BELGIANS UNDER THE GERMAN EAGLE CHAPTER I THE VIOLATION OF NEUTRALITY A.--The Preliminaries. We were too confiding. With the exception of the military and a few statesmen, the Belgians were convinced that nations, just as individuals, were bound by their engagements, and that as long as we remained faithful to our international obligations, the signatories of the Treaty of London (19th April, 1839), which set forth the conditions of the neutrality, or rather of the neutralization, of Belgium (_Belg. All._, p. 3), would equally observe their obligations towards us. However, in 1911, during the "Agadir crisis," our calm was a little shaken by a series of articles in _Le Soir_. According to this journal, all the German military writers held the invasion of Belgium to be inevitable in the event of a war between France and Germany. _The Belgians' Distrust of Germany lulled._ But our faith in international conventions--just a trifle ingenuous, it may be--very soon regained its comforting influence. Had not Wilhelm II, "the Emperor of Peace," assured the Belgian mission, which was sent to greet him at Aix-la-Chapelle, that Belgium had nothing to fear on the part of Germany (see _L'Étoile Belge_, 19th October, 1911). In September 1912 the Emperor made a fresh reassuring statement. Being present at the Swiss manoeuvres, he congratulated M. Forster, President of the Swiss Confederation, and told him how glad he was to find that the Swiss Army would effectually defend the integrity of her frontier against a French attack. "What a pity," he added, "that the Belgian Army is not as well prepared, and is incapable of resisting French aggression." This evidently meant that Belgium ran no risk from the side of Prussia. It was not only the Emperor who assured us of his profound respect for international statutes. The German Ministers made similar declarations in the Reichstag (_Belg. All._, p. 7). In Belgium itself the Germans profited by every occasion to celebrate their friendship for us and their respect for treaties. In 1905, at the time of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Belgian independence, Herr Graf von Wallwitz stated at an official reception: "And as for us Germans, the maintenance of the treaty of warranty concluded at the birth of modern Belgium is a sort of political axiom which, to our thinking, no one could violate without committing the gravest of faults" (_see_ p. 185 of the _Annales parlementaires belges, Senate, 1906_). In 1913, at the time of the joyous entry of the King and Queen into Liége, General von Emmich, the same who was entrusted with the bombardment of the city in August 1914, came to salute our sovereigns in the name of the Emperor. He spoke incessantly of the German sympathies for the Belgians and their country.