When Faith Faces Evil: The Winged Watchman

30 November 2025

When Faith Faces Evil:

The Winged Watchman

by Hilda Van Stockum

My journey to writing THE DAWN was not linear.  It was a circuitous series of intriguing steps, that led to other steps.  Each one granted me information and insights.  I was largely, if not completely, unaware of those creative dimensions until the summer of 2008 when I set out to compose THE DAWN.

Once I started to write this novel, I was in for a penny, in for a pound.  A very large pound!

The book entitled The Winged Watchman was written by Dutch-born authoress Hilda van Stockum.  I purchased this historic fiction from Bethlehem Books, sometime during 1998, just prior to moving Self and Family from The Suburbs in Roseville to the Country in Newcastle, CA.

I was inspired to buy this book after having watched Foreign Correspondent on the once-wonderful Turner Classic Movies.  TCM at that time was hosted by Robert Osborne.  He was always informative and witty.  He delightfully, but objectively, dished the dirt on Old Hollywood with elegance, accuracy, and pointed relevance to the Featured Film, Star, Director, whatever.  The cinematic backstory was always fascinating.  There were times when I watched the Intro by Mr. Osborne, and then didn’t view the flick in which I’d little interest!

Foreign Correspondent, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, was set in New York City, England, the Netherlands, and the Atlantic Ocean, just before the explosive outbreak of World War II.  This 1940 Hollywood film was shot in black-and-white, as befits its gritty yet ethereal “reality”.

The MacGuffin in this flick by Hitch is the secret paragraph in a treaty between the Netherlands and Belgium, that must be kept secret, or war will break out.  The reason for the secrecy is to prevent the Enemy Nation (aka Germany) from knowing how one country would respond to another country, in the event of invasion (which, with the Nazis, was a done deal). 

This MacGuffin is one of the stronger ones of the war/espionage cinema stories from Mr. Hitchcock.  The Vital Protection of the Pivotal Paragraph is vital right up until the end of this truly historic drama. The use of windmills in Holland is central to unraveling this thrilling and tense plot:

There are traitors in your midst!

Once my family and I were settled, or at least minimally so, in the Peach House in Newcastle, I initiated Weekly Reading Night (usually on Wednesday) for my pre-adolescent children, as part of home-schooling them.  Each week, I read a chapter from The Winged Watchman.

While I read each chapter aloud to my young progeny, my Muse must have been paying highly focused attention to how the secret unknowns of life are hidden amidst the obvious and the trite during wartime.  The every-day banalities of life can create cover for all sorts of mayhem committed while the innocents among us sleep, or sleep-walk through life.

Thus it was that on 9/11, I realized that my nation, the 50/50 country — that house divided against itself — which the Politicians of America have helped to foster and then exploit — could not stay 50/50 for long.  Co-existence is the turncoat’s sneak-thief recipe to defeat national identity, culture, pride, patriotism, and the traditional way of life in any land-of-liberty.

I informed my children that the Liberals were going to have a very hard time, taking cover under their sham Patriotism, because they feel, and think, much the same way as the Islamic jihadists.  Both groups of dead-enders hate America.

I didn’t waver, and have not wavered, from that opinion to this day.  Sure, I got called extreme, judgmental, harsh, mean-spirited.  The lily-livered “moderates” who wanted everyone to just get along — and not blame the murderous Islamic zealots of the Religion of Peace that just committed an act of war against the United States — those gutless wonders certainly found enough guts to denounce me publicly.

My reply to them came in a literary form called THE DAWN.  Book Three, Guillaume, begins with this truth, written by Jean Giraudoux, about the truth:

“Everyone, when there is war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.”

« Tout le monde, quand il y a la guerre dans l’air, apprend à vivre dans un nouvel élément : mensonge. »

Giraudoux, novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright, saw the wretched writing on the wall of the Nazis, and he sought to spread the word, through radio airwaves, before it was too late.  Giraudoux would die on 31 January 1944, not having seen the liberation of his patrie, but, most assuredly, he looked down upon the “Day of Deliverance”, the liberation of Paris.  That battle transpired from 19 - 25 August 1944.

