My grandparents remembered Edouard Degrelle as a harmless if unendearing man. He was also a member of one of the two local football teams, the Saint-Louis de Bouillon (my grandfather played for the other one, Le Standard), and despite his brother’s ugly notoriety he managed to live a relatively normal life in the town. Opinion on him is divided. To some, like my grandparents, he was withdrawn, not overtly political and certainly not a collaborator of the same stripe as his brother. For others, he was a ‘Rexiste ardent’ who propagandised for the Germans. This claim is not sustained by the living memory of any of the people who recalled him and to whom I have spoken over the years, and there is no evidence for it in any documents, letters or reports of the time. But Edouard Degrelle needed to be depicted as a Rexist collabo by both sides: by those who killed him, in order to justify their action and its terrible consequences, and by the Rexists and pro-Nazi collaborators, in order to create a martyr and justify their reprisals. These reprisals were ordered by Léon Degrelle, and were so vicious even the local German SS chief balked at carrying them out and complained about Degrelle to his superiors. Edouard Degrelle’s life must be worth a novel; there must be enough innocence, guilt, mixedness of motive, ambiguity and ill-luck to make it, in its way, a micro-history of twentieth-century Europe. There’s a poignant extra detail about Edouard Degrelle, which is that he was named after a sibling who died aged two and is now buried in Bouillon cemetery (see ‘Degrelle’, above). Various bottles and phials with Pharmacie Degrelle labels can still be found in brocantes and car boot sales around Bouillon, and in the cellar of 8 Rue du Brutz.
The Belgian resistance had failed to assassinate Léon Degrelle at least twice. He was too well protected, and they lacked the manpower or the intelligence. An easier target was his brother, whose misfortune was simply to be related to the wrong man at the wrong time. At around 17.00 on 8 July 1944, as Edouard finished work, he was gunned down by four members of the ‘armée secrète’. To this day no one knows who killed him, though the organisers are alleged to have been Bouillonnais and the killers maquisards from elsewhere, perhaps from across the border in France. Degrelle’s response: ‘Bouillon doesn’t know what it’s let itself in for: the town will weep tears of blood, blood will flow. I will avenge the death of my brother and the wrongs done to my father ten years ago.’ Degrelle was in a mood to settle scores, and many of the hostages he ordered taken were simply people he didn’t like or who had offended him, often in quite banal ways, over the years. The Germans talked him down from his original 100 hostages to be executed to 46, who were taken to Arlon prison and were lucky enough to stay there, unexecuted, until the end of the war. After the first spate of hostage-taking, Degrelle decided to add three personal enemies to the list, but have them executed separately: Louis Bodard, a Catholic activist and former friend of the Degrelle family who rejected Rexism and campaigned against it; René Pierlot, engineer in the ferronnerie factory where my grandfather worked; and Henri Bodard, whose daughter, Mme Clément, founded the museum of Bouillon and for whom, in the 1990s, I wrote and recorded the English-language guided tour of the museum (it’s still my voice you’ll hear on the headphones
fn1 ). Henri Bodard, a civil servant and brother of Louis, was accused of perhaps the noblest-sounding crime, and certainly the most typically Walloon: ‘administrative sabotage’ – slowness and inertia in the fulfilment of orders, lack of urgency at work, and the general obstruction of office business. All three were executed on 21 July 1944 on the outskirts of Bouillon. A small tatty memorial, more like a roadsign than a monument, marks the place where the Gestapo shot them. André Millard, one of the surviving hostages recently honoured by the town, had been arrested by the Gestapo for no other reason than that he had been seen by an informer arguing with Edouard Degrelle outside his pharmacy. It was assumed therefore that Millard had had something to do with the murder. Millard maintains that their argument was about stamp collecting, that Millard, then in his late teens, had refused to swap a particular stamp with the Rexist leader’s brother. The mix of quotidian banality and mortal terror in which Millard and so many others lived is a facet of life under the Occupation.
