Belgium in the First World War

Belgium did not enter the First World War by choice but because it lay in the path of the German army marching on France. On 4 August 1914 German troops crossed its border, breaking a neutrality that Germany itself had guaranteed, and it was for precisely this reason that Britain went to war. After the fall of Liège and Antwerp the Belgian army stopped the Germans on the river Yser and for four years defended the last strip of the country there, while almost all of Belgium lived under occupation. In autumn 1918, under King Albert I, it liberated the western part of the country.

The road to war

Belgian neutrality had been guaranteed since 1839 by the Treaty of London, signed by Britain, France, Russia, Austria and Prussia. The country had 7.6 million inhabitants and was the most densely populated state in the world, and from 1908 it also had a vast colony in Africa, the Belgian Congo. As tension in Europe grew, King Albert I backed the expansion of the army, and in 1913 parliament passed universal military service. The army was not due to reach its planned 340,000 men until 1926, however.

Entering the war

On 24 July 1914 the government declared that it would defend its neutrality, and on 31 July it ordered mobilisation. On the evening of 2 August Germany presented Belgium with an ultimatum demanding consent for its troops to pass through, and gave it 12 hours to reply. On the morning of 3 August Belgium rejected the demands, judging that consent would cost the nation its honour.

At 6 a.m. on 4 August the German minister announced the use of force, and two hours later German troops crossed the border. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg admitted in the Reichstag that the invasion of Belgium was contrary to international law. That same day Belgium broke off relations with Germany, and at 11 p.m. London time Britain found itself at war with Germany. Austria-Hungary also declared war on Belgium, although the Belgians received its note only on 28 August.

Invasion, 1914

The forts of Liège held up the Germans for almost two weeks, until on 16 August the last of them fell, destroyed by heavy artillery. After the fighting on the Gete the king ordered a retreat to the fortress of Antwerp, giving up the capital without a fight: on 20 August the Germans entered Brussels. On 25 August Namur fell.

The invaders, convinced that civilian partisans were at work, took revenge on the population. On the night of 25–26 August they set fire to Leuven and its famous university library, and according to Sophie De Schaepdrijver they killed 5,500 civilians during the invasion. The British Bryce Committee report made these crimes one of the most prominent themes of Allied propaganda.

From Antwerp the Belgians threatened the flank of the Germans marching on France, which is why at the end of September the Germans began a siege of the fortress. The city capitulated on 10 October, but the field army slipped away westwards along the coast. According to De Schaepdrijver about 30,000 soldiers escaped to the Netherlands, where they were interned for the rest of the war. The government moved to Le Havre and settled in Sainte-Adresse, where France granted extraterritorial status to the buildings it occupied.

The Yser front and the war in Africa

The army that reached the Yser numbered, by various estimates, between 50,000 and 70,000 exhausted men. From 16 October it held the line of the river against the new German 4th Army, and when the Germans had already crossed the river the Belgians opened the sluices at Nieuport and flooded the plain. The Battle of the Yser ended on 10 November with the loss of Diksmuide, but it saved a narrow strip of land with Veurne and De Panne. South of the Belgians, in the First Battle of Ypres, the British and French held the rest of western Flanders.

Behind the flooded plain the front froze for almost four years. The king stayed with his troops at De Panne and guarded the independence of his army: Belgium did not join the Pact of London, because it saw itself as a neutral state attacked by Germany rather than an ordinary member of the coalition. Albert also refused to bleed the army white in great offensives. Its ranks were filled by volunteers who made their way out of the occupied country through the Netherlands and, from 1916, by conscripts drawn from the refugees. By 1918 the army again numbered 170,000 men.

In Africa the Force Publique, the Congo’s colonial army under Belgian officers, fought the Germans in Cameroon and above all in the East African campaign. In spring 1916 the Belgian Northern Brigade took Ruanda, in summer the Southern Brigade took Ujiji and Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika, and on 19 September 1916 the Belgians entered Tabora, the largest town in the interior of German East Africa. The League of Nations later gave Belgium a mandate over the occupied part of the colony, Ruanda-Urundi.

Occupation and exile

Most of the occupied country was ruled by the German Government-General in Brussels. The zone nearest the front, the Etappengebiet, with roughly 22 per cent of the occupied population, came directly under the German army command and was run even more harshly. During the invasion almost one and a half million Belgians fled abroad, and about 600,000 remained in exile until the Armistice. The occupied population was fed by the Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation, which, thanks to its president Émile Francqui’s acquaintance with Herbert Hoover, received food from the American Commission for Relief in Belgium. From December 1914 the occupier levied a monthly contribution of 40 million francs, later raised to 50 and then 60 million.

In October 1916 the Germans began deporting unemployed workers to forced labour in Germany. After worldwide protests the deportations were halted in the Government-General in February 1917, but in the zone behind the front they went on until the end of the war. The occupier also pursued the Flamenpolitik, a policy favouring the Flemings that was meant to divide the Belgians: in October 1916 it opened a Dutch-language university in Ghent, and in February 1917 the Council of Flanders was formed with its tacit support, which in December proclaimed Flemish independence.

Despite the electric fence on the Dutch border, resistance networks smuggled some 25,000 people across it. From February 1918 until the Armistice the judges went on strike in protest at the protection the occupier gave the activists. The most famous victim of repression was the British nurse Edith Cavell, shot in Brussels on 12 October 1915.

The government in exile sought assurance that Belgium would have a seat at the negotiating table. On 14 February 1916 France, Britain and Russia undertook in the Declaration of Sainte-Adresse not to end the war until Belgium had regained its independence and received compensation, and in the Le Havre declaration they promised that it would keep the Congo. In May 1918 Prime Minister Charles de Broqueville, suspected of leaning towards a compromise peace, was replaced by Gérard Cooreman. The government in Le Havre rejected the German peace offer of September 1918.

Liberation and the cost

In September 1918 King Albert took command of the Flanders Army Group, made up of the Belgian army, the British Second Army and French divisions. On 28 September it attacked from Ypres and in a single day retook the Passchendaele ridge, and in mid-October it broke through the front at Kortrijk. On 19 October the Belgians entered Bruges, and the next day the whole coast was free. On 11 November, the day of the Armistice of Compiègne, the Army Group stood on the Scheldt.

In mid-November the Belgians returned to Brussels, on 21 November a government of national unity under Léon Delacroix took power, and the next day the king announced in parliament equal suffrage for all men.

According to Belgian government figures, 40,367 soldiers were killed or died in Europe, including 26,338 killed and died of wounds, and with those killed in Africa and the porters who died the toll reaches 58,637. In its reply to the International Labour Office questionnaire of 1924 the government gave 365,000 men mobilised, while the US War Department counted 267,000 mobilised and only 13,716 killed and died.

The government counted 23,700 civilian dead, including 6,000 killed in the massacres of 1914. After the war Belgium received the small territory of Eupen-Malmedy from Germany, and reparations smaller than it had wanted.