by Tom Blass
There are places, and Walcheren must be one such, that invite the repetition of history. In the Second World War a British force would again attempt to oust a despot from the island, though whether its commanders had an eye on the failure of its predecessor is unrecorded. Bulky and beautiful ships of the line had long passed into obsolescence; this time small groups of men would attack from small, fast rocket-launching ships and assault craft.
After the D-Day landings the Allies began probing weak spots in the German defences on the North Sea coast. The Netherlands was keenly defended, but just as Napoleon had regarded Antwerp as critical to his designs on Britain, so the British knew it was crucial to the retaking of Europe. Once they had secured the Scheldt, Antwerp would be a hub for unloading the supplies and materiel necessary for the big push to Berlin. But a division of German troops would need to be neutralised if Antwerp were to be taken.
The joint British and Canadian plan was to assault Walcheren by concentric assaults from the east, south and west, involving the crossing of the estuary, mounting a seaborne assault from the Channel and neutralising the defences of Walcheren by bombing the sea dykes and flooding the island – this last, the very tactic Napoleon had planned to defend Walcheren, the Allied generals sought to use as a means of attack.
Unlike the 1809 campaign, things started badly. Early assault craft were fired upon by their own side, and the attempt on the eastern side of the island turned into a bloodbath on the causeway linking it to the adjacent island of Beveland. One officer recalled ‘a long line of weary, muddy infantrymen which plodded back down the road which would take them [to safety]. The men were indescribably dirty. They were bearded, cold as it is only possible to be cold in Holland in November, and wet from having lived in water-filled holes in the ground for 24 hours a day.’ Failing to take the causeway, the Allies made an attempt to cross the adjacent Slooe Channel, ‘just such a muddy and ambiguous creek as you will find among the Essex Marshes’, flanked on each side by grey and glutinous mud and once crossed giving way to muddy creeks ‘just wide and deep enough to stop an armed man from either wading or swimming across and also quite impassable by armour’.
The messages back to London are remarkable for their similarity to those sent by Chatham and his colleagues 135 years before: long rostas of casualties, snatched jerky narratives to convey triumphs, mishaps and minor victories, petty recriminations, requests for ammunition, water and instructions. But this time the operation on Flushing was more successful, and a dawn crossing of the Scheldt succeeded despite dismal rain. Soon the river was lit by countless muzzle flashes and fires that cast an eerie, sickly glow and revealed in silhouette, an officer recalled, ‘the unmistakable outline of the Oranje Mill’.
I allowed myself an excellent coffee at the café which the Oranje Mill has become. Out in the estuary, just as in its twin the Thames, ships crawling in from the North Sea disembark their sea pilots and wait for river pilots to guide them into the Scheldt. The sleek profile of a US warship steamed past Flushing, heading, I was later told, towards the south Mediterranean, where combat missions had just begun against Libya. The weather was indulgently fine, and on the beach below a sort of passeggiata unfolded of figures in apparent Brownian motion wheeling pushchairs, eating ice creams, dawdling, tugging upon and tugged by happy spaniels and frisky poodles. This is where the landing craft had beached amid a rain of artillery fire.
Vlissingen was warming up for the summer invasion. The Iguana Mini-Zoo on Bellamy Square boasted a freshly painted sign, and early tourists ambled in the pretty backstreets. Although not all the shops had opened for the season, fragrant herbal smells wafted from the guitar repair clinic on the main drag behind the harbour, and Mr Van Houff at the bicycle hire shop by the station was whistling in anticipation of heavy demand for his heavy-framed back-pedal-brake machines.
There are newer apartment blocks around the edges of town, but the buildings in the centre, which the British attacked with rockets in 1809, remain at the core of the town and its identity. Some were already war-seasoned in the sixteenth century when the Duke of Parma fought William the Silent. In 1944 German snipers shot from their open windows, from derricks and pillboxes and bombarded their attackers with mortars.
