The Belgian Last Stand

My dearest Liesbeth,

I am writing this in the dark, by the light of a moon that looks down on a country drowning. The water is rising. I can hear it — a soft, persistent whisper, like the sound of the Scheldt after heavy rain, only this time the water is not nourishing the land. It is swallowing it.

We opened the sluices tonight. King Albert himself gave the order, and I watched the men at Nieuwpoort turn the great wheels, heard the groan of the iron gates as they gave way, felt the first cold breath of the flood as it began to spread across the fields. We are drowning our country to save it, Liesbeth. We are turning the farms of Flanders into a shallow sea, knowing that the crops will rot, the houses will collapse, the roads will dissolve into mud. Knowing that when this war is over — if it ever ends — we will return to a wasteland of our own making. But what choice do we have? Behind us is the sea. There is nowhere left to retreat. If this strip of mud is all that remains of Belgium, then we will defend it with every tool God has given us — even the water that was meant to give us life.

I think of our farm. I think of the fields where I worked beside my father, the smell of turned earth in spring, the weight of a full harvest. I think of the apple tree in the corner of the garden, the one your father planted when we were married. I think of the kitchen where you would sing while you cooked, your voice carrying through the open window. All of it is under water now. All of it is being sacrificed to stop the German guns. I tell myself that it is worth it, that land can be reclaimed, that houses can be rebuilt, that apple trees can be planted again. But my heart — my heart feels like one of those fields, flooded and cold and silent.

Do you remember the day we met? It was at the market in Antwerp. You were buying flowers — a bundle of white roses — and you dropped them, and I picked them up for you, and you smiled at me, and I knew that my life had changed forever. I have never told you this, but I kept one of those roses. I pressed it between the pages of a book, and I still have it. It is in my pack now, a dried and brittle thing, brown with age. It is not beautiful anymore. But it is ours. It is proof that before this war, there was a world in which a boy could buy flowers for a girl, and they could fall in love, and they could build a life together in a country that was at peace.

I do not know if this letter will reach you. I do not know if you are alive or dead. The last I heard, Antwerp had fallen, and the Germans were rounding up civilians, and the roads were choked with refugees. But I have to believe that you are safe. I have to believe that somewhere, in England or Holland or wherever the tide of war has carried you, you are still breathing, still hoping, still waiting for me. Because if I stop believing that, then the water will take me too.

If I die here, I die on Belgian soil. That is all I have left to give her. And you — I have given you everything else. My heart. My name. My future. You are my Belgium now. You are the land I fight for, the home I defend, the reason I stand in this rising water and refuse to drown.

I hear the Germans beginning their bombardment. The shells are falling closer. I should get back to my post.

Know this, my love: if we do not meet again in this life, I will wait for you in the next. I will be standing in a field of green, under an apple tree, with a bouquet of white roses in my hand.

And I will not drop them this time.

All my love, forever, Pieter