In August 1913 Herr Erzberger gave his word of honour, as Catholic deputy to the Reichstag, that there had never been any question of invading Belgium, and that Belgium might always count on the party of the Centre to cause international engagements to be respected. This is the very party that is now heaping up manifest falsehoods in order to justify the aggression of Germany.
German Duplicity on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of August, 1914.
Let us consider the days immediately preceding the war. The German newspapers were announcing that the troops occupying, at normal times, the camps near the Belgian frontiers had been directed upon Alsace and Lorraine; and these articles, reproduced in Belgium, had succeeded in finally lulling our suspicions.
In the currents of thought which were then clashing in Belgium, it was confidence that carried the day. Many of us who were present on the 1st of August at a session of the Royal Academy of Belgium, were speaking, before the session was opened, of the serious events which were approaching, the war already declared between Austria and Serbia, and the conflict which appeared imminent between Germany, France, Russia, and England. Yet no one imagined that Belgium could be drawn into the conflagration. That very morning, it was related, France had officially renewed, through her Minister in Brussels, the assurance that she would faithfully abstain from violating the neutrality of Belgium (1st Grey Book, No. 15); and there was no reason to doubt his words. A few days earlier the German Minister in Brussels had affirmed that his country had too much respect for international conventions to permit herself to transgress them; and we believed him too! Oh, simplicity! We still believed him, on the following day, when he repeated the same declaration (1st Grey Book, No. 19; Belg. All., p. 7). And on the evening of that Sunday, the 2nd of August, he presented to our Government the ultimatum of Germany (1st Grey Book, No. 20).
The Ultimatum.
The telegram of the 2nd of August, by which Herr von Jagow sent the ultimatum to the German Minister in Brussels, declared: "Please forward this Note to the Belgian Government, in a strictly official communication, at eight o'clock this evening, and demand therefrom a definite reply in the course of twelve hours, that is, at eight o'clock to-morrow morning" (Lüttich, p. 4). Never, since Belgium's birth, had a problem so breathless been placed before her Government. And Germany left her twelve hours to solve it: twelve hours of the night! She was not willing that our Government should have time to reflect at leisure; she hoped that in a crisis of distraction Belgium, taken at a disadvantage and forgetful of her dignity, would accept the inacceptable.
However, the German Minister in Brussels continued to offer us explanations which were as perfidious as they were confused and obscure, and to assure us up to the last of the friendly intentions of his Government. The Germany fashioned by Bismarck has assuredly nothing about it to remind us of the Germany of Goethe and Fichte. We might have guessed as much, for that matter, when we saw the Germans glorifying the man who boasted of having falsified the famous Ems telegram in order to make the war of 1870 inevitable, and who succeeded in making his countrymen accept, as a guiding principle, that "might comes before right."
The Speech of the Chancellor in the Reichstag.
However, we may suppose that some slight scruples lingered in the recesses of the German conscience, since on the very day when the Chancellor of the Empire told the British Ambassador in Berlin that an international convention is merely "a scrap of paper,"[6] and that neutrality is only a word, he recognized, in his speech to the Reichstag, that the invasion of Belgium constituted an injustice; but he immediately excused this violation of the law of nations by strategic necessities.