This is a story about a 26 year old woman who nearly got her leg blown off while on a camping trip….and now collects a World War One pension for it! And she’s proud to say she’s not interested in the history behind the war, the battles bought at the site where she nearly lost her leg, etc.
Maité Roël is just 26 and she is the youngest victim of the First World War. And when she walks to meet me past the old churchyard in her village of Bovekerke, she limps, ever so slightly, on her left leg, the living ghost of all those mutilated, long-dead men whose memory the world honoured on Armistice Day earlier this month. She even holds a First World War veteran’s card – “mutilée dans la guerre” – and when she shows it to the local railway ticket inspectors for reduced fare train trips, they suspect her – with awful inevitability – of stealing it from dead grandfather or great-grandfather.
But it’s all true. After shaking off – so far – a 10-year addiction to the morphine which Belgian doctors gave her during 29 excruciatingly painful operations on her leg, Maité is now a young mother with a year and a half old baby and, incredibly, a total disinterest in the war that almost killed her. Only an hour before I met Maité, I was listening to the “Last Post” at the Menin Gate, 15 miles away in Ypres. “I know nothing about it,” she says to me with indifference. “I’ve read nothing about it. This month was the first time they ever took me to show me the preserved trenches of the war.”
But then, take a look at the picture. Tell me you are surprised!
There’s more:
A million British soldiers had experienced this same terror in this same land more than 60 years earlier. But Maité could not understand. She was rushed to the local hospital at Wetteren where there were no specialist surgeons and she had to be rushed by air to Ghent University Hospital. For three hours, she wept and cried in pain before doctors could give her a sedative because the doctors were not sure which medication to administer. “I only started feeling the pain when I saw my leg – and then it never stopped,” she said.
Nor has it stopped now. The doctors took skin and muscles and arteries from thighs and back and ribs to reconstruct her left leg – and saved it after 29 operations in which Maité spent two years in hospital, all of them on morphine. For the next 10 years she was addicted, desperate to detoxicate but still finding the pain unbearable. Maité now has only one artery in each leg. The birth of her child, Damon, and the love of his father, Kurt, helped her, she says, admitting with a smile that she still needs cannabis and alcohol to survive the pain but has been without morphine for a year and five months.
Fancy that! She’s a drunken dope fiend. Who gets $1400 per month from a government who’s history she could give a shit about.
I bet she also supports Obama.
Now the EU has a President no one has ever heard of and who no one voted for and he is also Belgian. http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4181 Yet the government of Belgium can hardly make up its mind if it wants to be Fwench or Flemish. It saddens me greatly to think of all the lives thrown away in Flanders for what? So the unelected bureaucrat scum in Brussels could oversee a muslim takeover of Europe.
Someday they will want US to save them, but we can’t save them once we’ve become them.
She’s probably a whore too!
What also strikes me is that any male could possibly be turned on enuff by this thing to mate with IT. Yuk.
Grayjohn … well said and something to think a lot about.
L.
Headline story covering two pages in last week issue of Torygraph .. WW2 vets asking why they bothered to fight Hitler if this is what the UK has come to. I lost the damn page. Easy to Google tho.