2nd Regiment de Carabiniers, Belgian Army
Victor-Joseph de Martelaere was born on 18 July 1882 in Massamen near Ghent in Belgium. His father was an unnamed innkeeper and Marie de Martelaere. He was married to Angèle Verschelle but the various records do not show any children.
He had been conscripted aged twenty in 1902 into the militia to serve two years of military service but in September 1913 had re-engaged in what is described as a ‘voluntary reserve’.
He was mobilized on 1 August 1914, just two days before the Germans violated Belgian neutrality by putting their Schlieffen Plan into operation and sending two huge armies flooding into Belgium. He was posted into the 2nd Régiment de Carabiniers, part of the 6th Division of the Belgian Army.
Research shows that Carabiniers can be translated as being comparable either to dragoons or to rifle regiments. Despite those prestigious titles, de Martelaere was posted to a Fortress Battalion in the Antwerp defences.
Most continental armies had two types of operational units – Field Troops and Fortress Troops. In 1914 Belgium had a nominal 150,000 men in field formations and 130,000 in the fortresses, with 90,000 reservists available to make the units up to full strength in time of war.
Soldat de Martelaere took part in the defence of Antwerp but, after that port city fell on 10 October, was transferred to a Field Battalion of Carabiniers on the Yser sector further south. It was here that he received a gunshot wound through a lung on 4 October. He was taken to a medical station near Calais, then evacuated with other Belgian wounded to England a few days later, finishing up in the 1st Southern General Hospital in Birmingham.
He was seriously ill but the hospital authorities probably decided that he would be better off with his fellow countrymen when that contingent was sent to Norton Hall which s a modestly sized country house with its surrounding estate situated between the villages of Mickleton and Honeybourne. It took about three weeks for the staff to convert Norton Hall into a hospital. Maye Bruce became the Commandant. It opened officially on 11 November when the first patients arrived. The staff had been told in advance that their first patients were not to be British soldiers but would be Belgians. They were wounded soldiers of the Belgian Army evacuated to England, together with large numbers of civilian refugees, and had been distributed across many parts of the country.
The wounded Belgian soldiers arrived at Honeybourne Station at 5pm to be met by a local doctor, local motorists, two Belgian schoolteachers from Broadway and a Belgian priest from Chipping Campden. There were either seventeen or eighteen patients (accounts vary; the Evesham Journal reporter’s count of eighteen was probably the more accurate). It was noted that there appeared to be no serious cases and half of the Belgians were able to walk to the waiting motor cars.
The hospital had been running for less than two weeks when it suffered its first patient death. On 4 December Soldat Victor-Joseph de Martelaere died; he was 32 years old. His death was described as due to a ‘cerebral embolism’.
His burial, in the churchyard at St Lawrence’s Church at Mickleton was conducted with much ceremony. The coffin was covered with a Belgian flag. Father Henry Bilsbarrow, Chipping Campden’s popular Catholic parish priest, popularly known as ‘Father Bill’, took the service.
The local vicar, Reverend Arthure, also attended together with many villagers. Maye Bruce, two nurses and as many of her Belgian patients as were able to travel, came from Norton Hall. Some Belgian refugees came from nearby Lower Quinton and were later given a lift back in private motor cars. A firing party of lightly wounded British soldiers under a sergeant of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers fired a volley over the grave. A ‘farewell’ was blown on two bugles borrowed from the Boy Scouts.
In 1922 Soldat de Martelaere’s widow, who was now living in France, attempted to obtain the remains of her husband transferred to her new home town but the expiry date for such movements of wartime remains had passed. She was given a grant of 300 francs, perhaps as compensation for her disappointment. Being illiterate, she was unable to sign for that sum, so the local Mayor verified the payment.
Some time after the war, the Belgian authorities erected a standard Belgian military headstone over the grave at Mickleton; its inscription, in French, shows that de Martelaere was from a French-speaking family although his home was in a mainly Flemish part of Belgium. Belgian headstones can be in either language.
This grave, which I found by chance, is one of only two of the 296 First World War Belgian graves in British cemeteries to be located in Gloucestershire.
A group of wounded Belgian soldiers at Norton Hall
Research by Martin Middlebrook