Dominic Sandbrook

So people who listen to our first series about the Great War may recall that at the beginning of the war,

belgium resisted the german demands for free passage in august 1914 but within weeks belgium was absolutely steamrollered these extraordinary scenes of the kind of gray ranks like a tide like a kind of tide of teutonic militarism pouring through the streets of brussels just say that a tide of teutonic militarism i did but you know me tom i do i said it in a proving way a tidal wave of teutonic militarism

I love a tidal wave.

I love a peaked helmet.

So the Germans occupied Belgium.

They executed infamously about 6,500 civilians in their reprisals against suspected partisans.

And they burned the medieval core of the city of Louvain library, which I know you were very shocked by as somebody who loves libraries.

So even before today's story begins.

People in Britain and in neutral countries and the United States and so on are primed to see Belgium as a place where Teutonic barbarians in these kind of spiked helmets are carrying out dreadful atrocities against innocent women.

So already there are British posters that sort of say, remember Belgium.

And the image of Belgium as a sort of maiden being violated by slavering Huns.

Completely, yeah.

Holding a maiden in its arms.

Yeah, exactly.

So by the end of 1914, almost all of Belgium is under military occupation.

It's been divided into three occupation zones, and the largest of these, which includes Brussels, is called the General Government, anticipating what's, of course, going to happen to Poland in the Second World War.

And here you have a German general, and he leads a German-dominated administration.

And it's actually a pretty heavy-handed occupation.

So Belgium had been the world's sixth biggest economy before the war.

So much for plucky little Belgium.