The decision to bomb the sea wall was made with the reluctant consent of the Dutch government-in-exile. Grainy, flickering propaganda films show smiling women in traditional bonnets and shawls lifted from their flooded homes into evacuation craft by soldier gallants and removed to makeshift shelters. There was just time to move some livestock to the few remaining pockets of higher ground, much of which was mined, with the curious consequence that while the Walcheren islanders would lack almost every other comfort, their meat ration ballooned to five times that of their compatriots further north. The Germans, sodden and defeated, eventually withdrew.
It was not long afterwards that the villagers began to drift back to their blighted homes, to lead lives not unlike those of their terpen-dwelling ancestors a millennium and more ago. The fields remained semi-flooded, and the pastures, trees and shrubs had been poisoned by the saltwater. Against the backdrop of the European war’s thunderous closing stages, the islanders now battled hunger, exposure and the threat of disease, surviving on air-dropped provisions and what they could scavenge.
On 3 November 1947 British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and his wife Violet travelled to Walcheren for a ceremony marking the replanting of the island’s trees, arriving with Dutch dignitaries at Flushing station to a solemn reception. The party, said a correspondent from The Times, headed towards the town’s main church, Jacobskerk, ‘through streets densely packed with intent but undemonstrative crowds . . . scarred by war and hardened with toil. The flaunting jubilation of the first day of liberation was absent; it did not need the evidence of recently drained polders and patched up houses to show that this was a people that had had a hard field to harrow.’ First, hymns and Dutch folk songs were sung, and then, assisted by ‘a little girl with two pigtails done in orange ribbon and three small boys in outsize plus-fours’, the Princess Regent of the Netherlands planted the first of the 1,500,000 trees paid for by subscription, and the Dutch prime minister ‘made an address of welcome in which he emphasised the stoical understanding displayed by the inhabitants in never for one moment blaming the British for the terrible hardships inflicted in the course of attaining ultimate victory’.
I had an unexpected glimpse of how a war-torn village on the banks of the Scheldt might look, having been given a tip by a woman working for the Antwerp Port Authority, who had described to me the ‘desolate wasteland’ her employer had created in its project to accommodate the very longest and deepest super-freighters. She and I were standing on a giant computer-generated projection of the entire region – the centrepiece of an exhibition in a marquee on the Antwerp waterfront – an attempt by the port authority to engage with the local population. In the course of an afternoon I appeared to be its only visitor, and the woman, who wore the company’s logo and slogan on her sweatshirt, pointed with her toe to a small village on the left bank of the Scheldt. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘This is where you should go. To the village of Doel.’
I had already heard about the inexorable spread of the docks from Mrs Peremans, the proprietor of the guest house in which I stayed for the duration of my time in Antwerp. She lived alone with her cats among bookcases groaning with religious tracts in a large and gloomy nineteenth-century terraced house close to the resplendently majestic station in a neighbourhood which had once been genteel but has gone to seed – at least in the eyes of those who regard Belgium’s acceptance of immigrants as a ‘problem’ and take exception to an urban landscape where shops offering cheap phonecalls to exotic places and internet access have usurped traditional cafés and grocers, and where heavily accented Congolese French and Farsi have displaced French and Flemish as the dominant tongues.
Mrs Peremans said that she was trying to sell her house, but who wanted even such a magnificent dwellin
g when the area had the reputation it now did? She felt sorry, she said, for the rootlessness of the asylum seekers from Iran, Equatorial Guinea and the DRC, who lead ‘sad, intransigent lives’ before being made to return home.
‘Why do they come to Antwerp?’ I asked.
‘Perhaps because of the docks. Because there is always hope in docks of some kind of work or a passage to somewhere else. But Antwerp’s aren’t those kinds of docks,’ she said. Antwerp’s dock workers are highly skilled and extensively vetted. They live tidy lives in grid-like suburbs. These are not the happenstance quaysides of yore.
Mrs Peremans was desperate to sell her house not because she had problems with her neighbours, but because she wanted to return to the countryside of her childhood. Notwithstanding, however, that it no longer exists. ‘Now everything is docks. Docks docks docks. The fields are all devoured – eaten up!’ she said over breakfast and asked why I hadn’t finished my scarcely boiled egg.
