Mons - March 12th, 1951

The night of March 12/13 was a moonless one in Mons, a hotspot of resistance in the ongoing Wallonian insurgency. The army, in the midst of an operation to prevent intercity movement in Wallonia, had failed to shut down routes of communication along the transborder Mons-Conde canal. This route was notorious among locals and Wallonian insurgents as one of the main routes to smuggle arms into the country, since the government was afraid to shut down the canal and antagonize the French.

Such intelligence had also reached the Nationalist Legalist Party (PNL-NLP), one of the many Nationalist groups which had conducted a campaign of bussing supporters south from Flanders to combat what they saw as a Communist uprising in Wallonia. One such group was stationed at the Obourg lock on the night of March 12th. Charged (in a supposedly unofficial capacity) by the local army commander with preventing Wallonian arms from flowing through the lock. The commander of the PNL-NLP detachment, a German veteran by the name of Lange, were openly carrying pistols, rifles and a pair of Bren machine guns they set up on both sides of the lock.

The night was pitch black. The group allowed several boats, mostly commercial or pleasure cruises, through, after conducting a perfunctory search. However, approaching 2AM a darkened canal boat approached. Suspecting insurgents, the PNL-NLP group fired a warning shot across the bow of the boat before it reached the outer lock. What happened next is still up for debate. Lange would claim that they came under fire from insurgents on the boat. The evidence, however, points to an entirely different set of events.

The boat, Ma Fleur, was used for pleasure cruises in the area, and was returning from a successful cruise to Conde earlier that evening. The master of the boat had heard rumours of insurgents along the canals, and had decided to run along with the lights turned off to prevent the insurgents from interfering. Besides the master, half a dozen employees of the pleasure cruise company, as well as a family of four who were personal friends of the master, were being transported back to La Louviere. The evidence points to the master, armed with an ancient revolver, firing at the darkened positions on the canal sine he thoughts they were insurgents.

In response, the PNL-NLP group opened fire with their machine guns and rifles. Over 300 rounds were fired, riddling the wooden boat and almost causing it to capsize. When the fire ceased, the master and three employees were dead, while six others on the boat were severely injured. Only one, a young boy, miraculously escaped injury. His sister lost her hand and right eye to the machine gun fire.

The incident provoked outrage in Flanders against the actions of the pro-Leopoldist militias in the south, which, to this point, had been mostly glossed over by the Flemish press. The Wallonians themselves spoke little of the incident, only mentioning it in passing as another example of the pro-Leopoldist violence. Whether the Belgian government will respond to this incident by closing the canal remains to be seen, but sources inside the government in Brussels say that possibility is unlikely.