594. The First World War: The Invasion of Belgium (Part 1)

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A stupendous fate is breaking over Europe.

For 44 years,

since the time we fought for and won the German Empire and our position in the world, we have lived in peace and have protected the peace of Europe.

Like a silent vow,

the feeling that animated everyone, from the Emperor down to the youngest soldier, was this:

Only in defense of a just cause shall our sword fly from its scabbard.

The day has now come when we must draw it against our wish and in spite of our sincere endeavours.

Russia has set fire to the building.

We are at war with Russia and France,

a war that has been forced upon us.

Now the great hour of trial has struck for our people.

But with clear confidence, we go forward to meet it.

Our army is in the field.

Our navy is ready for battle.

Behind them stands the entire German nation.

The entire German nation.

United

to the last man.

And indeed, woman, he should have said, but he didn't, because this is the 4th of of August, 1914, and the Chancellor of Germany, Theobald Bettmann Holveg, who was dressed in a dragoon's uniform and was addressing the Reichstag.

He just wasn't a feminist, was he, Dominic?

No, he wasn't at all.

Actually, Tom, I felt that that reading became more Germanic as it proceeded.

There was a bit of Tom Holland in there, but you were progressing basically towards the Kaiser.

No, I wasn't.

What I was doing there was conveying...

the sense of a peaceful nation, maybe one of the most cultured, the most intellectually advanced nation in Europe and perhaps the world, slowly mutating into an army of spike-helmeted Huns

set on despoiling Belgium.

You've gone there straight away.

Wow.

All right.

Well, that's what we'll be talking about today, isn't it?

As we begin a mighty series on the First World War.

So that is, you could argue, the speech that kicks off the First World War.

It's the first global industrialized war.

It kills about 20 million people.

I think there's a fair case that it's the supreme, the defining modern calamity.

Oh, I I would say indisputably, wouldn't you?

I mean, there's nothing to compare to it.

Gaza, Ukraine.

You can trace them back to, as it were, the original sin of that cataclysm in the 1910s and everything that flowed from it, I think.

In this series, we're going to look at the first months of the war up to the end of 1914.

So we'll be looking at the Battle of the Frontiers, in which basically the Germans wiped the floor with the French and the British, the German advance on Paris, the great turning of the tide at the Battle of the Marne, the very bloody struggle for Ypres and the so-called massacre of the innocents, a huge

sort of German nationalist myth, the struggle between Germany and Russia in East Prussia, the rise of well-known figures on the rest is history, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and the beginning of the end for the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Habsburg Stalingrad, Tom.

That's very exciting, because that's basically a

combination of two very exciting things, Habsburgs and Stalingrad.

But today,

I think we should do the very beginning of the war and the German onslaught on plucky little Belgium.

So the heroic defense of Liège by the Belgians, the fall of Brussels, and the issue that becomes so important in Allied propaganda, the so-called, to use the terminology of the time, the rape of Belgium, the German reprisals and the atrocities against civilians in Belgium.

Were they real?

Were they contrived?

You know, what's the truth?

That's what I was conveying with that opening, because obviously, as someone who is British, the impact of this on Britain is immense, isn't it?

And kind of

Britain for the war.

So that's what I was doing.

So any German listeners, I was kind of conveying the complexities of our shared history.

And I think there are still a lot of people who would go along with

the old idea put about, obviously, about Allied propaganda in the 1910s, and then by lots of historians, the idea that the Germans are almost uniquely responsible.

for the war, that it's a noble cause and that the Germans are the bad guys.

And actually, I don't know where you stand on this, Tom, but it's not just propaganda because there are lots of very distinguished historians who've made that case, aren't there?

Most notably a German, right?

Fritz Fischer, in the 1960s, who essentially looked at the plans for conquests that the German high command had, the war aims, the war goals, and associated those war aims and goals and the behavior of the German troops in the invasion of Belgium with what then happened in the Second World War.

Kind of implied a correlation between the two, a line of descent.

Yeah, Fritz Fischer was writing in the 1960s, and he basically said, come on, Nazism didn't come from nowhere.

There's a continuity between the Wilhelmoin Empire and the Third Reich.

And he dug out this bit of evidence, which was that, so the bloke that you were ventriloquising, the Chancellor, Thebal Bethmann-Holwegen, early September, he basically drafted this list of demands that Germany would, you know, would want when they'd won the war.

And they would annex eastern France, Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland would become as kind of vassal client states.

They'd take the Allies' African colonies.

There would be a German customs union from the Baltic to the Mediterranean.

So Neil Ferguson famously called this the Kaiser's European Union.

And there are people to this day who say, well, this is the proof positive that Germany started the war motivated by a kind of lust for conquest, born of their kind of insecurity and all their issues and whatnot.

I don't agree with that.

I think there are a lot of historians who don't agree with that.

I think this is basically a wish list produced for discussion, produced after the war war started, as the German armies are approaching Paris.

I think the Germans are actually much more anxious and much more reactive than most people allow.

In other words, they're motivated by fear as much as they are by sort of aggression.

And actually...

But the two aren't mutually exclusive, are they?

No.

The aggression is often is there, of course.

They're quite a militaristic society, but the aggression, I guess, is exacerbated, heightened.

by fear you're more likely to lash out yeah as we will see when when they enter belgium when they cross the belgian border but it's true for all the combatants that all of them are motivated by fear and the fear feeds into hatred and the hatred then feeds into aggression i totally agree with you and if we remind ourselves how the germans got to this point so things have moved quite quickly on the 28th of june franz ferdinand was assassinated in sarajev on the 5th of july the kaiser and betman-holveg gave the austrians their blank check do what you like against serbia to punish them but then actually there's a hiatus of about 22 days where the kaiser is off on that lovely cruise of his yeah everyone's on holiday aren't they?

Bettman-Holvig's on holiday too, isn't he?

I mean, the whole, basically, everybody's on holiday.

Most people go to spa hotels, but the Kaiser, who loves it, as we know, loves a yachting shoe.

He loves a fjord.

Yeah, he does love a fjord.

So he's gone off to what, the sort of North Sea, hasn't he?

He's gone to Norway on a yacht.

He's gone to Norway.

And he comes back on the 27th of July.

