3. The violation of Belgian territory, though discounted in the cynical atmosphere of our time, when it came to the issue was, without question, a stupendous moral event. It was the first time that anything of this sort had happened in the history of Christian Europe. Historians unacquainted with the spirit of the past may challenge that remark, but it is true. One of the inviolable conventions, or rather sacred laws, of our civilization was broken, which is that European territory not involved in hostilities by any act of its Government is inviolable to opposing armies. The Prussian crime of Silesia, nearly two centuries before, the succeeding infamies of 1864, and the forgery of the Ems dispatch, the whole proclaimed tradition of contempt for the sanctities of Christendom, proceeding from Frederick the Great, had indeed accustomed men to successive stages in the decline of international morals; but nothing of the wholly crude character which this violation of Belgium bore was to be discovered in the past, even of Prussia, and posterity will mark it as a curious term and possibly a turning-point in the gradual loss of our common religion, and of the moral chaos accompanying that loss.
4. The preparations of this country by land were not complete. Those of the French were belated compared with those of the Germans, and the prospect of even a short delay in the falling of the blow was exaggerated in value by all the intensity of that anxiety with which the blow was awaited.
To proceed from these preliminaries to the story.
The German Army had for its ultimate object, when it should be fully mobilized, the passage of the greater part of its forces over the Belgian Plain.
This Belgian Plain has for now many centuries formed the natural avenue for an advance upon the Gauls.
It has been represented too often as a sort of meeting-place, where must always come the shock between what is called Latin civilization and the Germanic tribes. But this view is both pedantic and historically false. There never was here a shock or conflict between two national ideals. What is true is, that civilization spread far more easily up from the Gauls through that fertile land towards the forests of Germany, and that when the Roman Empire broke down, or rather when its central government broke down, the frontier garrisons could here depend upon wealthier and more numerous populations for the support of their local government. That body of auxiliary soldiers in the Roman army which was drawn from the Frankish tribes ruled here when Rome could no longer rule. It was from Tournai that the father of Clovis exercised his power; and in the resettlement of the local governments in the sixth century, the Belgian Plain was the avenue through which the effort of the civilized West was directed towards the Rhine. It has Roman Cologne for its outpost; later it evangelized the fringes of German barbarism, and later still conquered them with the sword. All through the succeeding centuries the ambitions of kings in France, or of emperors upon the Rhine, were checked or satisfied in that natural avenue of advance. Charlemagne's frontier palace and military centre facing the Pagans was rather at Aix than at Trèves or Metz; and though the Irish missionaries, who brought letters and the arts and the customs of reasonable men to the Germans, worked rather from the south, the later forced conversion of the Saxons, which determined the entry of the German tribes as a whole into Christendom, was a stroke struck northwards from the Belgian Plain. Cæsar's adventurous crossing of the Rhine was a northern crossing. The Capetian monarchy was saved on its eastern front at Bouvines, in that same territory. The Austro-Spanish advance came down from it, to be checked at St. Quentin. Louis XIV.'s main struggle for power upon the marches of his kingdom concentrated here. The first great check to it was Marlborough's campaign upon the Meuse; the last battle was within sound of Mons, at Malplaquet. The final decision, as it was hoped—the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo—again showed what this territory meant in the military history of the West. It was following upon this decision that Europe, in the great settlement, decided to curb the chaos of future war by solemnly neutralizing the Belgian Plain for ever; and to that pact a seal was set not only by the French and the British, but also by the Prussian Government, with what results we know.
The entries into this plain are very clearly defined by natural limits. It is barred a few hours' march beyond the German frontier by the broad and deep river Meuse, which here runs from the rough and difficult Ardennes country up to the Dutch frontier. The whole passage is no more than twelve miles across, and at the corner of it, where the Meuse bends, is the fortress of Liége. West of this fortress the upper reaches of the river run, roughly east and west upon Namur, and after Namur turn south again, passing through a very deep ravine that extends roughly from the French town of Mezières to Namur through the Ardennes country. The Belgian Plain is therefore like a bottle with a narrow neck, a bottle defined by the Dutch frontier and the Middle Meuse on either side, and a neck extending only from the Ardennes country to the Dutch frontier, with the fortress of Liége barring the way. Now the main blow was to be delivered ultimately upon the line Namur-Charleroi-Mons. That is, the situation was roughly that of the accompanying diagram: by the bottle neck at D the whole mass of troops must pass—or most of them—which are later to strike on the front AB. To reach that front was available to the invader the vast network of Belgian railways RRR crammed with rolling stock, and provided such opportunities for rapid advance as no other district in Europe could show. But all this system converged upon the main line which ran through the ring of forts round Liége, L, and so passed through Aix-la-Chapelle, A, and to Germany.
Sketch 33.