Word: frontierisms
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...were mapped for the Third and Second Armies under Generals Hausen and Buülow, respectively, who jumped off from between Aachen and Trier. Hausen's objective before swinging south was near Namur on the Meuse in Belgium. Billow's course pointed for Maubeuge on the French frontier after cracking through the forts at Liége in conjunction with the First Army. That Army, mobilized north of Aachen and led in under the Limburg tip of The Netherlands by General Alexander von Kluck, was, after passing Liége, to execute the widest, swiftest swing...
French resistance along the northwestern frontier was weak, though brave, because the French had not anticipated so wide a movement against them. While Kluck and Bülow drove through British resistance at Mons, the main French offensive, in the Ardennes, failed. The Third and Fourth German Armies crushed through on schedule, and the retreat to the Marne, though orderly, was saved from being a rout with Paris captured only because General Helmuth von Moltke, the German Commander in Chief: 1) weakened Kluck's Army by taking from it troops to police Belgium, 2) abandoned the classic outline...
...strong (instead of the 42,000 available in 1914). The Belgian fort system at Liége and southeast through Battice and Eupen to Malmédy backed up by another system along the Meuse around Namur, is rebuilt on modern lines and stands behind a frontier fringe of trenches and pillboxes. Behind the fort system runs a "Little Maginot Line" constructed with French engineering assistance and, back of that, all the way from Liége around to Antwerp, runs the new Albert Canal: 250 ft. wide, 15 to 20 ft. deep, built as a military obstacle with machine...
...having taken yet her most drastic defense step of all: pulling plugs in the Albert Canal to impede any German advance with a flood. The Dutch, however, did say they were flooding their country, at least experimentally, around Utrecht. Much weaker than the 'Belgians in fortifications along their frontier, the Dutch prepared if necessary to open their Zuider Zee dikes and inundate most of their central provinces, abandoning their entire northeast to the invader and taking national refuge in the Rotterdam-Utrecht-Amsterdam triangle. To give their waters time to rise, the Dutch mined all roads and bridges entering...
...Germany. This was even mooted in an official Moscow broadcast. Brushing it aside, the High Commands decided that no sufficient Polish authority remained in Poland last week to form the nucleus of a useful buffer, that the only thing to do was to draw the technically strongest possible frontier, separating the Russian and German Armies by the physical expanse of three great Polish rivers, the Narew, the Vistula...