It was thus fifteen months before the German invasion that this much-needed law secured a majority of votes in the Belgian Parliament. It stands to reason that, if we had wanted to sign a secret pact with England and France some years earlier, their Governments would have insisted, before all things, on the strengthening of our inadequate army. The new bill was to furnish an annual contingent of from 33,000 to 35,000 men, and we could look forward to a total of 340,000 combatants, excluding a variable number of volunteers, as soon as the system was in full working order. The anticipated effectives, however, would not be obtained until 1925. In 1914, at the moment of taking the field, the Belgian army had some 226,000 men, together with 4,500 officers and 4,170 military police, wherewith to stem the tide of invasion.
The introduction of universal service in Belgium was not looked upon with favour in Germany. As a matter of fact, the Emperor ought to have been delighted. During his visit to Switzerland in the previous autumn, he had complained of the exposed state of his north-western frontier, as contrasted with the solid rampart provided in the south by the excellent troops of the Swiss Confederation. The German newspapers spoke of our military reforms without any malicious comments, but the same cannot be said of the German officer class. I was able to gather this from the remarks made to me by Baron von Zedlitz, colonel of a dragoon regiment of the Guards, and grandson, on his mother’s side, of a former Belgian minister at Berlin. No doubt the Belgian sympathies that he had inherited from his mother moved him to unbosom himself to me one day. “What is the good,” he said, “of enlarging the number of your troops? With the small number that you had before, you surely never dreamt of barring the way to us in a Franco-German war. The increase of your effectives might inspire you with the idea of resisting us. If a single shot were fired on us, Heaven knows what would become of Belgium!” This was the language of a friend, but not of a soldier. I answered the colonel that we should be rated still lower than at present, if we were craven enough not to defend ourselves, and that our guns would be ready to meet the invader, whoever he might be. I had occasion to repeat this phrase several times to other Germans. They listened with smiles, but they did not believe me.
V.
The passage of the belligerents through Belgium was a favourite theme with all writers, French, German, English, Dutch, and Belgian, who handled, more or less competently, the problem of the coming war. Some of Germany’s preparations for invading her neighbours could not be hidden, and these naturally gave a fillip to the discussion of various moot points. As early as 1911, ten railway lines, both single and double, ran from the Eifel region to the Belgian frontier or the Duchy of Luxemburg. Four others were under construction, and yet another four were projected. Most of these lines were quite needless for purposes of traffic, and their aim was purely strategic. Stations with full plant and special platforms for the arrival and departure of troops had been built with that methodical thoroughness for which the Germans are famous. An enormous concentration camp, with a range for artillery practice, had been established at Elsenborn, near Malmédy, a stone’s throw from our frontier. Which route would be chosen by the oncoming host?
Some critics pronounced for the passage by the gap of the Meuse, along both banks of that river. As the German army had the advantage of a more speedy mobilization, it was generally credited with the design of taking the offensive in this region of Belgian territory. So far, we had no cause for doubting that our fortresses were impregnable, still less that they were capable of resisting. The progress of ballistics in Germany and Austria, the terrible results gained by unremitting toil in the workshops of Krupp and Skoda, were still unknown to the outside world. No one suspected the existence of German 17-inch and Austrian 12-inch mortars, which would shatter a fort of concrete and steel in a few hours under a fire of projectiles weighing nearly a ton.
Other writers limited the German march to the right bank of the Meuse, across Belgian Luxemburg, despite the scarcity of roads and the obstacles that the broken nature of the country would offer to a rapid onset. Luxemburg, an outlying spur of our territory in the Ardennes district, seemed impossible for a Belgian force to defend. The force in question would have been too far distant from the base of operations.
Some military prophets, such as General Déjardin in Belgium and General Maitrot in France, made a very shrewd conjecture. They held that the enemy would operate mainly in great masses on the left bank of the Meuse, where he would have ample room for deploying.
In point of fact, however, the plan of the German Staff had not been fathomed in all its bearings. Among those who could speak with authority, the greater number imagined that only a part—the right wing—of the army directed against France would pass through Belgium. They had not guessed the bold manœuvre, the tremendous developments, that we have seen carried out: to leave a “curtain”[19] of troops along the Vosges line, and with three-fourths of the army to cross the Meuse at several points, from Visé right down to Dinant; to take Liège and Namur by storm, if necessary; to march on Brussels, sweeping aside the Belgian army if it should try to withstand the advance; and from there to turn off southwards by the various routes that lead to Paris. The whole north-western section of France was unprovided with defences, excepting the fortress of Maubeuge. Once the plains of Belgium had been traversed, the road to Paris would be open.
The reader must picture to himself, not a stream or a torrent, but a veritable sea of men, inundating our country from Holland to Luxemburg, a million and a half to two million soldiers! The defensive plans of Germany’s opponents had not allowed for the inrush of such an avalanche through Belgium. At the outset of the war, according to an official Note issued by the Republican Government, the whole of the French forces were disposed over against the German border, from Belfort to the Belgian frontier.
The first condition of success for so daring an offensive was secrecy. The secret was well kept. The high German command did all it could to throw foreign military attachés off the trail and to encourage them in false notions. Among their various methods of hoodwinking the stranger, we may probably include the way in which the permanent stations of the twenty-five army corps were distributed. The map showed us ten of them massed together in Alsace-Lorraine, the Palatinate, and the Grand Duchy of Baden, as if ready to hurl themselves on France from that quarter. Along the Belgian and Dutch frontiers only one corps was stationed, and its command lived a long way off, at Coblentz. With so meagre a contingent, the chances of an attempt to enter Belgium seemed remote indeed. Yet the corps of Westphalia, of Hanover, of Holstein even, could be brought up to the western frontier in a very short time by the numerous railway lines. It was the two former, with that of Coblentz, that crossed the Meuse and attacked Liège, under General von Emmich, Commandant at Hanover, a leader of high repute. Assuredly the Staff did not await the order for a general mobilization before concentrating this vanguard at Cologne and Aix-la-Chapelle.