Europe @ 2.4 km/h (21 page)

Till now my sympathies have been totally with her but they shift 270 degrees when I ask whether she speaks any Flemish and she proudly answers in the affirmative, explaining, ‘
Mon père était
Vlamenc.
’ (‘My father was Flemish.’)

‘Well, then,’ I say, striving to keep my voice even, ‘since you are in the Flemish part of Belgium, surely you could have asked the gentleman in his own language, which you can speak.’ At this notion she sniffs the air, gives a taut double shake of the head — so much more emphatic than the word ‘
Non
’, on a par with ‘
Jamais
’ — and sallies forth to catch her train.

I’ve heard of many such encounters, but until you see two ‘civilised’ adults refuse to have a civil conversation in a language they both comprehend (and Jan later confides to me he
does
understand French) you really haven’t been to Belgium. Now I have.

Even more amazing than this encounter is one an hour and a half later, at Bruxelles-Midi Station, where I come across that rare bird, the European, which I have sought with scant success over a route that’s taken me 13,000 km, halfway across its presumed habitat. Diane — Dutch by birth and breeding — is one of the station’s information officers. She spends her working life in a transparent round booth 4 metres in diameter. Does she feel Dutch, or Belgian by adoption? I ask, and, if the latter, Flemish Belgian or Franco-Belgian? ‘None of them,’ Diane declares on the instant. ‘If anything, I am a European.’
Rara avis
indeed. No wonder they have put her under glass.

Brussels’ polyglot character — what some mistake for soullessness — is just right for a city at the crossroads. As an official booklet (produced, significantly, by the Commission of the French Community ‘to promote the European dimension of Brussels’) points out, ‘One-sixth of the city’s population was born in other European countries, and another one-sixth in countries outside Europe’.

Which gives the clue to the real reason why there is a Belgium. Now it can be revealed. Because to break it up would drive away ‘the capital of Europe’, in both senses of the phrase. The European Union — 50 years old while I’m passing through, and in self-congratulatory mood — gives this splendid old city an importance in the modern world that Brugge and Antwerp can only envy. It brings in money, too. To lose Brussels would, in soccer parlance, be to score several own goals in rapid succession.
¹⁷

This excellent booklet also describes a city landmark with such wit that I can only guess whether it was intentional. ‘Egmont Palace,’ it itemises. ‘Begun in 1534, this Italian Classical palace was home to the great and the good before it became part of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.’
¹⁸
So there you have it: the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not great, and no good.

590 km

Another campaign dispatch has arrived from True North.

13 August. 1.03 am AEST.

Hi Ken,

It’s less than one month to election day. How it will go is hard to say, but I have good hopes.

It looks like young against old in this election. It’s still summer here but we have no more midnight sun, it stopped at 31 of July. The sun was shining red and beautiful just over the sea. But I had no one to share this moment with.

Marius.

Long live Viking democracy. The loneliness of high office appears to be getting to Marius already — and he hasn’t even been elected yet.

591-598 km

A bus timetable on a shelter in Brussels North displays refreshing candour but has me scratching my head. ‘
Départ Théorique
’, it announces. ‘Theoretical Departure’.

Late today in the stately central square, Grand Place, I meet an 86-year-old man and his 54-year-old wife. He is bursting with civic pride. ‘
Voici le plus grand place du monde
,’ he exclaims. ‘This is the greatest square in the world.’ To mention rivals in Beijing or Budapest would be churlish, and anyway I must defer to age. Looking around me, though, I concede to myself that he may just have a point.

The Maison de Brasseries, one of the famous guildhalls that used to surround the square, sparkles in the evening sunlight. Most of the buildings around us now were built in a spirit of angry defiance within seven years of Louis XIV’s order to bombard Brussels back in 1695. The one building that was Louis’ real target — the Hotel de Ville, which according to my elderly informant dates back to the 14th century — escaped the bombardment intact.

The more I see of it, the more of a slur it seems to say that Brussels is charmless. Especially evocative are the pavement restaurants on the Rue des Bouchers near the Galeries St Hubert shopping arcade; the cathedral, magnificently illuminated by night; and a neon-lit office tower on the Place Rogier. For romantic revolutionaries there is the Place de Barricades, just up the road from the hostel where I stay in Brussels North. Victor Hugo lived here in 1830 — when Belgium was newly minted, and no one was devising ways to make it smaller still.

