So what happened when a priceless opportunity arose at the turn of the millennium to celebrate Belgium in all its historic-cultural dimensions? The European Community introduced a new coinage and gave each of the11, now 27, euro-zone members eight different coins on which they could stamp whatever significant symbols or portraits they wished.

The Italians made a game of it, showing the proposed designs on national television for the viewing audience to vote on. For the two-euro piece they chose the stern visage of Dante taken from the portrait by Raphael. On the one-euro coin we see Leonardo’s famous Vitruvian man, his study of proportions. For the 50-cent piece there’s Marcus Aurelius on horseback, and on the 10 cent and 20 cent there are Botticello’s Venus and a work by the Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni. Each of the for smallest coins shows us an outstanding work of Roman or Italian architecture.

Spain has given King Juan Carlos space on the two largest coins, but the 50, 20 and 10 are reserved for the face of Cervantes, his steep brow, pleated ruff and inverse-V moustache. On the last three we see the Cathedral of Campostela.

The Greeks have gone all out, scouring the millennia for symbols of their glory days. For the largest coin they selected, I can’t imagine why, the Rape of Europa from a third century AD mosaic. Their one-euro piece is that wonderful owl from an Athenian drachma of the fifth century BC. The next three show the features of a social reformer, a statesman and a leading figure in the Greek Enlightenment. Below that are some splendid ships, including an ancient trireme.

Well, you get the idea. Austria gives top spot to the pacifist Bertha von Suttner and next place to Mozart. Then there are flowers (primroses, edelweiss) and some fine buildings. Germany has the Brandenburg Gate, Ireland has its Celtic harp, Cyprus has some ships and wild sheep.

And so by now, if you know Belgium at all, you will already have anticipated what follows. That’s right, Belgium of its own free will, decided to stamp solely the profile of Albert II on all eight of its coins.

Now I have nothing against Albert; from all reports he is a fine fellow. That most acerbic of social critics, Patrick Roegiers, in his witty, sometimes scathing La Spectaculair histoire des rois des Belges, is quite generous in his evaluation of Belgium’s sixth monarch, calling him « le roi débonnaire, viscéralement belge. » But eight identical views of the same person? His plump profile, double chin, hair slicked back behind his ears, spectacles on his nose. No effigy of Vesalius or Rubens; no Magritte or Brel, no Antwerp cathedral, no Bruges canals, no house by Horta, no Ilya Prigogine? Albert has been picked to represent all that Belgium has to offer. It hardly seems fair to the nation, or to the man who should not be expected to bear such a heavy responsibility.

Final footnote: It seems that the Community has laid down certain strict rules and regulations about how each nation can mint its coins. Belgium alone managed to get it wrong. A boon, of course, for numismatists. Poke about in your pocket or purse and you will eventually come across the wrong one and the right one, both are acceptable. The difference is that the lone A of Albert was first printed, incorrectly, on the edge where the 12 European stars traditionally go, instead of beside the central image. Obliged to do it over again, Belgium got it right the second time round. Good ole Belgium!

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One of the most famous cartoons of the war appeared in Punch in 1916; the picture by artist-illustrator Bernard Partridge shows Albert and the Kaiser on a field of battle against a heap of smoldering rubble, a sky of garish red clouds and, disappearing into the distance off left, a long line of trudging refugees. The Kaiser in Prussian blue uniform and spiked helmet is leaning on the pommel of his sheathed sword saying to Albert: « So you see – you’ve lost everything. » Albert, bareheaded, naked sword in hand, turning his back but glaring over his shoulder, replies: « Not my soul. »

After the war, the weight of Belgium’s moral stamina, the very righteousness of her cause, came to prove a heavy burden, an awkward instrument to wield amid the subtler forms of conflict around the table at the Peace Conference at Versailles. As long as she suffered and her sad fate could serve as a rallying cry for others, then she was admired and pitied. But when she spoke up for her rights and began to stake claims, to talk of reparations and make demands, she became an embarrassment, was at first ignored, then shunned. Small countries, she was given to understand, should be seen and not heard. John Maynard Keynes in his The Economic Consequences of the Peace said that Belgium’s claims against Germany were « simply irresponsible. »

Germany, or rather the negotiators around the table, recognized that debts were owed, and yet, « Belgium is a small country » and it is « a popular delusion to think of Belgium as the principal victim of the war. » The delusion can be easily explained.  « The special position occupied in the popular mind is due, of course, to the fact that in 1914 her sacrifice was by far the greatest of any of the Allies. » But after 1914, « she played a minor role. » And so the gradual post-war reevaluation of brave little Belgium began. The posters came down, the engines of propaganda were dismantled, the old sentiments died. Then there was a second war and another king, and other sentiments.

