Avuncular American

Fighting With Fire and Water

Another First World War centenary: in October 1914, the Belgian Army, squeezed into the final corner of the country between the North Sea and France, floods the fields of Flanders and holds off the German army for the rest of World War I.

This feat of military hydrology was the main focus of a conference at IRSD - the Belgian Royal Higher Institute for Defence.  A gathering of experts - Belgian and Dutch, military and scientific - to mark this modern example of the use of water as a weapon in the Low Countries.  There's a useful slideshow here Download 01 03 ph mignolet.

This is an old, old story: French monarch Louis XIV, forced to abandon a siege of the Belgian town of Dendermonde (Termonde), cursed the town ("ville maudite"), saying he could only take it "with an army of ducks."

Medieval castles had moats, but as late as the Cold War, Dutch defenses included, as part of NATO, high-tech hydrological traps for any eventual Soviet invaders.

Flooding, as we know, can be deadly, and the collective memory in the Netherlands (and to a lesser extent in Belgium) hasn't forgotten the catastrophic breaching of the dikes in 1953.  As the world faces coastal flooding brought on by rising sea levels, this Low Country expertise will be of increasing importance beyond the land of the polders.

In October 1914, the German generals were no doubt cursing the collection of Belgian officers and canal wardens who improvised this defense that allowed King Albert - ever since revered here as the sovereign who stayed at the head of his troops during the entire war - to maintain a piece of Belgian territory free of German occupation.

The peaceful waters today at Nieuwpoort Belgium, flooded in October 1914

Last weekend we made a pilgrimage to the sites associated with the flooding that saved a piece of Belgium - Nieuwpoort and Diksmude.  The latter town boasts a towering monument to the sacrifice of Belgian soldiers, especially the Flemish (Dutch-speaking) dead of WW I, which has been associated with controversial Flemish nationalist sentiment.

No such sectartian feelings were evident at the Royal Higher Institute for Defence Studies, where French, Dutch, and English were used and the Belgian speakers were scrupulous in their bilingualism.  It looks like the Belgian army has set itself to be an example in that sphere to the rest of the country.

Hiking Europe's High Points

We're not mountain climbers by any stretch of the imagination, but over the past two weeks, we've walked plenty of mountain trails, first in Italy's incredible Dolomites (Passo Pordoi below), then Haute Nendaz in the Swiss Alps.

In the Dolomites, the Centenary of World War I was very much present.  I'd written about the "mountaintop trenches" during a previous trip in 2008, but I don't think I realized the extent to which the First World War along the Austrian-Italian border was WW I horror carried to the ultimate degree.  An entire "ice city" of galeries bored into glaciers, where soldiers could never find a warm place.  Heavy artillery hauled up sheer mountains, "via ferrata" staircases bolted onto the cliff faces, with soldiers slipping to their deaths if the shelling didn't get them.  Sheer hell in a cold, cold place.

After white knuckle switchback roads over the Alps and into Switzerland, our second week was spent on top of a high plateau in the Valais region.  Here, we left our car in its parking slot and just hiked all week.  According to the brochures, some 70% of Swiss citizens hike regularly, and we encountered a number on the great variety of well-marked trails out of Haute Nendaz, our base.

Today, while picknicking on a quiet trail overlooking the valley, our peace & quiet was interrupted by a crash and a splash - it was a hunter dragging his beautifully-antlered stag straight downhill, using a stream as his pathway.

He explained that the Swiss hunting licence, which allows him a quota of one stag, a couple of doe, and three chamois, costs 1,500 Swiss Francs, which is about $1,500 dollars.  At that price, I don't think the deer have too much to worry about - only a few really serious hunters would shell out that much for what in most US states would cost some $20.00.

But then everything in Switzerland is expensive.  We stayed, through a timeshare exchange, at a studio apartment, and saved money by eating in or picknicking.  We did splurge on a cheese fondue - had to have that while in the Alps - but you can't think too much about the price of food here.

Chatting with some Swiss people, the high cost of living is also a concern - "we're not all bankers," one said.  A longtime resident here, a taxi driver originally from Bosnia, said that it's really hard making ends meet.  He also gets a sense from foreign clients that they are not return visitors, once they experience local prices.  We read that Swiss voters rejected a referendum to establish a minimum wage last spring.

So, while we can't say that we won't be back, we will definitely plan on the budget approach to dining.  But then nothing tastes as good as a nice picnic in the mountain air...

For Whom the Tocsin Tolls - World War I Centenary

At 4:00 PM this Friday afternoon, all across France, the church steeples echoed the sound of the tocsin, a reminder of the "Guns of August" of 1914.

Today, life pretty much continued as usual, and other than a few officials in ceremonies around the country, I doubt many people stopped what they were doing to reflect on that distant conflict and what it meant for the world.

My wife's late aunt, a girl of almost seven when war was declared in August 1914, recalled that people working in the fields dropped their tools - it was right in the middle of harvest season - so immediate was the effect.

Within weeks, thousands would be dead.  And the thousands became millions.

Here in Brittany, far from the WW I battlefields of northern France, the war nevertheless was felt, and with devasting results.  On the "Monument aux Morts" of my wife's native village, her uncle's name appears.  He had been gassed, and died in hospital in Caen in Normandy:

On the same monument, the names of eight village soldiers killed the same day on a faraway battlefield in Belgium, just three weeks after trading their rakes for rifles (photo below).  On August 22, 1914, before the glory faded on the bright blue and red French uniforms with the deadly, muddy dreariness of five subsequent winters, France came to the aid of Belgium in the earliest days of the war.  There's a Belgian blog with information on the battle of Maissin.

Imagine the impact on a rural farming community such as this Breton village - seven of its sons killed on the same day.  In Britain, early pre-conscription recruitment resulted in "Pals Battalions," consisting of relatives, friends and neighbors.  As Wikipedia puts it:

The policy of drawing recruits from amongst a local population ensured that, when the pals battalions suffered casualties, individual towns, villages, neighbourhoods, and communities back in Britain were to suffer disproportionate losses.

I hadn't realized what this would mean to a small Breton village until I took in the names and dates on the monument.

The great British military historian John Keegan referred to the "chateau generalship" exhibited during the war, depicted so well in Stanley Kubrick's timeless "Paths to Glory."  Today, we watch contemporary wars - never "declared," such a quaint concept - while munching on our evening meals.

If the First World War seems so distant, its effects are very much with us now.  Think of the empires dissolved, the countries born of WW I.  And the seeds of nationalism sown.  You can play counterfactual history to no end with World War One: if it hadn't happened, would the Soviet Union and the Cold War happened?  Would Israel have come about without the 1917 Balfour Declaration?  Without the humiliating defeat of Germany and the Central Powers, would Hitler have risen to power and unleashed the Holocaust?

There are helpful websites to keep track of the complex history of The Great War: PBS and BBC's World War One are among the best.  But like today's tocsin, it's a somber, long four years that we're commemorating.  Next time you're outside for a few minutes in a dismal November rain, spare a thought for the soldiers - Tommies, Doughboys, or poilus - in their muddy trenches.

It all started 100 years ago today.