Secret Pigeon Service - Gordon Corera

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house in Stevoort, a village of a few hundred families who all knew each other. His father had become a teacher and then principal of a local primary school. Joseph was the eldest of eleven siblings – the one they all looked up to and idolized. Culture and Catholicism were the defining characteristics of a family who would pray, sing, draw and read poetry together. From the time he was a small child and grabbed a rattle or moved to the piano, it was clear Joseph had a love of and gift for music. But the church came first. The headmaster of Joseph’s school had a brother who was a missionary and his letters from far-off lands would be read out to the pupils. That inspired Joseph to follow in his footsteps, and in 1909 he left home and joined a Belgian missionary organization called CICM – known as the missionaries of Scheut or Scheutists, after the neighbourhood of Anderlecht in Brussels where they were based. It was a strict regime – up at 5 a.m., asleep at 9 p.m., the hours between filled with prayer, study and communal living. Family visits were limited, but when Joseph returned for a few days’ holiday in 1912, his siblings found he had grown up. He was still not tall, and he continued to walk with a slight stoop that had been there from childhood, but now he proudly sported a short beard, much to their amusement. Joseph and his youngest brother would become missionaries and another brother a priest. Two of the sisters would become nuns.

      When Germany declared war on Belgium on 4 August 1914, Raskin had just been ordained a sub-deacon, but he was not immune from the patriotic fervour sweeping Europe. God and country were intertwined for many at that time. But Raskin’s family were about to see up close what war really meant.

      The family had moved to the town of Aarschot a few years earlier, when Raskin’s father became a school inspector. It was a small town but would become famous both in Belgium and Britain for the events of August 1914. As the Belgian army retreated, two Belgian regiments acted as a rearguard in the town and held up the German advance, much to the anger of German commanders. In their house, Raskin’s younger siblings hid in the basement and sat fearfully around a single lamp, occasionally going upstairs to peek at events from behind the curtains. When the town fell, twenty captured Belgian soldiers were shot and thrown into the river. That evening a German brigade commander was shot while standing on a balcony on the square – perhaps killed by the ricochet of a bullet fired by his own soldiers. But the Germans treated the death as an assassination and began heavy reprisals aimed at what they saw as resistance from the local population. Men were rounded up in the marketplace and then taken to a field where they were executed. In all, 156 civilians were killed over the following days. Women were said to have been victimized. The events in Aarschot were pivotal in what came to be known in Britain as ‘the rape of Belgium’, an episode ably exploited by British propagandists as their country responded to the attack on neutral Belgium by joining the war. The British spy and author William Le Queux wrote graphically of babies being bayoneted and women savaged by the German army in the town. British newspapers were filled with lurid, exaggerated accounts, which in turn helped galvanize support for war amongst the British public. And so Belgium’s war quickly became Britain’s.

      The first time Joseph Raskin was arrested as a spy by the Germans he was entirely innocent. Priests and primary school teachers had been mobilized as stretcher-bearers and ambulance men for the Belgian army. Raskin was put to work at Beverlo ferrying wounded soldiers around. As word reached him of events in Aarschot, he became desperate for news of his family. At 6 a.m. one Sunday he put on civilian clothes and got on his bike. A German patrol stopped him. A young man cycling in civilian clothes was highly suspicious at a time when the Germans thought every Belgian was a spy. Worse, Raskin did not have his Red Cross papers. The case seemed open and shut. He must be a spy. The sentence was death.

      Raskin was taken to a fort that was being used a prison. In a car on the way he noticed that the papers regarding his case were lying on the seat next to him. He slowly edged them underneath him and then to the other side. As the car hit a particularly violent bump, he pushed them out of the side without the Germans noticing. Upon his arrival at the fort, the authorities were lost without the paperwork. In the chaos of the early days of the war, there was nothing that could be done. He would just have to be kept there.

      In December 1914, he made his escape from the fort. The family story was that he hid under the hay in a wagon on the return journey of a farmer who had come to deliver food. The reality may have been somewhat more prosaic. German papers indicate that they had been unsure what to do with him, and because he had made himself useful as a cook he was allowed to travel to Stevoort in early December. It was from there that he may then have made his escape, perhaps indeed in a hay cart. Whatever the real story, he was out. He then went to the front lines, again as a stretcher-bearer. This was dangerous work, sometimes involving making one’s way right to the front to load up the battered and broken bodies of soldiers and then suddenly having to drop into the mud as German bullets whistled overhead.

      He enjoyed a ten-day break in London – not knowing that a quarter of a century later the course of his life would be shaped by his attempts to reach out to that city once again. During that brief visit, there were visits to churches and museums, but Raskin had one problem. With his lively blue-grey eyes, rippled dark hair and infectious laugh, he was handsome, and he wondered how to explain to the local girls who seemed interested in him that he was actually a chaste priest.

      When he returned to the front, Raskin’s peculiar skills opened the way for him to become something else – an artist-spy. Since his youth, he had been good with his hands as well as his head. He would repair clocks and generally tinker with things. He was particularly talented as an artist. So now, he began to go to the front line, initially of his own volition, to draw what he saw in front of him. The result were beautiful drawings of the trenches and German positions.

      When his superiors in the Army saw the drawings, they immediately recognized their military value and they were passed up the chain of command to the highest levels. Raskin was dismissed as a stretcher-bearer and turned into an observateur – a kind of intelligence gatherer. He worked across the Belgian front, just north of Ypres where the British were fighting. It was a bleak, apocalyptic landscape. The Germans had initially advanced over the River Yser but the Belgians flooded the land to halt their advance. The Germans then partially retreated back over to one bank. The land in between was laid waste by a mix of water and war. Sometimes the two sides were close – at a place called the ‘trenches of the dead’ they were little more than twenty metres apart. But in other places, no man’s land was far wider and less clear-cut. Shredded trees stood amongst pools of muddy water with the remnants of farm life surrounding them. The Germans had established advanced observation points and positioned snipers in farmhouses across the desolate flooded plain.

      Raskin would travel out at night. He would give a password to a sentry and then sleep for a while in a shell hole. At first light, as the birdsong began, he would begin to observe and sketch. Two men would accompany him and provide covering fire if needed. At night, when he had seen enough, he would return. Back in his bureau he would take the rough drawings he had made and turn them into something approaching art. There are beautiful pencil drawings and watercolours of the view from the Belgian side facing the Germans, with each German position carefully marked out. The largest, most dramatic panoramas he made are two feet long, works of art crafted from the art of warfare.

      It could be dangerous. In mid-May 1916, he spent three days and nights without food or water trapped in an abandoned flour mill, full of rats, surrounded by Germans. Another time, a bullet shattered the lens of the periscope he was using.

      Sometimes in the picture is what appears to be an abandoned building. Look closely and you can just see the eyes of a German soldier hiding in a gap ready to shoot. A caption notes that this was a permanent German observation point. There were also bird’s-eye views of the same front lines, again marked out in precise detail with map coordinates and distances. One map has arrows indicating not just the direction in which the Germans shot from each trench but how regularly they fired; for instance, whether they only fired in response to Belgian fire or just at night. At one farmhouse, it is noted that every time the Belgian artillery began firing, a German periscope popped up. At another point it is remarked that the Germans at night sent out patrols so close they would throw grenades into Belgian trenches.

      Senior officers were impressed. One went so far as to put his signature on

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