And he basically, to his surprise, he finds the situation is completely out of control.

The Austrians have given Serbia an ultimatum that is designed to trigger a war.

Even at this point, Bethmann-Holveg says, you know, war might not happen.

And Kaiser then spends the next few days dreaming up elaborate wheezes.

So basically, having spent 20 years of his life dreaming up elaborate wheezes to, I don't know, invade Paraguay or something, now he's dreaming of elaborate wheezes not to have the war that's actually going to happen.

Anyway, on the 28th of July, a month after the shooting, Austria finally declares war on Serbia and begins the attack early the next day.

And the next day, the Russians really begin to mobilize in earnest.

And this is the key point, isn't it?

It is.

And so this is the point when Germany's military commanders enter the picture.

And the key one who's going to play a big part in this series that we're doing is a guy called Helmut von Moltke the Younger.

So his uncle, von Moltke the Elder, had been the great victor of the Franco-Prussian War.

And everybody thinks von Moltke the Elder is absolutely brilliant and fantastic.

And everybody basically has spent the last few years saying to von Moltke the Younger, you're not as good.

Yeah, you're not, which

plays on his mind because actually, like almost everybody in this story,

it's clearly something in the water in the Edwardian period.

He's extremely kind of melancholic and brooding, isn't he?

He's a Christian scientist,

which I think we talked about last time when he came up.

Basically, that's that Jesus was a scientist and science is great.

Is that right?

I'm not entirely sure.

When we do a big series on Christian science,

we'll pretend that we knew all along.

He plays the cello, which I think is not a warlike thing to do.

He's obsessed with the occult and with spiritualism.

He's a follower of this lady called Madame Blavatsky.

Everyone is.

They're all into this kind of mad stuff.

I was just thinking about this.

His first name is Helmut and that's a little bit like Helmut.

Okay, where are you going with this?

Well, so the German helmets with the spikes on, I think in the kind of the British imagination, that is the embodiment of Prussian militarism.

It is, completely, it is.

And also,

he has one of those moustaches where the ends turn up.

One thing to say, if people want to picture what the Germans look like and the French and the British, every German has a moustache with

the ends turn up.

The French all have massive white walrus moustaches, and the British all have kind of reserved, clipped moustaches.

I thought with this first episode, there were some excellent moustaches, but you see, I know what's coming, and you don't know what's coming, Tom, because I haven't yet shared the notes.

So, in the later episodes of this series, when the Russians enter the picture,

it's a very different and much superior moustache game.

There's a guy called Renan Kamp and Alexei Brusilov, and they have moustaches that basically would not fit on the screen.

But that proves my point.

So if you want to imagine the Russians, massive moustaches, I mean, the moustaches essentially define the competent nations.

That's the key thing.

And so Molk, he has this moustache, and because his name's Helmet, also subliminally, it conjures up a sense of him wearing a spike on his helmet.

That's what's going on in the head of British listeners, I think.

Well, certainly what's going on in your head.

I mean, whether it's going on anyone else's set, I do not know.

Let's go back to von Molke.

Like a lot of pit Germans of his class, he is absolutely obsessed with this idea of the inevitable war between Teuton and Slav.

So they love talking like this in 1910s Germany.

And they're very worried that the Teutons will lose because there are so many Slavs and not enough of them.

And so actually, von Molke has spent the last few years saying, well, I hope we have this war quite soon because otherwise we'll probably lose.

There are just so many Russians.

And also they're haunted by history, aren't they?

And the defeat of the Teutonic Knights at Tannenberg.

We will come to that.

We will come to that.

Very exciting.

May history repeat itself or be reversed.

We will see.

We will see.

But actually, von Moltke, once the crisis slows up, he doesn't really urge the Kaiser into war.

He's been on holiday, of course, during July.

In a spa?

In a spa hotel, having a rest cure, because he's like a lot of these people, he's really ill.

So half of these generals actually go into the war, like virtually at death's door.

And he has already said to the Kaiser, war will be a long, wearisome struggle.

It will utterly exhaust our own people, even if we're victorious.

Oh, that's optimistic.

Fighting talk there.

And then

At the end of July, with the war just hours away, he says to the Kaiser, I still think we can win, but just so you know, the war could annihilate for decades the civilization of almost all Europe.

Oh, brilliant.

Well, I look forward to that.

As we get to the very end of July, Molke realizes that the clock is ticking, and this sense of urgency is massively important to understanding what happens in Belgium.

And this, like Moltke's sort of brooding melancholy, reflects the broader strategic position that faces the central powers.

So he is running the most modern, the most formidable military machine in the world.

However, there are good grounds for fearing a conflagration, fearing that they might not win.

Because if you're fighting Russia, Russia's population and therefore manpower is a third bigger than Germany's and Austria-Hungary's combined.

And if the Russians are joined by France, Britain, and by Belgium, the so-called Entente will have almost 280 million people and the Central Powers only 120 million.

And Dominic also, of course, Russia and France are on either flank of Germany.

So that's the other huge anxiety, isn't it?

That they might be crushed between these two sides.

The sense of being encircled, I think, is massively important to understanding the German mentality above all.

Economically, so you take those two powers on the flanks.

France and Russia, their combined GDP is much bigger than Germany's and Austria's.

And they have far more soldiers.

Six million soldiers, the Entente have.

The Central Powers, less than three and a half million.

So if you're von Molke, you're sitting in your spa thinking about theosophy and the occult, and you're also making a little bit of time to think about this war, you know that in a long war, it'll be really hard for you to win.

That all the cards are in the Entente's hands.

And Dominic, just to ask, of course, they're aware of the massive manpower that Russia has, but they are also presumably fully aware that actually France is an even more militarized society than Germany, isn't it?

It is a formidable opponent, but you have to choose one of these opponents to go for first.

Their only realistic possibility of victory is to start to knock their enemies out quickly before the Entente's kind of underlying advantages can be made to tell.

So when von Moltke took over as the chief of staff in 1906, he inherited something called the Schlieffen Plan.

Anyone who's done this for GCSE or A-level in England will know about this.

Now, this doesn't mean that Germany was planning a war, as sometimes people think.

Basically, all nations had contingency plans.

The French had a plan called Plan d'Icette, which we'll come to next time.

