Attack on Lieja: the massacre in Herve

From the first night of the German advance in Belgium, Belgian snipers (or franctireurs) fired as best they could, from ditches and buildings, to the German soldiers who occupied with so much confidence and apparent ease the villages of east Belgium.

The persistence of those shots aroused the fury of the occupation troops, who considered that, having defeated an army in open combat, they should no longer harass them. The Commander-in-Chief of the 2nd German Army, General Erich Ludendorff, recalled later that the first night of the war he was awakened by “a few quick and energetic shots, some of which were aimed at our home”.

That would happen in the small Belgian town of Herve, a small town of about 5,000 souls. The commune of Herve was invaded at the early afternoon of August 4, 1914 by the 14th German Infantry Brigade, which had arrived on the national highway from Aix-la-Chapelle.

British historian John Terraine comments that “Herve, it was intact on August 4, however, it did not last long.” A German journalist who toured the town a few days later found it “totally devastated”. Of the about fifty houses there were in the town, he reported, “there are only nineteen left. There's corpses everywhere and everywhere it smells like burning. “The church is a pile of broken ruins.”

Together, they had made Herve pay for the snipers' night-time firing. The Germans insisted that the Belgians were using civilians for the task, to wreak havoc behind the front line. The Belgians responded that those responsible were well-constructed army detachments, or retired soldiers, or civil guards, and that it was a legitimate act of war against an invader.

International law was on the side of snipers. The Fifth Convention of The Hague of 1907 not only prohibited belligerants from moving troops through neutral territory, as the Germans were doing in Belgium, but also stated that resistance to such movements could not be considered a hostile act.

Following the first harsh retaliations by the Germans, the Belgian government banned all local resistance. Unable to protect their citizens by appealing international law, I try to do so by keeping them away. The Germans, frustrated by the intensity of the Belgian military opposition, soon began to consider retaliation against Belgian civilians at least as a way of preventing any disorder behind the lines.

What they considered the Belgian military resistance irritating, although useless, was evident in the wake of a kidnapping by the first secretary of the German delegation in Brussels, Baron Von Stumm, who on August 5 told his American counterpart: "Poor fools! Why don't they stay out of the range of the stapler?. We don't want to hurt them, but if they disturb us, we will crush them. ”

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