by John Keegan
The Austrian cavalry rode to war in uniforms as antiquated as the French; only the infantry had been re-equipped with service grey. The Russians were unexpectedly modern. Their service dress was a loose olive-green overshirt, the gymnastirka modelled on an athlete’s tunic; but there were exotic exceptions, notably the Astrakhan caps of the light cavalry. Only the Germans had made as clean a sweep as the British. Their army was uniformly field-grey. With an antiquarian deference to tradition, however, each branch of the service was outfitted in a camouflage version of parade-ground finery. Uhlans wore double-breasted lancer tunics and hussars field-grey frogging, while cuirassiers, dragoons and infantrymen kept their spiked helmets, disguised with field-grey covers. Little patches of colour and braid and lace distinguished regiment from regiment in almost all armies; the Austrians meticulously differentiated between ten shades of red, including madder, cherry, rose, amaranth, carmine, lobster, scarlet and wine, for collar patches, six shades of green and three of yellow. The Hungarian regiments of Franz Joseph’s army wore braided knots on their trousers and the Bosnian-Herzegovinian infantry the red fez and baggy breeches of the Balkans. Even the British, whom Captain Walter Bloem would describe on first encounter as wearing “a grey-brown golfing suit,”15 excepted Lowlanders and Highlanders from the uniformity of khaki. They preserved their tartan trews or sporrans and kilts.
However clothed, the infantrymen of every army were afflicted by the enormous weight of their equipment: a rifle weighing ten pounds, bayonet, entrenching tool, ammunition pouches holding a hundred rounds or more, water bottle, large pack containing spare socks and shirt, haversack with iron rations and field dressing; that was a common outfit. The British, after the experience of long marches across the veldt in the Boer War, had adopted the “scientific” Slade-Wallace equipment of canvas webbing, designed to distribute weight as evenly as possible over the body; even so, it dragged on the shoulders and waist. The Germans clung to leather, with the greatcoat hooped outside a stiff back-pack of undressed, and so water-repellant, hide. The French piled everything into a mountainous pyramid, “le chargement de campagne,” crowned with the individual’s metal cooking pot; gleams of sunlight from such pots would allow young Lieutenant Rommel to identify and kill French soldiers in high standing corn on the French frontier later that August.16 The Russians rolled their possessions, greatcoat and all, into a sausage slung over one shoulder and under the other arm. However arranged, no infantryman’s marching load weighed less than sixty pounds; and it had to be plodded forward, mile after mile for an expected twenty miles a day, in stiff, clumsy, nailed boots—“dice-boxes,” brodequins, Bluchers, to the British, French and Germans—which were agony until broken to the shape of the foot.
Feet were as important as trains in August 1914, horses’ feet as well as men’s feet for, after detrainment in the concentration area, cavalry and infantry deployed on to the line of march. That, for the Germans, presaged days of marching west and southwards, days in which human feet would bleed and horses throw shoes. The telltale clink of a loose nail warned a cavalryman that he must find the shoeing-smith if he were to keep up next day with the column; the same sound to the senior driver of a gun-team threatened the mobility of his six harnessed animals. There were 5,000 horses in an infantry division in 1914, more than 5,000 in a cavalry division. All had to be kept shod and healthy if the twenty miles of the day were to be covered to timetable, the infantry fed, reconnaissance reports returned, small-arms combat covered by artillery fire should the enemy be encountered. Fourteen miles of road was filled by an infantry division on the march and the endurance of horses—those pulling the wheeled field-kitchens, cooking on the march, quite as much as those drawing the ammunition waggons of the artillery brigades—counted with that of the infantry in the race to drive the advance forward.17
The race was tripartite. For the French it was north-eastward from their detraining points at Sedan, Montmédy, Toul, Nancy and Belfort behind the 1870 frontier. For the British Expeditionary Force, which began to disembark at Boulogne on 14 August, it was south-eastward towards Le Cateau, just before the Belgian border. These were short marches. For the Germans the marches planned were long, westward first and then southward towards Châlons, Epernay, Compiègne, Abbeville and Paris. General von Kluck’s First Army on the right faced a march of 200 miles from its detraining points at Aachen to the French capital.
