CHAPTER III
THE MORAL AND MILITARY EFFECT
When, on August 4, King Albert read his speech to the joint meeting of the Belgian Chamber and Senate, it might well have been thought that the darkest hour had come in Belgium’s long and troubled history. But the King spoke with unfaltering resolve. Come what might, the Belgian people would maintain the freedom which was their birthright. In the moment for action they would not shrink from sacrifices. “I have faith in our destinies,” King Albert concluded. “A country which defends itself wins respect, and cannot perish.”
The speech echoed the feelings of a united nation. In the face of peril, party was no longer known. M. Emile Vandervelde, leader of the Socialists, accepted a post in the Ministry. Without hesitation, the two Houses voted the measures of emergency proposed by the Government. The announcement by M. de Broqueville, the Prime Minister, that German troops were already on Belgian soil caused deep emotion, but the emotion was not born of fear. It was the realisation of how priceless is the heritage of liberty.
On that stirring day in Brussels, which witnessed the departure of the King to join his troops at the front, the sentiment uppermost was in truth “faith in the nation’s destinies.” Great Britain had sent her ultimatum to Berlin in defence of Belgian rights. Not merely reservists called to the colours, but volunteers in multitudes were anxious to take up arms. Crowds besieged the recruiting offices. The public feeling in the Belgian capital reflected the public feeling everywhere.
The mobilisation of the defensive forces of the country had proceeded smoothly and swiftly. Though it was common knowledge that in no part of Europe had the espionage system worked from Berlin become more elaborate, the national spirit was but intensified. Then came news of the fighting, and of the dauntless resistance offered by the garrison at Liége. Later came the first of many German prisoners of war.
Mistakes and miscalculations undoubtedly entered into the German disaster at Liége, and above all the mistake of grossly underestimating the quality and efficiency of the Belgian forces. That mistake was persisted in during all the attempts to storm the fortress. It cost thousands of German lives. Not certainly until this war is over will the extent of the disaster be really known. But that it was a disaster of the greatest magnitude is beyond any question.
From the merely military standpoint, the shattering of three army corps is a huge price to pay even for victory. But the shattering of General von Emmich’s army accomplished nothing. It had merely proved that to hurl men in massed formation against positions defended by modern guns and rifles is folly. Elementary common sense, however, would enforce the same conclusion. As the assaults upon Liége showed, elementary common sense is not a strong point of Prussian militarism. Because massed formations were used with effect by Frederick the Great, massed formations were the one idea of some of his would-be venerators.
The moral effect was greater than the military. It brought down in three days all that edifice of prestige which Prussian diplomacy, Prussian espionage, and Prussianised philosophy had been labouring for a generation to build up. To say that Europe gasped with surprise is to state the effect mildly. The peoples opposed to German ambitions woke as from a spell. The aspect of the war had changed.
Here was an army, part of the great Fighting Machine in which war was presumed to be practically embodied as an exact science, beginning a campaign with the blunder of assuming that men fighting for their country were no better than half-trained mercenaries. The resistance to the passage of the Meuse; the resistance offered to the troops sent to seize the country south of Liége was treated as negligible. A general of resource and experience would have reckoned on that resistance as a certainty.
Neither Prussian strategy then, nor Prussian tactics, were the perfection they had been taken to be. Both had broken at the first test. Nowhere was the gravity of the moral effect better appreciated than at Berlin. Henceforward the effort of Berlin was to efface it. In that fact will be found the key to all the succeeding “severities” in Belgium.