Wij Zijn Bevrijd

The sturdy Dutch inhabitants of Walcheren Island did not want to leave their flooded homes. The grey sea had snaked through Walcheren's bomb-breached dikes, coiled around hamlets and towns, drowned their handsome black-&-white Friesian Holland cattle. It had also brought salty death to orchards, pastures, grain fields. But most farmers and burghers shook their heads when Allied amphibious ducks chugged up to take them away.

At Domburg only one Dutchman was willing to go. It was the same in Oostkapelle, Westkapelle, Veere and all the other dike-side communities. Worried officials knew the marooned folk had food for two or three months. But they had little fuel for heating. Diphtheria, typhoid and influenza were spreading. And when the flood tides and angry storms of late winter and early spring struck Walcheren, what then? There might be famine. Baffled officials wondered if they should evacuate the people by force.

The Will of Man. By his labor a man imparts a portion of his life to the soil; to leave his land is thus like a touch of death. Nor does a man easily leave the soil his father and forefathers have wrested from the sea. The great basalt dike at Westkapelle had been started 500 years ago. The Germans had built pillboxes on it. Allied bombers had breached it. Commandos had poured through its gaps, in the wake of the rushing sea. Here & there, like beached sea monsters, still sprawled the rusting hulks of dead British armor.

The salt water which covered much of Walcheren (82 square miles) had undone the labor of generations. The once-rich soil would need five years, after dikes had been mended and sea pumped out, to become fruitful again. But the villagers, who remembered past floods and patient replanting, thought of life's struggle in longer terms. Of their dead fruit trees and flowering hedges they said: "Our children will live to see them again."

They were already making attempts to reclaim their soil. On dry isolated spots farmers hoed sugar beets, tended their barnyard fowl. Plank walks were set on fences above the water. At one place dike workers mended the torn sea wall in the age-old manner. A score of them hauled on the ropes of a leaden pile driver, keeping time to the chant of a greybeard.

The Will of God. The simple Godfearing people of Walcheren had no hard feelings against the British. They said that the Germans would have cut the dikes if the British had not. They accepted the trials of war as they accepted the trials of the sea. They did not despair. In the will of Providence rested ultimate good.

They knew, for example, that the trim little schoolhouse at Westkapelle was doomed. Its floor had become a black mire. Its desks were coated with oil and refuse left by the tide. Soon the whole building would crumble into the sea. But on its blackboard, beyond the water's reach, they had chalked three words: Wij zijn bevrijd--"We are liberated."

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