“War and Turpentine” by Stefan Hertmans

The author of this book has used his grandfather’s notebooks to compile this fictitious account of his ancestor’s experiences in WW1. Translated from Flemish we experience a Belgian soldier’s eye view of life in an over-powered, out gunned Army as the Kaiser’s troops stormed through the Belgian countryside.

Yet this book is so much more than an account of the war, as Stefan’s grandfather, Urbain Martien, was also an artist, as was Urbain’s own father, hence the book’s title. It also illuminates a tender love story, his parents, set against his background of a childhood in Ghent, where as a young man he was sent out to work in an iron foundry at the tender age of 14. In graphic detail his teenage memories are portrayed.

Urbain is devoted to his parents, and the love he holds for each of them is recounted with true devotion. Hours spent with his father a repairer of church murals until he leaves to undertake a restoration in Liverpool. During his absence Urbain teaches himself to paint, but his interest is only ever as a hobby; yet he matures to become a talented copier of the Masters.

The novel starts slowly uncovering Urbain’s early life, until in the middle the brutality of war is recounted. He becomes a wounded hero, convalescing one time in Liverpool, where he can trace his father’s stay. The clarity of the author’s grandfather’s war diaries provides, in such stark detail, a foot soldier’s existence. Long marches which if you do not know Belgium too well, are worth looking up on a map to understand the distances covered.

There is also the touching love story of Urbain as a man, about relationships that resonate through the ages, and why the author’s mother is christened Maria Emelia.

The text of the book is decorated with photographs and pictures which add an intimacy to the story. Beautifully written with an excellent translation – a read with a difference.