VIII.

The invasion of Belgium was a blunder, both political and military. Political, because England—who no doubt would inevitably have come to take her stand by France, but not at the very opening of hostilities—was moved forthwith to intervene; military, because the heroic and unexpected resistance of the Belgian army frustrated the rapid march on Paris—in other words, wrecked the initial plan of the German Staff.

The Imperial Government did not anticipate that we should show fight. Our hearts would fail us, they thought, at the mere approach of that redoubtable monster, the gigantic German army. A proof of this is the first attack on Liège. It was made by three corps without a siege-train for reducing the forts. They imagined that every gate would open before them; that they would enter with banners flying and drums beating, and be received as conquering heroes, almost as friends.

As soon as this illusion was dispelled the Germans hastened to attack the forts. They tried to takethem by storm, and left 36,000 dead on the field. When Liège was at last captured, they lost ten days in getting into proper trim again, before they resumed their forward march, this time fully provided with artillery. This forced respite affected the first issue of the campaign. The Staff, without taking the Belgian army into account, had mapped out beforehand all the opening stages—Liège, Namur, Mons, Charleroi, and so on, down to the Kaiser’s entry into Paris.

If our opponents went so far astray in their estimate of our fighting spirit, they must lay the blame on their diplomats and their military attachés, their journalists and their spies. The last German ministers at Brussels had certainly been of the same school as Herr von Jagow. They took no interest in the psychology of the Belgian people, and their contempt for the little country where they were received with open arms was only equalled, I should say, by their eagerness to leave its capital as soon as possible, since in their ambition they looked upon it as the mere stepping-stone to an Embassy. But what of their military attachés? Could they see in our soldiers nothing but marionettes of the parade-ground, and in our officers nothing but champion riders at army competitions? Stranger still was the lack of insight shown by the correspondents of German newspapers. They carefully noted the most trivial details of our public life, but their judgment of us was blinded byprejudice, and by the arrogance of a great nation which itself has only achieved unity at a recent date. They regarded Belgium as a mere geographical expression—the home of two hostile races, yoked together in spite of themselves, and determined never to fuse. The quarrels of Flemings and Walloons were depicted in their articles as the outcome of an implacable hatred, and the conflict of political parties as a war to the knife, for they only wished to see how far Germany could make capital out of this cleavage. But the love that all Belgians have for their freedom escaped the notice of these observers settled in our midst. They carefully dissected our national body, without discovering the national soul. Never had the Belgians seemed more divided than in the period preceding the war. Never were they in reality more united in a like devotion to their common country.

What should we have gained by yielding to the German threats? What confidence could we have in the promises of a Government that shamelessly tore up a solemn treaty in order to gain easier access to the country of its foe?

Had the Germans come into Belgium as friends and won the war, they would never have left our land after their victory. If any one is inclined to question this, let him consider the outburst of greed aroused in Germany by the invasion of Belgium. Intellectuals equipped with sham historical claims, manufacturers envious of our industrial successes,traders lusting to capture our markets, join hands to-day with the Socialists (who are no less infatuated than they with the ideal of a Greater Germany) in order to demand our annexation. The Berlin Cabinet would have resolved to break its word once more, and pretexts would not have been wanting—the need of seizing the whole North Sea coast, as a naval base against England; the strategical and commercial importance of Antwerp; perhaps, too, the inevitable wrangles between the Belgian authorities and the German officials who would have presided over the occupation of a part of the country. To what lengths, by the way, would this occupation not have gone? On what nook or corner of our soil should we still have been allowed to plant our national flag?

Perhaps (this is the best we could have hoped for) the Germans would have asked us, in a wheedling tone, yet leaving no room for refusal, to become members of the Germanic Confederation. At first a customs union, a Zollverein, before complete incorporation—the right of admission to the Holy Empire—had been decreed by our future Cæsar, on the advice of the Federal Council and in accordance with the progress of our Germanization. They would not have waited for this glorious day in order to control and regulate the output of our factories and our coal-mines, affiliating the workers to the German trade unions; to organize the activities ofAntwerp, without injuring those of the German ports, and to restrict its commercialhinterland; to watch over our daily life, prohibit all displays of national feeling, instil German discipline into our army, and make our statesmen and our diplomats their submissive thralls. We should have been at once relieved of the Congo, too heavy a burden for our shoulders. We should have been compelled to learn German as a third language, soon to become the official tongue. Many a time, while reading in our newspapers the wretched controversies caused by the rivalry between our two languages, I have had occasion to say to the young men on my staff: “They don’t seem to realize in Belgium the danger of our seeing German one day become the language of instruction at Ghent university.”

