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Remembered Today:

Schlieffen Plan


RodB

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Hello

I have resisted this topic so far but have to come to the defence of Gallant Belgium.

It is true that the Belgian Army was not at it's best in 1914 but yet the 3rd Division managed to repel the first German attempts to storm the Liege forts in August. Remember that this army had never seen action in Europe in its history. I think General Leman was quite right to send that Division back to join the main body after that repulse as they would have been lost otherwise.

The Combat at Haelen (Battle of the Silver Helmets if you prefer) was not a grand scale battle but yet the Belgians fought well, reinforcements arrived just in time and they won the day. The effect on Belgian morale was out of proportion to the event itself.

The Belgians also fought well during the siege of Antwerp particularly around the city of Lier. The decision to withdraw the field army was also the right decision. The French and British covered their withdrawal to the Yser where they also fought well with French assistance it is true but the bulk of the fighting was done by the Belgians. Their decision to open the sluices was what saved them in the end though.

Overall they did as well as any allied army of the period. After all the battles of the Frontiers were hardly allied victories no more than Mons or Le Cateau were.

The policy of the Belgian GHQ was to preserve their army intact and only to engage the enemy if they had a good chance of success. This was a sound policy although there was some bad feeling at French GQG who viewed their withdrawal to Antwerp as somewhat unhelpful. The King had to think of the long term and what would become of Belgium after the war. Nobody knew that that day was over 4 years away.

While the killing of civilians was deplorable and unnecessary, it had little or no effect on the military situation although during one of the sorties from Antwerp the Belgians came across some murdered civilians in Hofstad which was supposed to have spurred them on into action against the German perpetrators.

Besides the Royal Marine troops in Antwerp, the main British assistance was the 7th Division operating around the Ghent-Bruges area which covered the Belgian withdrawal to the Yser.

As regards the Schlieffen Plan, the more I read about the more confused I become. Ritter's book is essential reading and I found Terence Zuber's new book to be very enlightening. However I now have more questions than I had before I read these books. I am convinced that Von Schlieffen was not in contact with reality for most of the time.

I will venture one or two opinions at the risk of being pilloried -

I think the resistance at Liege had very little effect on the Schlieffen Plan. The maximum delay was maybe two days at most.

I don't think the Battle of Mons dislocated the Schlieffen plan.

I think the Von Kluck was right to turn south east BEFORE Paris rather than go around the city.

Am enjoying this post and I hope more opinions and contributions will appear soon.

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Andy's comment "There is an old bicycle racing saying "Plan the race, Plan the tactics ... Plan all you want ... then the whistle blows." I believe it's the same in war."

This got me thinking. Was indeed the intent not to slavishly adhere to the SP but to just use it as a useful overall concept, but from there deal with events and realities as they happened ? If so then the problem is our reading of history... commentators harp on about the limited timeframe the SP allowed for the defeat of France while Russioa mobilized, generally treating it as blueprint that had to be exactly reproduced. But as been pointed out, there were too many variables.

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Dear RodB,

That it a very interesting and thought-provoking comment.

I am now more confused than I ever was and will have to start reading the Schlieffen Plan all over again.

I am not convinced either by the timetable whereby France is crushed in 6 weeks before shifting the bulk of the troops towards the east. The big German fear in 1914 was that the campaign of 1870 would be repeated. It took far more men to defeat the "People's Armies" than it took the defeat the Imperial Army and it took longer. This had a very unnerving effect upon Von Moltke senior. It was also the reason why the Germans were obsessed by the possibility of franc-tireurs both in Belgium and northern France.

At what point could the German High Command decide that it was safe to move a large part of their army especially given that the French knew of the ongoing Russian invasion of Prussia. I think it would have taken a very brave commander to make such a decision. I have never read of any provisions in the Schlieffen plan for the transfer of troops eastwards.??

