220 The Great War rible Peninsular War, in which Spanish women vied with the men in their ferocity, their courage and their determination to kill invaders at any cost. In the opening days of the present war, when the little Belgian Army was fighting from Liege to Brussels, facing the screen of cavalry which the Ger- mans stretched before their main advance, a credu- lous world attached far too much importance to Bel- gian battles, saw far too great results flowing from mere skirmishes like that at Haelen. A stray war correspondent in Brussels when the Germans ar- rived reported that one German officer, seizing a Brussels newspaper filled with reports of Belgian " victories," burst into a loud laugh and threw the sheet away. A different situation existed, however, when the main German Army wheeled left at Brussels and started for Paris. Instantly it became necessary to detach three army corps to watch Antwerp, to which the Belgian Army had withdrawn; to mask Ostend, where British marines had been landed; to cover the railways, which were the life lines of German Armies now turned south to France. Behind the forts of Antwerp the Belgians stood like Wellington's vet- erans behind the lines of Torres Vedras in the Peninsular War, ready to strike whenever the forces before them were weakened. Three army corps, then, were removed from the first line of German invasion at the crucial moment. Looking back upon the desperate days of the great