Issue 28 - Summer 2015

Embattled Belgium: From the Revolt of The Netherlands to the First World War

Hugh Dunthorne samples a small selection of the Library’s extensive collection of books on the history of the Netherlands.

The invasion of neutral Belgium by German forces on 4 August 1914, and the subsequent military occupation of the country, was the immediate cause of Britain’s entry into the First World War. It had the effect of making Belgium’s fate a matter of immediate concern to British people in a way that is now difficult to appreciate. The reasons for this public concern were partly strategic and diplomatic, to do with the conduct of the war and the international treaty-making that preceded it. Under the Treaty of London of 1839, Britain (with other European powers) was a guarantor of the independence and neutrality of the young Belgian state, and thus had an obligation to come to its aid if that independence was violated. But there were other reasons for Britain’s concern over the plight of its southern neighbour. One of these was social, as more than a quarter of a million Belgians fleeing the German advance found refuge in Britain – the largest influx of its kind in our history.

There were literary reasons for Britain’s sympathy with Belgium, too, as from 1915 onwards scores of books and pamphlets – many of them now to be found on the History and French Literature shelves of The London Library, as well as in its Pamphlet Collection – told the story of Belgium’s suffering ‘under the German yoke’ , and appealed to allies and neutral powers for help.

The authors of these wartime publications – drawn almost exclusively from Belgium’s French-speaking minority – became familiar names in Britain. They included national figures such as Cardinal- Archbishop Désiré Mercier of Mechlin, a distinguished philosopher and teacher. After the Belgian government’s retreat into exile at Le Havre, he remained in Belgium where he assumed an entirely new role as the effective leader of his country’s civilian population and its international spokesman.

His pastoral letter of December 1914, Patriotism and Endurance – published first as a pamphlet in 1915 and later in a collection of the Archbishop’s wartime writings, The Voice of Belgium (1917) – was outspoken in denying the legitimacy of the occupying regime and in condemning the brutality that had accompanied the movement of German forces westwards. Between August and October 1914 some 5,500 unarmed men, women and children had been killed, in reprisal for supposedly hindering the German advance, and around 20,000 buildings had been burned down, among them much of the historic centre of Louvain, including the university library and all its contents.

Pierre Paulus, Flight, 1914, depicting Belgian civilians fleeing from German forces. A postcard reproduction of this picture was sold in Britain to raise money for the Belgian Soldiers’ Clothes Charity. © DACS 2015.

If Archbishop Mercier did much to win support in Britain for Belgium’s cause, so also did the writings of officers in the Belgian armed forces. Commandant Adrien de Gerlache de Gomery’s Belgium in War Time, translated by Bernard Miall (1917), is a fine example of the genre. Broad in scope, dealing with social as well as military aspects of the conflict, it is engagingly written, clear in structure and well documented, including in its documentation many of the author’s own photographs. It also paid tribute to ‘our brave king’ Albert, who led the Belgian army in the defence of Antwerp and subsequently on the River Yser line in the far north-west of the country. The heroic standing of the young king, ‘the soul of our resistance, ’ was almost as high in Britain as in Belgium itself.

By the time de Gerlache’s book appeared, leading Belgian academics were adding their voices to the literary war effort. One of them, the scientist Jean Massart, charted the rapid expansion of underground printing in Belgium from 1915 onwards, a development unmatched elsewhere in occupied Europe. Massart’s La presse clandestine dans la Belgique occupée (1917) was an anthology of newspaper articles as well as a narrative, and offered interesting sidelights on methods of distribution.

The cover of the French edition (sadly absent from the shortened English translation of 1918, also in the Library) reproduced the famous front page from La Libre Belgique, the best known of the secret newspapers, from June 1915, showing the Prussian Governor-General of Belgium, Baron von Bissing, apparently consulting the same newspaper. According to the picture’s caption, ‘our dear governor’ was ‘sick of the lies printed by the official press’ and was relying instead on a paper that told him the truth about the war. As it was intended to do, this lampoon infuriated the German authorities, who increased to 75,000 francs (£3,000) the reward offered for information about the paper’s editors. But the secret was kept – not least by Massart himself – and La Libre Belgique continued its subversive role.

