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  This novel is a work of fiction based on true events. Whilst some of the characters and events are based on real people and real situations, their portrayal in the novel are the work of the author’s own imagination.

  HarperInspire, an imprint of

  HarperCollins Christian Publishing

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  www.harperinspire.co.uk

  First published by HarperCollins 2020.

  Copyright © Christopher de Vinck 2020.

  The author asserts his moral right, including the right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Mein Kampf translation © James Murphy, Project Gutenberg of Australia

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-31-0111986 (TPB)

  ISBN: 978-0-31-0111993 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-0-31-0113591 (audio)

  Epub Edition March 2020 9780310111993

  Set in Crimson Text by e-Digital Design

  Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Christopher de Vinck is the author of twelve books and numerous articles and essays. His writing has been featured in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. He delivers speeches on faith, disability, fatherhood, and writing, and he has been invited to speak at the Vatican. He is the father of three and lives in New Jersey with his wife.

  Dedication

  To Catherine de Vinck

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  All unattributed epigraphs are either excerpts or memories as recorded and shared in the war journal of Major General Joseph Henri Kestens, the author’s grandfather. Major General Kestens was awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery, and served in the Belgian Army during the Second World War as part of the Belgian Resistance, before being captured and imprisoned in Spain. Following his liberation, he spent the rest of the war in London. After the War, he returned to Brussels. His family, including the author’s mother, emigrated to New Jersey, USA, via London, in 1948.

  “Who would ever think that so much

  went on in the soul of a young girl?”

  —Anne Frank

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Title Page

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Part I: Neutrality 1939 Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part II: Premonition 1940 Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part III: The Invasion, 10 May, 1940 Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part IV: Evacuation Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Part V: Liberation Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Part VI: In Memoriam Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  Terror. Pandemonium. Panic. Children wailed. People shouted, ‘Get down! Get down!’

  Brussels: a city consumed by fear. People rushed out of their homes, spilling onto the narrow streets, crashing into each other with suitcases and rumours about tanks crushing women, Nazis with bayonets, Antwerp to the north in flames. My father had said the invasion would happen. Where was my father now?

  Like so many frightened people, I ran too. A man carrying a typewriter pushed me aside. I fell against a woman who asked if I had seen her daughter.

  ‘Julie, she was just here, holding my hand. She was sucked up into the crowd. Do you know where my daughter is?’

  I was swallowed into the mosaic of red shirts, blue trousers, cotton skirts. Clothes seeming to move in terror, not filled with people, but with ghosts floating inside the sleeves and coats. Ghosts with grey features, slackened jaws and hollow eyes.

  I looked up and did not see clouds and spring leaves, but something much darker that seemed to shroud the entire city. Outstretched wings soared high above my head, and what looked like the belly of a dragon.

  I broke away from the mob, pushing my way between men in clogs and woman carrying crying children and baskets of bread, forcing my way towards Hava’s house. I needed to get to Hava. Then I heard a low sound, a growl. The belly of the dragon dropped closer until it finally became a plane swooping down towards the street. Closer. Closer. Then, a burst of blinding light flashed from under the wings, spraying bullets all around me.

  People called out and cried again and again, ‘Get down! Get down!’

  Bullets shredded the back of a man who managed to throw himself over a small boy who shrieked, ‘Daddy!’ A woman’s jaw was severed from her mouth. Blood splashed onto my blouse. I fell to the ground, holding my arms. I wanted my father. I wanted Hava. I didn’t know what to do.

  Seconds later, the bullets stopped. The plane disappeared. All was silent for a moment, a brief moment, as if the world took a deep breath. And then there was a scream. It was almost as if the wheels of a train had locked and strained against the railway tracks, a high-pitched sound like the wail of metal against metal. Tragedy embodied that scream: horror, conveyed in a single, anguished cry.

  A woman held a small girl in her arms. She wailed, ‘Julie! Julie!’ The little girl’s arms dangled at her sides like winter vines. Her head lolled back, her legs were limp. The side of the girl’s face and the cobblestones beneath my feet were streaked with blood. She was dead.

  ‘Julie! Julie!’ The woman moaned and rocked the child in her arms. She looked at me, as if to ask if I might save her daughter. ‘Julie?’ she pleaded. I looked at the small curls on the girl’s shattered skull, turned, stumbled and skinned my knees. Bloo
d dripped down my legs.