But this Schlieffen plan, elaborated by Moltke's predecessor, Graf Alfred von Schlieffen, they've revised it and revised it.

And military historians basically spent their entire careers arguing about this plan.

to boil it down and make it very simple.

It's all about the Battle of Cannae, isn't it?

It is modeled a little bit on the Battle of Canais.

Because he was obsessed by it, encircling and wiping out superior enemies.

So the premise of it is, look, we can't win a long war.

If we have a long war, there will probably be an economic collapse and a revolution.

And they're not wrong.

So the priority is to knock one enemy out before turning on the other one.

Now, we wouldn't be able to knock the Russians out quickly because their army is inferior, but they have so many men.

So we basically have to take on the French first.

Now, we cannot do what we did in 1870-71.

We can't just go across the Franco-German border because the French have built these swanky new fortresses of verdun nancy belfort places like this that stand in the way and they will slow us down so we have to find another way into france and that is through belgium and the brilliant thing about belgium is it has a very dense railway network so we'll be able to move our troops really quickly and don't just to ask the french it never crosses their mind the germans might do this and so they don't build forts along the frontier with Belgium.

I think they it's I mean they're not idiots right they it's not like they think it's impossible the Germans could go through Belgium but their priority is the forts along their own border, I guess.

And building forts along the Belgian border would seem a bit weird because it would look as if you were protecting yourselves against an invasion by the Belgians, which seems very implausible.

Might be a threat to French self-esteem, I suppose.

Yeah, exactly.

It would be like suddenly England decided to build loads of forts along the border with Wales.

Well, it's good enough for offer.

Right.

Yes, that's true.

Anyway, once you've gone through Belgium.

Basically, the plan is that the left wing of your army, so that's the southernmost wing, will pin the French against their own border, against these fortresses.

And meanwhile, the northernmost, the right wing bit of the German army, will go all the way around Paris and encircle the French capital.

That way, we'll crush their army against the frontier.

We'll encircle their capital.

France will be knocked out.

And then we'll use the railways to move all the troops east as quickly as possible to the borderlands of East Prussia and Galicia, where hopefully our Austro-Hungarian allies will have kept the the Russians at bay.

We'll see how the Austro-Hungarians get on later in this series.

Now, we have to do all this in six weeks.

We have six weeks to do all this before the Russians start to break through in the east.

And if we fall behind, we'll be into that war of attrition that we don't want and we could well lose.

And also, presumably, if the Russians break through in the east, they can capture Berlin.

They can go all the way into Germany.

They can drive into Germany.

They can drive into center of Austria-Hungary.

So the risk is that the Germans might capture Paris and the Russians might capture Berlin.

I suppose so.

That would be a twist, wouldn't it?

This is a massively risky idea so even if the germans concentrate their forces in the west they will still have fewer divisions than the french the british and the belgians put together but that's where the canny thing comes in right that you use the the size of your enemy's forces against them exactly they're lumbering and unwieldy but you're moving swiftly now there's a brilliant book on uh germany and austria and the the central powers in the first war called ring of steel by a British historian called Alexander Watson.

As he points out, this is a quote, a breathtakingly audacious and foolhardy aspiration because because the French are not nothing.

The French have one of Europe's most modern and biggest armed forces.

How are you going to knock them out so quickly?

And the very fact that von Moltke is considering such a scheme is a sign actually of Germany's underlying strategic weakness.

And that's actually one reason why I think I don't think the Germans are motivated by lust for conquest and aggression in this war, because they're up against it from the very, very beginning.

That's what they have to consider such a mad gamble.

But speed underlies everything.

If you can't do it in six weeks, you're in real trouble.

So if we go back to the summer of 1914, by the last two days of July, von Molke is studying all his reports with a massive sense of kind of panic.

The Russians are mobilizing.

The Belgians are calling up their reserves.

The Belgians are fortifying Liège, which is not just the key point in their eastern defenses, but is their major railway hub.

And von Molke knows that taking Liege quickly is central to his battle plan.

Hour by hour, he's thinking, God, it's slipping away and it hasn't even started.

So it's at this point that he and the Prussian war minister, Erich von Falkenhayn, who is the person, again, we'll be hearing from in this series.

That's a great name.

The thing about the Germans is they have the names that Richard Wagner would have given them.

Yeah.

But again, it's a falcon head.

I mean, it's like a falcon waiting to swoop down.

I think the names are conjuring up all kinds of images.

So they say to the Kaiser, okay, right.

The war's going to happen and we've got to really crack on that.

Stop messing around.

So they proclaim a state of imminent war on the 31st of July.

They send their ultimatums to Russia and to France.

And then the next day, this amazing scene that I think we talked about last time, Wilhelm driving down the Unter den Linden Avenue in the sort of uniform of a cavalryman with his helmet on.

He goes into the royal palace.

He signs the mobilization order brilliantly at a table hewn from the timbers of Nelson's victory that was a gift from the British.

They've all got tears in their eyes.

They're shaking hands.

There's a crowd outside singing Frederick the Great era hymns.

So, a hymn called Now Thank We All Our God, which is a Lutheran hymn that Frederick the Great's soldiers had sung after a victory in the 18th century.

And then the Kaiser goes out on the balcony and he gives this great speech.

You know, can I do it?

Go on, go on, go on, go on.

In the battle now lying ahead of us, I no longer see any political parties, I see only Germans.

All that matters now is that we stand together like brothers

and God will help the German sword to victory.

That's how he spoke.

And I think he really means this.

He does.

It feels very impassioned.

Yeah, I think it's important for listeners to get that into their heads that the Germans genuinely think that the war has been forced upon them.

There's no question in their minds that God is on their side.

And that explains why, for example, the biggest party, not just in Germany, actually, but in Europe, which is the Social Democratic Party, a left-wing, anti-militarist party, votes unanimously to fund the war, to give them war credits.

And they agree they will not criticise the German government for the whole of the war.

The trade unions promise they won't strike for the whole of the war.

And this is because they really think Germany has been very hard done by.

And this is a noble cause.

But it also reflects, I think, a sense of seriousness.

They know that the troops will not be home by Christmas.

Do they?

But the Schlieffen plan requires France to be knocked out within six weeks.