Finally, and just as influential in Britain, there were the impassioned writings and speeches of leading Belgian poets and playwrights such as Maurice Maeterlinck, Émile Verhaeren and Émile Cammaerts. Shortly before publishing his Belgian Poems: chants patriotiques in a bilingual edition in 1915, with English translations by Tita Brand-Cammaerts, Cammaerts had begun to collaborate with Edward Elgar, who set three of his patriotic songs to music. The earliest of these collaborations, ‘Carillon’ , evoked the ruined bell-towers of three of Belgium’s ‘martyr cities’ , Aarschot, Dinant and Termonde. The piece was an immediate success, received with ‘patriotic fervour’ at its first performance in London in December 1914, and in the spring of 1915 it was taken on a concert tour of eight British cities to raise funds for Belgian charities.

At the same time, Cammaerts’ fellowpoet Verhaeren was addressing enthusiastic audiences across England and Wales, urging ever closer ties of friendship between Britain and Belgium. When soon afterwards Verhaeren’s last collection of poetry appeared under the title Les ailes rouges de la guerre (The red wings of war) (1916), that work too became famous. One poem in particular, ‘La patrie aux soldats morts’ , still retains for francophones the poignancy that Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ has in the English-speaking world.

The destruction of Belgian towns and villages during the summer and autumn of 1914 was not unprecedented. For centuries in this embattled part of the Low Countries – ‘the cockpit of Europe’ , as it has been called – war had destroyed lives and buildings as, in many parts of the world, it still does. This dark subject, the endlessly destructive relationship between war and urban life, was chosen in 2014 by the M-Museum Leuven and the Catholic University of Leuven (to give the city its modern spelling) as their joint offering to commemorate the outbreak of the First World War. An exhibition was mounted and a book published to accompany it: edited by Jo Tollebeek and Eline van Assche, Ravaged: Art and Culture in Time of Conflict (2014) has recently been added to the Art shelves of the Library. As we would expect, one of the contributors to this volume, Mark Derez, retells the story of the ‘burning of Leuven’ in August 1914. But the book as a whole looks much further afield, pursuing its recurring theme across continents and from the ancient world to the wars of today.

The sense of history repeating itself, which anyone reading this book must feel, was also experienced by those who witnessed the havoc of 1914 at first hand. There were, after all, historians among Belgium’s wartime authors, so it is not surprising that some of their accounts should have echoed earlier episodes in the country’s war-torn history. The ‘German fury in Belgium’ , as one journalist termed it, recalled the ‘Spanish fury’ more than three centuries before, when in 1576 unpaid soldiers of Philip II of Spain had sacked the great Flemish city of Antwerp. Like the German invasion of 1914, the earlier occupation of the Netherlands by the Spanish Army of Flanders had provoked a European conflict – the war, or series of wars, now usually called the Revolt of the Netherlands (1568–1648). It had caused thousands from Flanders to flee the bloodshed, many seeking refuge in southern England. As in 1914 to 1918, the Revolt produced a substantial war literature of pamphlets and contemporary histories.

Published in the late sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, these works are now rare, so the Library is fortunate in possessing among its antiquarian collections more than a dozen of them, all now kept in the Safe. Some of the earliest contemporary histories of the Revolt were written by Netherlanders living in exile, such as Historia Belgica by the London-based merchant Emanuel van Meteren. (The Library does not possess this work in its original Latin edition, published in 1598, but does have two early translations: an English one by Edward Grimeston, printed in 1608, and a French edition of 1618.)