What the Belgians have done to develop their side of the Scheldt is like an inversion of the polder building of the Dutch. Whereas the Netherlands has made land out of sea, Belgium has made sea out of land. Hidden behind security fences and earthworks, the presence of the docks is only betrayed by an unearthly almost supra-human topography. The funnels and bridge houses of ships loom above an elevated horizon created by the sea wall. Through a haphazard cubist fantasy mountainscape of shipping containers snake roads along which articulated vehicles pass with pulse-like monotony. But nothing, not even Mrs Peremans’s soft-boiled egg, could quite prepare me for Doel.
Eight hundred years ago the luckless village was no more than an island surrounded by the river and a hinterland of permanent flood water. And for hundreds of years during the interminable wrangling between the independent and Spanish-ruled Netherlands its sovereignty was either unknown, in dispute or bartered between the two. At the middle of the twentieth century Doel remained a small town, its inhabitants mostly farmers before they took to seeking employment in the docks and refineries and chemical works that flourished after the Second World War. But in 2001 they were given notice that Doel had been earmarked for dock development. Given the choice of selling up on good terms or hanging on, risking everything as the value of their properties slid inexorably into the Scheldt, the great majority of its residents chose the safer path and moved to nice new houses nearby.
For the moment the bulldozers only cruise past Doel like small-town toughs putting on the frighteners. Pending resolution of a number of legal challenges, the developers have yet to move in, tempting some of its erstwhile inhabitants to question whether they made the right decision to leave. But with every passing year, their otherwise perfectly good houses sink into greater decrepitude. Windows creak listlessly on their hinges; gardens are overgrown, and every other square yard of wall has fallen prey to ‘street artists’, who like crazed cosmeticians in a firm of surreal undertakers have prepared the village for interment.
This is highbrow graffiti, macabre and darkly funny: the Olympic rings on the side of a house, DOEL 2018 beneath; Doel represented as various dead or dying animals – a buffalo, a festering rat, a jackdaw. In the churchyard the bell tower seems to have become a stranger in its own parish. There are indeed a handful of people for whom the automated tolling of the bells still transports them to the time when it was, they maintain, one of the most special places in Belgium. The remaining inhabitants are either older people who have hung on in the hope that the descent into madness will be reversed or younger squatters, who see in Doel a free place to live where the writ of the law does not apply. It is a place which is both thrilling and threatening, the kind of vacuum which dangerous elements might and might not abhor.
Compounding the insanity is the pub at the crossroads that marks the centre of the town. At lunchtime and in the evenings it is rammed from the bar to the dingiest corner seat with happy people and beer-furred smoky voices – a babble at the heart of an empty bedlam. They are for the most part workers at the local nuclear power station, the great silent chimney of which towers over Doel.
At the suggestion of the (hurried, harried) barmaid, I knocked on the door of a house on the fringes of the village, by the windmill. The woman who lived there, Cécile, might possibly be interested in talking to me as a representative of the older generation that had hung on. Her house, with a pair of wellingtons on the porch and a car in something approaching running order in the drive, looked to be one of the few in a state worthy of respectable habitation.
My knock was met with a querulous barking. Through a frosted-glass window I could see a basset hound running up and down the stairs, sprung into disorder by my arrival. Cécile opened the door a fraction to reveal wide and apprehensive eyes. In such a blighted, lonely village, anyone would be wary of a stranger. But she invited me into her cosy, cluttered home, with its cookery books, oil paintings and old photographs, an enormous fern taking up half her sitting room, a brooding sense of loss occupying the other.
She was, she said, one of the original inhabitants of Doel. As a child in the 1960s she had swum in the Scheldt with her friends and spent carefree summers in the woods and fields. Even when the nuclear power plant was built on its doorstep, the sense of community – and apartness from anywhere else – remained gloriously intact. In fact, the power station had provided jobs and contracts for local businesses. ‘It is true that some people got very rich, and some people didn’t, so there were resentments. There was some crossness. But we were still a village all together,’ she said.
