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Breaking the Fortress Line 1914 offers a fascinating new perspective on the German offensive against France and Belgium in 1914. In graphic detail it describes the intense fighting that took place around the forts and fortified cities that stood in the path of the German invasion. The ordeal began with the German assault on the mighty fortress of Liège. They took twelve days to batter their way through the 'Gateway to Belgium', losing thousands of men in repeated frontal assaults, and they had to bring up the heaviest siege artillery ever used to destroy the defences.??This is the epic struggle that Clayton Donnell depicts in this compelling account of a neglected aspect of the battles that followed the outbreak of the Great War. Not only does he reconstruct the German attack on the strongpoints they encountered along the entire invasion line, but he traces the history and design of these fixed defences and analyses the massive military building programmes undertaken by the French, the Germans and the Belgians between 1871 and 1914. ??Thousands of huge forts, infantry strongpoints, bunkers, casemates and shelters were dug out along the French and German borders. The German Moselstellung and Steinbruch-stellung were born. These massive concrete fortress systems with steel gun turrets and diesel motors to generate electricity were a completely new concept of fortress design.??As war approached, France and Germany devised plans to overcome each other's powerful armies and these border defences. The French plan avoided contact with the German fortress system. But the Kaiser's army faced twelve forts at Liège, nine more at Namur, and then the strongpoints of the first and second Séré de Rivières lines. Clayton Donnell provides a gripping narrative of the violent confrontation that followed.
Excerpt from The Invasion the War in Belgium From Liège to the Yser: With a Sketch of the Diplomatic Negotiations Preceding the Conflict In writing this book on The Invasion and the War in Belgium, our aim has been to give, for the first time, a connected account and a complete survey of all the events of the German invasion and the war in Belgium, from the attack on Liege till after the Battle of the Year. Of course, this account includes only the really important features of that period of recent history, whereas writing on every detail would have been impossible, owing to our lack of knowledge of all these details and also to the fact that it would have required many a volume. That will be the task of the future historians. However, we have gathered sufficient material to be able to expose the facts of the invasion as they really happened. We have submitted our evidence to a careful enquiry and sifting; we have deliberately passed by all that proved to be of a legendary character, and we have adopted, for this work on recent history, the same method we are enjoined to adhere to in dealing with mediæval chronicles or records of modern history. In that sense, then, our sketch is a critical one; and it is also critical for the fact that we have always referred to our sources, so as to enable the reader to control our evidence. Our task would have been impossible without the help of accounts furnished by eye-witnesses of the events, actors themselves in the great drama of Belgium's deeds and sufferings. We have not blindly followed their reports; we have tested them by the comparison of the sources and by an enquiry into their respective value. We are thus greatly indebted to the distinguished Belgian officer who, under the name of Commandant Willy Breton, has published very valuable material in Les pages de gloire de l'armee belge, as may be seen by our numerous references to that source. We have also to acknowledge the information we gathered from the official report of the Belgian General Staff: L'Action de l'armee belge, and from an account published by Le XX Siecle newspaper in a separate booklet, under the title La campagne de l'armee belge. We have also availed ourselves of private reports furnished by officers and soldiers of the Belgian army; and, however small they may be, we have interwoven the report of our own experiences during the early days of the war with the accounts from other sources. As to the chapters or passages relating to atrocities and excesses committed by the invaders, we have been as cautious as possible: only authenticated reports have been used, and where the slightest doubt occurred, we have systematically refrained from using material tainted by that suspicion. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
"People screamed, cried, and groaned. Above the tumult I could distinguish the voices of small children. All this time the soldiers were singing.... Sometime after the first salvo, there was another round of fire and, once again, I was not hit. After this I heard fewer cries, save from time to time a small child calling its mother."?Félix Bourdon, survivor of a mass execution in Dinant, BelgiumIn August 1914, without any legitimate pretext, German soldiers killed nearly 6,000 Belgian noncombatants, including women and children, and burned some 25,000 homes and other buildings. Rehearsals is the first book to provide a detailed narrative history of the German invasion of Belgium as it affected civilians. Based on extensive eyewitness testimony, the book chronicles events in and around the towns of Liége, Aarschot, Andenne, Tamines, Dinant, and Leuven, where the worst of the German depredations occurred. Accounts of the killing, looting, and arson have long been dismissed as "atrocity propaganda," particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. Rehearsals examines the campaign by revisionists that led to voluminous and compelling testimony about German war crimes being discredited.Recently, the case has been made that the violence that came to a peak between August 19 and August 26, 1914, was the result of a spontaneous outbreak of German paranoia about civilian sharpshooters. In Rehearsals, Jeff Lipkes offers compelling evidence that the executions were in fact part of a deliberate campaign of terrorism ordered by military authorities. In his shocking account of events that have been largely overlooked by historians of World War I, Lipkes commemorates the heroism as well as the suffering of the Belgian victims of German aggression.