The time came, Agatha Christie admitted, when she grew tired of her little Belgian, frankly bored with him; by 1975 she could stand him no longer and killed him off. On August 6, The New York Times accorded him a front-page obituary (Hercule Poirot is Dead; Famed Belgian Detective). « Mr. Poirot achieved fame as a private investigator after he retired as a member of the Belgian police force in 1904, » wrote Thomas Lask. « At the end of his life he was arthritic and had a bad heart. He was in a wheelchair often, and was carried from his bedroom to the public lounge at Styles Court, a nursing home in Essex, wearing a wig and false moustaches to mask the signs of age that offended his vanity. In his active days, he was always impeccably dressed.

« Mr. Poirot, who was just 5 feet 4 inches tall, went to England from Belgium during World War One as a refugee. » Christie, still writing, was 84 when Poirot died. « His age was unknown, » reported Lask.

Famous Belgians don’t often make it to the front pages of the world’s press. It is sadly fitting that this internationally acclaimed son of Brussels should be, much like his country, an English invention. The treaty the Kaiser spoke of with such historic contempt in 1914, « the scrap of paper, » was the 1839 Treaty of London that enforced Belgium’s neutrality and established the limits of its sovereignty.

Many Belgians saw it at the time as a humiliation, yet it was a formal guarantee of their safety in perpetuity signed by the Great Powers – Britain, France, Austria, Russia and Prussia. Beginning with Leopold I, Belgian monarchs learned to exploit the status of neutrality for the benefit of their diminutive kingdom – this perennial battleground of Europe –, for its industrial progress and colonial expansion in Africa. Belgium remained peaceful and unscathed during the continent-wide revolutions of 1848. She trembled but was untouched by the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The refugees then were escaping in the other direction, seeking and finding asylum in neutral Belgium, this conveniently located country.

For three quarters of a century that scrap of paper helped to keep the nation safe and prosperous, until the day the Kaiser tore it up and told Belgium to step aside. Then the Belgian people and their King fought back, and in the words of one of Albert’s biographers, astonished the world, and themselves.

The second part of this article can be found here

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Agatha Christie’s admiration for the exiled Belgians who had come barging into her tidy seaside resort town in Devon trailing their tales of woe was tinged with the exasperation that a hostess feels when her guests outstay their welcome. She did not see the same refugees that Rupert Brooke saw. And so she made Hercule Poirot meticulous, very tidy and endowed him with « little gray cells, » but skewed his foreign accent for comic effect.

When Christie speaks of the Belgian refugees wanting to be left alone to dig their garden and to « manure it in their own particular and intimate way, » she is referring with a touch of squeamish scorn to the traditional, ecologically sound but no doubt noisome use that some of these far-from-home kitchen gardeners made of night soil. These are Brooke’s refugees, the old men he saw crying and « the women with hard drawn faces. » These are the brothers and cousins of the farmers that Jacques Pirenne (son of the historian Henri Pirenne, like Adolphe Max a civilian prisoner in Germany) describes in his front-line report, Les Vainqueurs de l’Yser. Not the refugees; the ones that didn’t get away. These are the ones who, out of brute fidelity to the land, continued to live in their shell-battered houses, going out each dawn to work in what remained of their fields, returning at night over ground strewn with the bodies of the dead and the not-yet-dead. These farmers, men undone – called peasants to distinguish them from their betters – trudged by in the night without responding, abrutis par la peur. « They did not hear the rattle in the throat of the dying, nor did they aid the wounded, » wrote Pirenne. These were the indéracinables, the un-uprootables, who stayed on to protect their homes and cattle, the ones who would not leave to save their lives.

The uprooted ones crossed the borders into the Netherlands or France, or over the Channel to Britain by whatever overloaded ferries and fishing boats they could squeeze onto. « They received at first a warm welcome, » says A.J.P. Taylor, agreeing with Christie’s observation. « Later, things changed. The Belgians were resentful that the great British Empire had not protected them more successfully. English people were disappointed to find that most Belgians were ordinary folk of mixed character, not heroes. Belgians did not settle easily into English life; Belgian workers did not fit into English factories. In the end, they were given a munitions town of their own in Northumberland, where Belgian street names, Belgian police, and even, strange to relate, Belgian beer gave them the illusion of being at home. »

Between the ones who fled, for whatever reason, and those who stayed behind, for whatever reason, mutual suspicion soon grew that the others’ motives were less pure than their own. Albert’s come-what-may determination to remain on Belgian soil, however exiguous, set the example that the stayers-on could point to in justification of their decision. The escapees claimed that they could be more useful to their country by working for its liberation from the outside, and strongly hinted (later, the hints became accusations) that it was very convenient for the others, certain shopkeepers, businessmen and factory owners, to stay and mind the store, to watch over their property and such profits as there might be, to make the best of a bad deal, to compromise or, one step beyond, to collaborate.

