—
In a stately old-fashioned mansion that rose up out of the chilly mist, I finally found my younger stepbrother and asked him about my mother and sisters, being careful not to hurt his feelings, since he knew what I thought of his father as a husband to my mother. We were probably sitting too close to the fireplace—I fell to the floor unconscious around eleven in the morning and did not wake up until two days later. My body was covered with red blotches, a sign of blood poisoning.
I have now spent six weeks in this backwater, living in a daze. Early on, I went out to sea with a fisherman. After many hours, the huge creature that tugged at his crude line turned out to be a dogfish, a thrashing, inedible monstrosity that stared at us with a crazed grin as the fisherman cut the hook out of its throat with his knife and slid the colossal creature back into the churning water. A trail of blood, nothing more, wet snow in our faces again.
Port Talbot, the smell of silt, of sackcloth, of rope, of poverty. The coal mines in the mountains in the distance.
Bad fish, bad coffee, bad bread. We have rotting teeth and a nasty taste in our mouths. We chew in silence, sometimes gagging, looking at the bare trees against the line of the gray-green sea. Christmas brings wet snow and driving rain. Two nurses join us for a scanty meal. We hardly speak. New Year’s is barely celebrated. In a small chapel, long, monotonous prayers for the dead and wounded. The next day, under a blinding winter sun, in the cutting wind, we find an emaciated horse beaten to death next to the seawall. Everything seems unreal. I am homesick.
The last day of my trip, we visit a munitions factory in Swansea; one of the directors gives us a guided tour. I come to life again as we pass the glowing furnaces; I reminisce about the iron foundry; the conversation bucks me up. I see new technologies that amaze me—in the wink of an eye, a hunk of red-hot iron is pressed into hundreds of paper-thin sheets for tins and soldiers’ cups. Something in me can no longer distinguish between what I think and what I see.
Rocking back and forth in the same maddeningly slow train, my stepbrother and I sit in silence across from three English girls, who see no need to lower their voices as they keep up a running commentary on the two callow Belgian soldier boys, who have obviously never touched a woman. That one, there on the left, would make the perfect model for a bronze statue of the Simpleminded Soldier in some grassy plot, sprinkled with pigeon droppings. They squeal with laughter, until I rise to leave the carriage and wish them a pleasant journey in my very best English. Then they clap their hands to their mouths and cry out all sorts of apologies, all at once. We shrug, and as we walk away down the platform with a friendly wave, I feel a surge of dizziness, something that sweeps through my bowels, anxiety and desire running together into a kind of nausea that will stay with me for the rest of our journey back to the front, on yet another dirty, rickety train, chilled to the bone, peering through grimy windows thick with the soot of greasy candles. There are signs of vandalism everywhere, on the seats and on the floor; the toilets are covered with filth, too vile to use. Soldiers are destroyers and bitter men when they return from furlough to the front.
—
And once again, months pass in which utter boredom—we sleep half the day away—is suddenly broken by two hours of sheer ghastliness, an unexpected advance, shouted orders, panic, confusion, the cries of the wounded. Afterward, the dead are carted off—mutilated hunks of human flesh, where not long before, a young man was smoking and swapping stories with his pals in the trenches.
My story is growing monotonous, just as the war grew monotonous, death monotonous, our hatred of the Huns monotonous, just as life itself grew monotonous and finally began to turn our stomachs.
One thing does make a deep impression in those murky days. One evening a dying soldier is being carried off; I hear he has only one arm, yet distinguished himself through his bravery as a volunteer medical orderly. He was struck by a falling beam in a burning barn. I walk over to the stretcher and recognize the boy from my drawing classes, my much-loved, brilliant fellow student who constructed new worlds out of lines. His neck appears to be broken, at an odd angle to his body. He lifts his eyes for a moment and recognizes me. He wants to say something; he strains forward; I see what always used to strike me about him: the stump of his arm moving as he moves, under his torn uniform. Then he falls back. I walk along next to the stretcher, unable to help. By the time we reach the field hospital, he is dead.
