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lives. Although immune to the glamour of violence, they would nonetheless encourage their children to go to war when the time
     came. The Dodengang stretches well into the twentieth century.
    2. Dixmude
    The main square of Dixmude is surrounded by a Germanic gingerbread of gabled houses. Its central Grote Markt, awash in a sea
     of parked cars, holds scrupulously maintained monuments to a Belgian general and to the man in the moon. The square's cobblestones
     are well scrubbed, uniform, obedient. The flowers in the flower boxes are petunias, the cafe tables are rigid plastic forms,
     and the radiating streets are lined with cookie-cutter redbrick rowhouses straight out of a British suburban sitcom. If Dixmude
     were a person, it would wear socks with sandals.
    At the tourist office on the square, posters suggest that Dixmude is "The Heart of the Flat Country." Once my turn at the
     counter comes, I ask, in French, whether there are any vacant hotel rooms in town. After a pause, the blond hostess replies
     that everything is booked solid.
    "What, nothing?"
    "That's right," she says briskly, "nothing at all."
    I ask her if there are
     any hotels in neighboring towns, whether I could get a bus to them. My French must have faltered, for she looks me in the
     eye and says, "Are you Belgian?"
    When I tell her no, a transformation takes place. The wall of indifference vanishes. Concerned and motherly now, she leads
     me by the arm to a seat by her desk and asks me to wait a few moments. Of course we can find you a place to stay the night;
     Dixmude is crowded for the holiday weekend but we can phone around. Please, make yourself comfortable, m'sieur.
    Thus I learn the dangers of addressing a Fleming in Belgium's other official language, without so much as an excuse-my-French.
     This proof of animosity between Belgium's Flemish-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons gives me a guilty little
     thrill—having grown up a Canadian, I feel at home whenever I encounter bickering over language. The French speakers of Belgium
     used to have the upper hand in business, finance, politics, and the arts of the nation, but now demographic trends and economic
     changes have tilted in favor of the Flemish speakers, who are tired of being portrayed as oafs by the Walloons. That age-old
     habit of derision has long since spread south to France, where the telling of Belgian jokes is now a national pastime. These
     are often enjoyably stupid, as in the story of the public address system at Paris's Gare du Nord: "The train for London departs
     at 8:15; the train for Berlin departs at 9:15; and the train for Brussels departs when the little hand is on the ten . . .
     "
    Such jokes don't go down too well in Flanders, especially if told by a Walloon. Understandably, militant Flemings want respect;
     unfortunately, their loudest voice is the Vlaams Blok (Flemish Block), the kind of truly repulsive party of racist xenophobes
     that European political culture excels at producing. In Dixmude, the Great War plays a leading role in the Blok's theater
     of ethnic rage. What, from a distance, I took to be an enormous water tower wavering in the heat haze turns out to be a twenty-seven-story-tall
     memorial to the First World War that doubles as a shrine for the extreme Right. The IJzertoren (Yser Tower), a great brown
     truncheon rising out of the plain, looks the part.
    Originally erected to honor Belgian soldiers who died on the Yser, the tower gradually became a rallying point for local patriots.
     Flemish veterans of the First World War claimed that their fallen comrades had been wantonly sacrificed by the Belgian army's
     French-speaking officer class. Thus the Yser war monument automatically became a symbol of aggrieved nationhood. This was
     especially true after March 15, 1946, when the original IJzertoren was unceremoniously blown up, allegedly by anti-Flemish
     dynamite. The spectacular act of vandalism, spurred by indignation over the pro-Nazi