Rehearsals: The German Army in Belgium, August 1914

1. An Ultimatum

CHAPTER 1 An ultimatum Sunday, August 2, 1914, was not an auspicious day in the career of KarlKonrad von Below-Saleske, German Minister to Belgium.¹ Suave and polished, recruited from the ranks of the aristocracy, like nearly all prewar diplomats, the forty-eight-year-old envoy had served the German Empire in Turkey and China before assuming his position in Brussels in October, 1913. After the war broke out, Brand Whitlock, Below’s American counterpart, recalled an encounter with the German diplomat earlier that summer. It had been at the end of a formal reception at the German Legation, the last of the season. “Well, thank God it’s over,” Below had confided. “We can be tourists now, go where we please, do what we please.”² As the two men chatted, the American noticed that the silver bowl he had been using as an ashtray had a bullet hole in its side. Did it have a history? It did indeed. “‘In China,’” Below explained, it stood on my desk, and one day during the riots a bullet came through the window and went right through it.” Several of the guests pressed up to see;...the German Minister had to recount the circumstances several times. “I have never had a post,” he said, “where there has not been trouble; in Turkey it was the Revolution, in China it was the Boxers. I am a bird of ill omen.” He laughed, standing there very erect and tall and distinguished, with his pointed black moustaches, raising his cigarette delicately to his lips with a wide and elegant gesture, while the guests purred about, examined the silver bowl, thrust their fingers into the bullet hole. “But now,” he went on, “I have the most tranquil post in Europe; nothing can happen in Brussels.”³ On Thursday, July 31, Below had received a sealed envelope from a special messenger dispatched from the German Foreign Office in Wilhelmstrasse . He was told not to open it until he was so instructed by telegram. 22 CHAPTER 1 Below was one of the rare diplomats not to leave a written account of his activities on the eve of the war, but he must have been apprehensive . The Austro- Hungarian ultimatum was delivered to Serbia on July 23, four weeks after the assassination of Archduke Francis-Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Every professional diplomat understood that it was the prelude to a declaration of war; the Austrian ambassador to Serbia, indeed, barely glanced at the Belgrade government’s conciliatory reply before breaking off relations. What was not clear was how members of the two great alliances would respond to Austria’s transgression of international law. The German High Command was parsimonious in the information it communicated to civilians in the Foreign Office and the Willhelmstrasse was itself not very forthcoming with its ambassadors, so it’s unlikely Below knew much about the Schlieffen Plan, the grand strategy to launch an end-run around the French fortresses and take Paris from the west, flooding the Belgian plain with over 750,000 troops.⁴ Nonetheless, Below must have guessed that the sealed envelope contained some unwelcome requests of Belgium, whose neutrality Germany had pledged to observe. Whatever Below surmised about the contents of the envelope, he was obliged to put up a good front; this was precisely why the envelope had been sealed, of course. Called to the Foreign Office in the evening of July 31, he reassured Baron Léon van der Elst, the Secretary General, that he was aware of the solemn declaration his predecessor had made three years earlier that the Kaiserreich would respect Belgian neutrality . Van der Elst, regarded as sympathetic to Germany, reminded Below of similar commitments made even more recently, by the Chancellor in private and by the Foreign Minister in an open session of the Reichstag’s Budget Committee. Below replied that he was certain that the sentiments expressed on those occasions had not changed. Later that night, at 10:30 p.m., the Belgian government learned that the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had telegraphed Paris and Berlin asking if they intended to respect Belgium’s neutrality. The French Minister showed up promptly the next morning to assure Count Julien Davignon, the stout, professorial Foreign Minister, that his country had immediately and unequivocally replied in the affirmative.⁵ Dav- An Ultimatum 23 ignon was regarded by foreign diplomats as a rather quaint character, overly sanguine and...