Quiet

I tried to visit Le Mémorial Interalliés de Cointe today, but it was closed and had signs on it stating that entry was prohibited (I believe the exact wording was "interdit").  Behind the signs were a whole bunch of Belgian troops doing stuff with a whole bunch of Belgian trucks.  Well, we all know that on August 7th, you better not mess with Belgian troops.

Rather than poke around any more than I did, feeling that honor had been satisfied, I decided to call it a call it a day.  The memorial is right across the street on the other side of Mos Eisley, so I had an early lunch and then returned to my room to offer mercy to the feet I've been trying so hard to destroy.  Also, to plan out a little bit more of my trip, rather than just driving headlong in to the Great War unknown, because for me there sure is a lot of unknown.

While it might have been all quiet on the modern front, it was certainly not quiet on the Belgian front one hundred years ago.  As I attempted to describe in a previous post, the assaults against the forts around Liege continued on August 7th at terrible cost to the German infantry.  It's hard for me to imagine what it must have been like for those young men, many of them really just boys, to have to rush against a modern fortification on open fields with no cover against machine guns an rifle fire accurate out to 1/2 kilometer.

I meant to refer yesterday to a post made by Brad DeLong, in which he included a set of paragraphs from The Guns of August which had been etched in my memory.  I include a sub-quote from his quote here.  You might like to read the rest of the quote on his blog:

On August 5 Emmich’s brigades opened the attack on the four easternmost forts of Liège with a cannonade by field artillery followed by infantry assault. The light shells made no impression on the forts, and the Belgian guns poured a hail of fire on the German troops, slaughtering their front ranks. Company after company came on, making for the spaces between the forts where the Belgian entrenchments had not been completed. At some points where they broke through, the Germans stormed up the slopes where the guns could not be depressed to reach them and were mowed down by the forts’ machine guns. The dead piled up in ridges a yard high. At Fort Barchon, Belgians, seeing the German lines waver, charged with the bayonet and threw them back. Again and again the Germans returned to the assault, spending lives like bullets in the knowledge of plentiful reserves to make up the losses. “They made no attempt at deploying,” a Belgian officer described it later, “but came on line after line, almost shoulder to shoulder, until as we shot them down, the fallen were heaped on top of each other in an awful barricade of dead and wounded that threatened to mask our guns and cause us trouble. So high did the barricade become that we did not know whether to fire through it or to go out and clear openings with our hands....

...a terrible thing.