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

Summary

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The Rest Is History

Episode 594: The First World War: The Invasion of Belgium (Part 1)
Date: August 24, 2025
Hosts: Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook

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Overview

This episode kicks off a multi-part deep-dive into the early months of the First World War, focusing on the German invasion of Belgium in 1914. With their trademark wit and rich historical analysis, Tom and Dominic explore not only the military maneuvers, but also the context, motivations, myths, and atrocities surrounding the dramatic opening moves of history’s "defining modern calamity." This instalment goes in-depth on the Schlieffen Plan, the German mindset, Belgian resistance, civilian massacres, and the catastrophic impact on Germany’s reputation, setting the stage for the horrors that would define the rest of the war.

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Main Topics & Key Insights

Setting the Stage: Europe’s Descent into War

• German Perspective & War Guilt

  • Reading from German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s speech on August 4, 1914—capturing the sense of a cultured nation forced into war.
    • Notable quote (Bethmann Hollweg via Tom Holland, 02:12): “Only in defence 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.”
  • Early war narratives: Germany as both aggressor and victim—debates over blame, especially in historical literature (notably Fritz Fischer's controversial thesis of continuity between Wilhelmine Germany and Nazism).
    • Dominic Sandbrook (07:00): “Fritz Fischer said...Nazism didn’t come from nowhere. There’s a continuity between the Wilhelmine Empire and the Third Reich.”

• Fear, Encirclement, and the Calculus of Risk

  • German leadership, especially Moltke the Younger, acting from a mix of aggression and deep insecurity—haunted by the specter of encirclement by France and Russia.
    • Tom Holland (14:34): “Russia and France are on either flank of Germany...that they might be crushed between these two sides.”

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War Plans and the March into Belgium

• The Schlieffen Plan and Strategic Imperatives (16:23–19:16)

  • Detailed explanation of the famous German strategy to knock out France before turning east to face Russia.
    • The plan required a rapid advance through Belgium to encircle Paris, relying on precise timetables and the dense Belgian railway network.
    • Dominic Sandbrook (16:23): “If we have a long war, there will probably be an economic collapse and a revolution...So the priority is to knock one enemy out before turning on the other one.”

• Diplomatic Blunders and the Belgian Ultimatum (26:51–28:44)

  • Germany’s demand for safe passage, Belgian refusal, and Britain’s subsequent entry into the war—driven in part by the need to uphold Belgian neutrality (“a scrap of paper”).
    • Dominic Sandbrook (29:36): “Bethmann Hollweg said...‘You are fighting just for a scrap of paper.’...the British turn it into a great propaganda weapon.”

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The Belgian Defense and German Atrocities

• The Invasion and the Heroic Stand of Liege (34:27–39:22)
  • 750,000 German troops surge across Belgium; unexpected Belgian resistance at Liege delays the Germans and captures world attention.
    • Belgian Officer (Max Hastings’ quote, 37:27): “We simply mowed them down...the fallen were heaped one on top of the other in an awful barricade of dead and wounded men.”
  • The first zeppelin raid in history; the psychological shock of industrial warfare.

Notable Prose & Character Moments

• Descriptions of German columns: “columns of grey infantry, many of them...in those spiked helmets that you like so much.” (34:12)

• Moustache banter: The hosts’ comic riff on military facial hair among the combatant nations (11:09–12:23).

• Massacres and Reprisals: The ‘Rape of Belgium’ (39:50–52:39)

  • The myth and reality of German atrocities: systematic reprisals against civilians, fueled by rumors and collective memory of French partisan warfare in 1870.

    • Entire villages wiped out after suspected attacks, with hundreds of civilians killed in the war's first days—actions justified by the Germans as responses to alleged civilian ambushes.

    • Dominic Sandbrook (41:38): “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.”

  • Analysis of German soldiers’ motives, discipline breakdown, and the effect of fear, confusion, and expectations of conventional warfare.

  • Media and Propaganda:

    • “Scrap of paper” and “Hun” become dominant elements in Allied propaganda.
    • Atrocities—real, exaggerated, and fictionalized—fuel international outrage (notably in Britain and America).

