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Updated: May 4, 2025
The example of Liège was followed by Jemappes, Wavre, and by the miners of the Borinage; and Brussels was filled with a growing crowd of men filled with a revolutionary spirit. Their aim was to proclaim the independence of Belgium, and set up a provisional government.
Even the headquarters staff remained uninformed of the desperate situation developing on the French right at Charleroi. The headquarters of the British army was at Mons. It lies within what is known as "le Borinage," that is the boring district of Belgium, the coal-mining region. In certain physical aspects it much resembles the same territory of Pennsylvania.
I do not cite this fighting in Mons as something to be particularly proud of, for with the national guard, I had twelve or thirteen hundred men compared to the three hundred of the Prussians; but I thought it worth recording this bizarre encounter to demonstrate the volatility of the masses, which is displayed by the fact that all the peasants and coal miners of Borinage who a month previously had come in a mass to exterminate or at least disarm the few Frenchmen remaining in Mons, had come to join us to oppose the Prussians because they had killed one of their compatriots.
My job was made more difficult because, after the inhabitants of Liége, those who live in Borinage are the boldest and most turbulent in all Belgium, and to control them I had only a small unit of 400 conscripts, a few gendarmes and 200 unmounted cavalrymen from my regiment, among whom there were some fifty men who were born in the area and who, in case of trouble, would join the insurgents.
Mons, on a hill overlooking the great coalfield of the Borinage, with its strange pyramidal spoil-heaps, is itself curiously free from the dirt and squalor of an English colliery town; and equally worth visiting for the sake of its splendid cathedral of St.
The men seldom exceed four feet eight inches in height, the women and children appear bloodless and emaciated. The output of the Borinage coal field exceeds twenty million tons a year. Its ungainly features of shafts, chimneys, and mounds of débris are relieved in places by woodlands, an appearance of a hilly country is presented where the pit mounds have been planted with fir trees.
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