And then are they not hoping for a rapid victory?

Well, here's the thing.

I think they're hoping for a rapid victory, but fearing they might not get it against France.

But once they've beaten France in six weeks, if they manage to pull that off, they're then up against the Russians.

And one of the sort of premises of their plan is the idea that the Russians will be very, very hard to beat because of their manpower.

Because they know, you know, you go east and you get lost like Charles XII or like Napoleon in the great vastness of Russia.

Best case scenario, you can probably do that in another six months, a year.

You know, who knows how long it takes?

They are expecting a war to last that long.

Of course.

And the newspapers in Germany, you know, the Frankfurter Zeitung, over everything hangs a great gravity in the quiet rooms, wives and young women sit nursing a great fear of terrible things, what may be to come.

That doesn't sound to me like the journalism of a country that thinks this will be done and dusted really quickly, like the Franco-Prussian War, and we'll all be having, you know, we'll be celebrating on the 25th of December.

That says to me they know that they're in an existential struggle, a fight for their lives.

In a later episode, we'll talk a little bit about why they didn't stop.

Aisen, as the war becomes a stalemate, why don't people stop fighting?

I think one reason they don't stop fighting is they think, rightly, the survival of our entire society depends on winning this war.

And if we lose it, you know, we're finished.

And so that's why the

famous phrase in that speech that the Kaiser gives is that

he no longer sees any political parties.

He sees only Germans.

That becomes kind of emblematic of the German sense of an entire nation at war, right?

Yes, absolutely, it does.

Absolutely.

But if you're a German and you think, well, we're absolutely the good guys in this, you know, there's no doubt whatsoever that we're the plucky underdogs.

The one problem you have is that you are clearly breaking international law with your plan to go through Belgium.

Because Belgium, to remind people from last time, Belgium is a buffer state created largely by the British, actually, after the revolution of 1830 against the Netherlands.

All the great powers had signed treaties to guarantee its independence and its neutrality, first in 1839 and then in 1870.

And during the Franco-Prussian War, Belgium had been neutral and independent.

And if the Germans go into Belgium, and if the Belgians appeal for help, then Britain is legally bound to offer help, though what form that help will take is ambiguous and undefined.

So the British, just to quickly glance across the channel, they have been debating this for the last few days.

They're still very undecided.

We talked last time about how in the cabinet meetings, some of the British ministers have said, look, if the Germans just go through a little bit of Belgium using the railway and they don't cause any damage and stuff, it's not grounds for us to fight.

Churchill, incredibly bellicose in this period, actually said at one point to his cabinet colleagues, I don't see why we should come in if they go only a little way into Belgium.

In other words, you know, maybe we can still stay out.

The wad thing about all this is there's such a diplomatic fog.

Nobody knows exactly what anybody else is thinking.

And the Germans don't know what the British are thinking.

And so they end up making a terrible mistake.

Arguably, I would say the biggest diplomatic mistake of modern history.

But of course, the French do know that if the British are to enter the war, it's really vital that the Germans are seen to be the bad guys, the guys who've infringed Belgian neutrality.

And so they kind of issue military dikts, don't they?

That on no account are French troops to enter Belgium, that no French planes are to go enter Belgian airspace or anything like that.

It's really vital to France's interests that Germany do this.

Exactly.

And the French refrain from attacking Germany, from attacking the Germans.

They want the Germans to be seen as the aggressors.

And so on the evening of Sunday, the 2nd of August, the Germans make this cataclysmic mistake.

At seven o'clock, their ambassador gave the Belgians an ultimatum.

He said, we want our armies to have safe passage on your railway system.

We want to take over your border fortresses at Liège and Namur.

We're very sorry about this.

We will get out as quickly as possible.

We'll compensate you for any damage.

We'll also pay for our own kind of board and lodging.

So don't worry about that.

Did no one ever think they could just buy tickets?

Can you buy a ticket for like a million men?

I don't know.

Is that possible?

Get discount.

It would be a very amusing conversation at the counter.

I want to bring a few horses as well.

But then the Germans say in this alternative, we'll compensate you, blah, blah.

However, if you do stand in our way, we will crush you.

And you've got 12 hours to make up your minds.

Now, the mad thing is they could just have gone through the south of Belgium.

I mean, it would have been tricky.

And maybe militarily, it would have been very difficult.

But their foreign office, the German foreign office, had said, we think...

that persuading the Belgians, basically bullying the Belgians into agreeing, is the only way to be sure sure the British won't intervene.

However, this gamble completely backfires because even as nightfall comes, Belgium's King Albert Albert has already made up his mind.

And at seven o'clock the next morning, Belgium rejects the ultimatum.

The irony is that to the hawks in London who wanted to join the war, Herbert Henry Asquith and Edward Grey, who we talked about in the last series, this is the perfect issue.

It's the perfect Casus Belli to rally Liberal Party opinion.

And so when Edward Gray spoke to the Commons, he made this huge deal about plucky little Belgium.

They just want to be left alone and get on with exploiting the people of the Congo.

That's, you know, poor Belgium.

His pitch is literally liberal interventionism.

Literally liberal interventionism.

So even before the Germans have fired their first shot, they've handed the British and their opponents a most amazing propaganda weapon, breaking international law, all of this kind of thing.

And the next morning, the British duly issued their ultimatum.

It's not true that the Germans weren't aware of this.

They were very aware of it.

So Bethmann Holweg, when he spoke to the Reichstag, he said, listen, I completely understand why the Belgians and Luxembourg as well.

Nobody even mentions Luxembourg in this story.

Poor Luxembourg.

We completely understand why they're aggrieved that we're invading them, but we will make good the wrong we're doing as soon as we've attained our military objectives.

When you're as imperiled as we are fighting for everything we hold dear, you can only think of how you'll cut your way out.

He's actually furious, though, in private, that the British are using this as a pretext.

He has this huge argument argument with the british ambassador who's called gostchen that's a very german name isn't it

i know everyone's got the wrong because this was a feature of the diplomatic exchanges is that the germans all had french names and the french all had german names and so on and the generals are just as bad right when we get to uh general von renenkampf he's russian yeah right

and of course uh a field marshal french yes who hates the french who hates the french more than anybody so anyway the ambassador and bethman hovik had an argument and bethmann hovik said to him you are fighting just for a scrap of paper you know it's another German gaffe because yet again, the British turn it into a great propaganda weapon.

