To this the answer is simple: It has always been one of the objects of British policy to preserve Belgian neutrality, and that, aside from moral considerations, it would not be good military science for France to seek Germany via Belgium.
But this answer is capable of an expansion it has not hitherto received. Why did Belgium appear to fear an invasion from Germany and not one from England or France?
One has heard a great deal about Germany's supposed ambition to expand her North Sea coast at the expense of Denmark, Holland and Belgium, by coercing the Danish and the Dutch Governments to rebuild their coast fortifications toward England and to dismantle their forts on the German frontier. Much has also been said of Germany's contemplated invasion of the Low Countries at the time of the Agadir incident in 1911.
Documentary proof of Germany's contemplated initiative has hitherto been missing. Certain facts have, however, recently come to hand which enable one to review the German explanation. One of these facts embraces a project for railway expansion engineered and carried out on the Belgian frontier, which can leave no doubt in any reasonable mind that Germany deliberately planned to violate Belgium's neutrality the moment it became a military expediency to invade France.[8]
If, according to jurisprudence, the planning to commit crime is legally on a par with its achievement, then Germany, for five years prior to the war, had been guilty of violating Belgium's neutrality—guilty in such a manner as to leave no doubt in the minds of Belgian, French, and English statesmen and military experts that the actual commission of the crime would some day take place.
It was Belgium's peculiar duty, as will be seen, to prepare for that day. To have taken Germany into her confidence on a point on which Germany was already fully informed would very likely have hastened the day and the tragedy thereof.
In keeping up her forts facing Germany and building none on the French frontier, in exchanging ideas with English military experts as to how best her neutrality could be defended, Belgium was preparing for the inevitable. This inevitableness is no longer a matter of moral conjecture. It is a matter of material evidence.
First, let us see what it was that Germany violated. Belgium, partly by a decree of the Vienna Congress in 1815 and partly by revolution, secured her independence from the Netherlands in 1830. The next year she inaugurated her Constitution, and by the Treaty of London, signed Nov. 15, 1831, became the god-child, as it were, of Austria, France, Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia, who guaranteed her neutrality for all time in the following manner:
Article 7—Belgium, within the limits specified in Articles 1, 2, and 4, shall form an independent and perpetually neutral State. She shall be bound to observe this same neutrality toward all other States.
Article 26—Consequent upon the stipulation of the present treaty there shall be peace and unity between H.M. the King of the Belgians, on one part, and H.M. the Emperor of Austria, the King of the French, the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the King of Prussia, and the Emperor of all the Russians, on the other, respectively, forever.