On August 2, at 7 o’clock in the morning, a man calmly brought to the German Minister at Brussels the answer to the German ultimatum: the reply was a categorical refusal to let the German army pass through Belgium. On August 4, the army of General von Emmich, some 80,000 men, tried to take the fortified position of Liège by surprise. But the 30,000 Belgians of General Leman defended their hastily constructed trenches so well that many German regiments beat a hasty retreat. Panic already prevailed in the German town of Aix-la-Chapelle, where the news spread that the Belgians were invading German soil! However, in the midst of the confusion, a German column, under the command of Ludendorff, who then won his first laurels of the war, succeeded in breaking through the Belgian defenses. On the morning of August 7, the city of Liège was occupied by the enemy. The Belgian troops succeeded in escaping capture and went to rejoin the Belgian field army, posted on the river Gette, covering both Brussels and Antwerp. If the city of Liège was in the enemy’s hands, the forts continued to resist, and it was only when the 30.5- and 42.0-centimeter guns arrived from Germany, that one after another they were shattered to bits. The fort of Loncin, where General Leman had continued to resist, exploded, and was taken on the sixteenth of August. It had stopped the advance of the First Army under von Kluck for a week. And so it was that the army of von Kluck did not come in touch with the Belgian field army near Louvain before August 10. The number of the invading troops was so great and the danger of the Belgians being cut off from their Antwerp base so imminent, that King Albert decided to retire, after some combats at Haelen, Hauthem, and Aerschot, to the entrenched position of Antwerp. This happened on August 19. The flood of the invaders went over Louvain, Brussels, and then turned southward. There, thanks to the delay procured by the resistance of Liège, stood, on the Sambre, the Fifth French Army, and, on the canal from Mons to Condé, the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French. Moreover, the Belgian fortress of Namur, at the confluence of the Sambre and the Meuse, offered a strong _point d’appui_ for the Allied forces in the south of Belgium. Events happened, however, very rapidly. Namur fell under the attack of the Second German Army under von Bülow and the forts were destroyed by the fire of the giant German guns. The Belgian garrison, under General Michel, partly succeeded in escaping to France on August 23. The same day, the French on the Sambre were forced back by von Bülow and von Kluck maneuvering together, and the British at Mons were compelled to fall back and to begin their glorious retreat on Le Cateau.