Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/163

 first-class mystery of its subsequent easy fall. De Broqueville had carried a new army scheme which in due development would have given Belgium at need a million bayonets to defend her neutrality instead of three hundred thousand. King Leopold, couched like a super-spider behind his fine-drawn webs of diplomacy and finance, had made way for King Albert of the simpler gospel. But on the whole the temper of Belgium was not radically changed. When in 1912 the Kaiser, receiving General Heimburger, Governor of Liége, at Aix-la-Chapelle during manœuvres, expressed his astonishment at the improvement of the defences on the Belgo-German frontier, the latter had no stronger reply than: "Well, Majesty, we soldiers had a chance of getting something extra out of our Government, and we took it." Neither your courteous and subtle Liégois, nor your genial and abundant citizen of Brussels, nor your four-square indomitable Flamand really believed that the treaty would ever be violated, or that he would ever be called on to die for his independence.

We know now how that treaty was respected. There will be pens, and to spare, to celebrate the heroic defence of the valley of the Meuse, the stubborn withdrawal of an outmatched but unbroken army, the tide of rapine and devastation that marched with the Treaty-Breakers, the driving into exile of a gallant people, the rosary of desolation, Liége, Visé, Louvain, Termonde, Na