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    The Burning Souls
    The Burning Souls
    The Burning Souls
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    The Burning Souls

    By Leon Degrelle

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    Born to a Belgian family in the year 1906, Léon Joseph Marie Ignace Degrelle rose to prominence as a newspaper editor and head of the militant monarchist, Catholic, and anticommunist Parti Rexiste.

    Following the German occupation of Belgium, Degrelle and his party loyalists enlisted in the Wehrmacht-organized Walloon Legion to aid in the liberation of the peoples of the Soviet Republics. He raised approximately 6,000 volunteers over the course of the war, both for the Wehrmacht and, later, for the Waffen-SS. Barely a third of these volunteers would survive. Degrelle and his men were noted for extreme bravery, brutal ferocity in close quarters fighting, and an indomitable spirit of self-sacrifice, with Degrelle himself earning the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves.

    After the fall of Berlin, Degrelle made a daring escape from the crumbling Third Reich. He managed to reach Spain, where he was safeguarded by Franco's government. His native Belgium later sentenced him to death in absentia for collaboration with the Germans.

    Degrelle expressed no regrets for joining the war on the side of the Axis Powers, defending both his own actions and those of his superiors and comrades. He lived in Spain until his death of natural causes in 1994, and remained active in anticommunist and pan-European causes despite several attempts at his extradition, kidnapping, or assassination.

    The Burning Souls is Degrelle's reflection on his experiences and on the soul - part poetry, part memoir. In it, he traces his journey, from his idyllic childhood to the frozen steppes of Russia, not just as a physical journey but as a great spiritual trial. He instructs us that to give oneself completely, to be willing to weather all hardships in service of a transcendent ideal, is what is required to overcome the spiritual malaise of our day.

    The Burning Souls is now being made available for the first time in English by Antelope Hill Publishing.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAntelope Hill Publishing LLC
    Release dateMar 24, 2022
    ISBN9781953730091
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      Book preview

      The Burning Souls - Leon Degrelle

      LES ÂMES QUI BRÛLENT

      THE BURNING SOULS

      LES ÂMES QUI BRÛLENT

      THE BURNING SOULS

      also known as Militia

      A poetic memoir of

      —LÉON DEGRELLE—

      Translated by Rollo of Gaunt

      Antelope Hill Publishing

      Copyright 2020

      Printing 2020

      All rights reserved.

      Translated by Rollo of Gaunt

      Cover art by sswifty

      The publisher can be contacted at

      Antelopehillpublishing.com

      TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

      This edition of Léon Degrelle’s The Burning Souls is intended for the English reader, for whom there has thus far been no reliable translation of this particular work. This work has been a labor of love, and so while I am not the most qualified man to produce such a translation, I have faith that those more linguistically skilled than myself will forgive me for any errors, and if I inspire any of them to produce a better version, so much the better. The Burning Souls is half-prose, half-poetic, and as such, I have attempted throughout to preserve Degrelle’s meanings and intentions to the best of my ability, and also to preserve the impassioned quality with which he spoke and wrote throughout his lifetime. I hope only that I have done some justice to the author’s depth of emotion.

      May this man who found little rest in life find rest in what lies beyond, and may all men who grow weary and lose hope be inspired by his steadfast determination and unwavering courage in the face of great tragedy.

      ROLLO OF GAUNT

      CONTENTS

      Part One: Empty Hearts

      I – The Flame and the Ashes

      II – The Agony of the Century

      III – The Right Path

      Part Two: Wellsprings of Life

      IV – The Land of Our Birth

      V – Hearth and Stone

      VI – The Breath of Life

      VII – The Task of Happiness

      VIII – Christmastime

      Part Three: The Misery of Mankind

      IX – The Blind Men

      X – The Lines of Sorrow

      XI – The Saints

      XII – The Eternal Crucifixion

      XIII – Nobody

      XIV – To Have Loved

      Part Four: The Joy of Men

      XV – Strong and Hard

      XVI – The Price of Life

      XVII – Despoliation

      XVIII – The Power of Joy

      XIX – To Dream, to Think

      XX – Patience

      XXI – Obedience

      XXII – Kindness

      XXIII – Happy Isolation

      XXIV – Grandeur

      Part Five: A Man’s Duty

      XXV – The Great Retreat

      XXVI – The Taming of Horses

      XXVII – The Apocalyptic Cycle

      XXVIII – Enlightenment

      XXIX – Intransigence

      XXX – The Cross

      Part Six: To Give Completely

      XXXI – The Reconquest

      XXXII – Flotilla of Souls

      XXXIII – Summits

      PART ONE:

      —EMPTY HEARTS—

      I – The Flame and the Ashes

      Here I am, nearly at the end of my life. I felt almost everything. Knew everything. More than anything, I suffered.

      I saw, dazzled, the great golden fires of my youth arise. Their flames illuminated my land. The crowds made the starry waves of their thousands of faces dance around me. Their fervor, their eddies existed.

      But did they really, in fact, exist? Wasn't all this a dream? Did I not dream that thirty years ago, a nation called my name, and that on certain days the most distant newspapers of the planet repeated it?

      Tucked away in my exiled sadness, I can no longer believe in my past itself. Did I live those times or not? Know those passions? Raise those oceans? I walk my terraces. I lean over my roses. I discern the scents. Have I ever been another being, other than this lonely dreamer who vainly clutches at memories frayed like mountain fogs?

      Wasn't all this something other than a hallucination?

      I cannot see, far away, far away, in faded lights, their bodies, as if from a Greco painting, growing thinner and thinner. Did these men who have faded forever from the horizon know me? Did they follow me? Did I lead them? Did I exist?

      In my memories, as in my hands, I no longer feel that fleeting wind. My eyes - and what eyes should I have, eyes of desperation? - my eyes may search the impassive sky, try to see in the depths of the years, in the depths of the century, what did it mean?

      The being that I am, in what way is it still the being that once carried my name, who was known, who was listened to? For whom many have lived and for whom alas many have died? This being, what does it have to do with the man who walks, bitter, endlessly alone, upon a few meters of foreign land, rummaging through his past, losing himself in it, no longer believing in it, wondering if it is really he who was tossed a hundred times in the tornadoes of an implacable Destiny, or if this was no more than a dream?

      So if I doubt my flesh, my bones, what my public action once forged, if I doubt the reality of my past and the part that I took in a few years of building up the history of men, what can I still believe of the ideals which were born in me, which burned me, which I projected, of the value of my convictions at the time, of my feelings, of what I thought of humanity, what I dreamed of creating for her?

      Each human being is a succession of human beings, as dissimilar from each other as the passers-by whose disparate faces we scrutinize in the street.

      At fifty, how do we still look like the young man of twenty whom we are trying to remember and whose survival we want at all costs? Even his flesh is no longer the same flesh, it is gone, has been remade, renewed. No more than a millimeter of skin is the skin of those times.

      What then about the soul? And our thoughts? The feelings that propelled us to action? And the feelings that passed to us, like breaths of fire through the heart?

      How many distinct men do we carry within us, who fight, who contradict each other, or who even ignore each other? We are good and we are evil, we are the abjection and

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