Brain Fever - Assorted Thoughts and Articles

"Tough guys don't give up!" (Onkruid vergaat niet)

November 9th 2018 (1)

This weekend marks the 100 years anniversary of the Armistice that ended the first World War.

Sunday morning at 11 AM, I will pay my respects to a fallen generation during a remembrance ceremony in the Toronto beaches neighborhood. Last year, my fiancée and I joined hundreds for Toronto's main gathering in front of Old City Hall. It was cold. Even with thick coats and cradling a hot chocolate in our hands, wearing Hudson's Bay Team Canada gloves, we were still cold. A few feet next to us, stood a veteran. Insignias and decorations told us he had served in the Korean War, which made him at the very least 80 years old. He stood, leaning slightly on his cane, wearing just his jacket – not even a scarf – and saluted the troops that marched through the street. Nothing would have stopped that gentlemen to be out there. He made our discomfort from the cold seem very trivial.

In Canada, unlike my native Belgium, Remembrance Day commemorates all those who have served and continue to serve. Back home, it is very much Armistice Day, and, unfortunately, many people don't seem to care that much about it anymore. In Canada these days, you'll see poppies pinned on jackets and coats everywhere. I've always felt that people in the Commonwealth puts more stock in tradition and history than Belgians. You hardly see a poppy on a coat in Belgium. They seem to have forgotten that The Great War was thought on our land. Those trenches, and later those poppies that blew between the crosses row on row, shaped the fields of Flanders.

For me personally, November 11th is a day to remember one of my heroes.

It might be funny, even a little weird, for me to call Jean Louis Theuns one of my heroes: I never met him and know little about him. But what I do know is more than enough. He was my great-grandfather.

Photos that I have from Jean Louis as a young adult, show an energetic man with a boyish, even playfully mischievous, smile. As was custom at the time, as a 20-year-old he enlisted in the Belgian army in 1911 for his mandatory three years of military service. At this time, he was in love with a girl called Maria Dewaelheyns, her friends called her Marieke. She was a seamstress in service of a local Baroness. They got engaged before he left for the barracks.

As he was nearing the end of his service, and eager to be reunited with and marry his Marieke, the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serb anarchist Gavrilo Princip. The subsequent declaration of war on the Kingdom of Serbia by Austria-Hungary was the first domino to fall of many that would drag an entire continent – and following that the world – into bloody war.

Just over a month after the assassination, on August 4th, the German Army broke the treaty of London, which was supposed to guarantee Belgium's neutrality, and advanced into the little country. Jean Louis was one of 117,000 men sent to stop the invasion. The vastly outnumbered and ill-equipped Belgian Army resisted the Germans longer than expected and thwarted their plans of capturing Paris and encircling the French forces. Nevertheless, by October the Germans had all but conquered the small country, pushing the remnants of the Belgian forces back to a narrow strip of land between the coast line and the river Yser. This is where the Belgians were finally able to halt the German advance and dug trenches to defend the last 5% of Belgian territory still under Belgian control.

By this time the British Army had also joined the war, as the United Kingdom – and by expansion also the British dominion of Canada – declared war on Germany the day they invaded Belgium.

Already before the war, but increasingly as fighting over Europe broke out, thousands upon thousands of young men enlisted on all sides. Fired on by propaganda, and with the belief that they could settle this conflict easily, a whole generation took up arms.