author
L. (Lambertus) Mokveld
1890–1968
A young Dutch reporter who walked straight into the chaos of World War I, he turned firsthand experience into vivid, urgent writing. His best-known work captures the destruction in Belgium with the eye of a journalist and the pace of a witness who was really there.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in 1890, Lambertus Mokveld was a Dutch journalist and author best known for his reporting from the opening months of the First World War. At just 24, he was sent by the Dutch Catholic newspaper De Tijd into Belgium, where he traveled through the war zone and recorded what he saw.
Mokveld is often described as one of the first Dutch war correspondents at the front. His dispatches from Belgium were later gathered into De overweldiging van België and also reached English-language readers through The German Fury in Belgium. What makes his work stand out is its directness: he wrote as someone moving through ruined towns, meeting refugees, and witnessing the human cost of invasion up close.
He died in 1968. Today, his writing remains valuable both as journalism and as eyewitness history, offering readers a clear, immediate view of how the war looked and felt in 1914.