KING ALBERT’S HEROISM
BY EMILE CAMMAERTS.
I had not seen the Belgian front for three years. It was in December, 1914, on the morrow of the battle of the Yser, a vision of mud and rain, and a thousand hardships cheerfully borne. The work of re-equipment had scarcely started. Many things were still wanting, and some units looked, in their medley of uniforms, like irregular bands of brigands. A few farms could be seen emerging from the floods, like islets from the sea, and the men had to wade knee deep to roach their advance posts. Everything was grey, misty, silent, and mysterious – a desert haunted by an army of ghosts. The thousands of dead whom we had just lost made their presence felt, and there was a pervading reek in the air.
To visit the Belgian trenches as they are today, with the vivid memories of what they used to be, is to step from dream into reality, from the trial of sacrifice into the hope of an early reward. The bright weather which we enjoyed still increased the contrast. We moved in a world of colours where the warm tones of khaki and of the screens of “camouflage” blended in strange harmony with the blue of the sky and the vivid red of some freshly-wrecked brick wall. The floods were much lower, covered with rustling reeds, alive with waterhens and seagulls. Round Dixmude, Ramscapelle, and Nieuwpoort shells were bursting incessantly. Field-guns were harking away, and the voices of many heavies could be heard on our side. From time to time, some long distance shells whizzed overhead. Every detail brought the same message of life, struggle and readiness from the sturdy helmeted infantryman going to his rest-camp after a spell in the trenches, to the well-organised defences in every village close to the front, to the narrow footbridges loading to the advance-posts in the floods where Belgians and Germans confront each other in an amphibious war of surprises and thrilling incidents.
For even in the sector of the floods the front held by the Belgian army has never ceased to be lively. With the exception of the counter-attack of Steenstraete, during the second battle of Ypres, no operation on a large scale has been made since 1914, but the artillery duel has never stopped for more than a few days, and there is not one night when some bombing expedition, or some advance post raid docs not take place. Those who would go to the Belgian front with the preconceived idea that nothing happens in that quarter might be sorely disillusioned. They might, for instance, undergo the same experience as the Italian aide-de-camp who, while accompanying King Victor Emmanuel and King Albert in their recent tour, found himself unexpectedly half-buried by a shell. It would be a great mistake to judge the work of the Belgian army, or, for the matter of that, of any army, from the extremely concise and guarded utterances of the official “communiqués.”