Bedlam in Belgium!

Route: Antwerp to Lommel. Distance about 50km

Well, I’m out! That’s right kids I packed up and headed out by train yesterday from Calais to Antwerp. By the time I got to Antwerp, it was dark, so I hoteled it. I can’t tell you how lame I felt for sleeping in a bed and taking a shower. Now I’m cleaner than all of my gear! No worries though because I rode out to Lommel, Belgium today, so I’m back on the bike and back in the tent, only this time the camping is way better!
I wanted to relate, before I forget, a couple of folks who I met on the train yesterday. It was good to get on, and find out that other people shared a lot of the same frustrations in France as I did. Let me just say that when I wrote that last entry, I was tired, very tired. In fact, that kind of treatment, on top of sleeping in a tent in the cold, wore me down to the point where I was falling asleep standing up almost.
I have heard veterans describe similar experiences during combat. You are so tired all of the time and you are having to make quick, and often life and death, decisions all of the time on the edge of exhaustion. You sack out whenever and wherever you can. Once you hit the ground, you are lights out.
This kind of tired, although it in no way compares to being in a war, is what I was starting to feel like during my last couple of days in France. It was an ordeal rather than a vacation. In retrospect, that’s what I wanted it to be. I wanted to put myself through something hard like that so see if I could make it. I feel like I did, but time will tell.
When I pushed through the drizzled headwind and finally entered Calais, my heart rose to find a Holiday Inn right downtown. I entered, and asked if the counter woman spoke English, in English, because I had had it by then. She said yes very politely. I almost felt bad. Then, she directed me to the train station and let me use the toilet without paying. This is a big deal in France.
The train station was just up the street, across from a huge clock tower from around the early 1800’s attached to a much older nave from a now missing cathedral. It was early middle ages, and the stone was blackened by centuries of sea weather. I wondered whether it was English because for a long time they had claimed, and actually ruled Calais.
The train station was definitely French. Amongst all the craziness of getting my ticket and getting them to explain what the ticket meant (a process that took an hour and three turns in the line) I met another fellow on the Giant touring bike with front and rear panniers, a sleeping bag and a towel perched on the rear rack for drying in the sun. This is the same basic setup I have, minus the front panniers. We saw each other in the line, and I gave a thumbs up. The guy looked at me funny, so I put my head down and moved on. I’ve been awkward moments like this possible for the viewing public since 1977, but this one was some of my best work.
Later, as I was rearranging my stuff and watching for the supposed number of my train that would appear 20 minutes before my train left, he came up and said hello. He was asian, spoke very little English, but kept saying “Demo” between his phrasing. I asked if he was Japanese, in Nihongo, as somehow it’s the one language I’ve managed to pick up along the way.
His eyes lit up and he opened up a flood of Japanese that I hadn’t the slightest chance of following. He probably hadn’t spoken to anyone in Japanese for God knows how long. He laughed when I asked where he was from in Japan, what his name was and if he was healthy in that order. These are the first phrases they teach you in Japanese 101. After that he slowed his role enough for me to follow, and we had a conversation in half-japanese/half-english for an hour.
He felt the weight of my bike, I tested his. The front panniers definitely balance the bike better, but I’ve always liked having the majority of the weight behind me, with enough weight up front to keep the bike from tipping over backwards. This way, you are pulling the gear uphill on fixed rear frame mount, rather than a steerable front fork mount. On these steep grades in Europe, I’ve really appreciated not having to worry about too much weight on my steering.
Anyway, we discussed the finer points of bikes, and touring. It turns out that he has been on the road for 2 months already, sleeping under the awnings of grocery stores, and living off of food in dumpsters. Some people would call that being homeless, but somehow when you add a bike into the mix it’s not. He was heading back to Nagasaki, his hometown which he described by making a big explosion sound and puffing out his arms from his body in the motion of a mushroom cloud. I felt guilty somehow.
His manner was jovial, and he was smiling and laughing a lot. He told me he wanted to go to Britain next, but he had to return to Japan or they wouldn’t let him back in because he overstayed his visa. Either that or they wouldn’t let him into Britain because of something having to do with his fingerprints, which I never really got a real explanation for.
Never the less, he was happy to be there, and I thought if he’s happy after two months of living like a bum, what do I have to complain about? I’ve at least been getting showers. Also, I thought about how isolated he must feel. He spoke absolutely no French or German, and he spoke only very broken English. I can only wonder how he stayed sane. Or maybe, he wasn’t that sane. That would certainly explain the random laughter. Never did get his name.