Forty-eight hours after Edouard Degrelle’s murder, a group of Rexist killers came to Bouillon from Brussels and shot Henri Charles, the town’s other pharmacist, in his shop on the Grand’ Rue. That murder too was ordered by Degrelle, and one thing that strikes me about the way Degrelle operated here is that it reveals the essence of the reprisal mentality: on the one hand it must be (that word again) disproportionate, as in 100 executions for one murder; on the other hand it must also have a sense of symmetry, as in one pharmacist for one pharmacist. There’s now a plaque where Henri Charles was killed, and the shop is now a beer supermarket and successful micro-brewery, ‘Le Marché de Nathalie’. Their best-selling beer is the Cuvée Godefroid, a blonde ale with a label that depicts a scantily-clad voluptuous crusader’s woman, or perhaps a crusaderess in her own right, with tight comic-strip buttocks and an armoured bikini. She rests her hands on the hilt of a huge sword and her eyes on the imposing mass of Bouillon castle. Bouillon was without a pharmacy for the remainder of the war. When I was a child the building was a small cooperative supermarket, the Épécé, which closed in the late eighties. Bouillon had two other supermarkets, and all of them have closed, to make way for the excellent Colruyt, a great hangar of a place where one of Philippe Albert’s brothers works (see ‘The Golden Boot’).
At its peak, Rex had over 700 votes in the Bouillon area, though this is a touchy subject. Part of the problem with Rex was that, before the war, it was a popular and radical conservative movement that claimed to defend workers and small businesses from what Degrelle called ‘Banksters’, a term for rapacious gangster high finance that would strike a chord today. It was after the war that it became allied to the German cause, through Degrelle’s Führer-adulation (‘Degrelle ou la Führer de vivre’ is the tongue-in-cheek title of a documentary about him), and lost much of its support, though Degrelle filled the ranks of his Légion Wallonie with people from the area. When I was growing up, Bouillon was visited sporadically by TV crews and journalists making programmes or writing articles about Degrelle, or the war, or Belgian collaboration, and people stayed tight-lipped. Old people never liked to talk about Degrelle, because they understood something that we didn’t, namely that for a civil society to function the right kind of forgetting is just as good as the right kind of remembering, and certainly better than the wrong kind.
The owner of the ‘Vieille Ardenne’, whose daughter I spent time with as a teenager, gets it about right when, in a vox pop for Le Soir about Degrelle, he reminds us that Bouillon hasn’t produced many famous people, and apart from Godefroid and Degrelle none of its children have ever really made it on the outside. There’s a nuance of pride when he mentions them together. He then adds, provocatively, ‘The one was no better than the other’.
‘Discuss,’ you want to say, ‘discuss’.
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fn1 When I last went to the museum, in 1993, I took with me a girl I was trying to impress and boasted to her that it was I who was giving the guided commentary. She began laughing as soon as she donned the headphones. This was because, through some technical hitch that has still not been righted, the tape plays at one-and-a-half times normal speed, and the result is that I sound like a breathlessly excited Charles Hawtree.
CRIME WAVE
IN SITCOMS, WHEN someone takes an unnecessary precaution, they are challenged: ‘where d’you think this is – the Bronx?’ Here in Bouillon, ‘the Bronx’ is replaced by ‘Virton’, a town of 11,000 inhabitants forty-two km away. Try it: ‘Where d’you think this is? Virton?’
In the early nineties my grandmother read in the local paper that an old lady in Virton was robbed by an intruder while she sat dozing in her living-room. This crime captured Lucie’s imagination. With all the dozing she did in her own living-room, that old lady could easily have been her. One day when I returned to Bouill
on for a holiday I found the front door locked. This was a first. I was in my twenties, and I saw this as another broken link on the chain of my childhood. Christ, I didn’t even know that door had a key. (I have it now, use it quite often, and know its reluctant grincing sound as it turns.) I went round the back, through the alleyway, and in through the kitchen, which was open. There was Lucie in her Voltaire armchair watching TV. But something had changed.
