The Guns of August (21 page)

Troubled by what motivated these startling confidences, as much as by their content, Albert could only conclude they were intended to frighten Belgium into coming to terms. Evidently the Germans had made up their minds, and he felt that France should be warned. He instructed Beyens to repeat everything to Jules Cambon, the French ambassador in Berlin, and to charge him to report the matter to President Poincaré in the strongest terms.

Later they learned that Major Melotte, the Belgian military attaché, had been treated to an even more violent outburst by General Moltke at the same dinner. He also heard that war with France was “inevitable” and “much nearer than you think.” Moltke, who usually maintained great reserve with foreign attachés, on this occasion “unbuttoned” himself. He said Germany did not want war but the General Staff was “arch-ready.” He said “France must absolutely stop provoking and annoying us or we shall have to come to blows. The sooner, the better. We have had enough of these continual
alerts.” As examples of French provocations, Moltke cited, apart from “big things,” a cold reception given in Paris to German aviators and a boycott by Paris society of Major Winterfeld, the German military attaché. The Major’s mother, Countess d’Alvensleben, had complained bitterly. As for England, well, the German Navy was not built to hide in harbor. It would attack and probably be beaten. Germany would lose her ships, but England would lose mastery of the seas, which would pass to the United States, who would be the sole gainer from a European war. England knew this and, said the General, taking a sharp turn in his logic, would probably stay neutral.

He was far from finished. What would Belgium do, he asked Major Melotte, if a large foreign force invaded her territory? Melotte replied that she would defend her neutrality. In an effort to find out whether Belgium would content herself with a protest, as the Germans believed, or would fight, Moltke pressed him to be more specific. When Melotte answered, “We will oppose with all our forces whatever power violates our frontiers,” Moltke pointed out smoothly that good intentions were not enough. “You must also have an army capable of fulfilling the duty which neutrality imposes.”

Back in Brussels, King Albert called at once for a progress report on the mobilization plans. He found no progress had been made. On the basis of what he had heard in Berlin, he obtained De Broqueville’s agreement for a plan of campaign based on the hypothesis of a German invasion. He got his own and Galet’s nominee, an energetic officer named Colonel de Ryckel, appointed to carry out the work promised for April. By April it was still not ready. Meanwhile De Broqueville had appointed another officer, General de Selliers de Moranville, as Chief of Staff over De Ryckel’s head. In July four separate plans of concentration were still being considered.

Discouragement did not change the King’s mind. His policy was embodied in a memorandum drawn up by Captain Galet immediately after the Berlin visit. “We are resolved to declare war at once upon any power that deliberately violates our territory; to wage war with the utmost energy and with the whole of our military resources, wherever required, even
beyond our frontiers, and to continue to wage war even after the invader retires, until the conclusion of a general peace.”

On August 2, King Albert, presiding at the Council of State when it met at 9:00
P.M.
in the palace, opened with the words: “Our answer must be ‘No,’ whatever the consequences. Our duty is to defend our territorial integrity. In this we must not fail.” He insisted, however, that no one present should allow himself any illusions: the consequences would be grave and terrible; the enemy would be ruthless. Premier de Broqueville warned waverers not to put faith in Germany’s promise to restore Belgian integrity after the war. “If Germany is victorious,” he said, “Belgium, whatever her attitude, will be annexed to the German Empire.”

One aged and indignant minister who had recently entertained as his house guest the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, brother-in-law of the Kaiser, could not contain his wrath at the perfidy of the Duke’s expressions of friendship and kept up an angry mumbling as chorus to the proceedings. When General de Selliers, the Chief of Staff, rose to explain the strategy of defense to be adopted, his Deputy Chief, Colonel de Ryckel, with whom his relations were, in the words of a colleague, “denuded of the amenities,” kept growling between his teeth,
“Il faut piquer dedans, il faut piquer dedans”
(We must hit them where it hurts). Given the floor, he amazed his hearers with a proposal to anticipate the invader by attacking him on his own territory before he could cross the Belgian frontier.

At midnight the meeting adjourned, while a committee of the Premier, Foreign Minister, and Minister of Justice returned to the Foreign Office to draft a reply. While they were at work a motorcar drew up in the dark courtyard beneath the single row of lighted windows. A visit of the German Minister was announced to the startled Ministers. It was 1:30
A.M.
What could he want at this hour?

Herr von Below’s nocturnal unrest reflected his government’s growing uneasiness about the effect of their ultimatum, now irrevocably committed to paper and irrevocably
working upon Belgian national pride. The Germans had been telling one another for years that Belgium would not fight, but now when the moment arrived they began to suffer an acute if belated anxiety. A valiant and ringing “No!” from Belgium would peal round the world with effect on the other neutral countries hardly beneficial to Germany. But Germany was not so worried about the attitude of neutral countries as she was about the delay that armed Belgian resistance would inflict upon her timetable. A Belgian Army that chose to fight rather than “line up along the road” would require the leaving behind of divisions needed for the march on Paris. By destruction of railroads and bridges it could disrupt the Germans’ line of march and flow of supplies and cause an infinity of annoyance.

Prey to second thoughts, the German government had sent Herr von Below in the middle of the night to try to influence the Belgian reply by further accusations against France. He informed van der Elst who received him that French dirigibles had dropped bombs and that French patrols had crossed the border.