Before Paris, however, there was Liège and Namur and the other fortresses of the Belgian rivers which impeded any easy crossing for a German army into France. Belgium, small but rich out of proportion to its size, its wealth the product of an early industrial revolution and the colonisation of the Congo, had invested heavily in fortification to protect its neutrality. The forts at Liège and Namur, guarding the crossings of the Meuse, were the most modern in Europe. Built between 1888 and 1892 to the design of General Henri Brialmont, they were constructed to resist attack by the heaviest gun then existing, the 210 mm (8.4 inch). Each consisted of a circle, twenty-five miles in circumference, of independent forts, arranged at sufficient distance to protect the city itself from attack and to lend each other the protection of their own guns. At Liège there were 400, of 6-inch calibre or less, disposed in the twelve forts of the complex, all protected by reinforced concrete and armour plate. The garrison of 40,000 provided the gun crews but also “interval troops” who were supposed, at the threat of invasion, to dig trenches between the forts and hold at bay enemy infantry attempting to infiltrate through the gaps.
The strength of the Belgian forts had alarmed Schlieffen and his General Staff successors. They were, indeed, immensely strong, subterranean and self-contained, surrounded by a ditch thirty feet deep. Infantry assault upon them was certain to fail. Their thick skins would have to be broken by aimed artillery fire, and quickly, for a delay at the Meuse crossings would throw into jeopardy the smooth evolution of the Schlieffen Plan. No gun heavy enough for the work existed at the time of Schlieffen’s retirement in 1906. By 1909, however, Krupp had produced a prototype of a 420 mm (16.8 inch) howitzer powerful enough to penetrate the Belgian concrete. The Austrian Skoda company was meanwhile working on a 305 mm (12.2 inch) model which was ready the following year. It had the advantage of being road-transportable, when broken down into barrel, carriage and mount, on three motor-drawn waggons. The Krupp howitzer, in its original form, had to be transported by rail and embedded for action at the end of a specially built spur track in a concrete platform. Until a road-transportable model could be perfected, Austria lent Germany several of its 305s; only five of the Krupp rail and two of the new road-transportable guns had been finished by August 1914.18
Yet Liège had to be taken. Such was the necessity, and such the urgency, that the German war plan provided for the detachment of a special task force from Second Army to complete the mission. Commanded by General Otto von Emmich, its start line was drawn between Aachen and Eupen, at the north of the narrow corridor of Belgian territory lying between Holland and Luxembourg: Luxembourg, though independent and neutral, was to be overrun in the great German advance a few days after Emmich’s task force struck. The time allotted for the mission was forty-eight hours. It was expected by the Germans that Belgium would either not resist an invasion of its neutral territory or, should it do so, that its resistance would be swiftly overcome.
Both expectations were to be proved wrong. One of the clauses of the oath sworn by the Belgian sovereign on accession to the throne charged him with defence of the national territory, while Article 68 of the constitution appointed him commander-in-chief in time of war; he was also constitutionally president of his own council of ministers and therefore head of government, with executive powers unusual in a democracy. Albert I, King of the Belgians, was a man to take his responsibilities to heart. Intellectual, strong-willed, high-minded, he led an exemplary private life and set an example of fine public leadership. He was aware that his uncle, the aged Leopold II, had been bullied by the Kaiser in 1904: “You will be obli
ged to choose. You will be with us or against us.” He had experienced the same treatment himself at Potsdam in 1913, when his military attaché had been warned that war would be “inevitable and soon” and that it was “imperative for the weak to side with the strong.”19 Albert was determined not to take sides, correctly interpreting the treaty of 1839 to mean that Belgium’s right to neutrality was balanced by the requirement to avoid commitment to any foreign power.20 It was for that reason his government had so peremptorily rejected a British offer of 1912 to lend assistance in the event of a German invasion; to have accepted it would have been to prejudice Belgium’s enjoyment of the international guarantees of its independence.