If we had become attached to their Empire in this way—a process that every German would have regarded as an honour for us, the reward of our friendly neutrality—the outward form of our Government would have run little risk of being changed. William II., following the example of Bismarck, is not the man to overturn a throne without good reason. He will always prefer to bind other princes to himself by the strong chains of vassalage.

The same doom awaited Holland, although Herr von Jagow, shortly before the German ultimatum was sent to Brussels, had taken care to assure the Dutch minister that the neutrality of his country wouldbe respected. Was not Holland in the Middle Ages one of the jewels of the Germanic Imperial crown? With her shores washed by the North Sea, and the estuary of the Rhine flowing through her midst, did she not command the course of Germany’s greatest river? According to the view of the Chancellor, as set forth in his telegram of 4th August to Prince Lichnowsky, would not an annexation of Belgium by force or guile involve similar treatment of the Orange Kingdom? The conversation in which Herr Zimmermann clumsily dangled before the eyes of the Dutch Socialist Troelstra an invitation to Holland to enter the Zollverein after the war gave our Dutch friends a glimpse of Germany’s designs on their country. The King of Bavaria took it upon himself to give them another glimpse, when he declared, with the blunt frankness of a peasant from his own highlands, that the Germans needed the whole course of the Rhine down to the sea. This would imply occupying the mouth of the Meuse and the estuary of the Scheldt. Denmark, again, possesses one of the keys to the Baltic; can she forget, after the bitter experience she has had, the voracious appetite of her dread neighbour?

This picture, by no means overdrawn, of the blessings in store for us after a German triumph, must prove to my fellow-citizens that, in order to escape them, our King and Government took the only path open to them in an agonizing Calvary—the path ofhonour. There was nothing for it but to defend our freedom, sword in hand, at the price of the nation’s best blood—a freedom that the Germans, after defeating France, would have withheld from us all the more scornfully if we had been weak enough to listen to them and cowardly enough to obey them.

ASOVEREIGN, coming at an early age to the most conspicuous throne in Europe, already too sure of his own talents, fretting with impatience to rule without restraint or guardianship, pacific both by instinct and by reason, but of a helmeted and mail-clad pacifism, which loved to vent itself in needless threats. The same prince, twenty-five years later, puffed up with pride over the marvellous expansion of his country (in which he had certainly borne his share by keeping the peace), but gradually won over to the schemes of conquest and of domination whispered into his ear; ill-informed, for want of accurate reports and of personal discernment, as to the state of public feeling among his neighbours, and as to their capacity for resistance; ready, without any qualms, to seize the first opportunity of starting a war in which victory seemed to him certain and the risks hardly worth counting; the responsible author, since he wields a despotic sway, of all the horrors and disasters around us, bred by the relentless militarism and the boundless ambition of a dynasty that deems itself called upon to govern the world.

A royal family, void of prestige or distinction, obscured by the shadow that the dazzling personality of the Emperor cast behind it, although one figure strove hard to emerge from the darkness—the restless, carping, bellicose Crown Prince. Federal rulers enjoying a mere puppet sovereignty, and acquiescing in their subaltern rôle, from fear of vanishing altogether from the German stage, a stage now too narrow to let them stand by the side of their Cæsar. Statesmen as powerless to make their counsels prevail as to defend the Imperial policy, over which, perhaps, their conscience smote them at times. A Reichstag split up into too many groups and parties, and divided on all questions save that of the timeliness of this war, the Conservatives hoping thereby to strengthen their influence and the Socialists expecting to gain, as the price of their zealous support, those political liberties that they were unable to win by main force.

A disciplined, credulous, and hard-working nation, concerned above all with earning its daily bread, pacific for the most part, or rather indifferent to foreign affairs, until the day when, on the strength of official assurances, it believed itself to be attacked, and in peril of losing its work, its national honour, its very existence. A lying vision, yet hard to banish from its gaze; an erroneous belief, which will drive it, until the bitter end, to face the most dire suffering and to endure the most cruel sacrifices.The future will teach us whether it will not demand later on a heavy reckoning from those who have played it false.

