Vossenberg, from Zondereigen to Blenheim and Detroit

In the fall of 1927, not quite 10 years after the end of the Great War, Father Ladislas Segers left Belgium for Canada to work with Flemish immigrants in southwestern Ontario. On Aug 29, 1927, he set sail from Antwerp, accompanied by fellow Capuchin, Father Willibrord Pennincx, and arrived in Blenheim (Ontario), where he was to found the first Canadian settlement of the Belgian province of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin on Sep 17, 1927. Nearly a decade earlier, on Aug 1, 1914, just days before the German invasion, a mobilized Father Ladislas, then a young seminarist, had, like many other seminarists of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, volunteered for active participation as stretcher-bearer. After the fall of the port city of Antwerp, he was sent to the Yser Front where until Armistice Day 1918, he had the grim task of clearing the wounded piotten from the battlefield, without the protection of a weapon, all the while braving enemy bullets and shell fire. For his many acts of bravery and heroism, he received numerous citations, awards and decorations but those could not erase the trauma experienced on the front lines, where he had witnessed first-hand the horrors of trench warfare.