A.—The Preliminaries.
We were too confiding.
With the exception of the military and a few statesmen, the Belgians were convinced that nations, just as individuals, were bound by their engagements, and that as long as we remained faithful to our international obligations, the signatories of the Treaty of London (19th April, 1839), which set forth the conditions of the neutrality, or rather of the neutralization, of Belgium (Belg. All., p. 3), would equally observe their obligations towards us.
However, in 1911, during the "Agadir crisis," our calm was a little shaken by a series of articles in Le Soir. According to this journal, all the German military writers held the invasion of Belgium to be inevitable in the event of a war between France and Germany.
The Belgians' Distrust of Germany lulled.
But our faith in international conventions—just a trifle ingenuous, it may be—very soon regained its comforting influence. Had not Wilhelm II, "the Emperor of Peace," assured the Belgian mission, which was sent to greet him at Aix-la-Chapelle, that Belgium had nothing to fear on the part of Germany (see L'Étoile Belge, 19th October, 1911). In September 1912 the Emperor made a fresh reassuring statement. Being present at the Swiss manœuvres, he congratulated M. Forster, President of the Swiss Confederation, and told him how glad he was to find that the Swiss Army would effectually defend the integrity of her frontier against a French attack. "What a pity," he added, "that the Belgian Army is not as well prepared, and is incapable of resisting French aggression." This evidently meant that Belgium ran no risk from the side of Prussia.
It was not only the Emperor who assured us of his profound respect for international statutes. The German Ministers made similar declarations in the Reichstag (Belg. All., p. 7).
In Belgium itself the Germans profited by every occasion to celebrate their friendship for us and their respect for treaties. In 1905, at the time of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Belgian independence, Herr Graf von Wallwitz stated at an official reception: "And as for us Germans, the maintenance of the treaty of warranty concluded at the birth of modern Belgium is a sort of political axiom which, to our thinking, no one could violate without committing the gravest of faults" (see p. 185 of the Annales parlementaires belges, Senate, 1906).
In 1913, at the time of the joyous entry of the King and Queen into Liége, General von Emmich, the same who was entrusted with the bombardment of the city in August 1914, came to salute our sovereigns in the name of the Emperor. He spoke incessantly of the German sympathies for the Belgians and their country.
In August 1913 Herr Erzberger gave his word of honour, as Catholic deputy to the Reichstag, that there had never been any question of invading Belgium, and that Belgium might always count on the party of the Centre to cause international engagements to be respected. This is the very party that is now heaping up manifest falsehoods in order to justify the aggression of Germany.
German Duplicity on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of August, 1914.
Let us consider the days immediately preceding the war. The German newspapers were announcing that the troops occupying, at normal times, the camps near the Belgian frontiers had been directed upon Alsace and Lorraine; and these articles, reproduced in Belgium, had succeeded in finally lulling our suspicions.
In the currents of thought which were then clashing in Belgium, it was confidence that carried the day. Many of us who were present on the 1st of August at a session of the Royal Academy of Belgium, were speaking, before the session was opened, of the serious events which were approaching, the war already declared between Austria and Serbia, and the conflict which appeared imminent between Germany, France, Russia, and England. Yet no one imagined that Belgium could be drawn into the conflagration. That very morning, it was related, France had officially renewed, through her Minister in Brussels, the assurance that she would faithfully abstain from violating the neutrality of Belgium (1st Grey Book, No. 15); and there was no reason to doubt his words. A few days earlier the German Minister in Brussels had affirmed that his country had too much respect for international conventions to permit herself to transgress them; and we believed him too! Oh, simplicity! We still believed him, on the following day, when he repeated the same declaration (1st Grey Book, No. 19; Belg. All., p. 7). And on the evening of that Sunday, the 2nd of August, he presented to our Government the ultimatum of Germany (1st Grey Book, No. 20).
The Ultimatum.
The telegram of the 2nd of August, by which Herr von Jagow sent the ultimatum to the German Minister in Brussels, declared: "Please forward this Note to the Belgian Government, in a strictly official communication, at eight o'clock this evening, and demand therefrom a definite reply in the course of twelve hours, that is, at eight o'clock to-morrow morning" (Lüttich, p. 4). Never, since Belgium's birth, had a problem so breathless been placed before her Government. And Germany left her twelve hours to solve it: twelve hours of the night! She was not willing that our Government should have time to reflect at leisure; she hoped that in a crisis of distraction Belgium, taken at a disadvantage and forgetful of her dignity, would accept the inacceptable.
However, the German Minister in Brussels continued to offer us explanations which were as perfidious as they were confused and obscure, and to assure us up to the last of the friendly intentions of his Government. The Germany fashioned by Bismarck has assuredly nothing about it to remind us of the Germany of Goethe and Fichte. We might have guessed as much, for that matter, when we saw the Germans glorifying the man who boasted of having falsified the famous Ems telegram in order to make the war of 1870 inevitable, and who succeeded in making his countrymen accept, as a guiding principle, that "might comes before right."
The Speech of the Chancellor in the Reichstag.
However, we may suppose that some slight scruples lingered in the recesses of the German conscience, since on the very day when the Chancellor of the Empire told the British Ambassador in Berlin that an international convention is merely "a scrap of paper,"[6] and that neutrality is only a word, he recognized, in his speech to the Reichstag, that the invasion of Belgium constituted an injustice; but he immediately excused this violation of the law of nations by strategic necessities.