I Am Not Afraid of Looking into the Rifles by Rick Stroud

Author:Rick Stroud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2024-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

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By Christmas 1915 food shortages were severe in Roulers and smuggling food was treated by the Germans as a serious crime. House-to-house searches were a regular occurrence, with gendarmes knocking people up in the middle of the night. Anyone found keeping undeclared animals risked a long prison sentence. Coffee, butter and jam became expensive black-market items and were usually unobtainable. Food substitutes were used. Roasted oat chaff mixed with roasted pea shells served for coffee. Potato pulp mixed with beetroot served for jam.

Drapers’ shops had their stocks requisitioned and people improvised clothes from anything that came to hand; blankets, tablecloths, curtains and even canvas blinds suddenly appeared as suits, skirts, hats and dresses. One woman, Madame Veldock, kept a goat in her cellar. She had knocked a hole in the wall to connect it to the cellar next door. Whenever a house-to-house search was under way the goat was led into the next-door cellar until the gendarmes had left and then brought back again as the men moved on. Mme Veldock was never caught.

People could be arrested for the smallest offence and it became almost a badge of honour to have spent time in Roulers’ civic jail. Three young girls, all under twelve, were sentenced to ten weeks for picking up bits of coke lying along the railway leading into Roulers station. An old couple in their seventies were given the same punishment for hiding a few pounds of potatoes and some maize.

Many of the women left in the town found ways to smuggle food to prisoners in the small civic jail. It was discovered that ventilation holes had been drilled in the glass of some grated windows that protruded a few inches above street level. Food could be rolled into long cylinders and slipped through the holes. By this means, bread and meat could be passed to the prisoners. At night only a sergeant and an enlisted man were on duty, and only one patrolled the outside walls at a time, making it easy to evade them. As the year progressed they had become lazy and they too were hungry. In the end it became possible to bribe the two men with food and get them to turn a blind eye. Marthe Cnockaert too helped smuggle food into the prison.

As the year 1915 ended it became harder for Marthe to operate. Her contact, Number 63, had disappeared and security was generally much tighter than it had been at the beginning of the war. A new German battalion of a thousand men had arrived and were quartered in the town. Marthe Cnockaert’s contact, Canteen Ma, was now the only way in which she could get information to the Allies.

Nevertheless Marthe continued with her double life. She and her parents lived 20 miles from the front, hearing the constant noise of heavy gunfire and at night seeing the horizon lit by explosions and Very lights arcing into the dark sky. Even so they thought that life so near the

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