Xavier Hanotte
Xavier Hanotte is a Walloon writer of Belgian nationality born with Mount-on-Marchienne the October 31st 1960. He asserts as Walloon good dye as one of its biographies or the foreign critics indicates it which bring it closer to Simenon or Michaux. He lives with Brussels. Germanist of formation, it specialized in data processing after having worked some time in the legal edition. He is the translator of from Antwerp author Hubert Lampo and of the English poet Wilfred Owen. Its novels are published in the editions Belfond. Foreign critics which bring it closer to Simenon or Michaux.
Secret injustices
So secretly like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They are not bear:
We never heard to which face thesis were feels.
Wilfred Owen, The Send-Off
such of secret injustices, they of allèrent.
They were not ours:
Never we knew which face awaited them.]
Its book Of secret injustices (title inspired of a poem of Owen), has this of exceptional which he excavates the past of his country until making Bataille of the Lily (23 May 28th, 1940), the key of a police enigma which is untied at the end of the XXe century, implying the Walloon soldiers to some extent several regiments of the of the Ardennes Chasseurs of May 1940 and rendering without fighting the 4th Flemish Division, at the same time as the massacre of tens of innocent civilians in the Flemish village of Vinkt according to processes which directly make think of the same mechanism as that of the massacres described in the German Atrocités in August 1914 (sincere belief in the existence of franc-tireurs distorts it).
A scene on the wallo-Flemish tragedy
The 4th Division was raised this May 25th by the 1st Division of the of the Ardennes Chasseurs, a troop of elite which inflicted with the German attacker considerable losses, in particular in the village of Vinkt. The decimated Germans of this regiment (half of losses in wounded and killed), believed as in 1914 that franc-tireurs had drawn in their back. Blow this village Flemish (defended by Walloon troops), was seen showing by the Germans to contain franc-tireurs and 80 men, women and children had passed by the weapons. The book of Xavier Hanotte, entitled Of secret injustices puts in scene in manner rather extraordinary one of these soldiers, captured as Prisoner of war according to Geneva Conventions (only the Walloon soldiers remained prisoners in Germany), which is taken along by German soldiers and who arrives on the spot even of the execution (war crime) of the Flemish civilians (innocent of course). One of the Flemings shouts something in Flemish then to him that this Walloon soldier does not include/understand, a few moments before the German balls do not mow the villager, a despaired reflection, at the edge of the death, which is not necessarily a reproach, but which one will never know the content. This scene in the middle of a very good novel of this Walloon writer synthesizes the national question in Belgium in one fulgurating instantaneous: it is about a tragedy in the middle of Europe.
Other topics
The book embraces also the problems of the negationism, the description of human police officers , the simple contact in Brussels between Flemings and Walloons or French-speaking people, the human love, the relationship between men and women today who realizes, in the professional plan, an equality in fact. He is also written in the English memory of butcheries of 1914-1918 (in Flanders' field), evokes the famous Last Post of Menin, impassions from beginning to end like a true detective novel written with much humor.
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