“Where did these events take place?” van der Elst asked.

“In Germany,” was the reply.

“In that case I fail to see the relevance of the information.”

The German Minister offered to explain that the French lacked respect for international law and could therefore be expected to violate Belgian neutrality. This ingenious exercise in logic somehow fell short of making its point. Van der Elst showed his visitor the door.

At 2:30
A.M.
, the Council reconvened in the palace to approve the reply to Germany submitted by the Ministers. It stated that the Belgian government “would sacrifice the honor of the nation and betray its duty to Europe” if it accepted the German proposals. It declared itself “firmly resolved to repel by all means in its power every attack upon its rights.”

After approving the document without change, the Council fell into dispute over the King’s insistence that no appeal to the guarantor powers for assistance should be made until the Germans actually entered Belgium. Despite vigorous disagreement
he carried his point. At 4:00
A.M.
the Council broke up. The last Minister to leave turned and saw King Albert standing with his back to the room and a copy of the reply in his hand, staring out of the window where the dawn was beginning to light the sky.

In Berlin, too, a late meeting was being held that night of August 2. At the Chancellor’s house, Bethmann-Hollweg, General von Moltke, and Admiral Tirpitz were conferring about a declaration of war on France as they had conferred the night before about Russia. Tirpitz complained “again and again” that he could not understand why these declarations of war were necessary. They always had an “aggressive flavor”; an army could march “without such things.” Bethmann pointed out that a declaration of war on France was necessary because Germany wanted to march through Belgium. Tirpitz repeated Ambassador Lichnowsky’s warnings from London that an invasion of Belgium would bring England in; he suggested that the entry into Belgium might be delayed. Moltke, terrified by another threat to his schedule, at once declared this to be “impossible”; nothing must be allowed to interfere with the “machinery of transport.”

He did not himself, he said, attach much value to declarations of war. French hostile acts during the days had already made war a fact. He was referring to the alleged reports of French bombings in the Nuremberg area which the German press had been blazing forth in extras all day with such effect that people in Berlin went about looking nervously at the sky. In fact, no bombings had taken place. Now, according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be necessary because of the imaginary bombings.

Tirpitz still deplored it. There could be no doubt in the world, he said, that the French were “at least intellectually the aggressors”; but owing to the carelessness of German politicians in not making this clear to the world, the invasion of Belgium, which was “a pure emergency measure,” would be made to appear unfairly “in the fateful light of a brutal act of violence.”

In Brussels, after the Council of State broke up at 4:00
A.M.
on the morning of August 3, Davignon returned to the Foreign Office and instructed his Political Secretary, Baron de Gaiffier, to deliver Belgium’s reply to the German Minister. At precisely 7:00
A.M.
, the last moment of the twelve hours, Gaiffier rang the doorbell of the German Legation and delivered the reply to Herr von Below. On his way home he heard the cries of newsboys as the Monday morning papers announced the text of the ultimatum and the Belgian answer. He heard the sharp exclamations as people read the news and gathered in excited groups. Belgium’s defiant “No!” exhilarated the public. Many expressed the belief that it would cause the Germans to skirt their territory rather than risk universal censure. “The Germans are dangerous but they are not maniacs,” people assured one another.

Even in the palace and in the ministries some hope persisted; it was hard to believe that the Germans would deliberately choose to start the war by putting themselves in the wrong. The last hope vanished when the Kaiser’s belated reply to King Albert’s personal appeal of two days before was received on the evening of August 3. It was one more attempt to induce the Belgians to acquiesce without fighting. “Only with the most friendly intentions toward Belgium,” the Kaiser telegraphed, had he made his grave demand. “As the conditions laid down make clear, the possibility of maintaining our former and present relations still lies in the hands of Your Majesty.”

“What does he take me for?” King Albert exclaimed in the first show of anger he had allowed himself since the crisis began. Assuming the supreme command, he at once gave orders for the blowing up of the Meuse bridges at Liège and of the railroad tunnels and bridges at the Luxembourg frontier. He still postponed sending the appeal for military help and alliance to Britain and France. Belgian neutrality had been one collective act of the European Powers that almost succeeded. King Albert could not bring himself to sign its death certificate until the overt act of invasion had actually taken place.

O
N
S
UNDAY AFTERNOON,
August 2, a few hours before the German ultimatum was delivered in Brussels, Grey asked the British Cabinet for authority to fulfill the naval engagement to defend the French Channel coast. No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard and fast and specific decision. Through the long afternoon the Cabinet squirmed uncomfortably, unready and unwilling to grasp the handle of final commitment.

In France war came and was accepted as a kind of national fate, however deeply a part of the people would have preferred to avoid it. Almost in awe, a foreign observer reported the upsurge of “national devotion” joined with an “entire absence of excitement” in a people of whom it had so often been predicted that anarchical influences had undermined their patriotism and would prove fatal in the event of war. Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.

Britain had no Albert and no Alsace. Her weapons were ready but not her will. Over the past ten years she had studied and prepared for the war that was now upon her and had developed, since 1905, a system called the “War Book” which
left nothing to the traditional British practice of muddling through. All orders to be issued in the event of war were ready for signature; envelopes were addressed; notices and proclamations were either printed or set up in type, and the King never moved from London without having with him those that required his immediate signature. The method was plain; the muddle was in the British mind.