Owing to strategic reasons the magnitude and significance of the great four days’ battle which was fought in mid-September between the Belgian field army and the combined German forces in Northern Belgium was carefully masked in all official communications at the time, and, in the rush of later events, its importance was lost sight of.  Yet the great flanking movement of the Allies in France largely owed its success to this determined offensive movement on the part of the Belgians, who, as it afterwards proved, were acting in close co-operation with the French General Staff.  This unexpected sally, which took the Germans completely by surprise, not only compelled them to concentrate all their available forces in Belgium, but, what was far more important, it necessitated the hasty recall of their Third and Ninth armies, which were close to the French frontier and whose addition to the German battle-line in France might well have turned the scales in Germany’s favour.  In addition the Germans had to bring up their Landwehr and Landsturm regiments from the south of Brussels, and a naval division composed of fifteen thousand sailors and marines was also engaged.  It is no exaggeration, then, to say that the success of the Allies on the Aisne was in great measure due to the sacrifices made on this occasion by the Belgian army.  Every available man which the Germans could put into the field was used to hold a line running through Sempst, Weerde, Campenhout, Wespelaer, Rotselaer, and Holsbeek.  The Belgians lay to the north-east of this line, their left resting on Aerschot and their centre at Meerbeek.  Between the opposing armies stretched the Malines-Louvain canal, along almost the entire length of which fighting as bloody as any in the war took place.

To describe this battle—­I do not even know by what name it will be known to future generations—­would be to usurp the duties of the historian, and I shall only attempt, therefore, to tell you of that portion of it which I saw with my own eyes.  On the morning of September 13 four Belgian divisions moved southward from Malines, their objective being the town of Weerde, on the Antwerp-Brussels railway.  It was known that the Germans occupied Weerde in force, so throughout the day the Belgian artillery, masked by heavy woods, pounded away incessantly.  By noon the enemy’s guns ceased to reply, which was assumed by the jubilant Belgians to be a sign that the German artillery had been silenced.  At noon the Belgian First Division moved forward and Thompson and I, leaving the car in front of a convent over which the Red Cross flag was flying, moved forward with it.  Standing quite by itself in the middle of a field, perhaps a mile beyond the convent, was a two-story brick farmhouse.  A hundred yards in front of the farmhouse stretched the raised, stone-paved, tree-lined highway which runs from Brussels to Antwerp, and on the other side of the highway was Weerde.  Sheltering ourselves as much as possible in the trenches which zigzagged