Page:The Great War.djvu/130

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CHAPTER XXI THE GERMANS TAKE BRUSSELS AND START FOR FRANCE

  • " I HE Belgians were defeated at Louvain on

"*■ August 19 and the Germans entered Brussels the next day. Through this city for two days the vast army poured and from stray reports from the Belgian capital in the next few days the world was to learn that Germany had in fact concentrated more than half of her first line army, perhaps 900,000 men, In this tremendous thrust at France across the Belgian plain. As regiment after regiment, the men clad in those grey uniforms, which were previously unknown to their opponents, swept along the Brus- sels boulevards, they broke into the " goose step," and this little detail fixed itself upon the mind and the imagination of the world, which in the next few days was to discuss the possibility that the triumphal march through Brussels might soon be repeated in Paris. It was with the German occupation of Brus- sels, that the real power, force, menace of the great German offensive were first brought home to neutral and foe alike. To understand the next and second phase of Ger- man operations in Belgium and toward France there

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