—
Sometime in June 1916 I am sent on my third mission, this time to a forward observation post, a cowshed between the two lines. Every night, our commander dispatches three men. None of them return. The soldiers grumble and protest; the officers respond with punishment and intimidation. After a week and a half, I and two of my men are ordered to keep watch at the forward post. I salute and say I’ll do whatever I’m told, but this is a fool’s errand. The commander snaps that I can expect to be punished if I happen to come back alive.
Around midnight, we creep cautiously toward the post. In the dim light, we see dead boys all around us. Their ammunition is still inside the shed. I order the two men to gather as many bullets as they can and position themselves ten feet away from the shed, one on either side.
They cover me as I creep forward and sketch the spots where I suspect machine guns, the length of the trench, the height of the defensive wall. I creep back. Where did the other lads go wrong?
We snatch up all the bullets and put them in our bags. Now that we have an unexpectedly large supply of ammunition, I order the men to fire in turns through the night, after carefully calculating how many bullets we’ll need and how frequently we should fire. No Germans pop up that night; we are not taken prisoner; we return toward dawn, triumphant. But just as we think we’ve made it back safely, the bullets start to fly. In a few seconds’ time, I see the two lads next to me leap up to escape, one after the other, and drop to the ground dead; I remain perfectly still, flat on my belly. After a few minutes I cautiously rise to my feet and am immediately shot in the back, a cowardly shot that enters at an angle, passes through the small of my back, and comes out at my hip. I staunch the gushing torrent of blood, throw up, press the gaping hip wound shut with all my strength, and am carried away through the darkness to the field hospital, where the medical officer says, Marshen! You have a subscription, ou quoi?
I grin, the world goes blurry, and not until three days later do I wake up, with a brown-stained bandage around my belly and agonizing pain in my back. I have been heavily sedated for days, because the pain would otherwise have been unbearable, a nurse tells me. I am also told that after I heal, I shall face a court-martial for using ammunition not issued to me by my superiors. I shrug and say that they can go to hell.
Bed rest, flat on my back, boredom, frustration, thoughts of my men in the mud. This time I am sent to the Lake District to recover, to a small estate in Windermere. There I befriend the lady of the house, Mrs. Lamb, who plays cards with me and tells me tales of her ancestors over afternoon tea. Toward evening we often walk together in the park. Her husband is also at the front. We fall into an intimacy that perplexes us both. I am just a common soldier from Ghent, I keep telling myself, as I lie alone at night in my large room on the first floor and hear her footsteps in the corridor.
—
During my convalescence in Windermere I see in the newspapers that a new kind of poison gas has come into use: mustard gas, apparently even more gruesome in its effects than the shells filled with chlorine gas to which we were introduced in 1915. I read about the mass casualties and cannot sleep for several nights. How many of my comrades have died by now? I can only guess. I sometimes look back on our trench as a sheltered, relatively safe place, despite the weekly deaths. More and more, in every conversation, I hear how disgusted everyone is with the absurd, meaningless carnage that drags on without cease; it is said that even the Germans have had enough and are deserting in droves. Are there any young men left in Europe? asks Mrs. Lamb of Windermere, and she places her ha
nd on my shoulder. I am reading English newspapers, which report very different things from the French-language Belgian newspapers occasionally available to us at the front.
She has two farewell gifts for me: a carton of English cigarettes, yellow and oval in shape, and a scarf she has knitted for me, a long scarf—you’ll need it in the winter months at the front, she says fretfully. She takes me in her arms.
—
I shivered with distress the day I had to leave Windermere. In the distance, I saw the Langdale Pikes against the brightening gray of early morning. The front awaited me again; we were beginning our third winter.
When I returned to the front, I heard that my commanding officer still wanted me punished for insubordination; when I had come back wounded from the post by the cowshed, I still had masses of ammunition with me that I had collected there. We are forbidden to use ammunition not allocated to us by our superiors. I was guilty of a serious transgression.