Like the wartime literature of 1914 to 1918, these early accounts were fiercely patriotic in tone. Starting work on his Nederlantsche oorloghen (Netherlands wars) during the 1590s – a copy of which is also owned by the Library – the Utrecht notary Pieter Bor aimed to show that the Revolt of the Netherlands had been caused by the oppressive and unconstitutional rule of the Spanish Governor-General, Alva. The Netherlanders, in other words, had taken up arms in a just war of self-defence. Scattered throughout the book, the vivid engravings of Frans Hogenberg reinforced the point, contrasting the orderly conduct of forces loyal to the Prince of Orange with the ruthlessness of Spanish soldiers as they razed towns and murdered their inhabitants.

Later narratives, by Hugo Grotius and Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, adopted a more dispassionate approach, influenced by the famously impartial History of his Own Time by the great French historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou. A fine poet and playwright before he turned in later life to history, Hooft wrote his Nederlandsche historiën (Netherlands histories), first published in 1642, in a concise and powerful prose style that brought out the drama of the Revolt and the fortitude of the Prince of Orange; the Library has the third edition of 1677. At the same time Hooft was even-handed in his judgements, pointing out that both sides had been guilty of atrocities and that the Spanish rulers of the Low Countries were capable of acting with magnanimity as well as brute force.

A similar objectivity can be found in accounts of the conflict written from the Spanish or Catholic point of view, by authors such as the Jesuit Famiano Strada and the papal nuncio Guido Bentivoglio. As a diplomat, Bentivoglio understood the international dimensions of the Revolt of the Netherlands better than anyone. In his Della Guerra di Fiandra (The War of Flanders), published in 1637, he explained that the sheer ‘bulk’ and geographical spread of the Spanish empire had involved the King of Spain in commitments that went far beyond his limited military and financial resources. As a result he was forced repeatedly to divert men and money away from the Low Countries, leaving the Army of Flanders ‘in a forlorn condition’ and unable to suppress the rebellion there. The Library has a 1637 edition of Bentivoglio’s book, and a 1678 translation by Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth.

Engraving of Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, from the Library’s 1677 copy of his Nederlandsche historiën (Netherlands histories), first published in 1642.

In their original languages as well as in English translation, these works circulated quite widely in Britain. It is interesting to discover that the Library’s copy of Carlos Coloma’s well-informed Las guerras des los Estados Baxos (The wars of the States of the Low Countries), published in 1625, was once owned by William and John Paston, seventeenth-century descendants of the well-known Norfolk family. What is more, these contemporary histories of the Revolt of the Netherlands influenced the writing of history in this country. Having read Bentivoglio’s history in Italian, Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon, took this ‘excellent’ and instructive work as a model for his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1807, H. England).

The early publications about the Revolt influenced political thought and action, too. The best-known and most often quoted of the contemporary histories, Grimeston’s translation of van Meteren’s Historia Belgica, which was issued under Grimeston’s own name as A generall historie of the Netherlands (1608), provided English readers not only with a detailed account of the Revolt but also, thanks to the documents and tracts incorporated into the narrative, with arguments and precedents justifying resistance to tyranny. They were arguments soon put to use in Britain’s own political struggles – in the civil wars of the 1640s and again during the Revolution of 1688–9. By 1700 the Netherlands had come to be seen

as ‘the mother nation of liberty’ , in the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury’s phrase. To Americans during the War of Independence they were ‘our great example’ . As the story of the Revolt was retold and popularised in the nineteenth century, it took its place as one of the key chapters in the history of modern liberty. No wonder, then, that this struggle was still in the minds of the people of Flanders and the other provinces of Belgium as they fought once more to defend their liberty in the European War of 1914 to 1918.

The books discussed in this article are of course only a fraction of the Library’s extensive holdings on the history and culture of the Netherlands. Anyone in search of a broader view of these collections should browse the History shelves H. Belgium and H. Holland, as well as the equivalent sections in Topography, T. Belgium and T. Holland. They should consult not only contemporary histories of the Low Countries – often vivid narratives written by those who witnessed or lived through the events they were recounting – but also the arguably more impartial accounts written by later historians, including historians of the present day. It is worth noting that far more historical works on the Netherlands are now published in English than was the case a generation ago. All these writings have a story to tell about the experience of the Low Countries in peace as well as war, and across many centuries. .