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Hi Jan,

I don't want to get into a debate about whether the Belgians fought very well or just quite well, but I'm curious about this:

"Liege was never a real problem, the passage was secured in a few days with a minimum of troops. The fortresses that remained were mopped up without too much losses. The crossing of the Meuse was also not a really big problem for the Germans."

IIRC, Liege did not finally fall until 16 August. Granted the Germans had largely bypassed it by then anyway, with the fall of some of the forts, but surely the incomplete capture must have imposed some drag on AOK 1 and 2. Especially given that the modified SP that von Moltke was using provided for Liege to be siezed by a coup de main within 2 days. That's more like a 10 day delay. Or were the Germans running trains through Liege at full capacity within a few days of the invasion?

Andy, RodB - spot on. With an elephant stamp in this case. We must remember that the SP was not initially, a plan of invasion at all. It was a General Staff study in examining "what ifs" (sometimes useful, Joris), and had little grounding in reality, since the forces included in the "Plan" that did not exist at the time or in 1914. Any plan will go pear-shaped as soon as it runs up against reality. But a good plan will last you longer than a bad one (will take longer for the "reality gap" to become a problem). And one with flexibility will last better than a rigid one. Your observations are probably right, but they go for all plans.

And speaking of what ifs, I will leave you with a beauty from William Jannen, which sums up for me what I referred to as a failure of imagination.

"But it was the generals who destroyed Imperial Germany. Suppose that Moltke had not dropped his uncle's plan for a defensive posture in the west. A Russian mobilisation would not then have forced Germany to attack France, and the [diplomatic] difficulties for France and Russia would have been enormous. Even if Austria-Hungary had gone forward with its invasion of Serbia, as it almost certainly would have done, what could Russia do - attack Austria-Hungary and risk a war with Germany? War with Germany was the last thing any Russian wanted. Even assuming that Russia was willing to risk a German war to defend Serbia, Germany would then be defending Austria against a Russian attack, and France, however reluctantly, would have to attack Germany. Under those conditions, Britain would not have come into the war for months, if at all. That was the sequence Bethmann and the kaiser had assumed would follow when they told Austria to go ahead on 5 and 6 July. They were reasonable assumptions by the Great Power standards of the day, but the Schleiffen Plan robbed them of all hope of success."

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Dear Duckman,

As the German concentration was not completed until 13 August and operations could not properly commence until 14 August, the final fall of Liege on 16 August cannot really be said to have delayed the invasion very much. The Belgians maintain that it imposed a 10 day delay whereas the German and the French estimate that it imposed no delay at all.

Even if Liege had fallen after 48 hours, the German armies would not have been able to advance until 14 August anyway. It was important to engage Liege from the start in case it was used as a concentration point by the Belgian army and allied reinforcements

German troops (Von Marwitz) had already crossed the Meuse north of Liege on the first day. The combat at Haelen took place on 12 August.

Regards

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As the German concentration was not completed until 13 August

Thanks Dikke B.

That makes sense. I had it in mind that the concentration (against Liege) must have been completed rather earlier than that. Explains the "two day" versus "ten day" very nicely.

Thinking of the timing of the development of the Schlieffen Plan and the alliance between Russia and France, was there an alternative plan for a two front war PRIOR to Schlieffen becoming chief of staff?

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Dikke your bit at the end of your posts is something that interests me, Churchill saying the war was decided in the 1st 20 days. I don't get it unless he meant 20 days from 1st British action which would take us to Marne 1, if so I agree but 20 days from August 1 to 3 makes no sense.

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Dear Duckman,

Von Moltke had put together a special task force to seize Liege ahead of the main army mobilisation which is why the fighting started there ahead of everything else.

With the benefit of hindsight and bearing in mind your quotation from William Jannen, it might have been better for the Germans to have waited until they had fully mobilised before crossing the border into Belgium. They would have had their Dikke Berthas ready to go on day one and there was the possibility the Britain would not have committed itself in the absence of a casus belli.