  • The burning of Louvain’s medieval library—symbolic catastrophe for Germany's cultural reputation.

    • Dominic Sandbrook (55:15): “They break into the university library and set it on fire...A quarter of a million books went up in smoke...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.”

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German Mindset and the “Beastliness” Debate

• German officers and soldiers often see themselves as “doing their duty,” not sadistically, but with grim resignation and sometimes genuine horror at their own actions.

  • Dominic Sandbrook (52:39): “We have to do it, but I hope we can stop soon because...we're not Huns and we don't want to sully the honour of the German name.”

• The escalation and subsequent propaganda echo the “savage” language used by both sides, with references to “plucky little Belgium” and the supposed “Hun” barbarity fostering national unity and righteous anger in Britain.

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Tension, Timetables, and the March to Paris

• Despite atrocities and the delay at Liege, German armies make impressive gains, but time is running out before the Russians threaten Berlin and the westward gamble risks collapse.

  • Richard Harding Davis (American journalist in Brussels, 58:46): “This was a machine, endless, tireless, with the delicate organization of a watch and the brute power of a steamroller...a force of nature like a landslide, a tidal wave or lava...it carried all the mystery and menace of a fog rolling towards you across the sea.”

• With Brussels fallen, the armies press toward Flanders, the Marne, and Paris;

• The hosts close on the question: Will the Germans reach their objectives before the clock runs out and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) arrives to intervene?

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Memorable Quotes (with Timestamps & Attribution)

• "Only in defence of a just cause shall our sword fly from its scabbard..."
  – Theobald Bethmann Hollweg (via Tom Holland), 02:22

• "I think in this series we're going to look at the first months of the war up to the end of 1914. The German advance on Paris, the heroic defense of Liege, the so-called rape of Belgium..."
  – Dominic Sandbrook, 04:36

• "The Schlieffen plan requires France to be knocked out within six weeks."
  – Tom Holland, 22:57

• "Bethmann Hollweg said to him: 'You are fighting just for a scrap of paper.'...the British turn it into a great propaganda weapon."
  – Dominic Sandbrook, 29:36

• "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."
  – Belgian Officer (as quoted via Max Hastings), 37:27

• "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."
  – British naval cadet, (from Max Hastings, cited by Dominic Sandbrook), 55:20

• "This was a machine, endless, tireless, with the delicate organization of a watch and the brute power of a steamroller...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."
  – Richard Harding Davis, 58:46

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Timestamps: Key Segments

• 01:59 – Dramatic readings: German pre-war mindset, Bethmann Hollweg’s address
• 04:36 – Series overview and the stakes of the First World War
• 07:00 – The Fischer thesis and debates over German war guilt
• 16:23 – The Schlieffen Plan explained; urgency of German timetables
• 26:51 – Ultimatum to Belgium, British intervention, “scrap of paper” incident
• 34:27 – Numbers and strategy of the German invasion force; the Liege defense
• 39:50 – Atrocities begin: Bernau, Melan, and mass civilian reprisals
• 52:39 – German diaries, sense of duty, contrast to later Nazi atrocities
• 55:15 – Burning of the Louvain library and the collapse of Germany’s cultural image
• 58:46 – The fall of Brussels: American eyewitness account; the war machine advances toward Paris

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Tone and Atmosphere

Tom and Dominic maintain a blend of dramatic gravitas, dark humor, irreverent banter (notably about general’s names and moustaches), and poignant anti-war commentary. The observations are both empathetic to human suffering and intellectually rigorous in unpicking propaganda, myth, and the raw horror of war.

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a gripping, densely detailed account of the outbreak of total war in 1914—showing how a blend of fear, strategic necessity, political blunders and myth-making led to the German onslaught on Belgium, and how this shaped everything that followed. The hosts promise to continue the story with more on German advances, British intervention, and the catastrophic escalation that would define a generation.

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Up Next:
Will the Germans reach Paris before the timetable runs out? And what of "our own plucky countrymen, the British?" Stay tuned for Part 2.