I first had to report to a lieutenant, who gave me a stern lecture and explained the possible penalties. When I did not move a muscle and remained stiffly at attention, waiting for him to decide whether or not I would be court-martialed, he gave me a long look, straight in the eyes. He must have read the bitterness in my face. He reviewed the file again for a couple of minutes, stamped it, signed his name, and then said, The matter has been dealt with, Martien. Return to your men. Dismissed.
I saluted without a word. But I lost my will to fight that day—and what is worse, I lost my faith. The more human lives are sacrificed, the harder it is to bear the contempt of the French-speaking officers, the public humiliation and discrimination that they inflict on Flemish soldiers. They stand in sharp contrast to the Walloon lads from humble families who show us their friendship, and usually their solidarity. We’re all cannon fodder together. While we sit in the trenches with half-frozen fingers, thick woollen hats, and shreds of flannel in our worn-out boots, spending entire days trying to rub some warmth into each other so we won’t freeze to death, the officers sit in their well-heated farmhouses. Once a week a lieutenant performs a cursory inspection, his nose in the air, joking about how healthy this frosty weather is: it kills all the pests, and if it goes on this way, it’ll kill the Boches too. No one laughs. The lieutenant turns his back on us disdainfully and says, audibly, to his adjutant, Ils ne comprennent rien, ces cons de Flamands.
—
One day I’m told to report to another commanding officer, a French-speaker from Brussels who demands that I salute after every sentence. As he humiliates me in this way—at the end of every sentence, I lift my hand to my head and click my heels—he looks on with a smirk and haughtily informs me that I am soon to be transferred to another section, because I fraternize too much with my men and thus constitute a threat to military discipline. I ask whether the order comes from his superiors. He bellows in French that a Flamand has no business asking questions. I salute and make a quick exit. As I silently pack my things, the boys look on in confusion: What are you doing, Martien? I’m being transferred, I say curtly. Then something happens that I could never have anticipated: my men fly into a rage, rush off to the commander’s office in a body, and stand by the doorway shouting and shaking their fists. Soon, a few of them start throwing stones. The commander comes out and bellows at them—to no effect—telling them to shut their mouths and warning them that mutiny is grounds for immediate execution. The racket continues to swell, as soldiers come from all sides to join the uprising. Somebody shouts, Flemings, unite!
The commander goes red in the face, withdraws into the farmhouse, and returns with a senior officer. They talk to each other and point at me. I am on the other side of the mob of mutineers, still packing my things. Two lieutenants come to get me; they grab me by the arms and roughly drag me forward like a condemned man. When we reach the senior officer, I straighten my back and salute. It’s the same one who saved me from a court-martial. He scrutinizes me closely again, with narrowed eyes.
Eh bien, he says, and he cracks his whip against his gloved left hand.
I salute again, produce from my pocket the iron case that holds my medals, open the case, and display them one by one to the senior officer, without saying a word.
He understands my point. He examines the medals and takes a long look at me.
Then he removes my Knight’s badge from the case and says, slowly and distinctly, Sergent-Major Marshen. You have earned some remarkable distinctions. But you have been misled. This decoration is a counterfeit.
My most prestigious badge of honor, a counterfeit. Maybe the commander who awarded it made off with the real one. The senior officer glances around him and sniffs.
The commander flinches and tries to intervene.
Taisez-vous, Delrue, the senior officer snarls. I’ve had enough of seeing the Flemish soldiers humiliated. Et vous tous—he points at our commanders and at the sublieutenants who rushed over when they heard the noise—You are all to blame for this fraud, you idiots. Tenez, Marshen, you may remain in your regiment with your troops.
He promises me that the genuine badge will be delivered to me in just a few days and tells me to hold on to the forgery as evidence until then. The men cheer and toss their caps into the air. I salute, thank the officer, and try to calm down my men so as not to create any more bad blood. We return to the muck, the stench, the tedium, the sudden explosions, the frayed nerves, the occasional man dropping dead before our feet. A Walloon boy in our trench says in broken Flemish that he is ashamed. That night a bottle of Holland gin turns up in our trench—I don’t know where it came from. I pass it around, the boys sing softly, a light rain brushes over our heads under low-hanging clouds. A shell drops close to our funk holes, burrows deep into the ground, and does not explode. We wait in fear; nothing happens.
