Fair Towers of Former Days

By: Violet Millhouse Gardener

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Once Upon A Time of War—what happens when a fairy tale gets dropped into the middle of Europe in World War 2? Take Beauty & the Beast, now set in a Flemish-speaking village at a crossroads in Belgium, Autumn 1940, after the Nazi invasion, and amongst the remnants of the Great War before . . . for who could ever learn to love a Beast?
Like the other small lowland countries, Belgium could not long withstand the German blitzkrieg. In the Great War before, huge swaths of their countryside had become battlefields, scarred with trenches and soaked in blood. Julienne's father, a soldier then, still has those memories, and sometimes, he still fights those military battles in his head. But it wasn't just soldiers killed, many civilians were casualties of that war—not just as collateral damage, but as retribution.
When the Germans invaded again in May 1940, the country also faltered, but now there are many collaborators. Perhaps those people remembered the carnage of the war before. Hundreds of thousands fight under the flag of the Nazis, many sent to the Eastern front. Hundreds of thousands are prisoners of war. But a sporadic Resistance rallies in the King Leopold's name, as their monarch tries to keep his people from being deported to Germany to work in munitions plants. These groups were not organized nationally; most operated only on local targets—doing sabotage. But there is also an enemy within . . .