Cécile said she had felt unable to leave. She had no wish to be bought out of her childhood and home, and besides she could think of nowhere else in the world that she wished to live. It was sometimes a little scary at night but for the most part beautiful and quiet. Her great regret, she said, was that she was no longer on cordial terms with her neighbour Marina, who lived a few doors along, barricaded behind placards that promised hellfire and doom for the scheming businessmen and politicians who were determined to destroy their doorp.
They fell out, said Cécile, because whereas she had been born in Doel, Marina had only moved here to work on the power station twenty years ago. ‘But still she has all this activism and so forth, even though she is not really from Doel. . .’
I trotted along to Marina’s house to hear her side of the story and found her tale sadder still. As Cécile had said, the house was surrounded by placards. One (translated from Flemish) read, ARROGANT POLITICIANS ARE BAD FOR THE ECONOMY, and another, GOD WILL PUNISH THE MURDERERS OF OUR VILLAGE. Marina, an attractive blonde woman in her forties, told me that the village in which she had grown up a few kilometres east was just as beautiful as Doel had been, just as peaceful, and just as strong in community spirit, but it had already been destroyed. Where once had been her home was now an expanse of water and concrete.
‘And do you know what?’ She pinned me down with bitter blue eyes. ‘The ships do not even use it. They have massive overcapacity. They build and build far more than they can even use.’ So even if she was not born in Doel, she was still anxious to save it from the oblivion her own town had suffered. For her part, Marina pointed out that Cécile had sold her house, taken the money and was now renting cheap (from the same company that wanted to oust her), so wanted ‘the best of both worlds’.
And thus the two women continue their baleful mini-war within a war, both doing battle in their own way with forces that heavily outnumber them, and each failing, like others before them, to heed the warning of a nineteenth-century Belgian officers’ manual that ‘the polder country is generally unsuitable for military operations of any kind’.
4
With Ensor and Octopussies in Ostend
Ostend is my orphanage – there are probably places I’d rather be but I think that right now I need to be here.
Marvin Gaye, 1981
A cynic might describe the shortness of Belgium’s coastline as its greatest quality. Either way, its entirety can be travelled in comfort and relat
ive speed by taking the Kusttram – Coast Tram – which whistles its way between Knokke, a hop away from the Netherlands, and De Panne, close to the French border, in less than two hours, and all for the price of five euros.
Viewed from the deck of the ferry from Ramsgate, Ostend greets its guests as a stiff rictus of concrete. Fixed and a little forced. First it is only discernible as a bank of low dove-grey cloud, curiously clean cut, and then, almost only at the very last moment, does the city reveal its identity as a wall of apartment blocks looking belligerently out at the waves. During the Eighty Years’ War of the 1600s it had a terribly bloody time under siege or assault by the Spanish and took another knocking a century later during the War of the Spanish Succession. But in 1784 an English entrepreneur called William Herket transformed Ostend’s fortunes for ever by obtaining authorisation for the building of a lemonade hut. Herket had a captive constant base such was the frequency of shipwrecks at Ostend that watching vessels smash themselves to pieces on the shallow shoals around the entrance to the harbour had become a popular local entertainment.
The patronage of Leopold, first king of the Belgians, assured Ostend’s emergence as the resort it is now slowly unbecoming. Leopold was planted on the throne of the brand-new nation by the great powers in 1831. The grand design was that Belgium would act as a check against future French expansionism, which seems ironic given what would later happen. But the new monarch had the good humour to believe that he was a real king, deserving of a seaside playground. A hippodrome, spa and esplanade soon sprang from the dunes. With the passage both of time and the royal title to the second Leopold, the classical gave way to the belle époque, and long before the First World War arrived to knock on Belgium’s door Ostend really was a handsome place. In the right light on the right day and in the right mood she can still make that claim. But she does so despite herself – in splintered chinks between the grandiose and dreary.