At 722 members the European Parliament must be nearly the most ‘populous’ in the world, second only to China’s National People’s Congress. Near the Schuman roundabout stands the Charlemagne Building, named after a notable European. But, by the Continental breadth of their military reach, Napoleon and Hitler were Europeans of the first order, too.

604-607 km

Electronic noticeboards at Bruxelles-Midi advertise services to Waterloo. For a moment I think it will be easier to reach the famous battlefield by train than by bus — until I realise this Waterloo is the one in London, over 300 km away, named after the scene of Wellington’s greatest victory. It seems grimly fitting to visit the scene of the agony that led to the birth of Belgium while 18 km to the north — far less dramatically — signs begin to appear that may be portents of its death throes.

Waterloo, the work of a single day, still resonates nearly 200 years on. With 12,000 dead, far fewer than at Ypres or in the Ardennes, it was the most decisive campaign of them all. Consider. It took more than Ypres to turn the tide against the Kaiser, more than the loss of a Belgian forest to defeat Hitler.

As I am hoisted up into a Bedford truck — the passenger seats in the open-backed tray being inaccessible — our Moroccan tour driver, Aziz, tries to evince interest but he has clearly met his Waterloo a few too many times … Our recorded commentary — in French, English and German — begins. (Aziz knows when to push the buttons.)

It is Sunday 18 June 1815. Napoleon has shocked the diplomats of Europe, gathered in Vienna, by escaping from the prison island of Elba and retaking Paris. The ‘Continental powers’ — Britain, Prussia and the Dutch-Flemish fighting as one under the 23-year-old Prince of Orange — are arrayed against his troops. These 300,000 men massed on the field of battle are gambling for the future of Europe. At stake is whether the Continent is to be a French Empire as mighty as ancient Rome, winner takes all. The commanders spring to life. Behind that 3 km defensive ridge — the one we are now driving towards — Napoleon’s 72,000 troops slightly outnumber Wellington’s 68,000. Yesterday evening the French placed 80 cannon on this ridge: but it rained all night, their emplacements have sunk into the mire and they will be largely ineffective today.

Battle is joined at 11.30 am. The future of Europe will be decided, right here, in less than ten hours. The battle advantage will see-saw all day, until, after the capture in early evening of La Haie Sainte farm, which puts victory within his grasp, Napoleon loses it all on one final fling against the forces of Prussia’s 73-year-old Marshal Blücher.

The battlefields of those days are the sugar-beet fields of these.This is said to be the richest farmland in Europe. Is it irreverent to suggest that all that blood and bone fertilising the soil made it so? After June 1815 these fertile acres also entered the vocabulary as a byword for irreversible defeat. It was all about the ‘civilisation’ of destruction, and the destruction of civilisation. As even the victors agreed, it was all about Napoleon.

Before pushing off to catch the bus back to Brussels I take one last look at Lion’s Mound, the great pyramid built to commemorate this famous victory, this cataclysmic loss. Every bit as impressive as Giza’s Great Pyramid, its existence stems from the same delusional pharaoh complex, the immortal dream of vain men that they might be all-powerful.

608-610 km

The most gorgeous chocolate shop I’ve ever seen, right next to the clichéd
Mannekin Pis
statue, is called Chocopolis. Great sadomasochistic pleasure is to be derived from watching the molten liquid billow from a mechanical fountain that gives it a good whipping as it flows. And you get a free sample. Yum. The shop is now run by Chinese, but everyone likes chocolate and, since this sublime creation actually comes from Central America, associating it with Belgium — or Switzerland, for that matter — is about as authentic as a cup of ‘English tea’ grown in Darjeeling. Who cares? If it takes chocolate to hold Belgium together, so be it.

From what Belgians themselves tell me, Brussels drivers set a pretty poor standard. They are certainly not the only ones ever to have made or received mobile calls in their cars, but tonight I look on in horror as a motorist sends a text message while his car sails over a road crossing, almost running into another vehicle that hurtles round the corner, nearly skittling a small cluster of pedestrians on the crossing. Cacophony erupts. Plentiful use of the horn, of course, not so much of the brain.