The iron-gray masses of the German infantry advanced stolidly into that maw of death. It was unlike all the parade conceptions of battle. There were no flaming colors, no horses curveting around a golden-tasseled standard, no blare of bands, none of the pomp and panoply of war. Only, above the hills which circled the forts, rose the slowly deepening rose of the dawn; only, on the ground below, crept the steady ant-like advance of thousands of men who would be dead before the rising sun had risen.
Courtesy of "Panorama de la Guerre."
The First Clash.
Belgians with the dog-drawn machine guns, disputing the invasion of their country by the hordes of the Hun. Note the open warfare without cover or trenches.
"As line after line of the German infantry advanced," wrote a Belgian officer, when describing this first day's fighting, "we simply mowed them down. It was all too terribly easy, and I turned to a brother officer of mine more than once and said to him,
"'Voila! They are coming on again in a dense, close formation! They must be mad!'
"They made no attempt at deploying, but came on, line after line, almost shoulder to shoulder, until, as we shot them down, the fallen were heaped one on top of another, in an awful barricade of dead and wounded men that threatened to mask our guns and cause us trouble.
"I thought of Napoleon's saying—if he ever said it, and I doubt it, for he had no care of human life—
"'C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre!' (Magnificent! But it is not War!)