
My family and I went out for supper that night. In Cape Town. I was in the mood for stories and after we ordered I told my kids how WWI started.
In 1914 there were two power blocks in Europe. There was the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary and on the other side were the Allied Powers of Britain, France, Russia and Italy.
There was no love lost between the two camps and on June 28, 1914 a Serbian assassin killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo.
Austria blamed Serbia for the assassination which was motivated by fierce nationalistic fever in Bosnia.
Austria made demands to Serbia which they gave in to, except one. On July 28, 1914 Austria declared war against Serbia.
Russia declared war against Austria. On August 1, Germany in turn declared war against Russia. France mobilised against Germany in support of its allies and on August 3, Germany declared war against France.
Germany invaded the neutral nation of Belgium before it set its sights on France. This event lead to the British declaring war against Germany on August 4.
The lines were drawn and World War I had begun.
On the web-site eyewitnesstohistory.com I came across this amazing account. I read it to my kids.
“Richard Harding Davis was an American newspaper reporter and witnessed the German army’s march through the city [of Brussels in Belgium]. We join his account as he sits at a boulevard cafe waiting for the German arrival:
‘The change came at ten in the morning. It was as though a wand had waved and from a fete-day on the Continent we had been wafted to London on a rainy Sunday. The boulevards fell suddenly empty. There was not a house that was not closely shuttered. Along the route by which we now knew the Germans were advancing, it was as though the plague stalked. That no one should fire from a window, that to the conquerors no one should offer insult,
Burgomaster Max sent out as special constables men he trusted. Their badge of authority was a walking-stick and a piece of paper fluttering from a buttonhole. These, the police, and the servants and caretakers of the houses that lined the boulevards alone were visible.
At eleven o’clock, unobserved but by this official audience, down the Boulevard Waterloo came the advance-guard of the German army. It consisted of three men, a captain and two privates on bicycles. Their rifles were slung across their shoulders, they rode unwarily, with as little concern as the members of a touring-club out for a holiday.
Behind them so close upon each other that to cross from one sidewalk to the other was not possible, came the Uhlans [cavalry], infantry, and the guns. For two hours I watched them, and then, bored with the monotony of it, returned to the hotel. After an hour, from beneath my window, I still could hear them; another hour and another went by. They still were passing.
Boredom gave way to wonder. The thing fascinated you, against your will, dragged you back to the sidewalk and held you there open-eyed. No longer was it regiments of men marching, but something uncanny, inhuman, a force of nature like a landslide, a tidal wave, or lava sweeping down a mountain. It was not of this earth, but mysterious, ghostlike. It carried all the mystery and menace of a fog rolling toward you across the sea.
The German army moved into Brussels as smoothly and as compactly as an Empire State express. There were no halts, no open places, no stragglers. For the grayautomobiles and the gray motorcycles bearing messengers one side of the street always was kept clear; and so compact was the column, so rigid the vigilance of the file-closers, that at the rate of forty miles an hour a car could race the length of the column and need not stop – for never did a single horse or man once swerve from its course.
All through the night, like a tumult of a river when it races between the cliffs of a canyon, in my sleep I could hear the steady roar of the passing army. And when early in the morning I went to the window the chain of steel was still unbroken. It was like the torrent that swept down the Connemaugh Valley and destroyed Johnstown.
This was a machine, endless, tireless, with the delicate organization of a watch and the brute power of a steam roller. And for three days and three nights through Brussels it roared and rumbled, a cataract of molten lead. The infantry marched singing, with their iron-shod boots beating out the time.
They sang Fatherland, My Fatherland. Between each line of song they took three steps. At times 2000 men were singing together in absolute rhythm and beat. It was like blows from giant pile-drivers. When the melody gave way the silence was broken only by the stamp of iron-shod boots, and then again the song rose. When the singing ceased the bands played marches. They were followed by the rumble of the howitzers, the creaking of wheels and of chains clanking against the cobblestones, and the sharp, bell-like voices of the bugles.
More Uhlans followed, the hoofs of their magnificent horses ringing like thousands of steel hammers breaking stones in a road; and after them the giant siege-guns rumbling, growling, the mitrailleuses [machine guns] with drag-chains ringing, the field-pieces with creaking axles, complaining brakes, the grinding of the steel-rimmed wheels against the stones echoing and re-echoing from the house front. When at night for an instant the machine halted, the silence awoke you, as at sea you wake when the screw stops.
For three days and three nights the column of gray, with hundreds of thousands of bayonets and hundreds of thousands of lances, with gray transport wagons, grayammunition carts, gray ambulances, gray cannon, like a river of steel, cut Brussels in two.’”
References: Richard Harding Davis’ account appears in: Downey, Fairfax, Richard Harding Davis: His Day (1933); Keegan, John, The First World War (1999).’ (All quoted from Eyewitness to History)
Three evenings ago I was sitting in a Cape Town restaurant with my family and I read this to them. My wife remarked that the account is biblical in proportions.
“That’s my point”, I told her. ”It is biblical in proportion and the stories of World War I and World War II moves one.”
As I said, I was in the mood for story telling. We just got our food and as everybody started with their meals, I started to tell another great war story.
The story about Major John McCrae, also from the Great War.
Major John McCrae was a veteran doctor who served in the Anglo Boer war in South Africa. In 1915, during WWI he was stationed in Ypres, Belgium.
Here the 1st Field Artillery Brigade was engaged in a terrible 17 day long battle. Casualties were sky high. One death in particular shook McCrae. Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa was killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915.
He was buried close to McCrae’s dressing station and McCrae had to perform the funeral ceremony in the absence of a chaplain.
McCrae was sitting in an ambulance the next day only a short distance from where his friend was buried.
McCrae took his note book and described the scene and his feelings in what became the most famous war poem of all times:
He wrote:
(** Flanders was a region overlapping parts of Belgium, France and Holland)
IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army
Through the years poets wrote several replies to McCrae’s call. The most beautiful to me is: “We shall keep the faith” by Moina Michael who was responsible for making the poppy the symbol of remembrance.
On November 9, 1918, two days before the Armistice for a meeting with the war-secretaries of the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Organisation) she bought 25 poppies to use for the upcoming remembrance.
Here is her poem:
We shall keep the faith
Oh! You who sleep in Flanders’ Fields
Sleep sweet – to rise anew;
We caught the torch you threw,
And holding high we kept
The faith with those who died.
We cherish, too, the Poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led.
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies.
But lends a lustre to the red
On the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders’ fields.
And now the torch and Poppy red
Wear in honour of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught:
We’ve learned the lesson that ye taught
In Flanders’ fields.
I am glad that I could share these stories with my kids. As I read the last stanzas of Moina Michael’s reply, I get a lump in my throat. It is very emotional!
But, I compose myself and I get stuck into my steak. . . and my kids think their father is bit strange .


































































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