Although Albert wanted to deploy the entire Belgian field army (117,000 men) along the Meuse from Liege to Namur, the Chief of Staff would not allow it as this would be seen as an anti-German movement. He insisted that the army be deployed facing France, Britain, the Netherlands and Germany so whenever the Germans decided to move on Liege they would have found no more than one Division to support the city. General Leman, Military Governor of Liege and commander of the 3rd Division, was not allowed to construct trenches or other field works between the forts as this would be seen as a hostile act. He did not get permission until 3 August when it was too late. The Germans invaded on the 4th.

For German plans before the 1905 Schlieffen plan, I can only refer you to either Ritter's book or the new book by Terence Zuber both of which are fascinating but hardly a light read.

Regards

Dikke Bertha

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Dear Paul Guthrie,

The quotation from Churchills preface to Liaison 1914 says "the first twenty days of fighting" so I assume he means from Mons to the Marne. This would ignore the fighting from 4 August which didn't count as the BEF was not involved.

Churchill may have been using some broad sweeping artistic licence and you may be the first person ever to have analysed or queried it. I certainly never thought about it until now. In fact the decision was not reached until the end of the "Race to the Sea" as the armies were still mobile up to then.

Regards

Dikke Bertha

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From the viewpoint of world economics, the German nation was beaten before it all began!

Niall Ferguson takes that view in The Pity of War, all thru war world currency markets bet against Germany.

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From the viewpoint of world economics, the German nation was beaten before it all began!

Only after the and of 1914. They could have won militarily before then. They certainly had no hope once the Americans decided to throw their financial and industrial lot in with the allies.

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From the viewpoint of world economics, the German nation was beaten before it all began!

Only after the and of 1914. They could have won militarily before then. They certainly had no hope once the Americans decided to throw their financial and industrial lot in with the allies.

I am not sure they could have won after 1st Marne & see no way after 1st Ypres, after that they never threatened the channel ports which allowed the British Army to become a major force later.

I am also not sure US threw support to anyone, would have sold supplies to the devil if he had the money & was not blockaded. US support came much later, this was just business.

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I think the real reason why Germany lost two conventional wars was that the country was virtually landlocked.

In both world wars ,Germany and its occupied territories were subject to an allied sea blockade which deprived them of the raw materials required to wage war.During the Great War,despite their own U Boat offensive on the sea traffic to and fro the British Isles,by 1917 the Allies had in turn blockaded Germany so effectively that the war machine was adversely affected and the country was reduced to to a stravation diet that initiated civil unrest.

During the Second World War, the blockade was equally effective, a new war driven by oil.The U Boat offensive against the British Isles resulted in the war supply lifeline being initially crippled. However by 1943, the Allies had won the Battle of the Atlantic and the Allies (notably the US were launching shipping faster than the U Boat fleet could sink Allied shipping.) Oil supplies were always going to be critical to the German war machine which surprisingly depended heavily on horse drawn supply transport in the early campaigns. By 1941 the RAF had identified 17 major synthetic oil refineries which were bombed frequently by both the RAF and USAAF such that by the autumn of 1944, Luftwaffe pilot training was vitrually non exsistent and aviation petrol was reserved mainly for operational units.

Now if Hitler had beaten the Allies to the manufacture of the atomic bomb,it would have been a different tale,landlocked or not.

Regarding the Schlieffen Plan, wasn't the main principle to deliver a decisive blow to France (seen as the main Western oppponent )and knock them out of the war within 6 weeks before the Russians had time to fully mobilise?A scheme with a complementary plan of trying to ensure that Germany would not have to fight on both a West front and an Eastern front simultaneously.A gamble which failed in both wars, albeit in the second it took longer to materialise.

An interesting subject.

