The device which had been relied upon to cajole the public into the belief that the requisitions were being bought and not stolen had broken down, and the proclamation was nothing more than a confession of its failure. Henceforth the robbery must be crude and unashamed. As crude were the threats of outrage which the competent von Luttwitz indulged in. Summoning the aldermen into his presence and requiring them to elect another burgomaster, he found that the spirit of M. Adolphe Max, the ancient spirit of the Netherlands, was not to be destroyed by arrests. The aldermen firmly refused compliance. They were threatened with a German burgomaster and German military patrols in place of the police, and told that if riots broke out Brussels would be bombarded and burned. Riots, as the aldermen knew, might readily be provoked for that purpose. Tension in face of the burgomaster’s arrest was already acute. In these circumstances M. Maurice Lemonnier undertook with his colleagues the maintenance of public order, but the fiat for the election of a successor to M. Max remained unfulfilled.

Thus would-be conquerors of Europe in the face of unarmed citizens offered the world a proof of their inborn incapacity to rule, and themselves exposed the folly of their aspirations.

M. Max, it was afterwards learned, had been put under confinement in the fortress of Wesel in Germany.

CHAPTER VII
THE FINAL HACK

From Brussels by road to Mons is less than 40 miles; from Liége to Charleroi in the valley of the Sambre little more than 50. It is clear now that while one part of the great invading host took the direct route from Liége towards the Sambre, the other made a detour by way of Brussels to meet the Belgian army. The object was to strike towards the three great international roads running to Paris from Belgium. The most westerly of these great routes passes from Brussels through Mons and Valenciennes; the next through Charleroi and the French frontier fortress of Maubeuge; the third along the valley of the Meuse through Namur, past Dinant, and away to Laon. These brief facts on the topography of the country will help to explain the military operations. Briefly, if we imagine the march by way of Brussels as a bow, and the march direct from Liége as its string, we shall have a rough but fairly accurate idea of the movement executed; bearing in mind only that even the parts of a host of this magnitude, though the rear would be nearly two days’ march behind the van, would each be pouring at once along adjacent roads leading in the same direction.

In any event, and quite apart from any opposition offered by the Belgians, with the delay resulting from it, the detour by way of Brussels involved an additional two days at least. But the fighting with the Belgians caused a further three days’ delay. Of those days, two, certainly, were occupied in the battle, and the third in resting the troops engaged and in burying the dead. It was not, therefore, until August 23, five days after the start from Liége, that the forces, in fact, concentrated at the opposite end of the bow in southern Belgium.

Only a small part of them, as we have seen, passed through Brussels. The main body, even of the northern division, marched through Tirlemont and on to Hal, round the south of the capital. At the same time, the enormous column of cavalry, acting as a screen, rode round by the north of the city and then struck south through Enghien.

All the military display at Brussels was relatively but an aside to the main performance, intended both for moral effect, such as it was, and to throw dust in the eyes of the enemy.

We have therefore to imagine between August 21 and August 23 these great, and, from their size, inevitably unwieldy, forces concentrating towards the southern frontier of Belgium by every road available.