushing held out longer, but the British were prepared to burn it down in pursuit of its liberation and thus succeeded in killing over 2,000 people, the good citizens of a place which merely had the bad fortune to be en route to Antwerp. Amid this carnage a William Keep of the 77th Regiment wrote that he and his comrades in arms were able ‘to spread our tables under the shade of luxuriant fruit trees and enjoy all the pleasures of rustic life’. It was looking like a good campaign. Antwerp was sure to fall next.
It was in August that the expedition took a sickly turn, when (according to the letters home of a hospital inspector) the beds of the drainage canals became
thickly covered with an ooze which, when the tide is out, emits a most offensive effluvia. Each ditch is filled with water which is loaded with animal and vegetable substances in a state of putrefaction, and the whole island is so flat and near the sea that [it is] little better than a swamp, and there is scarcely a place where good quality water can be procured. The effect of all these causes of diseases is strongly marked in the inhabitants, the greater part of whom are pale and listless.
Worse, Napoleon’s troops were gathering their strength, and by early September the capture of Antwerp looked impossible, not least because 7,000 British troops were either dead or laid low by a mysterious illness which a doctor described as coming on ‘with a shivering, so great that the patient feels no benefit from the clothes piled upon him in bed, but continues to shiver, as if enclosed in ice, the teeth chattering and the skin blanched . . . It subsides, and then is succeeded by another paroxysm, and so on until the patient’s strength is quite reduced, and he is received into the arms of death.’
Which is more or less what would happen to Chatham’s reputation. In late August the late Earl, so full of brio only weeks before, wrote,
However mortifying to me to see the progress halted of an army from
whose good conduct and valour I had everything to hope . . . my duty left me no other course than to close my operations here, and it will always be a consolation to me to think that I have not been induced lightly to commit the safety of the army confided to me, or the reputation of his majesty’s arms . . . I [shall] hold [troops] in readiness to await his majesty’s command which I shall most anxiously await.
By December the entire force had returned to Britain with none of its objectives accomplished, and parliamentarians rounded upon the conduct of the campaign. To rousing cries of ‘Hear, hear’ Mr Windham Quin told the House that the adventure was ‘remarkable only for ignorance, imbecility and mismanagement’ and the litany of ‘egregious blunders’ accompanying its every step. Calls for a full inquiry failed, but the public believed with Quin that
In the military annals of Great Britain . . . there was no precedent of such extensive, complete, and unqualified failure . . . here was an Expedition terminating in great disgrace and unparalleled disaster, and with numerous presumptions of misconduct. It was not that the Expedition failed, but that it could not succeed . . . It was generated in calamity, and your troops were marched from their own shore to destruction. [Ministers] should have been aware of the nature of the climate, of the poisonous air of Walcheren. But the event proved that they either did not know of them, or knowing that, they disregarded them. They marched the British army to its grave, to be extinguished amidst the pestilential air of Walcheren, to go out like a candle in a vault.
Walcheren Sickness, or Flushing Fever, has baffled medical historians ever since. It exhibited some of the symptoms of malaria, but also typhus and cholera, so it seems this was not a single disease but a portfolio of ailments for which there was neither prevention nor cure. Many returning soldiers continued to suffer for several years, with the result that survivors of the Walcheren campaign were seldom taken back into the army again.