It took Captain Herbert Sulzbach’s regiment 12 days to cover 200 miles from the Armistice line to Bonn, where they were ‘cheered like anything’ and marched proudly past their commanding general at the bridge over the Rhine. As they pulled back through the Belgian villages they ‘kept meeting small or large parties of French or British prisoners moving west on their way home’. Yet, though Sulzbach reflected sadly ‘on the splendid mood they must be in compared to us’, he commented more than once on the conviction of his compatriots, soldiers and civilians alike, that ‘we are undefeated and unconquerable’.1 Dangerous legends were already in the making.
Throughout the second half of November 1918 and into December the armies were on the march again, back to the old frontier and beyond. The Armistice terms stipulated that allied and associated troops should occupy all western Germany as far as the Rhine. The French were to have a bridgehead across the river at Mainz, the British at Cologne and the Americans at Coblenz. No sector was specifically allocated to the Belgians, but it was subsequently agreed they would press northeastwards, as far as Duisburg. Despite political disorder in many German cities and pillaging in Brussels by one disaffected unit, the withdrawal from Belgium proceeded in good order and with impeccable discipline. The Dutch allowed as many as 70,000 Germans who had served in Flanders to pass through their province of Limburg and make their way home free of any restraints imposed by their enemies, a concession that infuriated the victors. But the armies further south rigidly followed a prescribed programme of retreat.
Two days after the guns ceased firing King Albert and Queen Elisabeth were welcomed in Ghent, although delicate political discussions delayed the king’s entry into his capital at the head of the army until Friday, 22 November. King George V’s second son, Prince Albert, represented his father at the celebrations in Brussels and, wearing RAF khaki, rode beside the Belgian king from the Port de Flandre to the Place de la Nation in autumn sunshine, among happy crowds whose cheers were often choked with emotion. General Plumer was among the allied commanders who, along with Belgium’s political and religious leaders, greeted the king in the Chamber of Deputies. There the monarch delivered a speech from the throne promising major reforms including universal male suffrage, an equal status for the two national languages and the establishment of a specifically Flemish university in Ghent. Although Belgian women had to wait until 1946 before they could vote, this speech foreshadowed radical changes in the structure of Belgian society, particularly in the relationship between Flemings and Walloons.2
The victorious Salient veterans began their advance on 17 November, the Sunday following the Armistice. At first the British Second Army moved forward at no more than 6 miles (10 km) a day, in order to give the enemy time to retire ahead of them. By Friday, however, some of the cavalry were riding once more beside the fields of Waterloo. The first troops arrived at the German frontier as early as 24 November and concentrated around Aachen, regrouping before continuing their march to the Rhine. The date of 13 December became the day of proudest satisfaction, for soon after nine o’clock that morning the British reached the Hohenzollern Bridge across the great river and entered Cologne, the 9th (Scottish) Division at their head, followed by the 29th Division, the Gallipoli veterans who had fought so tenaciously at St Julien during Third Ypres. Above them, the equestrian statue of the fallen kaiser in martial pose looked out towards the lands his armies failed to hold. Three days later Haig arrived in Cologne and was received by Plumer with a guard of honour outside the railway station. In the years ahead many ex-servicemen, reflecting on the sudden change of fortune in the autumn of 1918, remembered the day of crossing the Rhine and entering Prussia’s second largest city as the moment they could finally accept the reality of victory.