But Millard was in no doubt that the absent, the exiles, were in the wrong. « The majority, housed and fed for nothing, cherished and pampered like heroes, are gathering over there the fruits of the bravery of our army » he wrote in his diary of November 30, 1914. He is not thinking of the landless farmers or the indigent. He means, « The professors who have left their students, the doctors who have abandoned their patients, the burgomasters who have deserted their posts…, » the people who, « safe from the shooting, from the burning and pillage, from all danger of arrest, glory in their flight and bray loudly, ‘It is we who are the patriots!' »

Years later when writing his book, Millard brooded over it again after rereading an editorial in the expatriate Independence Belge, published in London, which had stoutly championed the refugees’ cause, urging them not to return to their beleaguered homeland where their presence could only give aid and comfort to the enemy. For the returnees, the paper insisted, this would mean accepting the Germanization of their land, « as a preliminary to the Germanization of their hearts. » This was too much for Millard and he lashed out at these « self-styled ‘patriots' » who had « fought like wolves » on the Belgian quayside scrambling for the boats, « dropping their own children in their wild frenzy to go and ‘sacrifice themselves’ at the expense of their English hosts. » In short, « the Belgian refugees who remained in England throughout the war represented with few exceptions the scrum of our country. »

Among the exceptions was Hercule Poirot. In her biography of the former Brussels chief of police, The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot, Anne Hart pieces together the evidence that he had served in the Belgian Resistance. In Christie’s story of The Kidnapped Prime Minister, when Poirot is approached to take on the case, he is told that he has been expressly recommended by « a very great man of your own country. » Hart says « it is clear that it had been King Albert himself…who had suggested his small compatriot as the one person in England capable of wresting a missing prime minister from the enemy. »

In Hart’s account, a badly wounded Poirot (he walked with a limp) was snuggled out of Belgium into France and thence to « the pretty Essex village of Styles St. Mary » where a colony of six Belgians had already been set up. « From the outset of the war the English had opened their hearts and homes to Belgian refugees, » she writes, confirming Christie, and Poirot acknowledged the hospitality he had received « with gratitude. » He could be grateful but he could not be happy. Digging and manuring a garden was not for him. He spent most of his days « sitting by a window overlooking the village street, smoking an occasional Russian cigarette, and pondering his fate. » Christie quotes him as telling a friend, « For me, my arrival at Styles St. Mary was a sad and painful time. I was a refugee, wounded, exiled from home and country, existing by charity in a foreign land. »

And yet, much later, even with the recognition and the fame that he went on to achieve in his adopted homeland, something persistently Belgian, or Flemish, or peasant-like in Poirot made him seek solitude and silence whenever he needed to get to to the bottom of a mystery. He was contemptuous of the commonplace picture of a good detective: « He must bee full of energy. He must rush to and fro. » He would have none of that. In The Kidnapped Prime Minister he says, « The true clues are within…. » After he comes up with the the intricate solution to the case of the vanished minister, he is asked, « Wen did you first begin to suspect the truth of the matter? » His reply is: « When I began to work the right way – from within! »

This inwardness is easily mistaken for glumness, surliness or gaucheness. Compared to some of their European neighbors, Belgians may seem to suffer from timidity or apathy. (Poirot’s insufferable vanity is a private joke of Christie’s. A conceited Belgian is about as likely as a bashful Italian.) Which is not to say that every taciturn or inarticulate Fleming or Walloon enjoys a rich interior life. But it does mean that a tolerance for silence, the ability to keep one’s mouth shut – the first rule of the Resistance – is a character trait that has been valuable to the survival of this country. King Albert had it to a painful degree. A wartime photograph of him standing alone on a dune gazing out over the gray North Sea shows him in a familiar mood. A compulsive rock-climber, his hunger for solitude drove him to the top of the most dangerous mountain peaks in Switzerland and Italy. The trait has been handed down over many generations. The man and leader of men who fought longest and hardest for the freedom of the Southern Netherlands (today’s Belgium) from oppression under the Spanish occupation in the 16^th century was William the Silent. The true clues are within.

[To be continued…]

The first part of this article can be found here

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In her autobiography, Christie describes her early efforts to invent an out-of-the-ordinary detective hero for the series of murder mysteries she was planning to write. She could not compete with Sherlock Holmes, and Arsene Lupin was « not my kind. » What she wanted was a character with a style of his own, recognizable yet original. She briefly considered a schoolboy sleuth, or perhaps a scientist, but in the end decided against both.

