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| Sint Amanduskerk, Oostacker Michielverbeek, CC BY-SA 3.0 |
I drove second from the last in front of the M.T. [1] workshop waggon in case anything happened. My second driver sat with an extinguisher in his lap all the way. This was the 20th. October. We got onto the road and I found the engine would not pull and kept giving up but by juggling with the choke we got on fairly well and managed to keep up with the convoy. We went through Lille and then crossing the French-Belgian border we headed for Ghent. We passed through Ghent and after taking the Antwerp road for about three or four miles we arrived at our site at Oostakker.
This time we did not have to put the tents up as the advance party who had arrived twenty four hours before had already done it. We had dinner when it was ready and then set up the technical equipment. The signals cabin where I work was put just outside my tent so I didn't grumble. We soon got settled in and started watches as usual. [2] I did not bother to leave camp for quite a few days as I could find plenty of odd jobs to do. After a couple of days billets were found for a third of the unit with civilians and empty houses for the rest of us. Those who had got the civvy billets moved in but the rest of us did not want to move as the empty houses were in a filthy state and unhealthy. Some of the chaps found civvy billets for themselves and were allowed to move in. Soon there were only about thirty of us left in tents including the officers. All our watch decided to stay in the one tent, six of us, and we made it waterproof by piling the earth up around it and fixing an extra fly-sheet out over the door. All our meals were still taken in the mess tent so I only had about twenty yards to walk for that. On the end of the large mess tent we had another large square tent and used it as a reading and writing room. It was fairly comfortable with a couple of Valor stoves working. Our radio-gram was also put in here. I quite often passed an evening away by playing all the records I liked. The radio-gram was made by certain members of the unit when we were in England.
While we were here we were allowed to use the shower baths in the local gas-works any time we liked. The water was always hot too.
- MT - Mechanical Transport
- He doesn't mention it in the diary, but what my father told me he was doing in Belgium was spotting the V-1 flying bombs so that they could be intercepted.
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| "Personally, Herr Schmidt, I don't think these Belgians here will support the British like the French have done." |
