Hacking Through Belgium

by Edmund Dane

The tactics adopted by the Belgians were well advised. The troops in the trenches held their fire until the attack fell into difficulties with the entanglements, and then withered the assault by well-aimed volleys.

The onset, nevertheless, was too determined to be shaken. Despite their heavy losses, the Germans negotiated the ditches, and though they were mowed down in hundreds by the machine guns now turned upon them, some gained the crest of the trenches. The earthworks were filled with dying and dead, but the storming parties still advanced over the bodies of their fallen comrades.

It was at this juncture that the Belgian troops received the order for a counter-assault. Rushing from the trenches en masse and in good order, they drove back the storming columns by an irresistible onset. In the pursuit, the German losses were enormous. The first attack had failed. Eight hundred prisoners fell into the hands of the victors, and were sent to Brussels as the first evidence of the national valour.

While that night the 7th army corps, withdrawn beyond the range of the forts, was licking its wounds, the 9th corps, having won the passage of the river below Visé, had advanced to the positions before the forts on the north-east, and on August 6 a second attempt was made to carry the fortress by storm.

The attack was, of course, made from the south-east and from the north-east simultaneously. The sectors between the forts on the north-east had been not less carefully entrenched, and although the attack against fort Evegnée was again repulsed with losses to the storming columns equal to, if not greater than, those inflicted on the preceding day, some troops, apparently of the 9th corps, managed, despite a fierce resistance, to break through the north-east defences. Furious street fighting, however, forced them to retire. It was while covering this perilous retreat that Prince William of Lippe fell at the head of his regiment. The assault from the north-east, though carried out with the greatest determination, broke before an appalling rifle and machine-gun fire, and was turned into defeat by a counter-attack made at the decisive moment.

A critical period in the fighting on this day was when a body of German troops had penetrated as far as the bridge at Wandre. The bridge had been mined, and before the invaders could obtain possession of it, it was blown up. A superior force of Belgians regained the position.

The defence remained intact, and the terrible scenes in the trenches bore testimony at once to its intrepidity and to the resolution of the assault. German dead and wounded lay thick upon the ground up to the very glacis of the forts. An evidence of the boldness of the enemy is that exploit of eight uhlans, two officers, and six privates, who, mistaken for Englishmen, rode during the fighting to the headquarters of General Leman with the object of taking him prisoner. They were killed or captured after a hand to hand struggle in the headquarters’ building with members of the Belgian staff aided by gendarmes.

But though two assaults had failed with heavy loss of life, a third, even more desperate, was made the same night. This time it was delivered from the south-east against fort Evegnée, and from the south-west against forts Chaudfontaine and Embourg. The attack from the latter quarter was carried out by the 10th corps, which had at length come into position. The third assault against fort Evegnée was open and supported by a heavy bombardment. That against Chaudfontaine and Embourg was intended as a surprise. The troops of the 10th corps advanced as silently as possible, hoping to steal up to the trenches under cover of darkness. They waited until the attack upon Evegnée had been going on for more than three hours.

The events of this anxious night in Liége have been admirably described in the vivid narrative of Mr. Gerald Fortescue, the special correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, who was an eye-witness of them.

There was a bright moonlight, and the Belgians took advantage of it to strengthen still further their defensive preparations, more especially to the south of the city. They were relieved from the necessity of using lights which would have exposed them to the guns of the enemy. Liége is undoubtedly most open to attack on the south-east and south, and most of all by the flat approach between the Vesdre and the Ourthe. This forms the industrial suburb. The great ironworks, the small-arms and gun factory, the electric lighting works, and the railway depôts in this quarter would make the seizure of it particularly valuable. On the other hand the difficulties of preparing an effective defence were serious. Forts Embourg and Chaudfontaine are here placed close together in view of that fact. A practically complete line of entrenchments, however, closed the enceinte between Forts Fleron and Boncelles. It was, for the defenders, all to the good that these entrenchments and the obstacles in advance of them had been so recently completed that the Germans could have no reliable knowledge of their details.