« Then I remembered our Belgian refugees, » she writes. This was 1920 when the Great War was still very much alive in the collective consciousness. « We had quite a colony of Belgian refugees in the parish of Tor [Torquay]. Everyone had been bursting with loving kindness and sympathy when they arrived. People had stocked houses with furniture for them to live in, had done everything they could to make them comfortable. »

As the massive German invasion of August 4, 1914, turned to occupation of city after city, Belgian civilians had fled to the coast, crossing the Channel by the tens of thousands in search of safety and shelter in Britain, weighed down with what possessions they had managed to bring with them. By then, their trampled-upon kingdom had earned the series of epithets that became inseparable from its name, repeated daily in the Allied press, in posters and public speeches: brave, gallant, heroic, plucky and, invariably, little.

In the early days of the war a single division of Belgium’s hastily put together army succeeded against all odds in holding off the massive German assault on the fortified city of Liège for several days (the exact number is in dispute) with a demonstration of far more stubborn courage than anyone, Ally or enemy, had thought Belgian soldiers capable of.

That, at least, was the legend, the first of many. Even if, as Barbara Tuchman suggests, the defence of Liège did not substantially disrupt the German timetable for the invasion of France by all that much, the effort, the bold and dramatic stand, was acclaimed round the world. In Tuchman’s words: « What Belgium gave the Allies was neither two days nor two weeks but a cause and an example. » (Guns of August.)

Antwerp was next. By October 6, the heavily defended port city had been evacuated; three days later it fell to the superior German artillery power. The Belgian Army under their king and Commander in Chief, Albert I, retreated to the coast, their backs to the North Sea. Among the witnesses to the collapse of Antwerp and the desperate escape of the refugees was Rupert Brooke, then a promising poet of 27.

« Antwerp that night was like several different kinds of hell, » he wrote to an American friend, « the broken houses and dead horses lit up by an infernal glare. The refugees were the worst sight. The German policy of frightfulness had succeeded so well, that out of that city of half a million men it was decided to surrender Antwerp, not ten thousand would stay. They put their goods on carts, barrows, perambulators, anything. Often the carts had no horses, and they just stayed there in the street, waiting for a miracle. There were all the country refugees, too, from the villages, who had been coming through our lines all day and half the night. I’ll never forget that white-faced, endless procession in the night, pressed aside to let the military – us – pass, crawling forward at some hundred yards an hour, quite hopeless, the old men crying, and the women with hard drawn faces. »

In the end, one hundred thousand refugees had to be provided for in Britain one way or another. The gallantry and the pluck were not then always so much in evidence. « There had been the usual reaction later, » Christie reports, « when the refugees had not seemed to be sufficiently grateful for what had been done for them, and complained of this and that. The fact that the poor things were bewildered and in a strange country was not sufficiently appreciated. A good many of them were suspicious peasants, and the last thing they wanted was to be asked out to tea or have people drop in upon them; they wanted to be left alone, to dig their garden and to manure it in their own particular and intimate way. »

Out of this tattered and heterogeneous human material Agatha Christie imagined the individual she had been looking for. « Why not make my detective a Belgian? I thought. There were all types of refugees. How about a refugee police officer? A retired police officer. » She made him « meticulous, very tidy. » In a study of her creation, Colin Watson has summed him up as « an incorrigible moustache-twirler. He carried a cane, smoked queer little cigarettes, was a fancy dresser and dyed his hair. » Decidedly foreign, he was not French. « He was a Belgian. And the distinction was more important in 1920 than it might seem today. » Watson noted that, « When his fearful foreignness brought him to the verge of being altogether too ridiculous, his being a Belgian foreigner rescued him. He came, one would recall, from that sturdy ‘gallant little’ country. He was all right. »

But is the dapper, moustache-twirling Poirot in any sense typically Belgian? Not if typical is taken to mean stereotypical, if Belgians are seen as Bruegelian, the mythical pre-mechanized Flemish peasant, big, beer-swilling and raucous. But Christie had other Belgians, no less authentic, to choose from, and the most prominent model she would have been aware of was a man who perfectly resembled the feisty and immaculately groomed Belgian police officer; he was the Mayor of Brussels, Adolphe Max.

Max’s biographer, Belgian journalist Oscar Millard, describes him in words that might as easily be applied to the fictional figure: « Everything about the man is neatness and discretion. He is neat physically and mentally. He is small of build and features, discreet of dress and economical of gesture. His mind and habits are meticulous and orderly. » They were both born in Brussels, both bachelors, both given to self-dramatization.

When the Belgian Government left the Capital for Antwerp on the first stage of its journey into exile, Adolphe Max remained virtually the sole representative of the King and the cabinet of ministers in Brussels. He quickly became the stuff that legends are made of and many extravagant tales sprang up in the five weeks between the morning the German troops marched into the city on August 20 and the day Max was arrested and deported on September 26. The Germans were expecting « a submissive hostage » when they arrived, says Millard, « instead of which they encountered a dignified, unyielding adversary. »

[To be continued…]

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