As so often during the past 33 months the most famous of trench magazines reflected the mood of the day. The Wipers Times had changed its name on five occasions, to keep up with the movements of the 24th Division, and when in December 1918 the twenty-third and final copy appeared it carried a long and involved letterhead: ‘The Better Times with which are incorporated the Wipers Times, the New Church Times, the Kemmel Times, the Somme Times and the B.E.F. Times.’ But, whatever the title, its 12 pages retained the familiar medley of simple jokes, dry irony and sentimentality that lifted morale in the darkest days. Readers were, for example, warned of ‘the horrors of peace’, their attention drawn to the attack ‘the redcaps’ began on 11 November when a ‘barrage of paper fell right on our trenches, and mixed with the H.E. was gas in enormous quantities’. But the editorial struck a more serious note:
One cannot but remark on the absolute apathy with which the end was received over here. England seems to have had a jollification, but here one saw nothing but a disinterested interest in passing events. Perhaps that was because the end came without the expected culminative crash, and the decisive battle was spread over many months and so became an indefinite action and not a ‘show’. Anyway though some may be sorry it’s over, there is little doubt that the line men are not, as most of us have been cured of any little illusions we may have had about the pomp and glory of war, and know it for the vilest disaster that can befall mankind.3
Back in Wipers itself, there was still a strong British presence. A makeshift hospital remained open, caring both for the men struck down by Spanish flu and for those wounded by the explosive debris of war that littered the fields and the streets. The search for live shells and grenades began, and so too did the systematic registering of graves, under the supervision of the Imperial War Graves Commission and the inspired leadership of Major Fabian Ware, who had set up the first Graves Registration Commission as early as March 1915. Shell holes were filled in, sometimes by German prisoners of war but also by ‘coolies’ from the Chinese Labour Corps, who remained encamped near Poperinghe for ten months after the Armistice. Progress was slow, not least because of heavy snowfalls in February 1919 that covered the city’s wounds with a white frozen sheet. After the thaw the fields remained sodden, bringing back to the surface that ‘Flemish porridge’ so familiar to all who had survived Passchendaele. Life remained hard for Belgians across the kingdom: only food relief from the British and Americans staved off a famine and a combination of war damage and German confiscations hampered industrial recovery. Before the end of the year four out of every five Belgian workers could not find steady employment either in the factories or the fields.
For several months after the war decisions on the immediate future of Ypres continued to be imposed by the town-major, Lieutenant-Colonel Beckles Willson, a Canadian. He was a fanatical advocate of preserving the ruins of the city as ‘an eternal memorial to British valour’, and he wrote: ‘What Jerusalem is to the Jewish race, what Mecca is to the Mohammedan Ypres must always be to the millions who have lost a husband, son or brother, slain in its defence, and now sleeping their eternal sleep within sight of its silent belfry.’ Until he was demobilized in October 1919, Willson used his authority to advance his ideas, even forbidding the start of work on rebuilding homes and shops around the Grand Place. ‘This is Holy Ground! No stone of this fabric to be taken away. It is a heritage for all civilised people’ ran a notice placed over the rubble of the Cloth Hall. After demobilization Willson played a major role in setting up the Ypres League, the association of Salient veterans, under the active presidency of Field Marshal Viscount Plumer of Messines and Bilton (the title taken by the former Second Army commander when, in 1919, he was raised to the peerage).
In London, Churchill, who returned to the Cabinet as Lloyd George’s secretary of state for war and air in January 1919, recognized the force of Beckles Willson’s arguments. ‘I should like us to acquire the whole of the ruins of Ypres,’ Churchill told the Imperial War Graves Commission a week after taking up office: ‘A more sacred place for the British race does not exist in the world,’ he proclaimed. Many in London agreed with him, to establish a protected zone of pilgrimage appealed to popular sentiment. But it was a curiously possessive idea; it ignored Belgian national feeling and the pride of the Yprians in their historic past. In the immediate aftermath of war too little thought was given to the long-term needs of ‘brave little Belgium’. It was fortunate that within the Cabinet Lord Curzon, ever sympathetic to King Albert, consistently countered the more extreme proposals with sound common sense. Ypres was singled out for honour with the award of the Military Cross in 1921, more than a year after President Poincaré bestowed the Croix de Guerre on the city. Practical aid came from the Agricultural Relief of Allies Committee, a body in which its patron, King George V, took a personal interest. Once the fields were cleared fertilizers, seeds, cattle and chickens were sent across the Channel to help Flemish farmers.4 King George and Queen Mary saw Ypres and the Salient battlefields for themselves in May 1922, during an eight-day state visit to Belgium.
