On August 2, at 7 o’clock in the morning, a man calmly brought to the German Minister at Brussels the answer to the German ultimatum: the reply was a categorical refusal to let the German army pass through Belgium. On August 4, the army of General von Emmich, some 80,000 men, tried to take the fortified position of Liège by surprise. But the 30,000 Belgians of General Leman defended their hastily constructed trenches so well that many German regiments beat a hasty retreat. Panic already prevailed in the German town of Aix-la-Chapelle, where the news spread that the Belgians were invading German soil! However, in the midst of the confusion, a German column, under the command of Ludendorff, who then won his first laurels of the war, succeeded in breaking through the Belgian defenses. On the morning of August 7, the city of Liège was occupied by the enemy.
The Belgian troops succeeded in escaping capture and went to rejoin the Belgian field army, posted on the river Gette, covering both Brussels and Antwerp. If the city of Liège was in the enemy’s hands, the forts continued to resist, and it was only when the 30.5- and 42.0-centimeter guns arrived from Germany, that one after another they were shattered to bits. The fort of Loncin, where General Leman had continued to resist, exploded, and was taken on the sixteenth of August. It had stopped the advance of the First Army under von Kluck for a week.
And so it was that the army of von Kluck did not come in touch with the Belgian field army near Louvain before August 10. The number of the invading troops was so great and the danger of the Belgians being cut off from their Antwerp base so imminent, that King Albert decided to retire, after some combats at Haelen, Hauthem, and Aerschot, to the entrenched position of Antwerp. This happened on August 19. The flood of the invaders went over Louvain, Brussels, and then turned southward. There, thanks to the delay procured by the resistance of Liège, stood, on the Sambre, the Fifth French Army, and, on the canal from Mons to Condé, the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French. Moreover, the Belgian fortress of Namur, at the confluence of the Sambre and the Meuse, offered a strong point d’appui for the Allied forces in the south of Belgium.
Events happened, however, very rapidly. Namur fell under the attack of the Second German Army under von Bülow and the forts were destroyed by the fire of the giant German guns. The Belgian garrison, under General Michel, partly succeeded in escaping to France on August 23. The same day, the French on the Sambre were forced back by von Bülow and von Kluck maneuvering together, and the British at Mons were compelled to fall back and to begin their glorious retreat on Le Cateau.
When the battles of the Sambre and Mons were raging, the Belgian field army suddenly made a sortie from Antwerp, in order to menace the Germans in the rear. They had a great fight on a line between Vilvorde and Aerschot, but, having no large guns, did not succeed in breaking through the German observation army which covered the line from Liège to Brussels.
They made a second sortie on September 9. They succeeded in recapturing Aerschot and were about to retake Louvain, when German reinforcements stopped their advance. This sortie retained in Belgium important German reinforcements, which were on their way to restore the German fortunes on the Marne. The German General Staff frankly admits the importance of this move on the part of the Belgian army.
A third sortie did not succeed, for, exactly at this time (September 27), the Germans began the siege of Antwerp. They wanted to put an end to these continuous threats on their rear and their communication lines with Germany. Just as Liège and Namur fell under the fire of the 30.5- and 42.0-centimeter guns, Antwerp proved irremediably lost after two or three days’ bombardment. The British marine fusiliers and men of the Naval Reserve, sent by Churchill with the hope of delaying the fall of the fortress, could merely support the morale of the Belgian defenders by their presence, but that was all. On the evening of October 6 the Belgian field army, under the personal conduct of King Albert, succeeded in leaving Antwerp without the Germans being aware of it. The city continued to be defended by the garrison troops and the British. After a terrible bombardment of thirty-six hours the last defenders escaped in their turn, and on October 9 the civilian authorities surrendered the town to General von Beseler. The Germans boasted of the great war spoils found in the town, but they were extremely angry to find the city empty of troops.
The Belgian field army, meanwhile, accomplished a very dangerous but admirably conducted retreat through Flanders, and stopped on the Yser, on October 14-15. The soldiers were exhausted. They had barely taken up their position along the little river when a mighty German army, composed partly of some corps of von Beseler’s army, partly of fresh troops—mostly university men, volunteers—just arrived from Germany, appeared, with the aim of breaking through in the direction of Dunkirk and Calais.
During more than seven days, 48,000 Belgian infantrymen, “in the last stage of exhaustion”—so said Sir John French in his dispatch to the War Office—supported by a force of not more than 6,000 French marine fusiliers defended the Yser positions against some 100,000 enemies, provided with very heavy artillery and all the means of modern warfare. On October 25, when at a certain point the Germans finally broke through, French reinforcements arrived and the Belgian General Staff decided to flood the positions in front of the last Belgian line. This put an end to the struggle. The troops of the Duke of Würtemberg suffered an ignominious defeat. They never reached either Dunkirk or Calais.
The Germans were not more fortunate on the Ypres front: here the British of Sir John French, supported by some French troops, also held their line, and at the close of November, 1914, the struggle ended in the south of Belgium and the long period of trench warfare began.