The British proposition, and the knowledge that only diplomatic delicacy deterred France from duplicating it, had the effect, however, of compelling the Belgian staff to confront the realities of national defence. Any intervention by the British or French, though necessitating resistance, would be benevolent. It would not threaten Belgian independence in either the long or even short term. A German intervention, by contrast, would have as its object not only the pre-emption of Belgian territory for a wider aggression but quite possibly the requisition of Belgian resources for the German war effort, and the subjection of Belgium to German military government for the duration of hostilities. From 1911 onwards, therefore,
Belgium’s political and military leadership had undertaken a major re-evaluation of Belgian policy. Three questions in particular worried Brussels: how to devise a military strategy that would limit the destruction of Belgium, how to ensure that a guarantor nation did not force Belgium into a war against its will, and how to ensure that a protesting power, once invited, would leave. Slowly, over a period of months and after much debate, the answers emerged. Militarily the Belgian General Staff planned to oppose any violation of Belgium; at the same time they hoped to confine all the fighting to a small area, possibly to the province of Belgian Luxembourg. Simply stated, Belgium would resist, yet seek to avoid losing either its integrity or its neutrality.21
Easier said than done. Belgium had adopted the principle of compulsory military service only in 1912, following the strategic review, and it had taken little effect by 1914. The army was one of the most old-fashioned in Europe. The cavalry still wore early nineteenth-century uniforms, crimson trousers, fur busbies, Polish lancer caps. The infantry were in dark blue with oilskin-covered shakos, feathered bonnets or grenadier bearskins. The few machine guns were drawn, like the Flemish milk carts much photographed by tourists, behind teams of dogs. Most of the artillery was allotted to the fortresses of Liège and Namur and the older defences of Antwerp. The army was actually outnumbered by the Garde Civique, the top-hatted town militias which descended from the days of the Thirty Years’ War. Belgium’s soldiers were patriotic and to prove themselves notably brave, but their capacity to confine any fighting for possession of their country to its eastern corner was delusory.
Yet, at the outset, they made a bold stab at enacting the General Staff’s strategy. The German ultimatum, fictively alleging a French intention to violate Belgian territory and asserting Germany’s right to do so in anticipation, was delivered, with a twelve-hour time limit, on the evening of Sunday 2 August. King Albert, acting as president of a council of state, considered it two hours later. The meeting lasted into the early hours of the morning. There were divided counsels. The Chief of Staff, General Antonin de Selliers, confessed the weakness of the army and advocated retreat to the River Velpe, outside Brussels. The Sub-Chief, General de Ryckel, demanded a spoiling attack into Germany: “Send them back where they belong.” This fantasy was rejected. So, too, was Sellier’s defeatism. The King was most concerned that no appeal should be made to France or Britain, whose aid was assured, unless they reasserted their respect for the country’s independence. Eventually a middle way was decided. Belgium would not appeal for French or British assistance until her territory was physically violated, but the German ultimatum would meanwhile be rejected. The reply, described by Albertini as “the noblest document produced by the whole crisis,” ended with the resolution “to repel every infringement of [Belgium’s] rights by all the means at its power.”22
It was delivered to the German Legation at seven o’clock on the morning of 3 August and received in Berlin shortly after noon. The Germans contrived to believe, nevertheless, that the Belgians would make no more than a show of force, sufficient to demonstrate their neutrality, before giving them passage. Later that evening the Kaiser sent a personal appeal to Albert—a member of the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and so a distant relative—restating his “friendliest intentions” and claiming “the compulsion of the hour” as justification for the invasion that was about to begin.23 On its receipt, the Belgian King gave way to his first outburst in two nerve-racking days: “What does he take me for?” He immediately gave orders for the destruction of the bridges over the Meuse at Liège and the railway bridges and tunnels at the Luxembourg border.24 He also charged the commander of the Liège fortress, General Gérard Leman, “to hold to the end with your division the position which you have been entrusted to defend.”