A minority drawn from the intellectual and governing castes, dreaming of victory and aggrandisement, with a passionate desire to see the colossal fabric of German supremacy towering to the heavens, steeped in a limitless hatred or disdain for those who have not the honour to be Germans. From the very opening of hostilities, the morbid conceit of the scholars and men of science was unveiled in clear outlines through those amazing manifestoes on the rights that the superior science, organization, strength, and culture of Germany empower her to claim. In my opinion, however, it would be a mistake to look upon this select band as typical of the nation, just as it would be wrong to make all Germany answerable for the misdeeds of her brutal soldiery, and for the frightful war waged by the military and naval chiefs.

Disheartening rebuffs to German and Austro-Hungarian diplomacy both in Morocco and the Near East, where, despite all the efforts of Berlin and Vienna, there arose a state of things inimical to the spread, nay even to the prestige, of Germanism. As a result of these checks, a vast increase of military preparations, while at the same time the war parties in Germany (and in Austria-Hungary too) raged and clamoured more than ever—warning symptoms, towhich public opinion abroad, misled by the peaceful solution of the previous crisis, paid but a half-hearted attention.

All these causes, individual or collective, whirling us abruptly—on the morrow of a murder that a little police precaution would have averted—to the brink of an abyss in which the freedom of Europe has come near to being engulfed for ever....

Such is the complicated picture that I have tried to sketch, with as a background the crimes committed against Belgium and Serbia. I hope that I may be pardoned for closing this book with a few words on the subject of my gallant country.

Civilization is not a unique, exotic plant, the product ofKultur, of a chosen people, but a cluster of varied flowers, grown on varied soils, and the most modest of them are not the least hardy nor the least beautiful. From the standpoint of human progress, the existence of small States, contributing to that progress, has justified itself as essential to the needs of mankind. Some have been fruitful fields for experiment in the introducing or the improving of various social or political systems. Others have outstripped nations far larger than themselves in the universal realm of literature and the fine arts; others on the broad path of industrial competition. In these and other domains, how many deathless glories can one of them show on the long and illustrious scroll of its history!

The political necessity for the existence of small States, as factors of peace, is no less imperative. It has sometimes been their lot, by virtue of their situation at the mouths of rivers, on the shores of seas, or at the intersection of mountain-ranges, to restrain the clashing and the jarring of the quarrelsome great Powers. They have thus served as watertight compartments or solid buffers, if these technical terms are worthy to express the services rendered by them in maintaining the harmony of Europe.

The war party and the Prussian military writers, with their imperialist doctrines, will not hear to-day of the European balance. To them it is an outworn shibboleth, a mere historical relic. Yet one of the great lessons to be learnt from a study of the past is that this balance remains permanent and indestructible in a continent peopled by rival races. In the end, it has always come to be restored on the ruins of mighty empires, after the shocks and oscillations that it has suffered from the ambitions of conquerors. At the beginning of the last two centuries, the map of Europe, a shifting mosaic, was fixed anew by a sort of historical process, and the small States were not the least useful materials that went to the working of this transformation.

As a matter of fact, Belgium is one of the oldest among these States, for she may fairly trace hercareer back to the days of the Duke of Burgundy, to the reign of Philip the Good, who succeeded in reuniting the Belgian provinces of the Netherlands. For four centuries—apart from an interval of twenty years, during which these provinces were attached to France and received from her their laws and their administrative divisions—their Walloon and Flemish inhabitants lived side by side under the same foreign rulers. They did not blend, it is true; each element was careful to retain its distinctive language and character. But they professed the same creed, kept up brotherly relations, and enjoyed similar liberties, more happy and more free in their thriving cities and mediæval communes than many a more ambitious nation. From the time that Belgium acquired a dynasty of her own and took her seat among the nations, wrapped in her neutrality as in a robe of spotless white, she made remarkable headway in almost every branch of human activity. The little people of a few million souls occupied before the war the fifth place in the list of commercial and industrial countries, standing above Austria-Hungary with its fifty million inhabitants! King Leopold did not overrate either the energy or the spirit of enterprise inherent in his subjects, when he opened up and finally handed over to them the vast basin of his great African river. What a splendid prospect of work and endeavour was offered to them in Africa as in Europe! What a noble future for an industriouslife, deserving the respect of the whole civilized world!