It features very heavily on posters.

You can Google them and you can see, you know, the references to the scrap of paper, although not as much as a gift as what the Germans get up to in the second half of this episode, because in Belgium itself, the pace has quickened.

At eight o'clock that morning, so we are on the 3rd of August, Monday the 3rd of August, 1914, the first German units crossed the Belgian border.

And at midday, King King Albert formally appealed to Britain as the guarantor of Belgian independence.

And then he got on his horse.

He's wearing full uniform.

He leads this procession, including his wife and his 12-year-old son, who's dressed in a sailor suit, through the centre of Brussels.

There are huge crowds of people cheering, some weeping, waving Belgian flags, the kind of trickler of Belgium.

And he leads his family into the Belgian parliament.

And it's truly, it's an amazing scene.

The deputies are all on their feet.

They're chanting and shouting, Vive le roi, vive la Belgique.

And

he goes up to the soot of the rostrum and he says, not since 1830 has our country faced such a grave peril.

The integrity of our homeland is under threat.

The task will be hard, but we stand prepared for the greatest sacrifices.

And then he looks out and he says, gentlemen, are you determined at any cost to preserve the sacred heritage of our forefathers?

And as a man, they get to their feet and they're all shouting, we, we, we.

Fine words, Dominic.

But when you have the mightiest army the world has ever seen preparing to cross your frontier, are words enough?

And what horrors may lie in wait for the people of Belgium who we are legally obliged to describe at this point as plucky?

We'll find out after the break.

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Welcome back to the rest of history.

It is the 4th of August 1914, and the Imperial German Army is poised to fall on the people of Belgium.

Dominic, give us some sense of what exactly this means.

So, this is an invasion unprecedented in human history.

Von Molke is unleashing 750,000 men in three armies.

They're being carried west to the border in more than 500 trains a day.

Of course, railways are very important since the First World War.

An absolutely mind-boggling sight for anybody who was witnessing it.

These columns of grey infantry, many of them, Tom, in those spiked helmets that you like so much.

A column is 50 miles long, followed by horses and trucks and artillery.

So these three armies, they are commanded by three generals, Karl von Bühloff, Max von Hausen, and the most compelling of them, I think, is a guy called Alexander von Kluck.

And he had fought in the Franco-Prussian War.

So no chicken he.

Very good.

I like what he did there.

He looks exactly as he should.

The casting agency who supplied these men have done superbly.

He's got a sort of polished, shining, bald head, a fearsome look, and an enormous bristling moustache.

And his task, he is the guy who's going to smash through Belgium, who's going to sweep around Paris, who's going to finish off the French and then turn east.

And remember, he and the other generals have six weeks to do all this.

So their target, he has set, von Kluck has set his men a target of 20 miles a day.

And he says, we cannot fall behind.

Like one day where we fall short, you know, we have to make it good later on because the clock is ticking.

And that urgency is absolutely essential to understanding what happens next.

So that was the 4th of August.

On the 5th of August, the Germans begin the assault on Liège.

So this is day two, and already they're slightly falling behind their timetable.

I'm done with it.

That's the thing, isn't it, about the First World War that people always seize on, the importance of timetables.

So there's the thing about that the railway timetables couldn't be changed or anything.

But I'm guessing that this reflects the industrial quality of the combat, that industrial society depends on precisely gauged time schedules.

And it must provide the German high command with a degree of pressure that no army previously had ever had.

People hadn't operated to these kind of timetables.

Absolutely not.

I think they go into this war under greater time pressure than any other combatant, arguably, in history.

You know, they can't be like a sort of 18th century army who sort of have a little campaign in the summer and then go to their winter quarters, do a bit of hunting on the side or something.

And maybe the war will take 20 years.

You know, they're not Charles XII.

They can hear a ticking clock in the back of their heads the whole time.

Now, Liège has a garrison of 40,000 men.

It's far more formidable than the Germans had expected.

The first wave of men the Germans sent in from Westphalia and Hanover meet withering Belgian fire and are just cut down.

So these scenes are described in Max Hastings' brilliant book.

I know you're a massive Max Hastings fan, Tom, Catastrophe.

And he describes how line after line of German infantry advance on this fortress.

And quote, this is a Belgian officer, we simply mowed them down.

They came on almost shoulder to shoulder until as we shot them down, the fallen were heaped one on top of the other in an awful barricade of dead and wounded men.

And you'll hear sentences like that again and again in this series about people who basically, their officers just say, this is going to be a bit like the Napoleonic Wars.

Come on, lads, go for it.

And they all go for it.

And about 10 seconds later, they're all dead in an enormous heap.

And the Germans, I think, learned that lesson pretty quickly.

Quicker than the French and the British, perhaps.

Certainly quicker than the French.

I mean, the French, as we'll see in the next episodes.

What's not like the Napoleonic Wars, though, is what happens the next day, right?

Because it's the first Zeppelin raid in the history of warfare.

Yes, the first ever air attack on a European city, I read.

I mean, they're literally just throwing bombs out of the Zeppelin, and they killed nine civilians in Liège.

I wouldn't want to go up in a Zeppelin with a bomb.

No, God, I wouldn't go in a Zeppelin at all, I don't think.

On the 7th of August, they finally captured Liège and the Citadel, and the final assault on Liège was led by a man who we'll be meeting again called Eric Ludendorff, who'll be very familiar to people who heard our episode about the beer hall putsch.

So a man who I think goes on to greatly let himself down with his political choices.

But the surrounding forts fought on for about another 10, 11 days and they tied up the German Second Army.

You know, at this point, kind of steam is coming out of the German generals' ears because they are falling well behind their schedule.

They can't move all their troops as quickly as they wanted.

And Liège, although it's largely forgotten now, in the summer of 1914, was a massive story.

It was a bit like Mariupol or something, one of those stories from the Ukrainian war.

People follow it obsessively in the newspaper headlines.

John Buchan, the 39 Steps author, said that the Belgian stand at Liège was an advertisement to the world that the ancient faiths of country and duty could still nerve the arm for battle, and that the German idol, for all its splendor, had feet of clay.