The most noble of earthly battles always receive help from Above.

In the weeks and months after 9/11, the undeniable facts of a nation under siege — from within — became increasingly clear to me as I began collecting images, perceptions and visions.  I guess you could say that from 9/11 on, I was well on my way to writing THE DAWN.

The truly fine children’s books are equally, if not more, enjoyed by adults.  Such was the case with The Winged Watchman, which was published in 1962.

The setting is the Nazi-occupied Netherlands in 1944. The Verhagen family uses the windmill, which they operate as a profitable business, and in which they live, as a sanctuary for the victims of the Nazis:  Jewish children, a downed RAF pilot, an escaped prisoner.  The members of this family became heroes of the Dutch Resistance.  Thereby hangs the tale of the triumph of courage in the face of danger, particularly among children.

For it is the children who are the keys to the future.  It is the children whom the enemies of freedom target, use, corrupt, and kill, either in the womb or outside of it.

Life, and liberty, the two most abundant, and essential, gifts from God, are hated by the enemies of America.  To know that those enemies are within your homeland, that the war is HERE, in the homeland; that the fight for civilization is a long and grueling war of attrition:  that knowledge came to me even before 9/11.  It was only within the past decade that I’ve come to terms with the sickening obsession by the enemies of America to destroy the will of her patriots.

That will, will not be broken.  It’s been bent, tested, and tormented.  Through the merciful hand of God, however, the courage and the compassion that We the Patriots have somehow been able to summon, that saving grace is what saves us, and saves America.

I will not descend into petty complaints about, or the vile hatred of people who do not deserve my time or attention.  Every moment that I grant to the cynic and his digital feed of despair is one less moment that I have to devote to the valiant fighter who persists in the face of danger.  It dishonors the valiant victims to devote any time to the moaners and groaners over our current crisis.

Complaints do nothing, except demoralize the already weakened soul who somehow wanders into that morass of pontificating opinion-spewing.  Those self-anointed elites, in reality, do the work of the devil, not the Lord.  I’m not sure if they are aware of that despicable aspect to their ignoble role in life; but I am sure that I want no part of whatever it is they pretend to do.

Ordinary people comprise the extraordinary heroes who quietly go about the business of keeping on, after they realize they’ve been betrayed.  They are the helpers of the Winged Watchman; and they do not ask for anything other than the blessed knowledge that they made a difference in defending that thin blue line that stands between barbarism and the civil society that increasingly seems to be hanging by a thread.

One of the major themes in THE DAWN is the shredding and warping of the fabric of society by the collapse of the French government, and, subsequently, civil order during May-June 1940.  I saw very similar heinous forces, and the usual suspects, the politicians, engaging in their hokum, starting on 9/11.  I saw even more of the chaos of corruption during 2020, and every single day after that year of bizarre betrayal of democracy by the media, the politicians, and anyone else on-the-take in the U.S.A., until January 2025.  Then the turncoat-clock got re-set for the snakes, haters and rat finks to pull their sh—, for who know how long?

Till the money — or funding — runs out?

The promises to protect the American People from betrayal and fear were made by the very people who betrayed and fear-mongered the fine, upstanding, tenacious and spirited citizens of this country, the U.S.A.

The proper, the necessary, response to that outrageous and traitorous bilge is not cynicism, nor is it despondency.  It’s steely outrage and fervent faith in the way of your Lord, and in the will of God.  For far too long, the outrage, and the faith, got stuffed into a corner by the meek, the forbearing, and the frightened individuals in America, if not throughout the world.

No more.

Faith fights fear.

Hilda Van Stockum saw many outrages in the real world that prompted this faithful Dutchwoman to pen her fictional accounts of — the consequences that arise from immoral choices, and the results born from moral ones.  THE DAWN was born of noble aspirations, and it continues to live because of some very undeniable truths of life.