The Guns of August (31 page)

The will to defend the country outran the means. Of machine guns, the essential weapon for defense, the Belgian Army’s proportion per man was half that of the German Army. Of heavy field artillery, needed for the defensive positions between the forts, it had none at all. The planned increase in military service which was intended to bring the Field Army up to 150,000 with 70,000 reserves and the fortress troops to 130,000 by the year 1926, had hardly got under way. In August 1914 the Field Army mustered 117,000 with no trained reserves, all the remaining reserves being used to man the forts. The Civic Guard, a gentlemanly gendarmerie in top hats and bright green uniforms were pressed into active service; many of its duties were taken over by Boy Scouts. The active army had had no practice in entrenching and hardly any tools to dig with. Transport was lacking as were tents and field kitchens; cooking utensils had to be collected from farms and villages; telephone equipment was negligible. The army marched in a chaos of improvisation.

It marched also, or was borne along, on a crest of enthusiasm, haloed by a mist of illusion. Soldiers, suddenly popular,
were overwhelmed by gifts of food and kisses and beer. They soon broke ranks and strolled through the streets, showing off their uniforms and greeting friends. Parents joined their sons to see what war was like. Magnificent limousines, requisitioned as transport, sped by piled with loaves and joints of meat. Cheers roared after them. Cheers greeted the machine guns pulled, like the milk carts of Flanders, by dogs.

Early on August 4, a quiet, clear, luminous morning, seventy miles to the east of Brussels, the first invaders, units of von Marwitz’s Cavalry, crossed into Belgium. Coming at a steady purposeful trot, they carried twelve-foot steel-headed lances and were otherwise hung about with an arsenal of sabers, pistols, and rifles. Harvesters looking up from the roadside fields, villagers peering from their windows, whispered “Uhlans!” The outlandish name, with its overtones of the savage Tartar horsemen from whom it derived, evoked Europe’s ancestral memory of barbarian invasion. The Germans, when engaged in their historic mission of bringing
Kultur
to their neighbors, showed a preference, as in the Kaiser’s use of the word “Huns,” for fearful models.

As vanguard of the invasion, the cavalry’s mission was to reconnoiter the position of the Belgian and French armies, to watch out for British landings, and to screen the German deployment against similar enemy reconnaissance. On the first day the duty of the advance squadrons, supported by infantry brought up in automobiles, was to seize the crossings of the Meuse before the bridges were destroyed and capture farms and villages as sources of food and forage. At Warsage, just inside the frontier, M. Flechet, the Burgomaster of seventy-two, wearing his scarf of office, stood in the village square as the horsemen clattered over the cobblestones of the Belgian
pavé.
Riding up, the squadron’s officer with a polite smile handed him a printed proclamation which expressed Germany’s “regret” at being “compelled by necessity” to enter Belgium. Though wishing to avoid combat, it said, “We must have a free road. Destruction of bridges, tunnels and railroads will be regarded as hostile acts.” In village squares all along the border from Holland to Luxembourg the Uhlans scattered
the proclamations, hauled down the Belgian flag from the town halls, raised the black eagle of the German Empire, and moved on, confident in the assurance given them by their commanders that the Belgians would not fight.

Behind them, filling the roads that converged on Liège came the infantry of Emmich’s assault force, rank after rank. Only the red regimental number painted on helmet fronts broke the monotony of field-gray. Horse-drawn field artillery followed. The new leather of boots and harness creaked. Companies of cyclists sped ahead to seize road crossings and farmhouses and lay telephone wires. Automobiles honked their way through, carrying monocled Staff officers with orderlies holding drawn pistols sitting up front and trunks strapped on behind. Every regiment had its field kitchens on wheels, said to be inspired by one the Kaiser had seen at Russian maneuvers, with fires kindled and cooks standing up stirring the stew as the wagons moved. Such was the perfection of the equipment and the precision of the marching that the invaders appeared to be on parade.