I mean, we should warn listeners that there's going to be a lot of that kind of prose.

Is that a warning, or is that an advertisement, surely?

When you read it over and over again, you get fed up with it.

I did.

I love that kind of 1910s.

Florida.

I don't think it is florid.

I think it's florid.

it's massively over-emotional i think it has a kind of moral earnestness it does which will end up um it's the kind of moral earnestness that will end up shot to pieces on barbed wire and being gnawed at by rats

okay well since you're introducing such beastly subjects let us turn now to the very first reports of german beastliness to use the terminology at the time these reports start in Liège.

So on the night of the 4th of August, so right at the very beginning of the war, the Germans had moved into the nearby village of Berneaux and they hear reports of unexplained gunfire in the night and there are rumors that reach the Germans that 12 of their men have been shot.

So the next day they round up suspected culprits in the village.

They get about 10 of them and they shoot them, including an entire family of five that they found hiding in a cellar.

Why are you hiding in a cellar?

Very suspicious.

We'll just have to get rid of you.

The next day, the Germans in a nearby hamlet, Saint-Adelin, a Belgian shell landed in the hamlet and it wounded some of the Germans who were billeted there.

And this time, the Germans said, well, probably the guy who gave a position away was the local teacher.

And they got him and his family, rounded them up and they shot them.

So this all sets the tone for what is to come.

So in the next few days in the village of Soumien, more than 100 people, Belgian civilians, are shot or bayoneted.

In a place called Melene, 72 people herded into a meadow, including eight women and four girls who are not yet in their teens.

and they're all shot.

The local mayor, the mayor of Melen, arrived to bury the dead and the Germans shot him too.

And then they burned the whole village to the ground.

And there are examples in any number of Belgian hamlets and villages.

So that after just four days of the war, the Germans have executed at least 850 Belgian civilians.

And this is the sort of the taint that has...

marked the German record in the First World War ever since.

And the one thing that a lot of people know is they disgraced themselves in Belgium.

And how do we know this?

Who is reporting this?

Are there Belgians?

Are there Germans?

Are they admitting it?

What's going on?

So there are reports in the Belgians.

There are lots of reports in Allied newspapers, but there are also German letters, German diary entries, and so on.

Because the Germans don't deny that this is happening.

All wars have civilian casualties.

I mean, it's completely fanciful to imagine that you'll ever fight a war in which...

civilians won't be shot.

But this seems to go well beyond that.

And the Germans' own explanation is we are being ambushed all the time by Belgian civilian partisans.

So there's an example, I think Max Hastings quotes it.

A soldier writing home, he says, I'm shocked by quote, I quote, the havoc wreaked by the bestial mob in Liège.

He's not talking about the German occupiers, he's talking about the locals.

And he says, we were greeted at first with cheers, people waving kind of white tablecloths and stuff as flags of surrender.

However, that was just a malicious trick.

Scarcely had we passed the houses when rifle barrels were poked out of the windows and we were shot in the back.

There were also shots aimed at our legs from cellar coal holes.

Now, the thing is, these probably weren't partisans.

These were probably regular Belgian troops who had taken cover and were ambushing the Germans.

But the Germans assume that this is a partisan warfare, that these are civilians who are betraying them in a cowardly way, attacking them when their backs are turned.

And why are they assuming that?

Well, this is the really fascinating thing.

I think the short answer is the Germans have travelled with an enormous amount of historical baggage.

And there's a brilliant study of this by two Irish Irish historians called John Horne and Alan Kramer.

And they emphasize the Germans had an institutional memory of what had happened in 1870-71 when they had invaded France, occupied France, and they had come under severe attack from French partisans called Front d'Eureux, kind of free shooters.

Even before the Germans went into Belgium, they are dreading that there will be a repeat of this.

And so the stories they got from Liège about being ambushed exacerbate their darkest fears, and they are then ramped up by German newspapers in a similar way to the way the Allied newspapers ramp stuff up during the war.

So German newspapers have loads of stories about how they've been tricked by franc tireuse, how they're being attacked, how they're being tortured, how German soldiers have been beheaded by Belgian civilians.

So these are the mirror image of the stories that Allied newspapers tell about the Germans.

In Britain, for instance, there's an assumption that if you're a soldier and you go to, say, a colonial war, there's always a risk that you might be shot.

So there's the famous Kipling poem, isn't there, about £2,000 of education drops to a 10 rupee jesse.

This idea that somebody might have a crack at you from behind a rock or something at any point.

This presumably is not something that has become part of German culture in the same way.

That perhaps the German military are not as inured to the possibility of getting a bullet in the back from some guy with a cheap rifle.

in the to the degree that the British or the French, who are colonial powers, are.

I don't know because the Germans, of course, have been fighting a colonial war in South West Africa and what becomes Namibia.

So they're not complete strangers to colonial warfare.

I wonder if they have a different standard for European wars.

Do you not think that they think that in a European war, you're walking down a basically suburban street or the street of a village that's very like a German village, really, and then you're shot in the back, that it's seen as completely legitimate and unexpected that people who are so like you would behave in this way.

Kaiser's outrageous compares the Belgians to the Cossacks, doesn't he?

And say that this is horrible behaviour.

This is not a pretext for beastliness that the Germans were kind of itching to unleash.

The Germans genuinely believe that they have been kind of betrayed in some way, that the Belgians have broken the rules of warfare.

The Kaiser, yeah, absolutely.

The population of Belgium, he writes on the 9th of August, have behaved in a diabolical, bestial manner, not one iota better than the Cossacks.

He comes out with all the newspaper kind of tableau ecliches.

They've been torturing our men, they've beaten them to death.

And he says, I mean, the Kaiser, who's got a terrible track record of diplomacy with the other monarchs of Europe, he says, tell the king of the Belgians that since his people have placed themselves outside European customs, they'll be treated accordingly.

I guess that line is a giveaway, right?

We might expect this in Africa, but in Europe, oh, that is shocking.

Except that...

Notoriously, in Africa, this is how the Belgians have behaved.

The irony.

Maybe the Belgians have got formed Tom.

Maybe the Belgians are the real villains of the story.