On the train, in between wrestling my huge bike between loads of students returning to school, I got to talking with a couple from Austria on their way back home from London. Maximilian and Anna. Anna had some sort of eye infection that she had acquired in the UK, so they were going back home early and going to the doctor. I backed away slowly as much as I could over the course of our conversation. I don’t think they noticed.
We talked for most of the ride to Lille about World War Two. Max is very interested in this history as both of his Grandfather’s were in the war. Of course, they were Nazi’s, but as he pointed out “so was every educated German at that time.”, by which I think he meant, anyone who wanted to make a living doing anything other than digging ditches had to be a member of the party.
One of his Grandfathers had disappeared on the Eastern Front, and the other had been a General in charge of Odessa, which was a super-secret German spy ring akin to Mi6 or the CIA at the time. He survived the war, only to die under somewhat “mysterious” circumstances of an apparent suicide only a day after writing a letter to his wife saying that he couldn’t wait to return home and be done with whatever it was he was doing. It sounds like a perfect Ian Fleming setup to me.
As I talked about my trip and my journey to find the places where my Grandad had fought, he brightened up s we discussed the places where our grandparents had been. He knew of the Ardennes Forest campaign, which we call the Battle of the Bulge. He knew how rough it was during that battle, and he was impressed that Grandpa had lived through it.
Of course, very few Germans who went into that meat grinder ever came out. They were all told that this was the climactic battle between good and evil, evil of course being the Americans. There would be no surrender. In fact, the standing orders for any German soldier surrendering to the Americans, or Ami’s as they called us, was that he would be shot on site. If they couldn’t find him, they would shoot his family back home for being traitors. There is evidence that this was actually carried out on a number of occasions. It’s a miracle that any Germans surrendered at all given this.
I thought about the difference between this time and 65 years ago. How much things had changed. There we were talking casually on a train about a war in which we were enemies. We talked frankly about decisions made like the Warsaw Pact and how that affected Europe so badly for so long. We discussed how it must have felt to be a Nazi after the war. He mentioned how horrible most of those people felt for having been part of something so tragic.
65 years ago we would have shot each other on site. Failing that, maybe we would have pulled knives and gone hand to hand. Ultimately, one of us would have killed the other. There would have been no talking, no discussing the finer points of world politics. It would simply have been death in its purest form. I wonder, did Grandpa ever have to do something like that? Is that one of the reasons why he never talked about the war?
As I approach the area where he went under his first fire, I notice how beautiful a landscape it is. It’s covered with deciduous forests alive with deer and horse farms. The people have re-built a new country after the devastation passed through. They thought about things like integrated traffic patterns, and sustainable housing before any of those were terms on some architects desk under the “memorize what this means” file.
I cycled through this land alive with ripe apples, pears, fruitstands, cute girls riding bikes, and beer gardens seemingly on every corner. It’s hard to imagine what it must have looked like at this time of year in 1944. The easiest thing for me to do is track the destruction through reverse logic, i.e. everything new is built after the war. That means it’s either a suburb built on what used to be farmland, or new buildings in ancient towns that were flattened.
The later is most usually the case. Baring a few notable exceptions like churches, some pubic buildings and ancient structures like old city gates, everything that it is in these little towns is post-war. Roscoe Blunt in his memoir “Foot Soldier”, talks about hiking through these towns one after the other, and not knowing you are in a town because everything is rubble. The street patterns that I cycled through today no doubt match those of the original villages, but the built work is as new as America.
It’s eerie in a way to see this in a land as ancient as Central Europe. After all, it was here that Caesar’s army defeated the Germanic Tribes and settled for good and all who held over the land west of the Rhine. Here Charlemagne rode his cavalry to victory over the former Viking settlements, reclaiming the land for Christendom before being crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800CE. Here the mighty war of 1914-1918 was fought to the tune of over 3 million soldiers bled out in these trees and fields. It’s as if all of that is wiped clean by the total destruction of World War Two.
Tomorrow I will finally meet up with Niek Hendrix. His father is from in Ospel, Holland, when my Grandpa’s unit liberated the place as part of an offensive action against a German counter attack in an area called the Peel Marshes. It’s a flat land in Limberge Province, Holland about 30 km to the NW of where I am now. It’s crisscrossed with levies and canals, and is windswept but fertile farm country. A lot of the cheese that we eat owes it’s origins to this part of the world, including Cheddar. No it wasn’t invented in California in the 1970’s.