Time has abandoned us; we have slipped into a dim, unreal fold in its fabric, with no beginning or end in sight. Season follows season, the clouds drift overhead, fabulous white beasts and capricious gods in the noonday light; we are old before our time, we behave like housebound, fatalistic children, numbed and indifferent to life and death.
—
Winter, 1917–1918. Still more boys have died of deprivation, cold, pneumonia, typhus, sorrow, intestinal disease, syphilis, anger, despair, who knows what else—but the most horrifying story we’ve heard took place in Passchendaele in October and November of this year.
We are sitting in the trenches when we see our stretcher-bearers called away one by one. The word Passchendaele is on everybody’s lips. The officers scowl and stare at the ground when we ask for information. The mortar fire in the distance is heavier than any we’ve ever heard before. They’re using mustard gas; the tales we hear are so gruesome that we’re almost grateful to be sitting here rotting away in the mud, where our only concerns are hypothermia, enemy machine guns, and the whims of the military mind. Mustard gas burns turn out to be more painful than anything we’ve ever experienced before, and no medicine or ointment at the army’s disposal will ease the suffering of the howling victims. Morale sinks even lower than the nighttime temperatures. There is another spate of thinly disguised suicides, lads running into enemy fire and shouting, Shoot me, you filthy Boches, go on and shoot me. Their wish is usually granted. Somehow, more and more strong drink finds its way into the trenches; according to rumor, the high command is responsible. Blustering, spluttering soldiers spend all night sobbing under the stars and fall asleep at sunrise, drained and sedated, and in those early hours, when the cold that bites into our bodies is at its most savage, they freeze to death.
Spring brings more and more rumors of the imminent German surrender; sometimes we see a muddled file of pointed helmets marching toward the horizon, like black silhouettes against the red evening sky; we have no idea what they’re doing. Summer comes again. The mosquitoes, hornets, and infections return; in a dead-end sap trench, a mountain of excrement lies stinking to high heaven; when we try to bury it, we keep digging up corpses, severed limbs, and shr
apnel. So we leave the whole mess as it is and slink off, gagging.
—
In the autumn, I receive permission to spend a few weeks at home on leave. In the course of the war, we’ve learned how to sneak in and out of the occupied zone, wearing mufti. Now the German soldiers have begun deserting. On the way home, I see the damage inflicted on our country, the houses shot to pieces, the vagrants and looters, the poverty. But also the relief that peace has come. Ghent lies partly in ruins and makes a strange sight, but here and there the Belgian flag is flying. People come out to greet us with beaming smiles. Traces of the most recent fighting are visible everywhere.
There are sporadic attempts at looting and acts of retribution against collaborators. Some houses are attacked and practically demolished. I am reunited with my mother, sisters, and brothers—heart-wrenching moments. My mother, who comes limping out of the house with a slipper on one foot and a clog on the other, sees my medals and bursts out weeping. She has changed and looks more sensitive, more fragile. My stepfather, Henri, has become an old man, nipping at his drink in glum silence: raw moonshine he distills in secret from rhubarb and half-rotted pears. Living in wartime poverty has ground them all down. My mother’s hair has turned completely gray, her proud, straight back is bent, but the force of her mind is undiminished. My sisters have become charming young ladies; Clarisse is going about with a loud red-haired fellow, Fons, who pollutes the air in our home with his pipe but makes everyone laugh with an incessant stream of jokes, amid the poverty and bitter hardship the war has brought upon the city’s people.
When I return to my regiment, the air is thick with rumors: there’s been a popular revolt in Germany, the front has been crumbling for months. During our final march homeward a month and a half later, as we pass heaps of all imaginable kinds of rubble, refuse, and abandoned artillery, I find an undented shell case in a ditch somewhere near Merelbeke, large caliber, 215 millimeters. My comrades rag me for wanting to bring the heavy thing back with me. I arrive home that afternoon, covered with sweat, and give the brass case to my mother, who says she will grow flowers in it.
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