Passing of a Monarch
(From a Correspondent) Brussels, August 1st
KING LEOPOLD'S second attempt at Kingship of the Belgians has ended as quickly as the first, and certainly with more drama. He returned to his Kingdom on July 22nd, one day late for the national festival which even his most ardent backers were too prudent to let him attend. He was careful not to show himself to his subjects, returning to Belgium soon after seven in the morning, without announcement of his coming, and driving to his palace through cordoned-off and'heavily- 'guarded streets in a car hard to identify in a procession of its..peers, which took the final turn into its sanctuary, if not actually on two wheels, at any rate above the recommended speed.
It did not take much more than a week for the King's opponents to stage a campaign which could not be denied. This took two forms, the political and the demagogic. On the political side there was an absolute refusal of political co-operation The Socialists did the thing in a big way, returning their decorations and demand- ing that this be gazetted in the Moniteur Beige. Their leaders, including Paul-Henri Spaak, resigned from the Crown Council and from their positions as Ministers of State. They all solemnly promised to attend no function, wherever it might be held, in the King's honour or in his presence. The Liberals were neither so drastic nor so demonstrative. They did, however, formally resolve to abjure all political co-operation, and appointed a special com- mittee to advise the King of the advantages of an "early and honour- able" abdication The demagogic side was more sensational. There were isolated acts of sabotage, which certainly added up to a good deal, though for the most part the actual damage done was small. The chief weapon, however, was the general strike, staged in an extremely workmanlike manner. As a background to it there were, on a number of pretexts, meetings and processions—quite enough to keep the police and gendarmerie busy. At this stage, however, the great provocation was the decision that the strike should be total ; this meant allowing the collieries to fill with water, with consequent subsidences and roof-collapses, and preventing the necessary main- tenance of other industrial property.
The trade-union movement in Belgium is not so strongly financed as to be 'able to cope with a long general strike. Nevertheless, the threat of damage to property, even though it was to occur only through neglect, hit the Belgians in a tender spot. There was immediate talk of emergency powers and requisition, and the Council of State—a body mainly composed of jurists—found fault with the Government's draft decree for the taking of emergency powers, and thus provoked further delays. In the end the Government seemed thoroughly rattled, and fell back on powers to forbid assembly of more than three persons, and the gendarmerie ensered into control of the position. Meantime, since there were not enough gendarmerie for the job, troops were recalled from the Army of Occupation in Germany and other units were put onto a war footing.
So far as Brussels is concerned, the discipline of the gendarmerie, more especially that of the mounted units, deserves the highest praise. The conduct of horsemen who can face a prolonged volley of chairs and tables, .calmly parrying them with their sword-points, is certainly memorable—as also was that of the horses. The only two serious casualties in the Brussels riots had nothing to do with the gendarmerie. One was a demonstrator at Laeken who lay down in front of a Leopoldist motor-coach, which passed over his body so injuring him that he subsequently died. The other was a
Leopoldist who, during a demonstration, let his voice sound too loudly against the mob. Although protected by two journalists, he was stripped and so cruelly mutilated that the incident will rank for those nearby as one of the worst instances of mob psychology.
Despite the good distipline of the gendarmerie, their command seemed to lack both elasticity and tact. This—and the officers of police (who were always good-humoured) were among the first to Jay it to the gendarmerie's charge—was what provoked the serious Saturday riots in which Socialist Senator Dautremont had a rib broken by a rifle-butt. By this time the crowd were angrier and more exasperated than they had been a few days earlier, and they sang, instead of "A Bas Ia Calorie," the " Marseillaise," the associa.
tions of which for them are not only revolutionary but anti-Flemish.
In Southern Belgium the position was entirely different. It was in the Liege district that feeling ran highest, and it was here that army troops first began to relieve the gendarmerie. Now the gendarmerie are professional soldiers, with the taste for the life and the training which goes with it. The soldiers are one-year con- scripts, and discipline is consequently less easily accepted. It could not be long, therefore, before some incident got out of hand.
