Bastogne: Where Belgians Remember Their Liberators

One of the funny things about being an ex-pat is that it has accentuated my Americanness in a lot of ways. Despite having lived in London, Brussels and Delft for 8 of the last 12 years, I sound a lot more like Chicago Mayor Richard Daley than I do John Cleese or Jean Claude Van Damme.

But every so often, the link between my exaggerated Americanness and my sense of being at home in Europe comes together. Such was the case in Bastogne, Belgium two weeks ago.

Bastogne, for those who don’t know it, was the town in the Belgian Ardennes that was the objective of the Nazi offensive that culminated in the Battle of the Bulge. It is also the one place in Belgium that has completely embraced the American role in the liberation of Western Europe at the heart of its local narrative.

There are three defining features of this embrace—a memorial to the 80.000 American troops who fell defending Bastogne and defeating the Nazi offensive, one of similar size and grandeur to the World War II Memorial in Washington, a series of stones along roads leading to the memorial marking the “Voie de la Liberation” or the Way of Liberty, and the ubiquitous references to U.S. General Anthony MacAuliffe, (as it happens, a Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity brother of mine) whose one-word reply to a Nazi surrender demand (“NUTS!”) has become a cottage industry in the town.

The star-shaped memorial, called the “Mardassson”, is poised on hilltop with a view of town, and was built on the scene of fierce fighting. In addition to the more-or-less alphabetically arranged names of the US states (Alaska and Hawaii were added upon statehood in 1959 without rearranging the incumbents), there was an intricate story of the battle and the havoc it wreaked upon the surrounding area on ten giant panels. And in the center, underneath an open circle connecting the points of the star, is a black granite stone with the inscription in Latin: “Liberatoribus Americanis Populus Belgicus Memor. IV VII MCMXLVI”, or “Belgium Remembers its American Liberators, July 4, 1956.”

Flying in front of the Mardasson are the flags of the US and the European Union. While the US and Europe don’t always see eye-to-eye, and neither the US nor the EU make things easy for those who want to do anything more than vacation in each other’s territory, European life as it is known today would not have been possible but for the contribution of American, British and, yes, Russian soldiers who died in the process of liberation. These sacrifices are rarely given much thought in other places, but are close to daily life in Bastogne, where the American Stars and Stripes flies alongside the Belgian Tricolor and the Walloon Cockerel from the town hall, and where “Le Nut’s” café remains a popular watering hole.