  ‘Julie! Julie!’

  I stood up. I ran. More people shouted. I ran on. The silence had been replaced with howls of grief and pain. Trams ground their way through the thick crowd. More planes flew overhead.

  ‘Julie! Julie!’

  The sound of the girl’s name rose above the calls and cries of other people. I felt that the little girl was chasing me, blood rushing down her face.

  I pushed my way forward, squeezing between shoulders, arms, legs, and bundles of clothing.

  When I reached the other side of the square, I stopped and leaned against a building and looked back. Like ants whose nest had been disturbed, people stumbled over each other, desperate to save what they could. They carried photo albums, bags of sugar, money, anything to help them out of the city, out of the path of the monster; to help them carry out with them what they knew and who they were.

  The Nazis were coming. Belgium was under siege.

  Run! I thought. Run! Run! They must not get me. They must not shoot off my arms!

  I knew Hava would be in her house. I knew that is where she would be.

  I ran down a familiar side street. I could see the windows of Hava’s home. They were dark.

  CHAPTER 1

  This is a war to end all wars.

  Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, 1917

  My father was a general, a major general, in the Belgian army. He didn’t start that way. He had been a private during the First World War, an ordinary engineering student, who volunteered to fight for his country.

  Everyone in Belgium knew about my father after the war. An ordinary student who became a private and who, it seemed, fought off the German invasion into central Belgium single-handedly.

  In 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres, the German army advanced towards France, but was stopped by Belgian troops at the Yser River, helped by intentional flooding, which temporarily stopped the battle. When the brutal fighting began again, under heavy fire from across the river, my father ran to an army supply truck, grabbed a shovel and began digging a trench. His commanding officer yelled at him to get down, but my father refused. ‘The flood waters will soon go down! We can build a trench and keep the Germans on the other side of the river! We can save Belgium! Vive la Belgique!’ And he kept digging.

  Inspired by my father’s courage, his commander ordered hundreds of soldiers to start digging too. Moments later, my father was shot by a sniper across the river and fell face-down into the trench. A bullet ripped through his left arm above his elbow, shattered the bone, tore out the other side and disappeared into the darkness. My father fell unconscious into the mud as blood drained quickly from the three-inch hole in his broken arm.

  Thirteen hours later he woke up surrounded by white sheets, the smell of blood and urine, and the voice of a doctor saying to his nurse, ‘Do you think I should cut it off from the elbow or from the shoulder?’

  Assessing the size of the wound and the damage in the bone, the nurse replied, ‘Just cut it all off.’

  In the midst of the pain, and before the morphine, my father rolled his head slowly back and forth on the operating table and pleaded, ‘Please, don’t cut off my arm. Please . . .’ And then he lost consciousness again.

  In modern times, if my father had suffered a gunshot wound, doctors with their microscopes and microsurgical techniques could have repaired his arm. In 1915, the best they could do was respect his wishes, stitch him up, and save the arm, which became just a prop, a dangling appendage, for the rest of his life. I spent much of my life as a child terrified that one day I too would lose an arm and look like him.

  Sixteen hours later, in a field hospital in Belgium, my father stirred, licked his lips, and asked for water. As he listened to the water gurgling from the jug to a glass, he reached across with his right hand and patted his left shoulder. Then he slowly began to run his hand downward, against the gauze and bandages, down to his elbow, down slowly inch by inch, until he touched the tips of his cold fingers on his left hand. His arm was still attached.

  When my father asked the nurses about the battle, they told him that, because of him, a half-mile trench, in places only 45 metres from Germans bunkers, had been built. He later learned that this section of Belgium sustained some of the bloodiest fighting in the war: 76,000 German casualties; 20,000 Belgian deaths. But because of the ‘Trench of Death’, as it became known, that had begun with my father’s shovel, that one small section of Belgium never fell to the Germans and inspired all of Belgium to hold on and resist the German invasion.

  At the end of the First World War, my father was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the highest military medal for service to his country. The king himself pinned it onto his uniform, and the newspapers announced his heroics on their front pages: NATIONAL HERO: SAVED BELGIUM WITH A SHOVEL. His name was engraved on the reverse side of the medal: Joseph Lyon – my father.