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Transcript

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Tom Holland]

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[Tom Holland]

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.

[Theobald Bethmann Hollweg (voice actor)]

Have lived in peace and have protected.

[Tom Holland]

The peace of Europe.

[Theobald Bethmann Hollweg (voice actor)]

Like a silent vow.

[Tom Holland]

The feeling that animated everyone, from the.

[Theobald Bethmann Hollweg (voice actor)]

Emperor down to the youngest soldier, was Only in defence 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.

[Tom Holland]

Last man and indeed woman. He should have said, but he didn't because this is the 4th of August 1914. And the Chancellor of Germany, Theobald Bettmann Hollweg, who was dressed in a dragoon's uniform and was addressing the Reichstag. He just wasn't a feminist, was he, Dominic?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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.

[Tom Holland]

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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, I would say indisputably, wouldn't you? I mean, there's nothing to compare to it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 Liege by the Belgians, the fall of Brussels and the issue that becomes so important in Allied propaganda, the so called, to use the terminology at 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?

[Tom Holland]

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

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And kind of massive. Britain for the war.

[Tom Holland]

So that's what I was doing. So any, any German listeners, I was kind of conveying the complexities of our shared history.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 made that case, aren't there?

[Tom Holland]

Most notably a German, right, Fritz Fisher in the. 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 Wilhelmine Empire and the Third Reich. And he dug out this bit of evidence which was a. So the bloke that you were ventriloquizing, the Chancellor, Theobald Bethmann Holweg, in 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 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 Niall 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 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.

[Tom Holland]

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

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, the aggression 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, as we will see, when they enter Belgium, when they cross the Belgian border.

[Tom Holland]

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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I totally agree with you. And if we remind ourselves how the Germans got to this point. So things have moved quite quickly. On 28 June, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. On 5 July, the Kaiser and Bettmann Hollweg 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.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, everyone's on holiday, aren't they? Bettman Hovig's on holiday too, isn't he? I mean, the whole. Basically everybody's on holiday.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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

[Tom Holland]

He loves a fjord.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, he does love a fjord. So he's gone off to, what, the sort of North Sea, hasn't he?

[Tom Holland]

He's gone to Norway on a yacht.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 Hollweg says, you know, war might not happen. And Kaiser then spends the next few days dreaming up elaborate wheez. So basically having spent 20 years of his life dreaming of elaborate wheezes to, I don't know, invade Paraguay or something, now it's dream of elaborate wheezes not to have the war that's actually going to happen anyway. On 28 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 mobilise in earnest.

[Tom Holland]

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

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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

[Tom Holland]

Is that right? Not entirely sure. I'm not entirely sure.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

When we do a big series on Christian Science, we'll pretend that we knew all along. Yeah. 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.

[Tom Holland]

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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Okay. Where are you going with this?

[Tom Holland]

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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It is completely. It is.

[Tom Holland]

And also he has one of those mustaches 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 better superior moustache game. There's a guy called Rennenkampf and Lexei Brusilov, and they have moustaches that basically would not fit on the screen.

[Tom Holland]

But that proves my point. So if you want to imagine the Russians, massive mustaches. I mean, the moustaches essentially define the competent nations. That's the key thing. And so mulk 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, certainly what's going on your head, I mean, whether it's going on anyone else's head, I do not know. Let's go back to von Molke. Like a lot of 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 Moltke 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.

[Tom Holland]

Also they're haunted by history, aren't they? And the defeat of the Teutonic Knights, Tannenberg.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

We will come to that. We will come to that. Very exciting.

[Tom Holland]

May history repeat itself or be reversed. We will see.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 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 at the end of July. 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, Mulk 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.

[Tom Holland]

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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The sense of being encircled I think is massively important to understanding the German mentality above all economically. The. So there's 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, 6 million soldiers. The Entente have the central powers less than 3 and a half million. So if you're von Moltke sitting in your spa thinking about theosophy and the occult and you also make 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.