Yet there was one thing lacking to Belgium: she had not been purified by sorrow or hallowed by suffering. This crown of thorns was at last thrust upon her head by the cruelty of the Germans. Then the little nation was seen to stiffen under its martyrdom, without abandoning the struggle to live and to resist. The shining example of heroism came to it from above, from its young royal pair, to whom it was devoted, and in whom it centred its fondest hopes. Ten months have passed, and King Albert still remains planted, firmly as an oak, in the last shred of territory, facing the enemy, whose strength is powerless to bend or to break him. Around him is his young army, sadly thinned by unequal struggles, but galvanized into new life, having repaired its losses by an accession of fresh blood, certain of victory, for it knows that the very heart of its country is throbbing beneath the folds of its flag. Not far off is the Government, which would not yield up the honour of Belgium at the German bidding, and which labours busily in its exile, in order to relieve our refugees, to maintain the public services, and to act as intermediary for the generous and sympathetic aid tendered from foreign sources.

If Europe turns aside from the sight of this indomitable resistance, and looks at our country, what does she see there? The head of the Belgian clergy,the very incarnation of civic patriotism and priestly virtues, stimulating his flock to courage and endurance, caring nought for coercion or threats, and awaiting with full trust in the Divine Judge the day when in his church (not spared, alas! by the invader) he shall celebrate theTe Deumof our deliverance. Everywhere she sees devotion to the fatherland and to Christian solidarity: she sees the burgomaster of Brussels, whose brave voice could only be silenced by imprisonment, although even now his memory and his example still hover, as an ever-present encouragement, above his fellow-citizens and his city; she sees men who yesterday were rich, heads of banks that to-day are closed and of workshops that to-day are empty, joining with the intellectual flower of Brussels citizens to provide for the poor, to ensure that the people shall not die of hunger and privation; she sees women of all sorts and conditions turned into Sisters of Charity; she sees fathers and mothers, stricken to the heart by the death of their sons or anxious as to their fate, living often in homes that the enemy has rifled, yet with calm, tearless eyes and faces ennobled by sacrifice; and last of all she sees, behind the classes that once were privileged, the admirable crowd, the army of humble toilers, stoically enduring their forced loss of work or their inability to help their country, watching in grim silence the countless dead and wounded brought in from the enemy regiments, who do not cease to dyewith their blood that Belgian soil where they thought they had only to appear in order to conquer!

No, such a people cannot die. The Belgian soul, whose existence some dared to deny, has gained a new temper from the flame of battle, and it still lives to-day, more vigorous than ever, to realize our national motto—“Union makes Strength.” But Belgium is not yet at the end of her long ordeal, at the limit of her travail, or on the eve of drying her tears. The iron monster of German militarism cannot be battered down in a day. I have seen him at too close quarters preparing and arming for the fray to have any delusions on that score. The league of his adversaries has swollen in number and grown in power; but at present this only whets his rage, and thus for the time being his might, like that of a man who suddenly goes mad, is redoubled. Germany is not yet near to waking up, with a start, from her tragic dream of triumph and domination. The day of liberation is slow to dawn for us, and we still have a long agony to go through. But let no Belgian, whether he has been forced to take the road of exile, or is suffering, with no word of complaint, the well-nigh intolerable contact with the oppressor—let no Belgian become for a single instant a prey to discouragement or despair! The hour will strike without fail from the belfries of our town-halls and the steeples of our churches—the hour when our country, reconquered and ten times more dear, will press toher lacerated bosom all her sons, once more united in an equal love for their common mother; the hour when Belgium will recover her place among the nations, a loftier place than ever, owing to her valour in the combat and her steadfastness in adversity.

Withregard to the view expressed in Chapter V. concerning the subordinate part played by the economic causes of the war, it has been pointed out to me that during the Agadir crisis the employers of labour in the various German metal industries, grouped under the name of “Steel Syndicate,” addressed a petition to the Chancellor asking that war should be declared on France. Other industrial and economic leagues suggested to him, in special memorials, annexations in Belgium, France, and Russia.