Regards

Frank East

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Zuber seems to say there never was a"Schlieffen Plan" in 1914, the idea grew after the war... John Keegan reckons Schlieffen had already decided years before that the right wing could not achieve what it had to achieve, i.e. a knockout, due to lack of men and transport, and also that a war of attrition couldn't be won... it didn't help eitrher when France learned how to use railway timetables and upped conscription to 3 years; seems the plan was filed away for use anyway. Moltke comes accross as the culprit, effectively panicking into a war he must have known he couldn't win. Looks to me like Sclieffen has been much maligned, he really did his homework, all the calculations, and never said to the Kaiser "here it is your majesty, a plan guaranteed to destroy France and Russia" - it was never finished.

What should have happened :-

Bethmann Hollweg : Russia is mobilizing. If we are to have war now is the time, before it completes its army expansion.

Kaiser : Very well. Moltke, execute the Schlieffen Plan, and we'll destroy France while we're at it.

Moltke : Uh... your majesty, we still don't think it'll work, it was only ever a concept.

Kaiser : You're fired. Falkenhayn - can we defend against France and attack in the East ?

Falkenhayn : Your majesty, we have no plan for that either.

Kaiser : You're fired. Chancellor, tell those Austrian lunatics to cancel mobilization. Tell the Tzar it was all a mistake, we have no intention of mobilizing. Tell the English we accept their offer to mediate a peace conference. And tell Hindenburg I have a job for him.

Bethmann Hollweg : Yes, you majesty.

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I take the view that what we understand of the Schlieffen Plan is largely a myth created in the 1920's by the German General staff to explain away their failure and blame it on a few dead generals who could not answer back.

Shown below is a piece I wrote earlier in the year for a discussion elsewhere:

In 1919, the historian and publicist Hans Delbrück wrote that the Germans had adopted the wrong plan in 1914. Giving reasons, he argued that they should have defended in the west, avoiding a breach of Belgian neutrality, and attacked in the east. At that stage, no details of the German war plan had been published.

The defence of the General Staff was quite quick in coming. In 1920, Hermann von Kuhl set out what was to become the “party line” that Moltke had failed to understand Schlieffen's brilliant plan. This was followed up in 1921 by Wolfgang Foerster, who included a map from Schlieffen's papers showing a total of 7 active corps and 6 ersatz corps making the famous move west of Paris. However, Foerster aslo acknowledged that Schlieffen's study was concerned with a war on one front only and needed am army larger than the Germans had. At about the same time, the Reichsarchiv claimed that Schlieffen's plan had failed because of mistakes by Moltke, Bülow (commander 2nd Army and also directing 1st Army) and Lt Col Hentsch, Moltke's liaison officer. Ludendorff wrote that Moltke had followed Schlieffen's concept but had failed in execution of it. Although Schlieffen employed imaginary divisions in his 1906 study, Ludendorff pointed out that in 1914 the Germans actually employed 54 divisions on the right, as in the actual 1905-06 war plan. This “party line” continues through to 1929, when Groener misrepresented Schlieffen's 1906 study, still unpublished, to “prove” that the German army had been strong enough.

Thus, during the 1920's, without publication of either the German war plan or Schlieffen's 1906 study, a position was established which has basically been followed by most historians since. My earliest sources which take this line are dated 1929(1) and 1934(2) and the Reicharchiv's official history took the same line, arguing that the imaginary divisions in the 1906 study were a programme for the future.

The Surviving Documents

Many of the original documents were lost when the Reichsarchiv at Potsdam was bombed in the last weeks of WWII, but some documents survive. Schlieffen's 1906 study did survive, but was not published until 1956 by Gerhard Ritter. Ritter himself was critical of Schlieffen's ideas, but the point I am making is that the established view is based on secondary sources which take the part of the General Staff, not on contemporary study of original sources.

Another important surviving document is a working manuscript by the historian Wilhelm Dieckmann, probably written in the late 1930's. Dieckmann, a wartime officer, had worked in the Reichsarchiv since 1920. The manuscript only covers Schlieffen's studies up to 1904, but shows that Schlieffen always sent a strong army to the east and always preferred counter-offensives to first strikes. It shows that from the time Schlieffen took up his post in 1891, his ideas consistently evolved along these lines (3).