[Tom Holland]

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?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 Plant di Set, 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 spend their entire careers arguing about this plan. But to boil it down and make it very simple, it's all about the.

[Tom Holland]

Battle of Cannae, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It is a battle a little bit on the Battle of Cannae because he.

[Tom Holland]

Was obsessed by it encircling and wiping out superior enemies.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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. When 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.

[Tom Holland]

And Dominic, 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think they, it's. I mean, they're not idiots. Right. 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.

[Tom Holland]

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

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, exactly. It would be like suddenly England decided to build loads of forts around the border with Wales.

[Tom Holland]

Well, it's good enough for offer, right?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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, will 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 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.

[Tom Holland]

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

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Berlin, they can go all the way into Germany. They can drive into Germany, they can drive into center of Austria, Hungary.

[Tom Holland]

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

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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.

[Tom Holland]

But that's where the canny thing comes in, right, that you use the size of your enemy's forces against them.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. They're lumbering and unwieldy, but you're moving swiftly. Now, there's a brilliant book on Germany and Austria and the Central Powers in the first war called Ring of Steel by a British historical, Alexander Watson. As he points out, this is, quote, a breathtakingly audacious and foolhardy aspiration 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. 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 Moltker is studying all his reports with a massive sense of kind of panic. The Russians are mobilizing. The Belgians are calling out their reserves. The Belgians are fortifying Liege, which is not just the key point in their eastern defenses, but is their major railway hub. And von Molka 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.

[Tom Holland]

That's a great name.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, but again, it's falcon. I mean, it's like a falcon waiting to swoop down. I think the names are conjuring up all kinds of images.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 31 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, he 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.

[Theobald Bethmann Hollweg (voice actor)]

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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's how he spoke. Right. And he, and I think he really means this.

[Theobald Bethmann Hollweg (voice actor)]

He does.

[Tom Holland]

It feels very impassioned.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. I think it's important for listeners to get that into their heads. 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 credit, and they agree they will not criticize 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's 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?

[Tom Holland]

But the Schlieffen plan requires France to be knocked out within six weeks. And then are they not hoping for a rapid victory?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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, how. Who knows how long it takes that.

[Tom Holland]

They are expecting a war to last that long?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Of course. And the newspapers in, in Germany, you know, the Frankfurter Zeitung, over everything hangs at great gravity. In their 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 an existential struggle, a fight for their lives. In a later episode, we'll talk a little bit about why they didn't stop. Eisen as the war becomes a stalemate, why don't people stop fighting? And 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.

[Tom Holland]

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?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, absolutely it does, absolutely. But if you're a German and you think, well, we're absolutely the good guys in this, 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's 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've 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, maybe we can still stay out. The rad 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.

[Tom Holland]

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 infringe Belgian neutrality. And so they kind of issue military dictates, 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 is really vital to France's interests that Germany do this.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 the Sunday 2nd August, the Germans make this cataclysmic mistake. At 7 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 Liege 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.

[Tom Holland]

Did no one ever think they could just buy tickets?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Can you buy a ticket for like a million men? I don't know. Is that possible?

[Tom Holland]

Get this guy.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Everybody, a very amusing conversation at the. The counter. Yeah, I want to bring it.

[Tom Holland]

Bring a few horses as well.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But then the Germans say, in this alternative, we'll, 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 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 7 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 Gray, 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. Yeah, Poor Belgium.

[Tom Holland]

His pitch is literally liberal interventionism.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 Hollweg, 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 with the British ambassador, who's called Gostjan.

[Tom Holland]

That's a very German name, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I know everyone's got the wrong name.

[Tom Holland]

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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And the generals are just as bad. Right. When we get to General von Rennenkampf, he's Russian. Yeah, exactly. And of course, a field marshal French. Yes.

[Tom Holland]

Who hates the French.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Who hates the French more than anybody. So anyway, the ambassador and Bethman Hovig had an argument and Beth Munhovik 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 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 8 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 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 center of Brussels. There are huge crowds of people cheering, some weeping, waving Belgian flags, the kind of tricolor 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 on, he goes up to the sort 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.

