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From the plans submitted, the one finally decided upon was that of the famous Belgian military engineer Henri Alexis Brialmont. His design was a circle of detached forts, already approved by German engineers as best securing a city within from bombardment.
Shells and his prattle about Hamley and Brialmont and Jomini, kriegspiel and the new drill, you would imagine he was bound to put the extinguisher on Marlborough, Wellington, Wolseley, and the rest of them; and yet the chances are, if you meet him twenty years hence, he will be a captain on the recruiting service, with no forces to marshal but six growing children.
He had served under Brialmont, and was pronounced a serious and efficient officer. He was a zealous military student, physically extremely active, and constantly on the watch for any relaxation of discipline. These qualities enabled him to grasp at the outset the weakness of his position.
The Antwerp defences had been, like those of Liège and Namur, designed by Brialmont, and were begun in 1861.
Brialmont had not foreseen the explosive force of modern shells, and two days' bombardment on the 13th-15th reduced the remaining forts, in spite of their construction underground, to a mass of shell-holes with a handful of wounded or unconscious survivors. The last to be reduced was Fort Loncin, whose gallant commander, General Leman, was found poisoned and half-dead from suffocation.
With regard to Liege and Namur particularly, Brialmont held that his plan would make passages of the Meuse at those places impregnable to an enemy. When the German army stood before Liege on this fourth day of August, in 1914, the circumference of the detached forts was thirty-one miles with about two or three miles between them, and at an average of five miles from the city.
The literature concerning itself with that period would make a library of itself. Scarcely a military writer of any European nation but has delivered himself on the subject, from Clausewitz to General Maurice, from Berton to Brialmont. Thiers, Alison, and Hooper may be cited of the host of civilian writers whom the theme has enticed to description and criticism.
Général Brialmont warned the Government when the forts were under construction, that if it could not maintain an army sufficiently strong to defend the open country between them, he was building them for the Germans. That statement revived suddenly, gives rise to an apprehension hitherto unfelt by the Liégeois, who have absolute faith in the impregnability of Liége.
It had been estimated by Brialmont that 75,000 men of all arms were necessary for the defense of Liege on a war footing, probably 35,000 was the total force hastily gathered in the emergency to withstand the German assault on the fortifications. It included the Civic Guard.
I based this suggestion about the supreme importance of Brussels because it has for years been an open secret among military men that the only hope of the famous attaque brusquee of the German armies being successful would be by violating Belgian neutrality and swarming in like wasps near Liege and Namur, and surprising the French mobilization by sweeping by the lines of forts constructed by the foremost military engineer in Europe, the late Belgian general, De Brialmont.
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