Because the German iron-masters, egged on perhaps by Krupp and the army contractors, and suffering on the other hand from a spell of reckless over-production, were hunting for fresh markets, even at the price of a costly and bloody struggle, and because other manufacturers embraced similar schemes of conquest, it does not follow, first, that the majority of employers, great and small, who wanted to work in peace, became advocates of war; secondly—this point I have tried to prove in the aforesaid chapter—that such a war would have obtained for Germany the new markets that she hankered after.

Nor does it follow that the Imperial Government let itself be led or dragged into the war by the manufacturers. Its opinions, I am ready to admit, coincided with those of many among this class, as also with those of the agrarian section. But in declaring war on France and Russia it pursued above all a political aim. It did not take up arms with the main object of securing for Germany an economic monopoly or hegemony in Europe. To-day, for instance, when we see the Germans endeavouring to change into an annexation their occupation of Belgium and north-western France, we see that it is the possession of the North Sea coast and the Strait of Dover that they mainly have in view, in order from there to be able to strike a deadly blow at the British power. The results of a German victory were admirably defined by M. Poincaré, in his fine speech of 14th July; “We should fall for ever into a political, moral, and economic thraldom.” The economic vassalage would only be a consequence of the political thraldom.

1[The following are the German newspapers mentioned in this book:—Kölnische Zeitung(Cologne Gazette);Kreuzzeitung(Cross Gazette);Vossische Zeitung(Voss’s Gazette);Norddeutsche Zeitung(North German Gazette);Berliner Lokalanzeiger(Berlin Local Advertiser); andBerliner Tageblatt(Berlin Daysheet).—Translator’s Note.]

2[Quoted from theTimesreport, 3rd October 1914.—Translator’s Note.]

3[Quoted from the British Blue Book.—Translator’s Note.]

4[In Racine’sBritannicus, Nero, although his wife Octavia has done no wrong, proposes to divorce her and marry Junia. Junia replies:“J’ai méritéNi cet excès d’honneur, ni cette indignité.”—Translator’s Note.]

4[In Racine’sBritannicus, Nero, although his wife Octavia has done no wrong, proposes to divorce her and marry Junia. Junia replies:

“J’ai méritéNi cet excès d’honneur, ni cette indignité.”—Translator’s Note.]

“J’ai mérité

Ni cet excès d’honneur, ni cette indignité.”

—Translator’s Note.]

5Report of Sir E. Goschen to Sir E. Grey, 8th August 1914, published by the British Government (Great Britain and the European Crisis).

6These laws deal with the military and naval forces of the Empire, finance, commerce, questions of domicile, means of communication, and justice.

7[In Continental politics, blue is the colour of the Conservatives proper, black that of the Clericals.—Translator’s Note.]

8[The term applied in Continental politics to the temporary combination of several parties or groups for some particular purpose.—Translator’s Note.]

9[This term arose out of the Social Democrats’ Congress at Baden in 1912. The “revisionists,” headed by Eduard Bernstein, proposed to abandon the old intransigent attitude, and to compromise with the Government in certain matters, especially taxation.—Translator’s Note.]

10[This word bears the same meaning, for political purposes, as “bloc.” It is the German form of “cartel,” a term used by modern economists to denote a manufacturers’ union to keep up prices.—Translator’s Note.]

11Yellow Book concerning Morocco, 1905.

12[Frenchtour de valse, GermanWalzertour—i.e., a step taken without regard to the consequences, a light-hearted escapade. We may, perhaps, trace here a flavour of Teutonic contempt for Southern airs and graces.—Translator’s Note.]

13Dispatch from M. Cambon, dated 5th November, Yellow Book for 1911.

14See especially reports 141 and 161 from Sir Maurice de Bunsen to Sir Edward Grey (Great Britain and the European Crisis).

15Belgian Grey Book, annexe to No. 2.

16Yellow Book, No. 120.

17See M. Waxweiler’sLa Belgique neutre et loyale(Lausanne: Payot et Cie.), and the pamphlet by M. van den Heuvel, Minister of State,De la violation de la neutralité belge(Paris: Louis de Soye).

18Statement made by the Chancellor on 6th November 1914 to the representatives of the great American agencies, United Press and Amalgamated Press.

19[It would have been a pity to drop this happy metaphor, although it is not used, so far as I am aware, by English military writers. A curtain, in fortification, is a plain wall connecting two bastions.—Translator’s Note.]

THE END.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.

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