Each soldier carried sixty-five pounds: rifle and ammunition, knapsack, canteen, extra boots, entrenching tools, knife and a multiplicity of implements and kits strapped to his coat. In one bag was his “iron ration” containing two cans of meat, two of vegetables, two packages of hardtack, one of ground coffee, and a flask of whisky which was only to be opened on permission of an officer and was inspected daily to determine if its owner had cheated. Another bag held thread, needles, bandages and adhesive tape; another held matches, chocolate, and tobacco. Around the officers’ necks hung binoculars and leather-bound maps covering the particular regiment’s designated line of march so that no German would ever be in the predicament of the British officer who complained that battle is a process which always takes place at the junction of two maps. As they marched, the Germans sang. They sang “Deutschland über Alles,” “Die Wacht am Rhein,” and “Heil dir im Siegeskranz.” They sang when they halted, when they billeted, when they caroused. Many who lived through the next thirty days of mounting combat, agony, and terror were
to remember the sound of endless, repetitious masculine singing as the worst torment of the invasion.

General von Emmich’s brigades, converging upon Liège from the north, east, and south, discovered when they reached the Meuse that the bridges above and below the city had already been destroyed. When they attempted to cross on pontoons, Belgian infantry opened fire, and the Germans to their astonishment found themselves in actual combat, hit by live ammunition, wounded and dying. They had 60,000 men to the Belgians’ 25,000. By nightfall they had succeeded in crossing the river at Visé, north of the city; the brigades attacking from the south were held off; those attacking through the center where the river makes an inward bend reached the line of forts before reaching the river.

During the day as the boots and wheels and hoofs of the German ranks overran villages and trampled fields of ripe grain, the shooting increased and with it the vexation of the German troops, who had been told that the Belgians were “chocolate soldiers.” Surprised and enraged by the resistance, the German soldiers in the state of heightened nerves produced by the first experience of combat were immediately susceptible to the first cry of “Snipers”! At once they imagined enraged civilians shooting at them from behind every house and hedgerow. At once they raised the cry,
“Man hat geschossen!”
that was to be the signal for every reprisal upon civilians from Visé to the gates of Paris. From the first day, the figure of the terrible
franc-tireur,
remembered from 1870, which the Germans were to conjure into gigantic proportions, began to take shape.

The spirit of resistance, soon to find its voice in the famous clandestine newspaper
Le Libre Belge,
was barely awake that first morning among the inhabitants of the frontier towns. Their own government, knowing the nature of the enemy, had already distributed notices to be posted in every community ordering civilians to deposit arms with the town authorities and warning that if caught with arms by the Germans they might be subject to the death penalty. The placards instructed the people not to fight or insult the enemy and to remain indoors
behind closed windows in order to avoid “any pretext for measures of repression resulting in bloodshed or pillage or massacre of the innocent population.” Thus sternly cautioned and awestruck at the sight of the invaders, the people were hardly prepared to try to halt the armored multitudes with individual rabbit guns.

Nevertheless on the first day of the invasion the Germans began the shooting not only of ordinary civilians but of Belgian priests, a more deliberate affair. On August 6, Major-General Karl Ulrich von Bülow,
*
brother of the ex-chancellor and commander of a cavalry division in the attack on Liège, told a brother officer that he disapproved of “the summary executions of Belgian priests which had taken place on the previous day.” The pretext that Belgian priesthood was engaged in a conspiracy to encourage
franc-tireur
warfare—organized within the first twenty-four hours and in defiance of the civil government—was designed for German consumption. For Belgian consumption the executions were meant as an exercise in frightfulness according to the theory developed by the Emperor Caligula:
“Oderint dum metuant”
(Let them hate us as long as they fear us).

On the first day too the Germans shot six hostages taken at Warsage and burned the village of Battice as an example. It was “burned out, completely gutted,” wrote a German officer who marched through it a few days later. “One could see through the frameless window openings into the interior of the rooms with their roasted remnants of iron bedsteads and furnishings. Broken bits of household utensils lay scattered about the street. Except for dogs and cats scavenging among the ruins, all signs of life had been extinguished by the fire. In the market square stood the roofless, spireless church.” In another place where, he was told, three German Hussars had been shot, “the whole village was in flames, cattle bellowed desperately in barns, half-burned chickens rushed about demented, two men in peasant smocks lay dead against a wall.”

