Word: antwerp
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...plan. Attack has always appealed to the German mind. And now they had such an attack! Their first push had already driven straight across Holland to Rotterdam. Before the Allied Armies rushing northward from the French border had time to reach prepared Belgian positions along the Albert Canal from Antwerp to Liége, a swift and fierce German drive cracked the Liége defenses the second day. *Headquarters watched the progress of German columns up the Meuse Valley towards Namur and westward towards Louvain...
...sweep in a wide circle through Belgium far to the westward around Paris and, still sweeping around, finally pin the French Armies against the Rhine and the Alps. Last week, they watched the execution of another plan, another swing, but a swing in the opposite direction. Pivoting at Antwerp, the scythe swept westward. Its point at Sedan swept onward to Rethel, Laon, St. Quentin. For a time it threatened to swing far enough south to take in Paris, but its surest aim as it swept on day by day was to pin the Allied Armies in Belgium back against...
...Brussels' first child to die. The body was taken to his school for a memorial service of his schoolmates. Salvos blasted the airfields at Nivelles and St. Trond. south and east of Brussels, followed by parachutists. Louvain (the university town), Malines, Hasselt, Verviers were other targets. So were Antwerp and even Ostend, over...
...Chasseurs (guerrilla forest fighters). Another 480,000 men with some training were mobilized, though there was fighting equipment for only about 130,000 of these. Instead of a trench-furrowed valley, Belgium's defense line now was the 250-foot-wide Albert Canal running from Liege northwest to Antwerp, with reinforced concrete blockhouses and pillboxes along its inner bank; with open fields on the far bank to expose an invader; with a flooding system to bog down those fields; with tank traps and barriers, mined highways and bridges...
From Liege up the Meuse to Namur and down through the hills into the rough, forested Ardennes, ran fort systems calculated to hold the mass invader until mass help arrived. From Antwerp through Louvain to Namur ran another line of forts, completed in the last seven months. And across the Belgian hills for 100 miles ran a flexible wall of heavy steel fence set on rollers, calculated to enmesh all tank advances until defensive cannon could demolish them. In 1914, King Albert had to withdraw his forces from Liege after twelve days, first to Brussels, which fell in another four...