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By Root 1656 0

and closed their shutters. Everyone went to church and in every parish the churches were full from early morning. This year there was no great Te Deum at the Cathedral of Ste Gudule, but the packed congregation heard high mass, and as it finished, the great organ began to play. It played the National Anthem, faintly at first, and people stood straining to listen, silent and a little unsure how they ought to react. And then the organist found his courage, pulled out the stops to give the great organ its voice, and began again. As the music of the ‘Brabançonne’ swelled and rolled round the cathedral the people went wild. They cheered, they laughed, they wept. They stood on chairs and called for their national anthem again and again, and when it began for the fourth or fifth time they joined in. They shouted rather than sang the words, and when they reached the last line – ‘Le Roi, la Loi, la Liberté’ – they positively raised the roof. The music tailed away but the people went on shouting: ‘Vive le Roi! Vive Belgique! Vive la Liberté!’ The atmosphere was electric, and it changed the mood of the day.

There was almost an air of carnival, just like old times, and it quickly spread. Now nobody wanted to stay indoors behind drawn blinds and soon it seemed that the entire population had thronged into the streets and parks. They ignored edgy parties of German troops, trailing machine-guns as they paraded the streets, and were careful not to provoke them. They jostled and chattered and laughed, they congregated round the statues of Belgium’s national heroes and removed their posies to pile around their pediments. It hardly mattered that the cafés were closed. The people of Brussels were already drunk on a heady cocktail of patriotism and defiance.

The shut-down in the city had infuriated the German authorities but their face-saving effort was belated and somewhat unimaginative in its conception. Late in the afternoon German soldiers were sent into the streets to post up yet another edict. It informed the citizens that, by order of the occupying power, the shops, cafés and restaurants in Brussels were to close on 21 July. It gave all Brussels a hearty laugh to cap the emotions of a satisfying day.*

The Belgian national fete had, not unnaturally, passed unnoticed in the trenches, although it ought to have been a day of celebration for the men of the 3rd Division who were due to be relieved. But the situation round Hooge was still fluid as the Germans relentlessly pounded the captured ground and it was thought best to postpone the relief for twenty-four hours. It was a night of teeming rain and the 4th Gordons were not happy. To crown the miserable day their relief was late and the men were exhausted long before it arrived.

Sgt. A. Rule.

For four days we hadn’t had more than two hours’ sleep at a time and there were a lot of cases of shell-shock among the men who were more highly strung.

Our relief was due at dusk, but the weary hours dragged on towards midnight and still there was no sign of it. The rain that had set in about midday became heavier and heavier and our spirits flagged with the increasing emptiness of our stomachs. When the long-expected relief finally did arrive, well after midnight, we were quite past caring what happened to us.

We were heavily shelled all the way out, some of the shell-bursts were so close that we could actually feel the vicious hot blast of the explosions and every blinding flash seemed to make the darkness even more intense than before, so that the column sagged and stumbled in all directions. We were still in the danger zone when dawn broke and although we were by now entirely dead beat we kept plodding along like automatons without a solitary breathing space. We picked up our company pipers at Kruistraat, but our progress along the Vlamertinghe Road was more of a stagger than a march – we scarcely knew whether the pipes were playing or not. I was parched with thirst and I vividly remember sucking the moisture from the lapel of my greatcoat, which was saturated by the teeming rain. At times