I’m anxious to see the places where Grandpa first joined his unit as a replacement. I really hope that I feel something standing there. Grandpa always used phrases like “fracas” and “little dust up” in his letters home when he talked about the battles he had been in. Here in the Peel Marshes, his division was ordered to clear a section of land west of Meuse River. When he joined the 48th AIB, he was assigned to CCA (Combat Command A) as a 2nd Lt. They had just been involved in a horribly misguided attack on the city of Overloon, Holland during which most of the guys in charge of the unit were killed or wounded, including the Lt.
Literally two days after this massive blowout, Grandpa comes in to try and “lead” these guys who have just all seen their buddies get there faces blown off. The men all new and trusted eachother, and they didn’t know this new shavetail Lt. He would have had to earn their trust and respect. This is one of the hardest things to do in life.
Grandpa didn’t have to wait long, because the Germans launched a counterattack across their lines within 10 days of him taking over the platoon. In some ways this was the best thing that could have happened because he didn’t have to wait around in some rear area drilling his troops and fighting boredom. He was thrown right into the thick of some of the worst fighting in the ETO. He didn’t have to think about how to earn the respect of his unit, he had to think more about how to survive himself, as well as, how to get his men through in one piece.
Sitting here in my cozy tent with my wine, cheese and computer, it’s hard to imagine what that must have been like. It was this time of year, and the reports do say it was rainy, just like now. The land couldn’t have been much different then, except that now where burning and destroyed buildings were, now stand clean new ones.
He would probably have had a tent as well, but he makes several references in his letters about being in foxholes when they are in the line. There is no quicker way to earn the respect of those you are expected to lead than to share in their burdens, and partake of their suffering. This, and never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn’t do yourself. He would have been thinking about these things, as well as his new wife and his future waiting for him back in Seattle, as he shivered in his foxhole on a rainy fall night in Belgium like this one.
In one letter, he tells the story of him and one of his sergeants sitting in a foxhole trying to remember a psalm but not being able to. He tells grandma that he asked for a new prayer book from the chaplain because his, along with all of his gear, dress uniforms, winter clothing, and (most importantly) pictures of grandma, have been “lost” to the Germans.
There is only one reason why two men in their 20’s would sit in a foxhole and try to remember a psalm. They were probably under shell fire from German artillery. It was a well known fact that the Germans had the absolute best artillery in the world at that time. Their 88mm field gun, which could also be used as an antiaircraft weapon simply by pointing it up, was a very powerful and accurate weapon. The saying of the day that the Germans could put an 88 “in your back pocket”
Roscoe Blunt talks about this as well in his book. He discusses how the muzzle velocity of the shell was so fast that by the time you heard it, it was already over you head, unless you are standing right in it’s path. This is because you can hear the sonic boom ahead of the shell as it approaches, hence the expression “you always here the one with your number on it.”
One of the favorite things for the Germans to do was sight in a bunch of artillery onto a concentrated spot on the American lines and fire a short sharp barrage lasting anywhere from 5-10 minutes. This would definitely do some damage. Then they would wait 20 minutes, or just long enough for us to get out of our holes and start trying to deal with wounded, before unleashing a much longer barrage hoping to catch people out in the open where their shells would have more effect.
Blunt talks about what it is like to be in one of these. The “soul consuming noise” of such an attack is more than a lot of men could deal with. Blunt himself had to be removed from the line on two occasions for shell shock, the standard treatment of which was a shower and some food for 2 days.
Can you imagine that moment when the shelling stops, and you’ve made it through somehow, but the guy in the next hole has had a leg blown off and is screaming for his mom. You can’t go and help him because you know the Germans are going to start shelling as soon as they see someone, anyone, move from their foxhole. Still, they guy is dying, and if you don’t get over there, tie off his leg, and give him some morphine, he will die screaming over the course of several minutes while being completely lucid the entire time.
This was what was meant by holding the line. You sat there, usually in plain site of the Germans, and got killed. When a certain number of men died, they sent up new ones to take there place. When those died, they sent new ones in a seemingly never-ending loop.
When Grandpa says that he wants a prayer book because of a moment in a foxhole with his Sergeant, I picture the two of them huddled together in the very bottom of a muddy hole getting shelled for days at a time while their men all around them are having there guts blown out. The noise, the sights, and the confusion must have been enough to make anyone religious.
Ok, well, that’s all for tonight. I hope the end wasn’t too depressing there… It is partly about the war, and that is mostly what I’m here to see. I can’t wait to get into that Jeep tomorrow! It will at least be a welcome change to the bike.
Thanks once again for the kind words, and the comments. Keep ‘em coming man! I do read them, and I am now in a land of more frequent internet! Thank God for Belgium!
Peace.