More Belgians killed in WWI than previously thought

Belgium suffered five times more casualties in the First World War than previously thought, according to the results of a research project in which volunteers across the country counted the names on war memorials in every municipality.

“Results showed that not 5,000 Belgian citizens were killed during the First World War, but five times as many,” said Piet Chielens, co-ordinator of the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, which organised the census.

The project was part of a larger programme called The Name List, a comprehensive register of victims during the war. “It’s a list with room for civilians as well as soldiers, regardless of their nationality … as much for Belgians who died in their own country or another, as for non-Belgians who died here or were fatally wounded, to die elsewhere later,” the project website explains.

Registers of victims, the project points out, tend to be composed of lists of “our” names: “Even with the best of intentions, public remembrances tend to underwrite an insuperable Us and Them logic.”

The research project started three years ago and is due to be complete in 2018, the centenary of the end of the war. A searchable list of the names will be made available online; they will also be projected  over the next four years on a wall in the In Flanders Field Museum, each one exactly 100 years after the person died.

On the first day yesterday, some 200 names were projected, including 18 Belgian civilians, 29 Belgian soldiers and 23 German soldiers. Today there will be 727 more, and so on for the next 1,558 days. 

photo courtesy In Flanders Fields Museum