The final important series of documents from the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Frieburg and some other sources give details of the General Staff strategic map exercises for 1904/05, as shown below.

1904/05 Map Exercises

We know of four exercises in which Schlieffen played the German side.

1.1904. The German army deployed from Aachen to Strasbourg, with 17 corps on the right. The French attacked in strength and forced the Germans to fight the decisive battle between Metz and Strasbourg, with the three right wing armies marching south through Belgium.

2.1904. The French invaded southern Germany and decisively defeated the Germans.

3.1905. Schlieffen played against three successive opponents:

- in the first war game, the decisive battle was fough in Belgium,

- in the second, the French attacked south of Metz and German forces were shifted to meet them from the right to the left.

- in the third, the French attacked on both sides of Metz and Schlieffen again sent significant reinforcements for a counter-attack.

4.November-December 1905. Schlieffen played both sides himself to the 42nd day of mobilisation. With simultaneous offensives on the eastern and western front, he used the rail network to move sufficient forces east to defeat the Russians and, when he had done so, to move forces back from the east and from Alsace to defeat the French in a decisive battle in Belgium and the Ardennes.

He wrote his famous 1906 study after he retired and there is no evidence that he ever played it as a map exercise. There is evidence, however, that its purpose was to calculate and make a case for the size of army needed to win a war on two fronts, for he repeatedly included divisions in his exercises which never existed and these figured greatly in the 1906 study. In fact, he was using the size of army he calculated Germany could raise by employing all available manpower. His view was that without an army of this size, Germany could not hope to win against the combined forces of France and Russia.

Moltke

Moltke's 1906 map exercise followed a similar plan to Schlieffen in 1905 and by 1908 he was basically following the line he would take in 1914. This was that the German army would attack into Belgium and Luxembourg and attack the French where they were found to be. He thought that with Belgium and Britain as a allies, the French would defend on the frontier and attack through the Ardennes, which is of course what they did not do initially in 1914.

It is true that a move west of Paris was a variant which Schlieffen considered in the event that the French held a line from Verdun to Paris, but Moltke appears to have rejected this when he was evaluating Schlieffen's plan in 1911, due to insufficient forces and his belief then that the French would attack in Lorraine.

The Actuality

I do not intend to plot out the German movements in 1914, as plenty of sources do this well, but it does seem to me that the Germans were never heading west of Paris. Their entire series of movements seem dedicated to finding the French army, with 1st and 2nd Armies attempting to turn the flank, wherever it might be found. This seems to me to be consistent with all the real pre-war planning.

I just find it too incredible to believe that Bülow, with Kluck's acquiescence, would abandon the plan on his own authority if it had been at the heart of the German strategy. He would have been thoroughly familiar with his orders and followed them, even allowing for the bad communications with Moltke and the fact that the Germans undoubtedly made mistakes like failing to locate the BEF.

Further reading:

Ritter, Gerhard: The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth, London 1958

Zuber, Terrence: Inventing the Schlieffen Plan, Oxford University Press, 2002

Zuber, Terrence: The Schlieffen Plan – Fantasy or Catastrophe, in History Today, September 2002

Footnotes:

(1) The Army Quarterly, July 1929: Review of the Schlieffen Plan, Anon.

(2) Liddell Hart, B H: History of the First World War, London 1970 (text as in the 1934 edition)

(3) Discovered after reunification among Reichsarchiv papers formerly in the possession of the DDR

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Hello ,

Could not resist posting one of my favourite cartoons that illustrates well

Parts of the discussion of this topic here . from a news paper in 1914.

The caption says Belgian valiantly holds the German

@+

Patrick

belg.jpg

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Kaiser : You're fired. Chancellor, tell those Austrian lunatics to cancel mobilization. Tell the Tzar it was all a mistake, we have no intention of mobilizing. Tell the English we accept their offer to mediate a peace conference. And tell Hindenburg I have a job for him.

