“Mort pour la France” : Édouard Roland
War
He was 30 years when the First World War broke out and he was mobilised as a sapper in the first regiment of the Engineering Arm of the French army. He left his wife Augustine and their 6-year-old son behind. He would never see the little Edouard, named after him, again. His regiment was first stationed at Versailles. From there, the soldiers left for what would be known as the Battle of the Frontiers, a series of battles in the Ardennes and Alsace-Lorraine.
His unit withdraws during the Grande Retraite and fought in the infamous Battle of the Marne. In the front line Roland digs trenches, chopping with an ax in the undulating fields. In the trenches the soldiers hide from enemy fire or attack the enemy with rifles and bayonets, often to gain but a few meters of soil. Millions of Frenchmen, Britons, Belgians and Germans are killed in trenches and dug out passageways, such as those carved with hand tools by Roland and other sappers.
But Roland does not stay behind lifeless on a field strewn with bodies and munitions debris. He was taken prisoner on September 7, 1914 by the Germans and sent to a camp in Germany, the Haus Spital, northwest of the city of Münster, just across the border with the neutral Netherlands. A year later, he sends a picture of Kolberg on the Baltic Sea, where he is employed in an agricultural labour company.
Armistice
On 11 November 1918 the First World War officially ended. In a forest near the French town of Compiegne, about eighty kilometers north of Paris, the truce was closed. The war has cost the lives of nearly ten million soldiers, injured tens of millions of young men and hordes of women and children were forced to flee.
Soon more prisoners of war arrive in the Netherlands than can be shipped home – due to lack of trains and coal. In early December the government therefore starts the temporary billeting of prisoners of war in transit in temporary camps and other facilities. Roland is also repatriated. On his way home, he arrives to Enschede on 4 December 1918. He writes to his wife Augustine that he is healthy and that it won’t take long before he’s home.Roland ends up in a camp in Nieuw-Milligen in Apeldoorn, where several thousand mainly French and Serbian soldiers are put up in a month’s time. As on 22 and 24 December a batch of French soldiers leave the camp, only twelve Frenchmen remain sick in the camp. Three of them die: Raphael Joseph Devaux from Auchylez la Bassée, Pierre Galy from Montpézat and Roland, on 2 January 1919.
Miliary tuberculosis
The camp commander reports in the weekly report: “Roland deceased in the camp hospital. The coroner notes two days after Roland’s death the cause of death as “miliary tuberculosis”, a still incurable bacterial infection. A week later the Spanish flu breaks out in the Dutch camps. During this epidemic another six Frenchmen die along with thirty Serbians, one of whom in the Military Hospital in Amersfoort.The French are almost all buried at the Roman Catholic cemetery in Apeldoorn. The bodies of two of the nine deceased French are transferred to France in 1923. Roland and the other six are exhumed in the summer of 1935 and reburied in Soesterberg. That serves as a gathering place for about 200 French victims of the First World War, primarily civilian refugees but also fifteen soldiers. As a widow, Augustine received a payment of 150 francs after the war. She never heard where the grave of her husband was.
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