The government in Brussels – a ten-man coalition in which half the ministers were francophone Catholics – was inclined to allow preservation of the devastated Cloth Hall and the cathedral church of St Martin. The ministers also considered preserving Dixmude in its ruined state as a similar tribute to the Belgians killed in the Yser battles. But before the war West Flanders had become one of Belgium’s most fertile agricultural areas; it was too vibrant a province to have towns fossilized as archaeological sites. More than 50 villages in the Salient and along the Yser had been levelled during the four years of shelling and hand-to-hand fighting. The Belgian government instituted a Service for Devastated Regions as soon as the guns fell silent but little could be achieved during the winter months. Some farmers took the initiative, recruited temporary labourers themselves and cleared the fields, subsequently seeking reimbursement by the state, but to undertake a major rebuilding programme was beyond their means.
By spring 1919 almost a third of the Flemish peasant refugees had come back in search of what remained of their homes – and found in most cases that they had to improvise shelters, sometimes taking advantage of the old German bunkers. The Belgian authorities hurriedly purchased some of the many British Nissen huts still in the Salient and promised the home-comers ‘Albert Houses’ – temporary wooden bungalows, provided from a fund sponsored by the king. The Albert Houses were slow to arrive. They could be erected speedily, but they proved extremely cramped: a family’s needs were met either with three rooms, covering an area of 65 square feet, or by two squeezed into just over 40 square feet.5 Although a high royal commissioner was appointed in April 1919 to co-ordinate planning, by midsummer the leading Dutch-language newspaper was complaining of ‘the government’s shameful neglect of the Flemish people’.6 This apparent muddle over reconstruction made good propaganda for the Flemish national movement, already a powerful influence across the Yser basin.
The initiative was taken, not by the high royal commissioner, but by a clear-minded, vigorous burgomaster whom the Yprians were fortunate to have presiding over their municipal affairs. Long before the Armistice was signed René Colaert voiced his opposition to preserving the ruins: Ypres should be rebuilt and recover its rightful place as one of Belgium’s historic cities. The burgomaster was supported by Jules Coomans, whose work on modernizing Ypres had been nearing completion when the war began, and also by a younger architect, Eugène Dhuicque, who had remained in Ypres and supervised the erection of emergency buttresses to support the outer shell of the Cloth Hall after the great bombardment. Colaert toured the kingdom to collect money for rebuilding the Cloth Hall and to make certain that Flemish Ypres, no less than Louvain in Brabant, was remembered as one of Belgium’s ‘martyred cities’. Meanwhile, with municipal backing, the townsfolk set about the task of reconstruction independent of any formal plan. Work began on the totally wrecked railway station. The Place de la Gare – or as most locals called it the Stationsplein – was cleared of debris; the centre of the square was filled with flower-beds and shrubs that came as a gift from England; young trees were planted along what had been the Boulevard Malou, making a pleasant contrast to the Nissen hut shanties of the first months of peace. By 1923 a new station was complete and hotels opened for visitors in the square as well as along the northern side of the Grand Place and the western end of the Menin Road. René Colaert remained the most influential figure in Ypres until he became terminally ill in 1927. The Stationsplein was renamed in his honour.
The British attachment to the sacred ruins remained an embarrassing problem. In spring 1920, Colaert had suggested that the most suitable memorial to the British dead would be the rebuilding of the Cloth Hall in their honour, but this proposal was unacceptable to the British government, not least on financial grounds. A few months later Colaert did, however, succeed in accommodating the wishes of a newly constituted National Battlefield Memorials Committee, headed by Lord Midleton, to the needs of the city. It was agreed that the Midleton Committee should abandon the idea of a memorial in the centre of Ypres and consider replacing the wrecked Menin Gate that had stood at the head of the road along which so many thousands had marched into battle: Hell Fire Corner was barely a mile (just over 1 km) away. In June 1921 the Midleton Committee and the War Graves Commission authorized Sir Reginald Blomfield to design a memorial that would both honour the long struggle of King George V’s armies in the Salient and commemorate by name the ‘missing’ dead.
Blomfield chose to create a new and grandiose Menin Gate, where before the war there had been a mere passageway through Vauban’s ramparts. Work began in spring 1923. It immediately ran into difficulties that might perhaps have been foreseen, for beneath the surface clay came a layer of shifting sand. Blomfield had to sink a virtual carpet of concrete piles 36 feet into the ground to support the massive arch he envisaged. The Scottish sculptor William Reid Dick, himself a veteran of the Western Front, designed a lion, alert and brooding rather than poised to roar; it surmounts the eastern entry to the arch and looks out towards the eastern ridges between Gheluvert and Passchendaele. Beneath the lion, and beneath the sarcophagus with which Blomfield crowned the western entrance to the arch, was inscribed the dedication: ‘To the armies of the British Empire who stood here from 1914 to 1918 and to those of their dead who have no known grave.’