Bethmann Hollweg : Yes, you majesty.

:lol::lol:

If only....

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Dear Angie 999

I fully agree that Von Kluck's mission was to turn the extreme left of the French wherever it was found. I have stated already above that I think that Von Kluck was right to turn south east before Paris as this was the correct thing to do AS HE SAW IT AT THAT TIME. To have done otherwise would have been suicide.

Certainly Schlieffen made no realistic provision for dealing with Paris other than vague notions of moving second line units to invest what was the largest and strongest fortress in the world. No transport arrangement were made for this notional force. There were no units set aside following up behind the main body to deal with the city and it would have been unthinkable to have passed it from the west and south without such precautions.

Von Bulow was a conservative general and the absence of communications from headquarters would have made him stick to his original plan all the more. He would not have allowed himself any flexibility in his interpretation of orders.

The Germans were aware of the existence of a Paris garrison but did not realise that it was so large (the 6th Army) or could strike so swiftly. Von Kluck assumed that the BEF were no longer part of the equation (which they would not have been had Sir John French had his way).

Regards

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Kaiser : You're fired. Chancellor, tell those Austrian lunatics to cancel mobilization. Tell the Tzar it was all a mistake, we have no intention of mobilizing. Tell the English we accept their offer to mediate a peace conference. And tell Hindenburg I have a job for him.

Bethmann Hollweg : Yes, your majesty.

That job being?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hmm, well wanted to add my 2 eurocents...

Dirtyduck, you wrote that you have been pondering what would have happend if

"ii) If Germany had offered financial and territorial compensation for using Belgium as a conduit to attack France;"

--> this is exactly what Germany did in their ultimatum to Belgium, didn't it?

And just imagine, Wales (just an example) would be on the continent in place of Belgium and the Germans would have asked 1914 to pass through Wales, using it's infrastructures, roads etc (so in fact giving up independence) to invade France. Would the British governement have agreed? I don't think so.

I don't think that from a strategic point of view the Belgian army had a lot of influence on the Schliefen plan, but for me it doesn't matter, they defended my home country against an invading army and that's what matters (alongside the French and Brits which where the ones who undid the schliefen plan).

Wondering if the Belgian army fought 'well or exeptionally well' is somehow weird, it's like saying "well the Irish fought well, the English exceptionnaly well and the Scots not".

And just for your information, coming with a car from the german border you need exactly 20 minutes to drive into the outskirts of Liège and within 30 minutes you are in the city centre. Liège is very near the German border. Exactly like 1914. And if the Belgian army hold up the Germans during 2 days I say: WELL DONE.

If they hold them up during 10 days: WELL DONE AS WELL!

Well sorry, hope I din't got too much off topic.

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We pause for an ancillary comment ....

The above posts go to show you ... or show Americans at least how tiny Europe really is ... our (US) concept of space is almost apriori set on "vast" ... the idea of going through a country in under an hour is beyond belief. Heck it takes 20 minutes to drive from the outskirts of Dallas to the innner outskirts of Dallas. Heck, Dallas the (Real Texas) Fort Worth share an airport and it's an hour and a half to drive from Downtown to Downtown on superhighways ...

Now, back to our program ...

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Andy has come a long way since he joined the forum. He can now discuss Texas without claiming John Bell Hood was a Texan! B)

A shameless hijack on my part! :angry: Bad!

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Well, he should have been a Texan ... we don't say Hood's Kentuckians, do we? It weren't Kentuckians who created an undying reputation ... Fort Hood is in Texas, not Kentucky ... you've got Fort Knox ... a great masssaachewsets boy, I believe ... I lived on Fort Knox for a while and driven the dixiedieway ... Like Sam Houston ... I got here (Texas) as soon as I could ...

But I believe we were talking of Belgium ...

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