Sketch 34.
It is high praise of the Belgian people and character to point out that, after the fall of Fléron, for forty-eight full hours such a gap was still contested by men, a great part of whom were little better than civilian in training, and who, had they been all tried regulars, would have been far too few for their task. General Leman, who commanded them, knew well in those early hours of Wednesday, the 5th, that the end had already come. He also knew the value of even a few hours' hopeless resistance, not perhaps to the material side of the Allied strategy, but to the support of those moral forces lacking which men are impotent in maintaining a challenge. Not only all that Wednesday, the 5th, but all the Thursday, the 6th, he maintained a line against the pressure of the invaders with his imperfect and insufficient troops.
During those forty-eight hours, the big howitzer, which is the type of the heavy German siege train—the 225 mm.—was brought up, and it is possible that a couple of the still larger Austrian pieces of 280 mm. (what we call in this country the 11-inch), which are constructed with flat treadles to their wheels to fire from mats laid on any reasonably hard surface (such as a roadway), had been brought up as well. At any rate, in the course of the Thursday, the fort next westward from Fléron, Chaudefontaine, was smashed. The gap was now quite untenable, and the first body of German cavalry entered the city. The incident has been reported as a coup de main, with the object of capturing the Belgian general. Its importance to the military story is simply that it proved the way to be open. In the afternoon and evening of the day, the Belgians were retiring into the heart of the city, and it is typical of the whole business that the great railway bridge upon which the main communications depended was left intact for the Germans to use.
With the morning of Friday, the 7th August, the first bodies of German infantry entered the town. The forts on the north and two remaining western forts upon the south of the river were still untaken, and until a large breach should be made in the northern forts at least, the railway communication of the German advance into the Belgian plain was still impeded. Great masses of the enemy, and, in proportion to those masses, still greater masses of advance stores were brought in.
In all that follows, until we reach the date of Monday, August 24th, I propose to consider no more than the fortunes of the troops who passed through Belgium to attack the French armies upon the Sambre and the Meuse, with the British contingent that had come to their aid. And my reasons for thus segregating and dealing later with contemporary events in the south will appear in the sequel.
This reservation made—an important one in the scheme of this book—I return to what I have called the preliminaries, the advance through Belgium.
We have already seen that the reduction of the northern forts of Liége was the prime necessity to that advance.
We have also seen that meanwhile it was possible and advisable to accumulate stores for the advance as far forward as could be managed, and that it was also possible, with caution, to bring certain bodies—not the bulk of the army—forward through the Ardennes, to command the passages of the Meuse above Liége, between that fortress and Namur.
This latter operation was effected by the 12th of August, when the town of Huy, with its bridge and its railway leading from the Belgian Ardennes right into the Belgian Plain, was seized.
Meanwhile, upon the north of the river Meuse, cavalry and armed motor-cars were similarly preparing the way for the general advance when the northern forts of Liége should be dominated; and on this same Wednesday, August 12th, the most advanced bodies of the invader lay in a line roughly north and south from the neighbourhood of Diest along the Gethe and thence towards Huy.