The inauguration of the Menin Gate was planned to mark the tenth anniversary of Third Ypres. Characteristically the weather threatened to delay completion. Heavy rain swept in from the northeast as the painters worked to engrave the last of the 54,900 names of officers and men with no known grave on the panels of the interior of the arch or beside the steps and in the loggias. But the gate was completed on time, and on Sunday, 24 July 1927, Field Marshal Viscount Plumer unveiled the memorial in the presence of King Albert and several thousand relatives of the dead. Buglers from the Somerset Light Infantry were the first to sound the Last Post beneath the arch. Pipers from the Scots Guards played ‘The Flowers of the Forest’, and Lord Plumer sought to hearten the bereaved: ‘Now it can be said of each one in whose honour we are assembled here today, “He is not missing. He is here.” ’ King Albert also spoke, emphasizing that for four years the city of Ypres had stood at the very threshold of the British Empire. The novelty of radio allowed the occasion to be relayed to London by the one-year-old British Broadcasting Corporation. Monday’s Times, as well as reporting the deeply moving ceremony in fall, commented, ‘In view of the difficulties, the reception was good.’7
The reception accorded Blomfield’s masterpiece was, however, mixed. Thousands of bereaved relatives, sweethearts and close friends present that Sunday shed tears of anguished pride on seeing the name of a loved one incised on the panels. So did many other visitors who made individual pilgrimages to Ypres during the summer of 1927, when for two months after the unveiling the Last Post rang out each evening from beneath the arch. But some veterans were deeply unhappy. Many found their reflective memory rekindled only by the cemeteries and poppies. Siegfried Sassoon, who attended the ceremony on 24 July, went angrily back to Brussels and in a powerful poem deplored the consecrating of this ‘sepulchre of crime’.8 Others were affronted by what they considered the pompous grandeur of the memorial itself, feeling it was out of character with the rebuilt town that lay behind it.
There was criticism, too, at the failure to provide enough panels in the Menin Gate to include the full roll of 90,000 ‘no known grave’ names. For the United Kingdom dead, the panels showed only those killed before 15 August 1917. Some 34,000 further names of United Kingdom victims of the last 15 months of battle were inscribed on Sir Herbert Baker’s memorial boundary wall at Tyne Cot. Unlike the Canadians, the South Africans and Australians, the New Zealand government preferred to honour all of the Dominion’s ‘missing’ names with memorials close to where they fell, notably at Polygon Wood, Messines, Tyne Cot and neighbouring Gravenstafel.9
A year after the unveiling – on 8 August 1928 – the British Legion, the charity for ex-servicemen for which Earl Haig had worked tirelessly until his death in the previous January, organized the first, great, national pilgrimage to Ypres and the arc of surrounding cemeteries. It was a five-day event with 11,000 participants and culminated in a Sunday service at the Menin Gate attended by 20,000 people, which was again broadcast across the Channel. The Legion’s pilgrims included the Prince of Wales.
By now the craftsmen and gardeners of the Imperial War Graves Commission were bringing peace and dignity to the battle cemeteries created during the war itself. Uniform headstones, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and given slightly curved tops to relieve their severity, replaced the temporary wooden crosses of wartime; carefully trimmed lawns set among shrubs and plants suggested the serenity of an English country garden. A white Cross of Sacrifice, designed by Blomfield and bearing a bronze sword of salvation, presided over each cemetery. Some headstones showed the emblems of other faiths, notably the Star of David. ‘There are more than 150 burial places, 169 to be exact, within an area of less than 140 square kilometres or 54 square miles,’ Dr Marc Derez estimates. ‘One cemetery per square kilometre or three at least per square mile.’10 One of the smallest cemeteries, dating back to the earliest fighting, was on Ypres’s ramparts, shaded by trees above the waters of Vauban’s moat. The largest of British cemeteries in any theatre of war was on Tyne Cot, where Baker included three surviving German pillboxes in his colonnaded memorial wall. No lion was depicted here, as on the Menin Gate: instead, sculpted kneeling angels surmount the twin pavilions at either end of the wall, in mourning for the dead of Passchendaele.