As fate would have it, the gendarmerie were the first to draw blood in the attempt to break up, as the law now required them to do, a Sunday afternoon meeting at Grace Berleur, a suburb of Liege. Two people were killed on the spot, and a third later died of wounds, one of them being a Yugoslav national who appears not to have been concerned in the incident. This occurred less than forty-eight hours before the much-proclaimed "March on Brussels," against which powers had been taken to bar the roads and in aid of which all force was to be deployed. It was known that the Liege strikers were armed, and it seemed certain that the march would provide a blood-bath. With a consciousness of martyrdom behind them, the mob would assuredly be formidable.
It was against this background that the colloquies of Sunday night, and day and night on Monday, took place. It was obvious that something had to give way somewhere, and the only possible point was the King. Certainly the Catholic Party, and almost cer- tainly the Cabinet itself, were beginning to split ; there have always been a number of Catholics who were anti-Leopoldists, but whose votes had hitherto reflected the exceptionally strict party discipline inherent in the Belgian political system. For the whole of Monday night, it seemed, the tragedy of last April was being repeated, in the good-faith acceptance of an offer of conciliation, followed by its chiselling by subtleties of phraseology before it came to public announcement. Mercifully positions were taken in time, and the final text was in agreed form before the King's voice was on the radio again on Tuesday morning.
There is much, in the whole of the story, pervaded for those who have lived close to it with a vague unreality. It seems almost incredible that the King, informed by the referendum last March of the state of opinion and the huge localised vote against him in Wallony, could sincerely have regarded the vote as a victory and believed he had a mandate to return to his throne. It was in Belgium itself that the paeans of victory were first sounded ; and, in justice to King Leopold, it must be owned that there is every reason to suppose his adherents put great pressure on him to adopt the attitude he did. Another anomalous figure in the affair is that of Jean Duvieusart, himself a Walloon leading a Government returned to absolute power predominantly by Flemish votes. This may account for the sense of awkwardness which has characterised many of the Premier's debating pronouncements, singularly reminiscent of the awkwardness of a recruit suddenly called upon to make a speech in the Sergeants' Mess. Another point of major importance, in King Leopold's brief transit, was the rather sharp recrudescence of the Belgian indepen- dence motif. He did, indeed, commend West European organisation and the Atlantic Pact as a guarantee of peace and prosperity. Nevertheless he spoke to his people of "Belgium and the Allies," not of "Belgium and her Allies." His declarations contained no hint of any wish to make good the omission, from his Testament Politique of 1944, of any tribute to the Allies for their contribution in helping Belgium to win the war.
This throws into relief a rather well-defined aspect of Belgium and its Government party. At Laeken two non-Belgian journalists (passes had to be prominently worn) were surrounded by a Leopoldist mob accusing them of being "dirty English." This, incidentally, was before the British Press had made itself notorious by reporting so many incidents of the strike out of proportion or relationship to actuality. The general atmosphere of the Social Christian Party reflects rather precisely this type of attitude, just as the independence policy drove a wedge between Belgium and France before 1940, and certainly long before Paul Reynaud made his famous denuncia- tion of the King which, the Belgians always say, was intended to divert attention from the French collapse at Sedan. Theye are hints of an attitude here which may be at least as dangerous as would be the splitting of Wallony from Flanders, from .the stand- point of Western defence. It is worth remembering that the Brigade Piron, essentially those Belgians who got out of the country and answered the call to continue the war beside the .Allies, has not been granted the official status accorded, to all who remained in Belgium and have established a claim to being classified under one of the resistance headings.
Finally, though Brussels has apparently accepted the solution afforded by King Leopold's "abdication by instalments," Liege has not. The few of the marchers who, having started before the march was cancelled, actually reached Brussels were in a state of fury in the Place des Martyrs on Tuesday morning. They wore emblems of the Grace Berleur martyrdoms, and their cries were: When is the King going ? " and: "You folk don't know what we risked." There is a consciousness of destiny in many of these people which is genuinely fanatical. They say quite definitely that a mere political compromise will not appease them ; they have, they say, had enough of that sort of thing. Moreover, they were unmoved by Achille van Acker's promises of social reforms and wage increases. The Communist Party, the only party which has not subscribed to the compromise, is waiting for just such a gang of malcontents.
Previous page
