In all that follows, until we reach the date of Monday, August 24th, I propose to consider no more than the fortunes of the troops who passed through Belgium to attack the French armies upon the Sambre and the Meuse, with the British contingent that had come to their aid.  And my reasons for thus segregating and dealing later with contemporary events in the south will appear in the sequel.

This reservation made—­an important one in the scheme of this book—­I return to what I have called the preliminaries, the advance through Belgium.

We have already seen that the reduction of the northern forts of Liege was the prime necessity to that advance.

We have also seen that meanwhile it was possible and advisable to accumulate stores for the advance as far forward as could be managed, and that it was also possible, with caution, to bring certain bodies—­not the bulk of the army—­forward through the Ardennes, to command the passages of the Meuse above Liege, between that fortress and Namur.

This latter operation was effected by the 12th of August, when the town of Huy, with its bridge and its railway leading from the Belgian Ardennes right into the Belgian Plain, was seized.

Meanwhile, upon the north of the river Meuse, cavalry and armed motor-cars were similarly preparing the way for the general advance when the northern forts of Liege should be dominated; and on this same Wednesday, August 12th, the most advanced bodies of the invader lay in a line roughly north and south from the neighbourhood of Diest along the Gethe and thence towards Huy.

Of the outrages committed upon the civilian inhabitants in all these country-sides, the Government of which was neutral, and the territory of which was by the public law of Europe free not only from such novel crimes but from legitimate acts of war, I shall not speak, just as I shall not allude, save where they happen to have military importance, to the future increase of similar abominations which marked the progress of the campaign.  For my only object in these pages is to lay before the reader a commentary which will explain the general strategy of the war.

[Illustration:  Sketch 35.]

While this advance line of cavalry was engaging in unimportant minor actions, or rather skirmishes (grossly exaggerated in the news of those days), the attack on the northern forts of Liege, upon which everything now depended, was opened.  It was upon Thursday, August 13th, that the 280 mm. howitzers opened upon Loncin.  Other of the remaining forts were bombarded; but, as in the case of Fleron a week before, we need not consider the subsidiary operations, because everything depended upon the fort of Loncin, which, as the accompanying diagram shows, commanded the railway line westward from Liege.  General Leman himself was within that work, the batteries against which were now operating from within the ring—­that is, from the city itself, or in what soldiers technically call