In July 1931, Albert’s son, the future King Leopold III, inaugurated a memorial to the missing in the Armentières sector of the Front at Ploegsteert, only a short distance from the Franco-Belgian border. On it were inscribed more than 11,000 names, commemorating not only those killed around Ploegsteert but also some of the dead with no known grave from Loos, Aubers Ridge and Hazebrouck. These battlefields were well across the frontier; their dead were buried in Belgian Flanders because the authorities in Paris would allow the British only four memorials on French soil. Sir Gilbert Ledward’s open-rotunda design for the Ploegsteert Memorial made an interesting contrast to Baker’s classicism.
In central Ypres, northwest of the cathedral, one further shrine of remembrance for the war dead of the United Kingdom and the Dominions was completed more than a decade after the fighting ended. St George’s Memorial Church, designed by Blomfield in unmistakably Anglican style, was built in response to an appeal from Viscount French, made shortly before his death in May 1925, and warmly backed by the Ypres League. Lord Plumer laid the foundation stone immediately after unveiling the Menin Gate, and St George’s was dedicated on Good Friday, 1929. Soon brass plaques covered the walls or were inserted discreetly into the floor, commemorating by name the contribution of outstanding individuals and the tenacity of battalions, regiments or divisions. Fading regimental-colours standards hung above the outer aisles like banners of an order of chivalry. A new ‘must’ was added to the British pilgrim trail.
Despite the chronic uncertainties of the Irish problem between the wars, the province of Cork presented Ypres with a Celtic cross monument to the dead of the Munster Regiment, which was placed uniquely in the centre of the city, outside St Martin’s Cathedral. Not until 1998 did a single memorial commemorate the ‘thousands of young men from all parts of Ireland . . . who fought a common enemy’. On the eightieth anniversary of the Armistice, Queen Elizabeth II and President Mary McAleese unveiled a stone Peace Tower in a specially created park on Messines Ridge, and Catholics and Protestants alike solemnly repudiated ‘violence, aggression, intimidation, threats and unfriendly behaviour’. But another world war had been fought and Northern Ireland wracked by almost 30 years of bloodshed before such a pledge of peace could be made.
Apart from a Belgian war cemetery at Zonnebeke and a French cemetery south of Wieltje, most final burial places for other nationalities lay some distance from Ypres, making less impact on the prevailing landscape than did the British. The largest Belgian cemetery was set in the forest of Houthulst, some 7 miles north of Poelcapelle and east of Dixmude. There is also an attractively wooded cemetery at Keim, north of Dixmude, and others near Poperinghe and at Ramscapelle. Soldiers from the United States killed in August and September 1918 were buried in the Flanders Field American Cemetery at Waregem, beneath the first slopes of Mount Kemmel. The main French national cemetery at Kemmel dates from the early 1920s, but it was not until 1932 that Marshal Pétain unveiled the impressive winged figure that fronts the column on the hill above it. The French were slower at caring for graves in foreign fields than remembering the dead of their homeland; Pétain had inaugurated the massive and macabre Thiaumont Ossuaire on the ridge north of Verdun five years earlier, within weeks of the unveiling of the Menin Gate.
At first the German dead – more than 100,000 across Flanders – posed problems for the diplomats. In 1925, however, the Belgians agreed that the authorities in Berlin should assume responsibility for almost 700 small cemeteries in West Flanders. Work began on concentrating the burials at Langemarck and at Vladslo, some 3 miles east of Dixmude, or out at Menin, which with nearly 48,000 burials became the largest German cemetery. Hooglede, where only some 8,250 were interred, remained almost unchanged.
The legend of heroic sacrifice made by student volunteers in October 1914 gave Langemarck a special place in Nazi mythology, and when the enlarged cemetery was rededicated in 1932 brown-shirted SA were present in noisy numbers. Despite flowering shrubs and the colourful insignia of the German universities, Langemarck remains a sombre resting place, shaded by oaks. A mass grave holds the bones of 25,000 victims of the early fighting. Concrete from a German pillbox, dating back to 1916, was incorporated in the north wall. At the far end of the cemetery four sculptured figures stand at attention, mourning silhouettes against the western sky.