I mean, I'm just wondering, is that also maybe a part of it that's kind of feared?

No, surely not.

No.

That the Belgians are going to start cutting off people's hands and forcing them to collect rubber i mean there is there is obviously a kind of shadow that hangs over all of this that atrocities that the belgians had inflicted in the congo are now being inflicted on the belgians in their native land i i just wonder the degree to which people are oblivious to that irony or aware of it well do you know what the fascinating thing is when the british papers exaggerate the german atrocities so even today some historians basically parrot british propaganda and and repeat these stories about the Germans impaling babies on bayonets and cutting women's hands off and stuff.

Stories that I think are almost certainly luridly exaggerated because, I mean, they are doing mass shootings and things, but they're not doing all this.

These stories, as Alexander Watson points out in his book, Ring of Steel, these stories are directly inspired by newspaper reports about what was going on in the Congo.

I mean, unbelievable.

They're basically taking the stories about what, you know, King Leopold's men had been doing in the Congo and just changing the names and making the Germans the bad guys and the Belgians the victims.

It's really remarkable.

To go back to the German soldiers, I think there's an image in the popular imagination that most of them are hard-faced, kind of hatchet-faced stormtroopers in waiting.

But actually, as Horn and Kramer point out in their study, a huge proportion of the German soldiers are teenagers.

They've been mobilized in haste.

They've been very quickly and poorly trained.

Most of them have never been abroad.

They are excited, frightened, confused, and they're also often drinking heavily because as they go through a town, they'll obviously, you know, soldiers always do this.

They'll loot the local shops, they'll get stuck into the kind of Belgian beer or whatever.

So they're a little bit tanked up.

And then when somebody shoots at them, they lose their temper very, very quickly.

But it's also driven from the top.

So by the 12th of August, von Molke is issuing a solemn warning.

Any Belgian civilian suspected of what he calls atrocities will be immediately shot under martial law.

And the Germans effectively by this point are running a formal policy of mass reprisals, even though this is forbidden by the Hague Convention.

They're carrying out collective punishment for individual actions.

And there are just endless, endless stories.

Max Hastings lists a lot of them.

Basayes, 11th of August, the Germans shoot 25 people.

They burn 50 houses.

Visé,

16th of August, they shoot 42 people.

A particularly grim story, a place called Tamin, which is on the River Sombre, on the 22nd of August.

So here, what's happened is the germans moved in the people in the village defied the germans basically didn't obey their orders they didn't shoot them but they just didn't obey their orders they didn't collaborate and they started chanting vive la france so a belgian inquiry later found out what happened next the germans herded 400 people in front of the church they lined them up they opened fire with a machine gun and the next day the people who were left in the village were ordered assembled at the church to gather the bodies and bury them and the german officers stood there drinking champagne while watching this happening now the inquiry that the belgians convened claimed that 600 people in total were killed in this in fact modern historians put the death toll at less than 400 and that tells its own story that so much of this was later sensationalized and exaggerated that it is quite hard sometimes to get at exactly what happened however you asked about how we know and i mentioned german letters and diaries.

And it is really important to say that German officers themselves write about this.

So there are a couple of examples.

A guy called Count Harry Kessler.

He says the inhabitants of C or Silles attacked our pioneers building a bridge and they killed 20 of them.

As a punishment, 200 citizens were court-martialed and shot.

Isn't there a story also that the Germans take hostages and put them on the bridges to stop them being destroyed?

Which I think is perfectly plausible.

You might well do that.

There's a guy in in Leffer called Frantz Stiebing.

He says we pushed on past house after house under fire from every building.

We arrested all the male inhabitants.

They were summarily executed in the street.

We only spared children under 15 old people and women.

There are stories, aren't there?

So that it's not just women who have their hands chopped off, that children as well are having their hands chopped off.

And isn't there an American in Paris who offers a bet to the Belgian army or something?

who are putting out these stories that children are being massacred and says, you know, give me hard evidence that any child has been killed.

And I think that that's a kind of a bet that is left standing.

Is there a hard evidence that children are massacred or not?

No.

I think some children are definitely swept up in these shootings.

I don't think it's, I don't think there are zero.

Targeted.

There's no target.

No, they're not targeted.

Of course they're not targeted.

And probably about 5,500 people were killed in Belgium and another thousand in France.

About 15,000 people were probably deported to Germany.

And some historians have said, gosh, this is dreadful.

This is a preview of Nazism.

But actually, you know, you ask about our people being deliberately targeted.

Is this a sort of descent into total savagery?

I don't think it is.

If you look at Alexander Watson's book, he quotes a lot of people who talk about carrying out these reprisals.

So he's got a brilliant example of a rifleman called Wilhelm Schweiger, who's from a small town in northwestern Germany, and he was killed and he left a diary for his fiancée.

And he describes coming under attack on a night patrol.

And he says, you know, we found the house that we thought we were being shot at from and we burned it down.

We shot everybody who came out.

And he he says, you know, we're really angry, we all this kind of thing.

But then he goes on to say, it was terrible, quite terrible.

I did my duty and I obeyed orders, but it's dreadful if only this horrible war were at an end.

And you see that a lot, I think, in German letters and diaries.

The people say, it's dreadful that we have to do this.

I don't enjoy doing it at all.

You know, it's not an exercise in sadism.

It's very different from the sentiments in the Third Reich.

where you're being told that what you're doing is kind of important racial hygienic cleansing and it's a noble thing to do and all of this these people feel bad about what they're doing they they all know they feel bad about it the officers feel bad about it because the officers as watson says they have an aristocratic honor culture they see themselves as chivalric knights he gives an example of another guy major general koch his division shot more than 200 belgian civilians and he wrote to his wife and he said you know we're doing this and we have to do it but i hope we can stop soon because and i quote we're not huns and we don't want to sully the honor of the german name so it's not as bad for instance as the behavior of the french in the peninsula war um against guerreros or napoleon's troops in italy actually alexander watson in his book makes precisely this point he says if you look at previous european wars on a similar scale there are far more civilian atrocities it's actually an interesting example of how this sounds a weird thing to say but i think the value of human life increased

in the course of the 19th century.