Leman, the King’s former military tutor, was a long-service professional soldier in the nineteenth-century tradition. Thirty years of his life had been spent at the Belgian War College. He was also a man of honour and, despite his advanced age, of courage and an unyielding sense of duty. The Meuse, which he was entrusted to hold, is a mighty river. “Sambre-et-Meuse” is a traditional marching song of the French army, for the two rivers form a barrier which the revolutionary armies had defended against their enemies in 1792. At Liège the river runs in a narrow gorge 450 feet deep. It cannot be crossed in the face of a determined defence. So Emmich was to discover. His command entered Belgium early on the morning of 4 August, the outriders distributing leaflets disclaiming aggressive intent. Soon they came under fire from Belgian cavalrymen and cyclist troops who showed a quite unexpected resolution to oppose their advance. Pressing on to Liège, they found the bridges above and below the city already blown, despite the warning given that demolitions would be regarded as “hostile acts.” The Germans responded as threatened. Memories of “free firing” by irregulars against the Prussian advance into France in 1870 were strong and had been re-enforced by official stricture. Despite the heroic place allotted to the Freischütze who had waged the War of Prussian Liberation against Napoleon in 1813–14, official Germany interpreted international law to mean that an effective occupying force had the right to treat civilian resistance as rebellion and punish resisters by summary execution and collective reprisal.25 There were, later enquiries would reveal, few or no francs-tireurs in Belgium in 1914. It was an unmilitary nation, prepared for war neither in mind nor body; the loyal government, though determined on a legal defence with the inadequate means it possessed, showed itself anxious from the start to deter citizens from useless and dangerous opposition to the German invasion. It issued placards urging avoidance “of any pretext for measures of repression resulting in bloodshed or pillage or massacre of the innocent population.”26 The government also advised civilians to lodge firearms with the authorities; in some places the Civic Guard took the warning so seriously that it deposited its government weapons at the local town hall.27
Non-resistance did nothing to placate the invaders. Almost from the first hours, innocent civilians were shot and villages burnt, outrages all hotly denied by the Germans as soon as the news—subsequently well attested—reached neutral newspapers. Priests were shot, too, perhaps because German officers remembered that it was the priests who had led the resistance of Catholic Brittany against the armies of the French Revolution in 1793. The “rape of Belgium” served no military purpose whatsoever and did Germany untold harm, particularly in the United States, where the reputations of the Kaiser and his government were blackened from the outset by reports of massacre and cultural despoliation. The reputation of the German army was dishonoured also. On 4 August, the first day of the Emmich
incursion against the Meuse forts, six hostages were shot at Warsage and the village of Battice burnt to the ground. “Our advance in Belgium is certainly brutal,” Moltke wrote on 5 August, “but we are fighting for our lives and all who get in the way must take the consequences.”28 The consequences were to get worse. Within the first three weeks, there would be large-scale massacres of civilians in small Belgian towns, at Andenne, Seilles, Tamines and Dinant. At Andenne there were 211 dead, at Tamines 384, at Dinant 612. The victims included children and women as well as men and the killing was systematic; at Tamines the hostages were massed in the square, shot down by execution squads and survivors bayoneted. The execution squads were not, as were the “action groups” of Hitler’s holocaust, specially recruited killers but ordinary German soldiers. Indeed, those who murdered at Andenne were the reservists of the most distinguished regiments of the Prussian army, the Garde-Regimenter zu Fuss.29
Worst of all the outrages began on 25 August at Louvain. This little university town, the “Oxford of Belgium,” was a treasure store of Flemish Gothic and Renaissance architecture, painting, manuscripts and books. Panicked allegedly by a misunderstood night-time movement of their own troops, the occupiers, 10,000 strong, began to shout “snipers,” and then to set fire to the streets and buildings where francs-tireurs suspectedly operated. At the end of three days of incendiarism and looting, the library of 230,000 books had been burnt out, 1,100 other buildings destroyed, 209 civilians killed and the population of 42,000 forcibly evacuated.30 The worldwide condemnation of Germany’s war against “culture” bit deep in the homeland. There academics and intellectuals were in the vanguard of the appeal to patriotism, representing the war as an attack by barbarians, philistines and decadents—Russians, British and French respectively—on high German civilisation. On 11 August, Professor von Harnack, director of the Royal Library in Berlin, had warned that “Mongolian Muscovite civilisation could not endure the light of the eighteenth century, still less of the nineteenth century, and now in the twentieth century, it breaks loose and threatens us.”31 “Light” was a cherished idea to the Germans. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment of Lessing, Kant and Goethe—who had called for “more light” on his deathbed—had been Germany’s passport into Europe’s life of the mind. Enlightenment had been the inspiration of Germany’s enormous contributions to philosophical, classical and historical scholarship during the nineteenth century. For Germans to be found out as book-burners cut educated Germany to the quick. Even harder to bear were the expressions of disgust from the world’s great centres of learning and research; American as well as European universities denounced the atrocity and committees were formed in twenty-five countries to collect money and books for the restoration of the Louvain library.32 Germany’s scholars and writers responded by a “Call to the World of Culture,” signed by such pre-eminent scientists as Max Planck and Wilhelm Röntgen, which “endorsed the franc-tireur hypothesis and the right to reprisal, and claimed that if it had not been for German soldiers, German culture would long have been swept away.”33