For Lucie, who had been through many bereavements and privations, this remained the worst thing that could happen: to be burgled in your own home. And it hadn’t happened halfway across the world, but in Virton. After that, for years to come, or for the few that remained, she would invoke the Virton story: she began locking the doors when she went out, or went to bed. If she was in the front room, her old workshop, she’d lock the back door; if she was in the back watching TV, she’d lock the front. ‘You know what happened in Virton don’t you.’
The coda to the Virton story is that the old lady who was the victim of the burglary was a little confused, mid-doze, and had forgotten that the intruder was in fact her grandson, who had popped in, as he regularly did, to get some money to do her shopping. Afraid to wake her, the only stealing he did was in and out of the house. In the throes of a senior moment, the Virtonnaise saw what she took to be a stranger in the penumbra of her living-room, and called the police, who responded with Walloon urgency eighty minutes later. One of the officers was able to establish the nature of her confusion when the boy returned with two shopping bags and her change.
My grandmother read this story in La Meuse (Province of Luxembourg edition) and knew how it ended. But she focused entirely on the intrusion and ignored the happy conclusion. After that, Virton, the name alone, was enough: a shudder, a quick tour of the doors and windows, double-checking she had double-locked them.
NEWSHOUND
LA MEUSE IS the regional newspaper, slack with news from all over Wallonia. It has local supplements, and ours, for the Ardennes, proves there is no such thing as no news. Slow news maybe, but never no news. ‘It is a rich world, full of minor deeds’, writes William Bronk in his poem ‘The Rain of Small Occurrences’, and if I ever doubted him, La Meuse is there to set me straight. This summer, these minor deeds were a welcome relief from what we Belgians (there’s a phrase we Belgians don’t use much) still call, more from habit than engagement, national news: the constant threats of divorce between Flanders and Wallonia that would make any real divorce, were it to happen, feel like a mere tautology.
My uncle Jean-Pol – aka ‘Johnny’– Lejeune was, to all intents and purposes, the sixties in Bouillon.
fn1 Suspected of being a delinquent, he became one. His behavioural problems were made worse by the beatings he received from his teachers for being left-handed. It was an attempt to turn him into a right-hander, and this, ‘la main du diable’ as they called it, was something even the secular school punished with a cultish superstitiousness. His left hand bled and they beat the skin off his knuckles. He never became right-handed, but he did become very angry, and to this day has an anti-clericalism that would make Dawkins blench. It’s a particular kind of atheism, one where you can’t actually let go of God, because if he were not there it would be impossible to insult him. It’s a facet of life in Catholic societies. You can’t rebel against intelligent design, or the selfish gene, or even evolution. But you can rebel against God. In terms of pure ‘révolte’, it’s very good value, because you get several targets for the price of one: your parents, your school, your country, and, if you play it right, yourself. And that’s just for starters. After that there’s architecture, a lot of art and literature, plenty of music and a raft of Judeo-Christian values, all at no extra cost. Science doesn’t have a hope in hell against that package, which is why so many atheists still plump for God. ‘The last judgement’, Johnny used to say at mealtimes as my great-grandmother tried to say Grace, ‘it’s God who’ll have to answer for himself’: ‘c’est Lui qui aura des comptes à rendre’.
Johnny is now a journalist for La Meuse, and one of their Ardennes correspondents. ‘Hang-glider makes emergency landing – more through prudence than danger,’ is one of his front-page headlines. ‘Un scoop’, he tells me over his morning glass of Luxemburgish Pinot Gris : ‘I was first on the scene, and I had my camera’. We are in the Café Op de Trap, just across the border into the Duchy of Luxemburg where the drink is cheaper. The accompanying photo, which Johnny took, shows an unscathed man walking away from an accident that never happened. There’s no such thing as no news.