However,

having said that, I mean, I suppose you you could argue that this is because it's because the British or the French aren't actually invading anywhere, but the Allies are not doing this.

It's only the Germans who are doing this.

Fighting on home territory.

There's a lot more bad behavior to come by the Austrians, by the Russians, and so on, almost always on enemy soil.

And that's because if you're fighting, you know, outside your

homeland, you tend to behave badly.

If you're fighting on...

on home turf, you tend to behave much better.

Was it within the Allied

repertoire to behave badly?

I think if anybody listening to this who is from Asia or Africa would say, come on.

Well, Ireland, how does it compare to British behaviour in the war of independence that we did a series about earlier?

Exactly.

We've just done that series.

Now, of course, the numbers are much smaller because the whole conflict is on a smaller scale.

But if you look at the behaviour of the Black and Tans in Ireland, is it in the British national character to carry out reprisals of a similar kind?

Clearly it is.

What would the Boers say about this?

Yeah, and the British in that burned down a section of Cork.

And there is a certain degree of burning things down in Belgium, isn't there?

It has to be said.

The British don't, for instance, burn down libraries.

I mean, the Germans have been very poor at PR throughout this entire episode, but there's one incident in particular, which is disastrous for their worldwide reputation.

And this is a story about a library.

about the medieval University of Louvain or Leuven, which is the oldest university in the Low Countries.

And basically what happened in this place, which is now, I mean, it's called Louvain at the time, but now I think people call it Leuven.

There are reports of gunshots in this town, and the German soldiers run completely amok.

They lose their discipline.

They're beating up people in the streets, bayonetting them and stuff.

They break into the university library and they set it on fire.

And firemen arrive to tackle the blaze and the Germans hold them back.

They want to watch it burn.

And basically a quarter of a million books went up in smoke and hundreds of...

you know, priceless medieval manuscripts.

And then the fire spread overnight into the old city of Levain and loads of of it was destroyed, hundreds of people killed, all of this kind of thing.

And this is the one incident that goes around the world and leads to people saying they're the Huns, they're barbarians, they're book burners, all of this.

And as you say, it's a particular disaster, maybe particularly in Britain, where

intellectuals and opinion formers almost have a cultural cringe towards...

Germany, Germany's cultural and intellectual achievements, the sense that Germany is the most highly educated nation in the world.

I mean, it's not an inaccurate impression, but it is a disaster, isn't it?

Because the spectacle of German troops destroying a library, it detonates that image.

It does completely.

And so the remarkable turnaround in the image of Germany in Britain between the sort of the summer before the war started, the summer of 1914, and then the end of the year.

Max Hastings quotes this British naval cadet.

He writes in his diary at the end of August.

He says, if their army is capable of doing what it is doing, then the rest of the race must be the same.

From now onwards, I shall regard every German, man, woman, and child, from the Kaiser downwards, as a willful savage.

The use of that kind of language, the Germans are Philistines, they're barbarians, they're savages.

That becomes very common.

I mean, that's the kind of language you might expect from a young man.

But you do also start to get it among British writers and intellectuals and scientists who previously had been in awe of German cultural achievements.

I mean, it's incredible how fast that sense switches.

Obviously, the Kiplings and the people like that and the Buchans and whatnot, people who are basically co-opted for the war effort and who previously, as you say, they'd been perfectly happy to go and give like a lecture at the University of Heidelberg.

But by 1915, they're saying, I'll never have a German book in the house again.

These people are absolute savages.

They're the worst of the worst.

So all of this catastrophic, I think, for Germany's reputation.

Now, meanwhile, their juggernaut has been rolling through Belgium.

Now, they have fallen behind the timetable, but they're still making amazing progress.

So they are sometimes hitting their 20 miles a day target.

And by the 19th of August, so what are we?

We are two weeks into the war.

They reached the suburbs of Brussels.

There's a brilliant description by an American journalist called Richard Harding Davis, who was in Brussels at the time.

And he describes the scenes that the streets are already crowded with the wagons of refugees who fled from eastern Belgium, sort of three generations of people.

And he says the tears rolled down their brown, tanned faces.

To the people of Brussels who crowded around them, they spoke in hushed, broken phrases.

The terror of what they'd escaped and what they had seen was upon them.

Now, people are preparing barricades.

They're preparing for a great siege.

But overnight, on the 19th, 20th, the King of Belgium sends orders.

He says, I don't want to see my capital destroyed by fighting.

There's no point.

The Germans are going to win.

It's better to surrender intact now and hopefully we'll regain it later.

So at 11 o'clock in the next morning, this guy, Harding Davis, this American guy, he watches the German advance guard coming down, ironically maybe, the Boulevard Waterloo.

And he says, the advance guard was three men, a captain and two privates on bicycles.

Their rifles were slung across their shoulders.

They rode unwarily with as little concern as the members of a touring club out for a holiday.

So these guys on bikes come down, and then behind them comes the might of General von Kluck's army.

Here's an amazing description.

This was a machine, endless, tireless, with the delicate organization of a watch and the brute power of a steamroller.

And for three days and three nights through Brussels, it roared and rumbled a cataract of molten lead.

That is so good.

And it so sums up everything

that people admired about Germany.

And you can see how that admiration could turn into fear.

The idea of it being as delicate as a watch and as powerful as a steamroller.

I mean, it's perfect.

He has this description.

They're singing the Germans, Waterland, mein Waterland.

He says their iron-shod boots beating out the time like the blows from a giant pile driver.

The sight was uncanny, inhuman, a force of nature like a landslide, a tidal wave, or lava sweeping down a mountain.

It was not of this earth, but mysterious, ghost-like.

It carried all the mystery and menace of a fog rolling towards you across the sea.

That's brilliant.

And so, Brussels has fallen.

Ahead lie the fields of Flanders.

Beyond them, the valley of the Marne, and beyond that, the ultimate prize, Paris.

But, Dominic, as you have been saying, the clock is always ticking down.

And I suppose the huge question is: will the Germans make it in time?

And also, an even more important question: what of our own plucky countrymen, the British?

If you want to hear not just the next episode, but all six episodes of this epic series in one go, then you can join our very own crack Teutonic division, The Rest is History Club, at the restishistory.com.

Afida Zain.

Alfida Zain.