Having raced through Belgium, pushing the Allies nearly to the gates of Paris, the German Army was still organizing itself to serve as an occupying power. The journey recounted in Silhouettes crépusculaires took place at an exceptional moment, as the two sides were just beginning to dig themselves - literally as well as psychologically - into the 500-mile line of trenches that came to be the Western Front for the next four years. Even more astonishing, she got him to agree to issue an order directing other German units to allow Ernst and Sinclair to make their way back to France so that he could rejoin his family.
She was able to convince the city’s German garrison commander that Sinclair’s condition effectively made him a noncombatant and therefore that he ought to be exempt from being treated as a prisoner of war. Working as a volunteer in a Belgian hospital in Charleroi whose wards were filled with wounded French, Belgian, and English soldiers, she came to know André Sinclair, a French artillery captain blinded in combat. Silhouettes crépusculaires is a memoir of a remarkable journey that Carola Ernst undertook in the fall of 1914. I stumbled across a brief item about this book some months ago that so intrigued me that I tracked down and read it, despite the fact that it’s in French and my reading ability in French is passable at best.
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