Belgian restrictions on the amount of land that might be covered by cemeteries for the vanquished made them necessarily compact. Even at Langemarck in some instances eight exhumed bodies were reburied in a single grave, with the names and rank of the dead (when known) recorded on a flat-stone marker shared with a second grave. Among the dead at Vladslo is 18-year-old Musketeer Peter Kollwitz, the son of a doctor and a sculptress from Berlin, who was killed on 23 October 1914 in a Belgian attack near neighbouring Esen; Kollwitz’s name is inscribed on a stone alongside 19 others. Originally he was buried in the small graveyard at Esen, but in 1956 the remains of all interred there were transferred to the larger cemetery. His mother’s tragically beautiful memorial, showing two parents on their knees in grief, was completed for Esen in 1932 but moved to its present site at the same time as the reburial.11 While the angels of Tyne Cot and the statuesque mourners of Langemarck pay tribute to soldiers who died fulfilling their sense of duty, Käthe Kollwitz’s creation perpetuates the human tragedy of families called to sacrifice the joys of parenthood and plunged thereafter into questioning sorrow over the futility of war.
Inevitably the spread of memorials and war cemeteries changed the character of Ypres. Gradually old landmarks were restored: St Martin’s Cathedral was ready by 1930, the city’s skyline improved by an elegant spire above what, in old photographs, always looks an unfinished tower. Work began in earnest on the Cloth Hall in 1928, and the belfry was unveiled in 1934, although it was another 33 years before the scaffolding finally came down around the Nieuwerk.
Post-war Ypres remained a market town, bustling with activity on Saturday mornings. But the most profitable industry was now a restrained tourism that, at least between the wars, avoided vulgarity. The devaluation of the Belgian franc in 1926, leading to a revised exchange rate favouring sterling, attracted more and more English visitors, at least until the slump of 1931; a further devaluation by 28 per cent in 1935 led to a second influx. The emphasis was focused on remembrance. From May 1929 the sounding of the Last Post by buglers under the Menin Gate became a nightly ceremony that was to continue until six days before the German army returned 11 years later. A Salient Museum opened in the basement of what had once been the Butcher’s Hall. Visitors who might have patronized a Belgian company were assured that only ‘bona-fide British ex-servicemen’ were employed as drivers and guides for the cars and charabancs of Blue Queens excursions. The Blue Queens were ambitious: they sought to boost Ypres’s hotels as centres for Belgium as a whole by offering daily excursions to Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges and every Thursday to Middelburg market, on the Dutch island of Walcheren. For purely holiday tourists, however, Ypres could never compete with the long line of resorts along the coast.12 Within the Salient the Blue Queens had as rivals Wipers Auto Services, also run by veterans, while other ex-officers were ready to drive visitors to particular battle-sites or cemeteries at 10 guineas for each journey – payable, no doubt, in sterling.
Most visitors came, however, as day trippers, whisked in by coach from Ostend and Blankenberge, Heist or Knokke. They saw the Menin Gate, watched the restoration of the Cloth Hall and were taken out to Tyne Cot cemetery and Hill 60, the most frequented battle-site. In the 1930s the coaches paused at Diksmuide (the Dutch name for wartime Dixmude) during their journey from the coast to remind their passengers of what many felt was the forgotten sector of the Western Front.
The French had honoured the Yser battles as early as January 1920, when the ruined town received the Croix de Guerre at the same time as Ypres. But political tension between Dutch-speakers and French-speakers delayed commemoration of the heroic struggle by the government in Brussels. At last, ten years after the Armistice, a Calvary dedicated to soldiers and civilians killed during the war was erected on the far side of the river south of Dixmude. Belgians from all parts of the kingdom travelled to the Calvary and knelt in prayer at a religious shrine blessed by the Catholic Church.
