On his arrival he was assigned to improve the posts of Isangila, Manyanga and Lutete along the caravan route to the upper Congo River.
The Congo Free State had given command of this station to Tippu Tip, with the title of Vali, after Lieutenant Dubois had died and Captain Walter Deane had retreated in 1886.
He personally ordered the execution of the Arab who had assassinated the English major Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, whom Henry Morton Stanley had left in Yambuya during the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition.
At the start of World War I in 1914 he assisted in the defense of Namur in Louis-Napoléon Chaltin's volunteer corps of former colonial troops.
Later he founded the African Circle of Brussels and chaired the Liège section of the Association of Colonial Veterans.