Oorlogsbon - Bon de guerre

Menin — Meenen in Dutch — sits directly on the Franco-Belgian border along the Lys river, and by late 1914 it was under German occupation. Like dozens of Belgian communes cut off from the national banking system, the town issued its own emergency paper to keep local commerce functioning. These "oorlogsbonnen" or war bonds were a purely local solution to a currency vacuum, authorized at the municipal level with no backing from any central authority.

The engravers Vandevoorde and Pardoen were local craftsmen, not commercial printers — an unusual arrangement that gives the note a distinctly hand-finished quality compared to the more polished emergency issues from larger Belgian cities.