Belgians Under the German Eagle

by Jean Massart

Belgium therefore had serious reasons for expecting a German attack. There was evidently only one thing for her to do: to demand assistance of the country which had constituted itself the protector of her neutrality, and on which she had always been accustomed to rely with unshakable confidence.

1. The Report of M. le Baron Greindl, sometime Belgian Minister in Berlin.

Falsification of the Greindl Report.

On the 14th October, 1914, the German Government posted on the walls of Brussels a placard entitled: England and Belgium (Documents found at the headquarters of the Belgian Staff). A reproduction of this placard was distributed gratuitously, thousands of copies being issued the same day. This document contains, first, a rapid summary of a report on the relations which existed in 1906 between the Belgian Chief of Staff and the British military attaché. Then the placard reproduces, "word for word," a portion of a report made by M. Greindl, dated the 23rd December, 1911. In this report M. Greindl warns the Belgian Government of the possibility of a French attack.

Whosoever will attentively read the exhibited portion of this report will at once remark that its phrases lack connection and logical sequence. Thus, there is certainly a hiatus between the opening phrases and those that begin with: "When it became evident that we should not allow ourselves to be alarmed by the pretended danger of closing the Scheldt, the plan was not abandoned, but modified, in the sense that the English army of assistance would not be disembarked on the Belgian coast, but in the nearer French ports." Now what is meant by this "pretended danger"? Pretended by whom? And then "we should not allow ourselves to be alarmed." Who is "we?" Remark that a few lines farther on the report speaks of the eventuality of a battle between the Belgian army and the British army; Belgium, which was just now the ally of the British, is now their adversary, although nothing indicates how she passed from the first attitude to the second. In the same sentence the closing of the Scheldt is spoken of with an English landing on the Belgian coast; yet we cannot imagine M. Greindl placing Antwerp on the Belgian coast. Can we doubt after this that phrases have been suppressed in this portion of the document? Evidently not; for it is radically impossible to realize the bearing and the meaning of the report by reading the portion published. What, then, is the conclusion forced upon us? It is that the German Government has "cooked" the text; omitting to copy certain passages which would not tally with the deductions which it wished to draw from it, and that it has perhaps even twisted the meaning of certain phrases.

The publication of the complete report was demanded by the Belgian Government (see K.Z., 24th October, first morning edition). But Germany refused; the report was too long, it replied, by the medium of the N.A.Z. (25th November, 1914). All that could be obtained was the publication in facsimile, in the same issue of the N.A.Z., of the heading and the two first lines. Since the German Government did not publish the rest, we have the right to conclude that this was because it had subjected the document to falsifications such as were introduced in that we are now about to consider. In any case, the report as it was published means nothing. One feels that it was intentionally made confusing. By whom?

2. The Reports of Generals Ducarne and Jungbluth.

The falsifications inserted in these documents by the German diplomatists have already been lucidly exposed (for example, by E. Brunets, Calomnies Allemandes); so there would be no need to return to the subject, had not the German Government thought fit to attempt to use these documents in order to demoralize the Belgians.

At the end of December 1914, and in January 1915, Germany distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of a pamphlet containing several documents, among which were translations (into Flemish and French) and facsimiles of the Ducarne and Jungbluth reports. The famous words of the "reference" are replaced in their natural position in the middle of the fourth paragraph,[8] but—and this was a wholly unexpected discovery—they were also found in the commentary. According to the copy in the text, one reads: "The document bears on the margin: 'The entrance of the English into Belgium would take place only after the violation of our neutrality by Germany.'"