Flemish nationalists – most of them lower-middle-class Dutch-speakers from the smaller towns and villages – were far from satisfied. Even while the war was in progress, gravestones with specifically Flemish markings were replaced by standard stones with French inscriptions, a practice intensified after the return of peace. Resentment at continued discrimination against Flanders induced Dutch-speaking sympathizers to raise a large sum for the erection in 1930 of the IJzertoren, a 165-foot tower half a mile west of Dixmude. Architecturally the tower was a striking symbol, a huge Celtic-style cross solidly expressionist, anti-militarist in conception and dedicated to the Flemish war dead; the bodies of eight Flemish heroes were interred in the crypt. High on the IJzertoren the letters AVV-VVK stood out boldly: they comprised the initials of the nationalists’ fundamental pledge, ‘All for Flanders: Flanders for Christ’. Anyone heading down the N35 to Ypres could not fail to be impressed. Pan-Belgian pilgrimages to the Calvary declined. Each August, Flemish ex-servicemen’s associations gathered at the tower for ceremonies that began as tributes to the war dead but increasingly became strident protests at the failure of the government in Brussels to satisfy Flanders’s needs or defend Flemish interests.
The Flemish Question, particularly the language issue, plagued Belgian politics throughout the inter-war years. It was voiced more often at demonstrations or in the press than in parliament; Flemish nationalists, sitting under various labels, remained a fringe group in the chamber. Concessions were gradually wrung from a succession of 18 coalition governments, all except two headed by Catholic leaders. As early as 1921, Dutch alone was recognized as the language of administration in the Flemish provinces although, since the schooling of most civil servants had been in French, the law was difficult to enforce. The University of Ghent did indeed become fully Dutch speaking, as King Albert had promised in his speech from the throne, but not until 1930. Proposals for separate Dutch-speaking and francophone armies were abandoned, as inoperable and potentially divisive. At last in 1931–2 revised legislation clarified the status of Dutch as the recognized language of the Flemish provinces: in the old Salient, Ypres thereafter officially became Ieper, Passchendaele Passendale, the Menin Gate the Menenpoort and the Lille Gate the Rijselsepoort.
Despite his undoubted respect for democracy, King Albert kept a tight hold on foreign affairs and defence, although, in 1924, Flemish nationalists thwarted a proposed commercial treaty he favoured with France. In 1918–19 he was incensed with the Dutch over their relations with Germany during and after the war; he backed a bid by his foreign minister, Paul Hymans, to induce the victorious Great Powers to force Holland to cede the Dutch province of Limburg and the left bank of the Scheldt down to the sea in a general readjustment of frontiers. This policy was unrealistic: both Hymans and his king hoped to benefit from the adulation heaped on Albert and his suffering subjects in the first months of war. But there is no place in diplomacy for gratitude or sentiment. The realism of the Paris peacemakers came as a shock. ‘Has England forgotten August 1914?’ ran a banner of protest at a demonstration in Brussels.13 By the Treaty of Versailles, Belgium’s sole gains from the Great War were 400 sq miles of heavily forested land around Eupen and Malmédy, a mandate over Ruanda–Urundi (formerly in German East Africa) and a far smaller sum in reparations than Albert thought his kingdom merited. It was not finally paid for another six years.
Both the king and Hymans – foreign minister eight times down to March 1935 – were ready to jettison the old concept of neutrality, convinced that it had failed the nation in the pre-war crisis. Despite Albert’s lingering suspicion of France, the Belgians sought security by attachment to the new alliance system the French were building up in Europe, and in September 1920 a military agreement was concluded, remaining secret for more than a year. When, in 1923, Germany lagged behind in payment of Reparations, Belgian troops supported the French decision to occupy the Ruhr. Such close co-operation was always highly unpopular within Flanders. The policy came under severe strain after 1929 once the French began to build fortifications as a barrier against German aggression, for the proposed Maginot Line stopped short at the Belgian-Luxembourg frontier. Many Belgians argued that the new, purely defensive, role of the French army invited Germany at some future date to strike once more through their kingdom to outflank the Maginot Line. The anger of demonstrators on the Yser pilgrimage – anti-French, anti-militarist, anti-Brussels – reached such a pitch that it attracted attention abroad: was Belgium moving towards partition?