“Our advance in Belgium is certainly brutal,” Moltke wrote to Conrad on August 5, “but we are fighting for our lives and all who get in the way must take the consequences.” He did not have in mind the consequences to Germany. But the process which was to make Belgium the nemesis of Germany had begun.

On August 5 Emmich’s brigades opened the attack on the four easternmost forts of Liège with a cannonade by field artillery followed by infantry assault. The light shells made no impression on the forts, and the Belgian guns poured a hail of fire on the German troops, slaughtering their front ranks. Company after company came on, making for the spaces between the forts where the Belgian entrenchments had not been completed. At some points where they broke through, the Germans stormed up the slopes where the guns could not be depressed to reach them and were mowed down by the forts’ machine guns. The dead piled up in ridges a yard high. At Fort Barchon, Belgians, seeing the German lines waver, charged with the bayonet and threw them back. Again and again the Germans returned to the assault, spending lives like bullets in the knowledge of plentiful reserves to make up the losses. “They made no attempt at deploying,” a Belgian officer described it later, “but came on line after line, almost shoulder to shoulder, until as we shot them down, the fallen were heaped on top of each other in an awful barricade of dead and wounded that threatened to mask our guns and cause us trouble. So high did the barricade become that we did not know whether to fire through it or to go out and clear openings with our hands .… But would you believe it?—this veritable wall of dead and dying enabled those wonderful Germans to creep closer, and actually to charge up the glacis. They got no farther than halfway because our machine guns and rifles swept them back. Of course we had our losses but they were slight compared to the carnage we inflicted on our enemies.”

The prodigal spending of lives by all the belligerents that was to mount and mount in senseless excess to hundreds of thousands at the Somme, to over a million at Verdun began on
that second day of the war at Liège. In their furious frustration at the first check, the Germans threw men recklessly against the forts in whatever numbers would be necessary to take the objective on schedule.

During the night of August 5 Emmich’s brigades reassembled on their separate roads for a renewed attack, scheduled to begin at midnight. General Ludendorff, accompanying the 14th Brigade which occupied the center of the German line, found the troops gloomy and “nervous.” Ahead the fortress guns loomed fearfully. Many officers doubted that infantry attack could prevail against them. Rumor reported that an entire cyclist company sent out to reconnoiter earlier in the day had been “annihilated.” A column taking the wrong road in the darkness bumped up against another, tangled, and came to a confused halt. Ludendorff riding up to find the cause of the trouble discovered the orderly of General von Wussow, commander of the 14th Brigade, leading the General’s horse with empty saddle. Von Wussow had been killed by machine-gun fire along the road ahead. Ludendorff with instant boldness seized opportunity by the throat. He took command of the Brigade and gave the signal for attack that was intended to pierce the interval between Fort Fleron and Fort d’Evegnée. As they advanced, men fell under fire and for the first time in his life Ludendorff heard the “peculiar thud of bullets striking human bodies.”

Through some quirk in the fortunes of war, the guns of Fort Fleron less than two miles away failed to open fire. In a village where house-to-house fighting developed, Ludendorff ordered up a field howitzer which “fired right and left into the houses” and soon cleared the way through. By two o’clock on the afternoon of the 6th the Brigade had broken through the ring of forts and reached the heights on the right bank of the Meuse from where they could see Liège and its Citadel, an imposing but disused fort, directly across the river. Here they were joined by General von Emmich, but although they waited in increasing anxiety, scanning the roads to north and south, no troops of the other brigades appeared. The 14th discovered itself isolated within the circle of forts. Its field guns
were trained on the Citadel and fired as a signal to the other brigades as well as “to intimidate the governor of the fortress and the inhabitants.”

Angered at having to waste time and manpower fighting a people who, with ordinary common sense, should have let them pass, the Germans throughout the month of August were obsessed by the goal of “intimidating” the Belgians into giving up their stupid and futile resistance. Under a flag of truce the former German military attaché at Brussels who was personally known to General Leman had been sent the day before to persuade or, failing in that, to threaten him into surrender. Leman was told by the emissary that Zeppelins would destroy Liège if he did not let the Germans through. The parley failed of its purpose, and on August 6 the Zeppelin L-Z was duly sent from Cologne to bomb the city. The thirteen bombs it dropped, the nine civilians it killed, inaugurated a twentieth century practice.