[Tom Holland]

Fine words, Dominic, but when you have the mightiest army the world has ever seen preparing to cross your frontier, our 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

This episode is brought to you by SEGA and Creative assembly to celebrate 25.

[Tom Holland]

Years of creating award winning video games. Total War Rome 2 and Total Rome Remastered will be on sale on Steam. Get rome Remastered at 75% off and get Total Rome 2 for 80% off. From 21 August to 4 September, visit.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Steam and search for Total War Rome to buy. Now. The discount is valid for a limited time only. Terms and conditions apply.

[Tom Holland]

This episode is brought to you by. Indeed. Now, speed can be very, very important at times.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, speed's massively important, Tom. A great inspiration for me is the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in 1797, when Horatio Nelson really made his name. He went out of the line to attack the Spanish. His ship got entangled with a Spanish ship. He jumped onto the Spanish ship and captured it. And then he realized they become entangled with a second Spanish ship and he leapt onto the next Spanish ship, captured that one as well. A tremendous example of quick thinking, saving the day.

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

Hello.

[Tom Holland]

Welcome back to the Rest Is 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So this is an invasion unprecedented in human history. Von Moltke 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 to the First World War. An absolutely mind boggling sight for anybody who, who was witnessing it. These columns of grey infantry, many of them tom, in those spiked helmets that you like so much. The columns 50 miles long, followed by horses and trucks and artillery. So these three armies, they are commanded by three generals, Carl von Bulow, Max Vonhausen, and the most compelling of them, I think is a guy called Alexander von Kluck and he had fought in the Franco Prussian War.

[Tom Holland]

So no chicken.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He very good. I like what you 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. He'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 One day where we fall short, you know, we have to make, 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 Liege. So this is day two and already they're slightly falling behind their timetable.

[Tom Holland]

And Dominic, that's the thing, isn't it, about the First World War, that people always seize on the importance of timetables. Say there's a 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Absolutely not. I think they go into this war under greater time pressure than any other combatant arguably in history. They can't be, what, 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. 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 Liege 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 a 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 peep. And the Germans, I think, learned that lesson pretty quickly.

[Tom Holland]

Quicker than the French and the British, perhaps.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Certainly quicker than the French. I mean, the French, as we'll see in the next episode, what's not like.

[Tom Holland]

The Napoleonic War is what happens the next day, right, because it's the first zeppelin raid in the history of warfare.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 Liege.

[Tom Holland]

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

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No. God, I wouldn't go in a Zeppelin at all, I don't think. On the 7th of August, they finally captured Liege and the citadel. And the final assault on Liege was led by a man who will be meeting again called Erich 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 general's ears because they are falling well behind their schedule. They can't move all their troops as quickly as they wanted. And Liege, 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 Liege 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.

[Tom Holland]

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

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Is that a warning or is that, I think, an advertisement?

[Tom Holland]

Surely when you read it over and over again, you get fed up with it. I did.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I love that kind of 1910s. Florid. I don't think it is florid. I think it's. It is florid.

[Tom Holland]

It's massively over emotional.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think it has a kind of moral earnestness.

[Tom Holland]

It does. Which will end up. It's the kind of moral earnestness that will end up shot to pieces on barbed wire and being gnawed at by rats.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 Liege. So on the night at the 4th of August. So right at the very beginning of the war, the Germans had moved into the nearby village of Bernau, 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 souman, more than 100 people, Belgian civilians, are shot or bayoneted in a place called Melan, 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 Melan, 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 disgrace themselves in Belgium.

[Tom Holland]

And how do we know this? Who is reporting this? Are there Belgians? Are there Germans? Are they admitting it? What's going on?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So there are reports from 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 German's own explanation is we are being ambushed all the time by Belgian civilian partisans. So there's 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 Bastille mob in Liege. 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.