The big summer story in these parts, apart from the inconclusive disintegration of the country, concerned the late Alain Garbar, 51, of Montigny-le-Tilleul, who attempted suicide by sitting beside a large butane gas bottle and lighting it with what he hoped would be his last cigarette. He destroyed his house and the houses of his neighbours on either side, and injured himself terribly, while contriving to remain alive. ‘What kind of a country is this, where you can’t die in peace’, he asked the paramedics who brought out his badly burned body. A week or so later he died of his injuries, by which time M. Garbar was merely an inset on page 4 with no picture.
Because of the time-lag between his death and the action that led to it, I can’t write that he ‘committed suicide’. Even in the crude causality of self-harm, it’s difficult to express this species of temporal filler that seems to have been injected into the join between what M. Garbar did and the result of what he did. Instead I have to write ‘attempted suicide’ and then add, further along the story, the rider that he did so ‘successfully’. But do I mean ‘successfully’? What I mean, surely, is that he died as a result of an unsuccessful suicide attempt, which is an absurd statement.
* * *
fn1 Johnny introduced himself to an American friend visiting Bouillon as ‘Johnny Lejeune: Leader of a Generation’, and claimed that the café on the Ramparts called ‘Le Sixties’ was named after him. I once took a rather proper girlfriend from Luxemburg to visit Johnny and Marie-Paule in their house in Martelange, a town that straddles the Belgium/Luxemburg border so completely that one side of the main street is Belgian and the other Luxemburgish. When Johnny had fed us and declared himself too drunk to drive us back across the border, he showed us to our guest room and told us to leave the door open if we intended to have sex: ‘j’aime encore regarder’, he said, ‘I still like watching’. He then remarked on the similarity – in looks, voice and deportment – between my girlfriend and Lady Penelope, the Thunderbirds puppet, and called it a night.
ALL PHOTOGRAPHY IS TRICK PHOTOGRAPHY
ONE MORNING I find Osian sitting at the table with a box of old photos. He looks like he is playing solitaire. The box is one of those big but shallow cardboard boxes Lucie received her cloth in, and he is sorting them according to resemblance, guessing who is who, who might be related to who. He’s pretty good at it – children have a way of knowing while not knowing about their ancestors. He calls himself ‘Osian Lejeune’ here, which makes me happy, and he imagines what it would have been like if Guy rather than my mother had ‘married English’ (as they call it) and left the country. If I, his father, were the local politician, deputy Mayor of Bouillon and regional arts minister, and my cousin Patrick had been the lecturer in a British university. If he were at the école communale that his grandmother attended and his great-aunt taught at, and if Alexandre, his cousin, were at Ysgol y Gelli in Caernarfon. The photographs help with these imaginings, each one like a door into a house, and the people in them stand or sit as if they were welcoming you into room after room. A box of photographs is all rooms and no house.
What throws him about these photos, and it threw me when I was his age, is that the box doesn’t just contain pictures of our family, people we see now on the street twenty, thirty or even eighty years older, but photographs of Lucie’s best dresses with strangers inside them. That was how she recorded her creations: interspersing family and friends with dresses she had made. Thus we have the Bo
uillonnais, roughly clothed or, when well-dressed, bearing that stamp of discomfort you see in people in their Sunday best, their ‘trente et uns’. With men, it’s an itching around the neck, the tight collar, the pendulous slack tie with the fat-fingered knot. With women it’s the stiffness, the fear of making creases in the dress. Then we find sparkling brides snapped by society photographers, a retinue of factory owners’ wives and daughters at millionaire banquets that are always held in pavilions and banqueting halls in Namur or even – even – Brussels. There’s one in a hunting lodge done up to look like the Congo. For years I thought it was the Congo, but there are no black faces, so perhaps it was some industrialist’s themed Africa room, full of ivory, palms, and elephant’s-foot plant pots. Osian is sorting them, asking me who was who, who is still who. He puts them together in pairs, then threes and fours. Chasing the gene, chasing Eugène, who he finds in a photo of the football club, Le Standard de Bouillon, and again in a dark photograph holding my mother on Cordemois bridge.
Osian says it’s like playing ‘Happy Families’. I feel on safer ground calling it ‘Pelmanism’.
Other People's Countries: A Journey Into Memory Page 5