The only light in the hallway came from the windows at each end, making it darker and darker towards the middle, as if I were walking deeper and deeper into a forest. I took another look at the picture and the text on the back: Parigné-l'Evêque, 1915. A village near Le Mans. I couldn't find any more information about it.

A man shuffled towards me, with hollow eyes and a suspicious glance. I told him I was visiting my great-grandmother, Elise. He repeated the name with a hoarse voice and slowly raised his arm, but I had already spotted the door with the correct number and slipped inside.

The room was tiny, just enough space for a bed and a small table. When I showed her the photo, a wistful look appeared on her face.

“That's Ferdinand. My first husband. Ferdi.” She took a deep breath and peered through the window. “I remember that photo well. That was in France, in the training camp where he had ended up. After that, he was at the front.”

She got up and dragged her feet towards the bed, remained seated on the edge for a while and then lay down. “Actually, he shouldn't have been there. He was exempt from military service.”

I asked her why, but she sighed and pulled the blanket up to her chin. Suddenly, she looked worn out. And so frightfully old. Ninety-eight years. Flat on her back, her eyes closed and her mouth slightly open.

“If you don't want to talk about Ferdi, it's fine,” I said.

“No, I’m just having a bad day. Nothing to do with that picture. I feel like I don’t belong here. Yesterday, a priest came by. I didn't want to talk to him, but he kept insisting. I lost my temper and… I threw my piss pot at his head. I shouldn't have done that. Now they’ll think I’m losing it.”

I gently smiled and said they’d surely understand, but it sounded like I didn’t really believe that.

“No, no,” she instantly replied. “You don't need to do much before they think you’re nuts. That's how it goes with people of my age.”

“You're not used to this place yet, that's all. It’ll be okay.”

“I dunno. I miss my house, and I miss being on my own.”

I nodded and looked at the wall, not knowing what to add. She smiled sadly and pressed her lips together.

The next week, I accompanied my parents to her house, to clean and pick up some things for her. I decided to take a look in the attic. In a corner, there was a kind of storage room. Under a load of clutter I found an old chest. On the lid in faded letters was written: Hazebrouck, 1915.

That's how I discovered the diary. In a side pocket of the chest, a notebook with a gray-black moiré cover. My great-grandmother's handwriting, when she was about my age.

“1913. This will be a great year, a turning point in my life. I am now eighteen years old, and soon I’ll be engaged to Ferdi, and then get married! Hopefully this year!”

It went on until 1915. In the back I also found a bunch of letters. From Ferdi. Written in Parigné-l'Evêque, the same village name as on the back of the photograph.

“Things are worse than I feared. We don't even have uniforms and walk about in some kind of prison garb. Pajama-thin cloth; we’re freezing! The food is disgusting. Shank and beans, cassoulet with giblets… I miss you so much and feel completely out of place here. The army’s clearly not my thing. They had better throw me in jail.”

A few days later, I was back at the retirement home. After updating her on the progress with the cleaning, I cautiously started talking about Ferdi, but remained silent about the letters.

She gazed mournfully for a while and then started talking.

“We married early 1914. When the Germans approached, we fled to my aunt in Hazebrouck. She had something against Ferdi, and we had to sleep in separate rooms: me on the first floor and he in the attic room. He usually stayed indoors because we knew that the gendarmes were arresting Belgian young men to deliver them to the training camps. He was exempt because we were married, but in 1915 the law changed, and married men could also be drafted. When it was his birthday, I absolutely wanted to celebrate it at a nearby bistro. We had vol-au-vent and wine; then two gendarmes entered. Before we knew what was happening, he was arrested. I never saw him again.”

She stared gloomily at her fingers and then a nurse came in with her dinner. “So, Elise? You think you’re capable of behaving like an adult today?”

At home, I continued reading the letters.

“Yesterday, a bunch of guys who were already in the trenches arrived. Their sullen faces give me the creeps. I’m dead scared of what’s coming. I often think about God. Again, yeah. You must think I'm an idiot embracing my faith again. I would much rather be with you, you know, in your arms, and not believe in God together with you. But here, it turns out, I really need him.”

That night I dreamed about it all. An invisible hand knocking soldiers out of the trenches as if they were rats, blown to bits at the touch. All that remained of them were bloody strings of flesh in the mud. In the gunk at my feet was a face. A face without a head, just a layer of facial skin, like a mask. Ferdi. Then it shriveled up and was swallowed by the mud.

As soon as I woke up, my mother entered my room. Her face was white with tension. During the night, Elise was found on the soccer field next to the retirement home. sitting right in the center circle, on a chair she had taken with her, talking to herself and waving her arms.

She told the staff that it was the Germans who dragged her out of bed, to interrogate her in the field. They had also beaten and tortured her. It was the SS men who shot her second husband. Now they were coming for her. No doubt they’d return the next night and finish the job.

She told us the same story, with a wild look in her eyes. My mother told her not to worry about it, after which Elise immediately looked up angrily and shouted, “They fucking killed my two husbands! And now it's my turn! Always those goddamn Germans, damn Krauts! You’ll see! They’ll be coming for me!”

I browsed through the letters. It was mostly descriptions of the poor conditions in the camp, until I got to one that said the training was over and departure to the front was imminent.

“Normally, we’ll be near Langemark. But first we are in Belle for a few days. That close I'll be to you. I can’t stop thinking about it. It's only twelve miles. If we meet halfway, we could flee to Godewaersvelde, where I have an uncle. We could hide there for a while and see what happens. Please let me know what you think. Desperately waiting for your reply.”

I spent the entire afternoon riding my bike around Passchendaele and Langemark, crossing the military cemeteries. Endless meadows with white crosses, columns with thousands of names. Eighty years ago. Muddy pools of blood, piss, shit and rotting corpses, the stench and the rats. This is where he walked. This is where it all ended for him. Three generations apart. Three generations earlier, and it would have been me, in that wasteland of pain, misery and gory madness.

A couple of days later Elise was outside again at night and brought back inside with a high fever. Early in the morning, she was transferred to the emergency department at the nearby hospital.

Her cheeks were deeply sunken. She was breathing quickly and heavily, her voice weak and raspy. “It's my fault he's dead. He wanted to desert the army and asked my opinion. I replied I didn't know. I was scared. I was so young and so scared.”

She looked at me with glassy eyes. “It happened in his first days in the trenches: missing in action. They never found him.”

She repeated the last sentence a few times. Her eyes were such a bright blue that they seemed to radiate light. Then she fell asleep.

She passed away a few hours after we returned home, at nine o'clock, just before sunset, sixteen months before her hundredth birthday.

The following weeks I helped my parents in her house. In a dresser, I found a photo of Elise and a man who gazed at the camera with a tough look.

“That's her second husband,” my mother said. “Cyrille, a communist who was active in the resistance. That was also the end of him.”

“What happened?”

“He was involved in a sabotage operation. Things went wrong, and he was shot in the street by the SS. He died a few days later. He was grandma's real father, and thus, my grandfather.”

I looked at the picture and said she had his eyes. Me, too, no? A little bit? She smiled and nodded.

I went to my room, put the photos next to each other and looked at them until the faces faded away. And I reflected again on her last words, that it was her fault Ferdi was killed.