[Tom Holland]

And why are they assuming that?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, this is the really fascinating thing. I think the short answer is the Germans have traveled with an enormous amount of historical baggage. And there's a brilliant study of this by two 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'd come under severe attack from French partisans called folk dureur, 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 Liege about being ambushed exacerbate their darkest fears. And they are then ramped up by German newspapers in a similar way to the way the Allies newspapers ramp stuff up during the war. So German newspapers have loads of stories about how they've been tricked by Franck Tireurs, 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.

[Tom Holland]

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 pounds of education drops to a 10 rupee jeze?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tom Holland]

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

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I don't know. Because the Germans, of course, have been fighting colonial war in southwest 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.

[Tom Holland]

Kaiser's outrage and compares the Belgians to the Cossacks, doesn't he? And say that this is terrible behavior.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 9 August, have behaved in a diabolical bestial manner. Not one iota better than the Cossacks. He comes out with all the newspaper kind of tabloid cliches. They've been torturing our men. They've beaten them to death. And he says, I mean, the Kaiser, who's got a. I mean, 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 custom customs, they'll be treated accordingly. I guess that line is a giveaway, right?

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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

[Tom Holland]

Except that notoriously in Africa, this is how the Belgians have behaved.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The irony. Maybe the Belchers have got form, Tom. Maybe the Belgians are the real villains of the story.

[Tom Holland]

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

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Surely not, no. That the Belgians are going to start cutting off people's hands and forcing them to collect rubber?

[Tom Holland]

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 just wonder the degree to which people are oblivious to that irony or aware of it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 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, you know, 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 Moltke 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. Bazae, 11th of August, the Germans shoot 25 people. They burn 50 houses. Vise, 16th of August, they shoot 42 people. A particularly grim story, a place called Tamines, 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. 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 Sea or Sills attacked our pioneers building a bridge and they killed 20 of them as a punishment. 200 citizens were court martialed and shot.

[Tom Holland]

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

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Which I think is perfectly plausible. You might well do that. There's a guy in Leffe called Franz Stiebing. He says we pushed on past house after house under fire from every building. We arrested all the male inhabitants. They were seminary executed in the street. We only spared children under 15, old people and women.

[Tom Holland]

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?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, I think some, some children are definitely swept up in these shootings. I don't think it's.

[Tom Holland]

I don't think there are zero targeted. There's no target.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They're not targeted. Of course they're not targeted. And probably 5,500 people were killed in Belgium and another thousand in France. And 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 fiance. And he describes coming under attack on a night patrol. And he says, you know, we, we found the house that we thought we were being shot at from and we burned it down. We shot everybody who, who came out. And he says, you know, we 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 at an end, and you see that a lot, I think, in German letters and diaries, that 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 all know they feel bad about it. The officers feel bad about it, because the officers, as Watson says, they have an aristocracy, democratic, 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 honour of the German name.

[Tom Holland]

So it's not as bad, for instance, as the behavior of the French in the Peninsular War against Guerreros or Napoleon's troops in Italy.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Actually, Alexander Watson in his book makes precise 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.

[Tom Holland]

However, having said that, I mean, I suppose 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

This, voting 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. 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.

[Tom Holland]

Say, come on, well, Ireland, how does it compare to British behaviour in the. The War of Independence that we did series about earlier?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 behavior 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.

[Tom Holland]

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? Has to be said the British don't, for instance, burn down libraries.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 Leuven 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 Levent and loads 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.

[Tom Holland]

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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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 that the Germans are philistines. They're barbarians, they're savages. That becomes very common.

[Tom Holland]

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 intellectual scientists who previously had been in awe of German cultural achievements. I mean, it's incredible how fast that sense switches.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Obviously the Kiplings and the people like that and the Buchans and whatnot, people who are basically co opted for the war efforts 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. 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 reach the suburbs of Brussels. It'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'd 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 11:00 clock 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 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. He has 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.

[Tom Holland]

That is so good. And it so sums up 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.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It has this description. They're singing, the Germans. Vaterland, mein Vaterland, 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.

[Tom Holland]

That's brilliant.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

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.

[Tom Holland]

But, Dominic, as you have been saying, the clock is always ticking down. And I suppose a 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 rest is history.com@feedersane a feeder Zen.