  PART I. NEUTRALITY 1939

  CHAPTER 2

  As Belgium struggled to recuperate after the devastation of the First World War, the country reminded all of Europe that Belgium was declared a neutral territory in 1831, and would continue to be a buffer between France and Germany.

  I was 18 years old in 1939. My hair was brown. I had read Gone with the Wind in French, and my friend Hava Daniels found an advertisement for the film in an American magazine, and thought Clark Gable, the lead actor, looked like Otto the baker. I spent the autumn going to the opera with Hava.

  We were Flemish, but of course everyone in Belgium had to speak both Flemish and French. At one time all the officers in the army spoke French, and all the soldiers spoke Flemish. Poor Belgium: half-Dutch, half-French.

  I wasn’t interested in politics. My father was afraid I spent too much time reading novels. He worried that my legs would be weak because I didn’t walk enough. He thought I would go blind because I read so often beside the dim parlour light. He was also disturbed when I said ‘Damn it!’, imitating an American seamstress in a book I was reading.

  My mother had died when I was born. I cooked, mended my father’s uniforms, kept the washerwoman busy, and said the rosary three times every night, on my knees before a statue of Mary that I kept illuminated with penny candles.

  My father was destined for a military career. He had wanted to be an artist, painting miniature scenes of Belgian farmland onto porcelain plates, but his father had felt that this was nonsense and had sent him to military school where he excelled in mathematics. After his fame in the First World War, he completed a Communication degree at the University of Ghent, was appointed the Military Commissioner of Communications for the entire Belgian army, and was given the rank of major general.

  To me, he was just my father.

  Our typical days began at the breakfast table where, each morning, he would ask me questions about life. ‘What would you do in a panic?’ he asked once as he buttered his toast. I could hear the scraping of the knife on the hard bread.

  ‘Run?’ I teased.

  He did not laugh. A major general in the Belgian army did not run.

  ‘Simone,’ he said as he raised the butter knife in the air, ‘you will need to know this someday. Think of life as a sailboat.’ He lowered the knife and looked at me as I sat in my seat with a cup of tea in my hand, anxious to run off to school.

  ‘Pretend you’re on a small sailboat on a lake. You are guiding the ropes to control the shape and direction of the sails, when suddenly a strong wind blows down from the mountain and begins tipping the boat over sideways and rocking you violently. What do you do?’

  I was tempted to say that I would jump in the water and swim away, but that was the same as running in fear. So I said, knowing he expected more of me, ‘Push the sailboat into the wind?’

  ‘Just let go of the ropes, Simone. Just let go and let the sails flap helplessly. The wind will no longer fill the sails, and the boat will quickly right itself so you can ride out the storm. Remember, in a panic, just let go of the ropes
.’

  We would spend our evenings together too. One night, after supper, my father sat beside the fireplace with his military documents on his lap. I liked seeing him with a blanket on his knees, writing notes on the pages as I read in my chair beside him. After an hour, he stopped, looked up from his work and asked, ‘What have you discovered in your book tonight?’

  If I said something vague like, ‘Something sad,’ he’d ask me to be more specific.

  So, I replied, ‘Sister Bernadette has assigned us an English novel – A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens’. I’m at the part where Sydney Carton pretends he’s Charles Darnay so that Charles is freed from prison, escapes the guillotine and is united with his love, Lucie.’

  My father closed his papers. ‘I remember a line from that book: A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.’

  That is how my father and I got along. He asked serious questions, or shared something that he read or remembered.

  On another summer evening, while we were sitting before the flames in the fireplace, he handed me the newspaper and said, ‘Simone, you need to know what is happening outside your books. Here, read this.’

  My father flattened the newspaper on my lap and pointed to an article about Albert Forster. I stared at him blankly. He sighed.

  ‘Albert Forster is in charge in Poland. He’s a Nazi and calls Jews dirty and slippery. He’s a monster, Simone. Look here at what he says: Poland will only be a dream.’

  I looked up from the newspaper. Being an officer in the army, my father knew much about political and military events.

  ‘That man wants to invade Poland,’ my father said, as he lifted the paper from my lap and tossed it into the fire. He and I watched the paper smoke, turn black, and then flare up into orange flames.