To follow in detail the operations from now of the Belgian forces from day to day would be less informing than to sum up their plan and their effect.

As it stood on August 25 the situation was that the Belgians held all the country to the north of the Scheldt and the Dyle, and the Germans all the country to the south of these rivers. From Turcoing on the French frontier to Antwerp, the Scheldt follows a course roughly parallel to the coast. At Antwerp its bed describes a sharp bend to seaward. Some ten miles south of this bend, the main waterway receives the Rupel, formed by the junction to the eastward of the Dyle and the Nethe. Taken together, the Scheldt and the Dyle, both deep, sluggish watercourses, offer a natural defence of the seaboard provinces.

From behind this natural line of defence the Belgians, ceaselessly on the watch, sallied forth at every chance offered, to harass and entrap the enemy. Sudden dashes were made upon his communications by armed motor-cars; attacks were made upon railway lines and bridges; his convoys were unexpectedly attacked and cut up by superior forces; in a word, he was kept in perpetual hot water.

The military effect of this was more important than may at first sight appear. In the first place, it was made necessary for the Germans, not only to keep heavy forces afoot in Belgium, but to disperse those forces. Hence though the forces, taken together, were large, the Belgians concentrated on Antwerp were in a position to deliver in superior strength a blow at any one of these bodies, and thus to worst the whole of them in detail.

In the second place, these Parthian tactics made the transport of munitions and supplies to the German armies in France by the line through Brussels a business calling for vigilance and caution. That greatly lessened the value of the line to the enemy. On this supply line the German right wing in France mainly depended. The Belgians, therefore, were not merely defending their own country, but indirectly were aiding the French and British operations on the farther side of the French frontier.

Now the weakness of the Belgian position was that, while they could hold the line of the Dyle and that of the Scheldt as far as Termonde, their force was too small to bar the passage of the Scheldt farther west. It was open to the Germans, by seizing Ghent, to turn the defensive position in a manner that would speedily have become dangerous. Well aware of this, the Germans advanced upon Ghent. Coincidently, however, the Belgian operations farther east became more active and threatening. To meet them, the Germans were obliged to withdraw most of the troops sent to Ghent. Just at that juncture (August 27) a body of British marines was landed at Ostend. From Ghent the enemy had hastily to withdraw. British troops advanced to Ghent, and the whole line of the Scheldt was secured.

The value of that move is clear. From behind the line of the Scheldt, the Allied forces were within easy striking distance of the main railways south of Brussels. Later on, and at a critical juncture for the German armies in France, the Belgians cut those railways. That these lines were not cut before was a part of the Allies’ strategy.

What in these circumstances were the measures taken by the invaders? The main measure was, as far as possible, to depopulate the country between their lines and the Belgian defences. The measure had two objects—to prevent the Belgians receiving information of German movements, and more especially of the movement of reinforcements; and to embarrass the defence by driving into the seaboard districts crowds of homeless and starving refugees.

The measure, however, was carried out on such a scale as to suggest that yet another object was to prepare the way for a German immigration as a support of the contemplated conquest. The expropriation of native land-owners on the frontier of Prussian Poland, and the granting of their lands to officers and non-commissioned officers of the German army reserves, is an example of the policy, accompanied in Prussian Poland by the prohibition of the native language in elementary schools.

European history affords happily few episodes equal to the depopulation of part of the valley of the Meuse, which was at this time entered upon. The towns of Dinant and Ardenne were totally destroyed, their male populations massacred, and the women and children carried off in defiance of every usage of civilised warfare. Indeed, to describe this devastation of Belgium as in any sense civilised warfare would be a travesty of the term. Its ferocity was possibly no more than a cloak to hide a calculated purpose.

In an official declaration issued from Berlin on August 27 it was stated that:—

The distribution of arms and ammunition among the civil population of Belgium had been carried out on systematic lines, and the authorities enraged the public against Germany by assiduously circulating false reports.

They were under the impression that with the aid of the French they would be able to drive the Germans out of Belgium in two days.

The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil population has been to interfere with unrelenting severity and to create examples which, by their frightfulness, would be a warning to the whole country.

On that declaration, one or two observations are necessary. Part of the defensive force of Belgium was its Civic Guard, having a total strength of some 400,000. So far from arming the civil population, the Belgian Government called in the arms of this force. It was decided that, situated as the country was, the best course was to confide its defence to its regular troops and reserves, and so remove all excuse for military severities.

The reports circulated by the Government of Belgium, as anybody who refers back to them may ascertain, were carefully drawn up and substantially true.

The statement that the Belgians were under the impression alleged in this declaration, is, in face of the now known facts of the Allied plan of the campaign, ludicrous.

Still more remarkable, however, is the calm assumption that neither Belgium nor its Government had the smallest right to defend themselves, and that any attempt to exercise that right was, in effect, an act of rebellion against Germany. In fact, the presumption is that Belgium was already part of Germany; and this in face of the “solemn assurance” offered on August 9.