The king’s prestige continued to bind the nation together, but, in February 1934, Albert slipped and fell to his death while rock-climbing near Namur. He was succeeded by his eldest son, 32-year-old Leopold III, carefully groomed for the past 20 years for the responsibilities awaiting him but lacking his father’s worldly intelligence and moral courage. For most of the Great War, Prince Leopold had remained with his mother, brother and sister at the Villa Maskens in La Panne, less than 15 miles from the Yser Front. When he was 14 he was formally ‘presented’ in uniform to the 12th Infantry Regiment and crossed to England in 1917 to further his education at Eton, joining the Officers Training Corps at the college. A happy marriage in 1926 to the beautiful Princess Astrid of Sweden helped Leopold conquer a diffidence he showed in these early years, and the couple were popular in Brussels and Wallonia. Tragedy struck on 29 August 1935, a mere 17 months into the reign, while they were on holiday in Switzerland: Leopold was driving his car beside Lake Lucerne near Küssnacht when he apparently misjudged a bend in the road and crashed, killing Queen Astrid.
On recovering from his injuries the grief-stricken king buried himself in official duties, but he became increasingly dependent for advice on his military aide-de-camp, General Raoul van Overstraeten, who in 1917–18 had served on Albert’s staff at Furnes. In 1940, General Sir Alan Brooke thought Overstraeten an evil influence on the king, and General Montgomery agreed with him.14 In 1936, however, Overstraeten’s views seemed to Leopold to make good sense. Flemish nationalists, and the growing number of Catholic politicians shocked by the leftward swing of Paris politics, would be placated by cancellation of the 1920 agreement with France. Leopold could then commit Belgium to a treaty-free neutrality, and in relief parliament would accept increased taxes to complete the new, proudly Belgian, defensive line of hopefully impregnable forts, west of Maastricht, begun in Albert’s later years; Eben Emael, the key concrete and steel fortress, covering three vital bridges over the Albert canal north of Liège, already bristled with well-protected artillery. The end of the military accord with France was publicly announced on 6 March 1936. Significantly next morning Hitler defied the Treaty of Versailles and sent the German army eastwards into the demilitarized Rhineland.
In May a general election showed a swing to the right, with a newly formed fascist party receiving almost an eighth of the votes cast nation-wide. The chief of staff General Édouard van den Bergen, a Francophile at heart, still hoped to keep in touch with the French Ministry of War, but for the moment Overstraeten’s star was in the ascendant, and little heed was given to van den Bergen’s views. The king pressed ahead with the policy inaugurated earlier in the year. In a speech in October 1936 he looked back to the situation in 1914: he declared it was now time for Belgium to prepare, not for a coalition war against Germany, but for crises in which powerful defences would let the kingdom remain as ‘unflinchingly’ neutral as ‘the Netherlands and Switzerland’.15 Two months later military conscription was extended from 12 to 17 months, and work was speeded up on the Albert canal defence line. The Brialmont doctrine was, it seemed, back in favour.
On 13 October 1937, Germany gave an assurance to Brussels that the Führer would respect Belgium’s neutrality. King Leopold believed his Belgium could serve Europe as a neutral arbitrator, a role he strove personally to assert in the last month of peace and again after the conquest and partition of Poland a few weeks later, on both occasions with no success. Less sanguine observers of German policy in Paris and London suspected a resurrection of the original Schlieffen Plan and in January 1939 suggested informal talks to settle a policy should the Netherlands be invaded, but the response from Brussels was adamant: no French troops would be allowed passage through Belgium whatever happened in the north. Mobilization of the Belgian army began on 25 August 1939; by now it included two embryonic motorized cavalry divisions, but no more than 10 tanks. Ten days later King Leopold assumed the responsibilities of commander-in-chief, having approved a declaration of neutrality on the previous day. After inspecting the defences he was as confident of Eben Emael’s impregnability as were the French generals of the Maginot Line.
Others shared their king’s confidence. Three months earlier, on Whitsunday afternoon, a veteran of the Yser battles fell into conversation with an Englishman and his 12-year-old son on the seafront at Ostend. The Belgian recalled the water-logged trenches around Dixmude and the grim fighting across the river in 1918. ‘But it won’t happen again,’ he said proudly. ‘We’ve fine forts along the canal behind our frontier. If they come next time, they’ll never get through.’