CHAPTER XXXIX A GERMAN ATTACK UPON ANTWERP TN the closing days of September, while the Battle '*' of the Alsne continued without cessation and with no promise of solution, the Germans suddenly began a considerable attack upon Antwerp. So ex- tensive were the preparations that they seemed ex- plicable only as the evidence of a grim determination to rid themselves of the intolerable burden, the present hindrance and the future peril, if at last they should be compelled to retire from France, which had long been discoverable in the brave and energetic operations of the Belgian Army, commanded by its intrepid sovereign and operating about the Antwerp fortress. The determination of the Germans to press siege operations against Antwerp revealed in the closing days of September was simply explicable as the de- sire to rid themselves of an Intolerable burden, a present hindrance, and in case of defeat in France a possible peril in the future. What Spain was to Napoleon in the latter days of the First Empire, Belgium had plainly become for the Kaiser, and the very atrocities, sufferings, brutalities of the Belgian campaign were but incomplete repetitions of the ter- 219