Last, but not least, has been the effort more recently made to suggest, despite this declaration, that the “unrelenting severity” and “examples of frightfulness” are hallucinations of Belgian excitement.H These things speak for themselves. Nine towns in Belgium—Louvain, Aerschot, Tirlemont, Termonde, Jodoigne, Dinant, Ardenne, VisÉ, Charleroi, and Mons—had been reduced to ruins. Others, like Malines, Diest, and Alost, had been in great part wrecked. At LiÉge a whole quarter of the city had been surrounded, set on fire, and its terrified and unarmed inhabitants, as they fled from the burning houses, shot down wholesale by machine guns until the streets ran with blood.I Yet the world was solemnly assured that it was all no more than a bad dream.

So far from aiding, as intended, the military situation of the German forces, this policy of rapine tended to defeat itself. After the defeat of the German armies on the Marne, the Government of Berlin made a second offer of accommodation to the Belgian Ministry. The reply was a sortie in full force from the Belgian lines, which obliged the enemy to employ against them three army corps of reserves they were just then sending through northern Belgium into France. In France, those reinforcements were urgently needed. It is evident that this second offer of accommodation merely had as its primary object the prompt arrival of those troops. They had to be recalled from the French frontier, and to join with the forces of occupation in a fiercely fought four days’ battle.

In putting upon the renewed offer the interpretation here alluded to, the Belgian Government were well aware that, apart altogether from its worthlessness as a pledge, the Germans, in the political object which had plainly from the first dictated their treatment of the population, had signally failed. The invaders had relied as their chief instrument on terror. The instrument had broken in their hands. Neither had they as yet gained one real military success. On the contrary, they had suffered either heavy reverses, or had fought at great cost actions yielding no substantial fruits. It was in vain that half the country had been laid waste. So long as the Belgian army, with a strongly fortified base, held the seaboard provinces, the situation of the invaders remained utterly secure. To understand the true position of the Belgian resistance, it is advisable to realise the character of the defences of Antwerp. When, after a prolonged discussion, General Brialmont was, fifty years ago, authorised to modernise the defences of Antwerp and Namur, and to re-fortify LiÉge, he adopted, in the case of Antwerp, the resources afforded by its situation as a seaport. The older ramparts were demolished, and replaced, at a distance allowing for natural expansion of the city within them, by a new inner ring of massive earthworks between forts, of the form known as a blunted redan. The plan adopted by Brialmont was on the system described by military engineers as the polygonal trace, and his work has always been looked upon as one of the best examples of that system, considered best adapted to meet the range and accuracy of modern siege artillery.

But undoubtedly the distinctive feature was presented by the wet ditches, 150 feet broad with some 20 feet depth of water, which surround not only the inner works, but also the line of detached forts built on an average two miles in advance of those works. Brialmont was the first military engineer to carry out this idea, now followed in all present-day fortification. Each of his forts, with a front of 700 yards, mounted 15 howitzers and 120 guns. There were thus on the 9 forts, including Merxem, 1,080 pieces of ordnance.

Since Brialmont’s time, however, his outer forts had been connected by an enceinte, now 15 miles or thereabouts in length, strengthened by 18 redoubts, and the second wet ditch. As a third line of defence, there were, at the same time, built the 25 large forts and 13 redoubts, enclosing round the city an area of some 200 square miles. Between the first and second line of defences, the space formed an entrenched camp of, roughly, 17,000 acres in extent.

To protect the navigation of the Scheldt, and to prevent the city from being deprived of supplies, six of these great outer forts were placed at commanding points along the river. By cutting the dykes on the Rupel and the Scheldt areas could be flooded which would limit an attack to the south and south-east, and not only enable a defending army to concentrate its strength in that direction, but enable it behind the outer third line of fortifications to dispute in force the passage of the Nethe.

There were thus on the various defences some 4,000 pieces of ordnance, and, looking at the rivers and wet ditches to be negotiated, it was evident that an attempt to take the fortress by storm could only hope to succeed after a very heavy bombardment followed by an attack with overwhelmingly superior forces.

Since at LiÉge, as proved by the identification tallies collected from the German dead, the attempt to storm that place, a far easier enterprise, had cost the attackers 16,000 lives, it is no matter for surprise that they intended to postpone an attack upon Antwerp until their enterprise against France had proved successful.

So acute, however, was the annoyance they experienced from the Belgian army, and so manifest the political effects of its continued activity and being, that they resolved upon an attack with what was evidently an insufficient though, nevertheless, a large force. This force, more than twice as numerous as the Belgian army, succeeded in making its way round to the north of the fortress, where both the outer and the second line of defence were judged weakest. They had failed, however, to reckon upon the element of defence afforded by the dykes. These at Fort Oudendyk, and elsewhere along the Scheldt, the Belgians promptly cut, though not before they had allowed the besiegers to place their siege guns in position.

The result was that the Germans found themselves flooded out, and lost a considerable part of their artillery. Men struggling breast deep in water, or to save their guns, were shot down from the forts. Some climbed into trees; not a few were drowned. They were forced to beat a hasty and disastrous retreat, harassed by a sortie of the whole Belgian army.

Not until the failure of their great expedition into France had become manifest, with the prospective loss, in consequence, of the possession of Belgium, the real and primary object of the war, did they address themselves, with all the resources available, to the reduction of the great fortress. Evidently the hope of being able, with Antwerp in their power, to defy efforts to turn them out, inspired this enterprise. After a bombardment with their huge 42-centimetre guns lasting some ten days they succeeded in making a breach in the outer ring of forts, and at the end of five days of heavy fighting drove the Belgians across the Nethe. These successes, however, were dearly bought.