Ambassador Charlie Stuart, a former UK soldier, will present Hold at All Costs to the Belgium Battles and Books Club. His book draws on an in-depth study of military records and, crucially, detailed terrain walks that helped him understand how American and German soldiers survived and fought through the harshest winter conditions. The...
Review of our 2026 books and book recommendations for 2027. Annual Holiday Season dinner at the home of the Fraternelle des Agents Parachutistes in Brussels.
Justin Sammon leads a discussion on the Battle of the Somme (1916), the deadliest battle of the first world war.
Belgium holds many Armistice Day commemorations, but perhaps the most moving takes place at the Menin Gate in Ypres, in western Belgium. This is one of the sites where hundreds of thousands of American, Belgian, British, Commonwealth, French, and German troops lost their lives during four years of trench warfare under the harshest conditions. We...
New Begnnings is a Belgian film by Isabelle Ingold and Vivianne Perelmuter. It is the personal story of an American infantry soldier, from an Indian Tribe in northern California who recalls his experiences in Vietnam and then seeks to find his old comrades. The film will be followed by William Bache, with his reflections on being an infantry...
William Bache will lead our discussion of Attack on the Scheldt 1944, by Graham A. Thomas, a brutal five-week Allied campaign to clear German forces from the Scheldt estuary and unlock the vital port of Antwerp. Led by the First Canadian Army, alongside British and Polish troops, the grueling operation involved fighting through flooded, mud-soaked...
Judi Nicolay led our discussion of Diana Souhami's biography, Edith Cavell, which follows the life of the British nurse who became a world-renowned symbol of humanitarian courage during World War I. She moved to Brussels to lead a "ramshackle" hospital, which she transformed into a model training school for nurses. When WWI began in 1914, Cavell...
Battles and Books members attended the annual Liberation Ceremony of the Royal British Legion, Antwerp Chapter, at the Cromwell Tank, on Jan Van Rijswijcklaan (opposite Antwerp Expo), on 5 September. It was an excellent ceremony of remembrance.
Battle and Books members attended the Royal British Legion Brussels Chapter's commemorative event, hosted by the City of Mons, marking the arrival of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in Belgium during WWI. Under the Schlieffen Plan, the German Army invaded Belgium to separate the French armies from the Belgian forces on the North Sea coast....
William Bache presented The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman’s masterful history of how a conflict among European royals and their empires ignited and escalated into a world war. He explored how mass mobilization, nationalism, military doctrine, political alliances, new technologies, and railroads combined to accelerate the slide into a four-year...
Rainer Hiltermann led a tour of fifteen Book club members in which he shared his period photographs of Brussels under German military occupation during the First World War. Most instructive was the closing off of the area stretching from the Royal Palace, Parc Royale and Grand Assembly. The area was a No Go zone for Belgians, who could...
Eric Padgett led a compelling discussion of The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War by Peter Englund. This non-fiction work recounts World War I through the personal experiences of 20 ordinary people—soldiers, nurses, and civilians—from different nations. It presents the war as a deeply human experience rather than...
After the excellent three-course meal in the Bistromy Dinning Room, the Battles and Books members adjourned to the Wasteels bar of the Club Prince Albert, for informal social time with Helen Fry. All-in-all it was a great event. Shown in the photograph is Helen Fry with the Battles and Books Co-Chairs, Dr. Christina Bache and Colonel William Bache...