Fighting in Flanders

In August 1914, the world is about to change forever, and E. Alexander Powell is there to document it. Written in the heat of the German invasion of Belgium, this is not history remembered but news being wired as it happens. Powell, an American war correspondent embedded with Belgian forces, watches peaceful Flemish towns transform into battlegrounds overnight. He races alongside retreating armies, dodges shells, and fights for access to frontlines where correspondents are more of a hindrance than a help. Through his dispatches, we meet the adventurous photographer Donald Thompson and a cast of fellow journalists, each competing to be the voice of a country being crushed between empires. But the real story belongs to the Belgian soldiers and civilians whose grit Powell witnesses firsthand. This is the war correspondents' account: urgent, adrenalin-soaked, and painfully aware that everything they are seeing will reshape the century.