Bombed out area of Göttingen at the end of WWIIAlbert's first encounter with being under fire was not personal. It was not him who was under direct fire. It was the brewer's three sons in his native village of Bissegem in Flanders, Belgium. They died in an Allied air attack on the village during WWI and their memory lives on in the company of the Battle of the Golden Spurs and The Lion of Flanders. These all imbued the local youngsters with a spirit of patriotism and a hate of the French and of the English bombers.
Albert's direct experience of being under fire was during WWII when he returned to Brussels from training for the Flemish Legion in Germany, Poland, and near the Russian front. He was staying with relatives and on his bike when he was strafed by an English war plane. Fortunately the pilot missed. What he thought to gain by killing Albert is something Albert never understood.
Albert's final experience of being physically under fire was in Göttingen in Germany in early 1945 when he was working there and Allied bombing of the city was intensifying all the while. Juliette, his wife, nearly lost a baby when she was trapped under a pile of rubble in the course of one of these bombing raids.
I am not going to dwell on it here, it is a subject for another day, but he was posthumously under fire in 2007, when a scurriloous RTÉ television programme portrayed him as a brutal Nazi war criminal. That was never cleared up and that's how he is still perceived by some people.
Perhaps now is the time to set that one straight.
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The book is available to readers in Europe here, and to those outside Europe, and particularly in the USA here
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