Part 4

One question of which Denmark and the Schleswigers showed great desire to keep clear was the Kiel Canal. Even the widest limit of evacuation proposed carefully left a belt of Schleswig territory between its southern border and the canal, lest what was fundamentally a question of popular rights might become complicated with a wholly distinct international problem. Only in case of the internationalization of the canal would its fate have reacted on the Schleswig problem by leaving an isolated strip of German territory to the north which might then have been separated from Germany and attached to the adjacent Danish territory. Whatever might have been said for the internationalization of this great waterway, the question was not seriously considered at the Conference. The parallel to Suez and Panama was too close! The treaty leaves the canal under German control, but provides that it shall be open on terms of entire equality to the vessels of commerce and of war of all nations at peace with Germany.[9]

The island of Heligoland, which England had seized from Denmark in 1807 and ceded to Germany in exchange for Zanzibar in 1890, is not restored to either of its former owners. Instead it is stipulated that all fortifications and harbor works there shall be destroyed by German labor and at Germany’s expense, and that no similar works shall be constructed in the future.[10] Immunity for the future might do something to offset the great price which England had paid for Zanzibar throughout the World War.

The case of Belgium at the Peace Conference was widely different from that of Denmark. Denmark had remained neutral; her neutrality had been respected by others, and had even been a source of commercial profit; and at the end of the war, without the slightest effort on her part, she saw all her desires gratified in Schleswig. Indeed, her only fear was lest she should receive more territory than she wanted. The neutrality of Belgium, specially guaranteed by an international treaty, and thus far more binding on her neighbors than that of Denmark, had been violated by Germany at the very outbreak of the war. Belgium had suffered more than four years of German occupation, including the systematic spoliation of her farms, her factories, and her railroads, and the deliberate attempt to divide her people into two separate Walloon and Flemish states; she had barely escaped permanent incorporation with Germany. Yet all this time she had fought as best she could beside the Allies; she had made heavy sacrifices; she had stood for international right. Belgium expected much from the peace, and Belgium was in large measure disappointed.

Belgium was disappointed on the economic side, for she was flooded with depreciated German currency which the Allies did not take over, and her hopes for full priority on the account of restoration and reparation were not entirely fulfilled. Indeed, it soon became apparent that the general bill for reparation would far exceed the ability of Germany to pay, and that there were not resources enough in all Germany to meet that restoration of invaded territory upon which President Wilson had declared “the whole world was agreed.” Belgium had suffered less than France by the destruction of war itself, for her territory, save in the case of the Meuse fortresses and the battle zone in Flanders, had not been fought over; but the German occupation which she had borne in equal measure was relatively far more serious, for it affected the whole country and not merely a part, and it produced stagnation of industry and cessation of commerce on a scale that destroyed enterprise and left idleness as well as poverty in its stead.

In territorial matters Belgium’s desires, save for a small correction of the German frontier, concerned neutral powers, Holland and Luxemburg, which were not members of the Peace Conference and not subject to its jurisdiction. The most that the Conference could do was to help in the adjustment of Belgium’s claims, and Belgium feels strongly that the Conference did not help enough.

Finally, Belgium was dissatisfied with her whole position at the Conference. During the war she had acted as one of the Allies and had her representation in the Allied councils. At Paris she was only a small power, limited to three delegates--at first even to two--and excluded from the guiding and deciding group of the Five Great Powers. Even the decisions which directly concerned her were taken by the Council of Ten or the Council of Four. She was outside, while Italy and Japan were inside. Individually her delegates sat on important committees, but there were times when Belgium must have felt far removed from the central tasks of the Conference, in the outer limbo occupied by Liberia, Panama, and Siam. A Belgian told the story of an officer who had lost both legs. “You will always be a hero,” said a consoling friend. “No,” replied the officer, “I shall be a hero for a year and a cripple for the rest of my life.” Belgium felt that the days of her position as a hero were over. You will recall Mr. Dooley on Lieutenant Hobson: “I’m a hero,” said the Lieutenant. “Are ye, faith?” said Admiral Dewey, “Well, I can’t do anything f’r ye in that line. All th’ hero jobs on this boat is compitintly filled be mesilf.”

Let us call to mind so much of Belgium’s history as is necessary to approach her modern problems. Belgium as a separate and independent state has existed only since 1830, but her national history goes back into the Middle Ages. Easy of access from both the Rhine and the north of France, the territory of modern Belgium has always been a highroad of peoples, for migration, commerce, and war, and the natural meeting-point of races and civilizations from north and south. It formed a part of the great middle kingdom created between France and Germany by the partition of the Frankish empire in the ninth century, and with the break-up of the middle kingdom it became a natural object of ambition from both sides. The various feudal principalities which shared this territory in the Middle Ages divided their allegiance between the king of France and the German emperor; and it was not till the fifteenth century that the rise of a new middle kingdom under the dukes of Burgundy brought the region of the Netherlands, northern as well as southern, under a single hand and made them for practical purposes independent of France and Germany. Enlarged toward the east by the Emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century, the territories of the Netherlands comprised seventeen provinces and included substantially what is now Holland and Belgium.

By the marriage of Mary, heiress of Burgundy, to Maximilian of Austria in 1477 the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands passed to the house of Hapsburg, and thus to their grandson, the Emperor Charles V. Upon the division of his possessions in 1556 they went with Spain to the so-called Spanish branch of the family, represented by Philip II. Religious and political reasons led to the great revolt against Philip II in 1568, a movement in which the whole seventeen provinces joined. The skilful policy of Philip’s general, Alexander Farnese, succeeded in detaching the southern provinces, which had remained for the most part Catholic, from the Protestant, or United, Netherlands of the north, and from 1579 on the southern provinces led a separate existence under Spanish rule, being generally known as the Spanish Netherlands. In this period they lost considerable territory on the north to the Dutch and on the south to the French.

Upon the division of the Spanish dominions by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the Spanish Netherlands were in the following year transferred to Austria, and were known as the Austrian Netherlands until their conquest by the armies of the French Revolution in 1794. They were then incorporated with France (1795) and organized into nine departments, a state of affairs which lasted until 1814.

By the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the northern and the southern Netherlands were reunited, under the rule of a king of the house of Nassau. After a separation of one hundred and thirty-five years the union proved unsatisfactory to the southern population. Marked differences of religion, economic interest, and language produced friction from the start, which was aggravated by the exclusive policy of the Dutch, who, though a minority, monopolized the higher offices and enforced the use of the Dutch language. The revolutionary movement of 1830 kindled a revolt in the southern provinces, and a separate government was organized under a constitutional monarch, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. The separation was declared “final and irrevocable” by a convention of representatives of the five Great Powers meeting in London in 1831, and the treaty was accepted by Holland in 1839. The boundaries of the new kingdom were, as we shall see, drawn in a manner quite unsatisfactory to the Belgians.

The treaty of 1839 guaranteed the independence and the neutrality of Belgium, while at the same time it placed restrictions on the new state. By Article VII it was provided that

Belgium ... shall form an independent and perpetually neutral state. It shall be bound to observe the same neutrality toward all other states.

It will thus be seen that, while the roots of Belgian nationality lie deep in the past, the modern state was established in a somewhat artificial form, its boundaries drawn and its international status fixed by the Powers, not by Belgium itself. Its frontiers are in no direction ‘natural’ frontiers. At the same time Belgium is dependent in the closest way upon the outside world. It possesses the densest population of any country in Europe--the same number of inhabitants as the state of Pennsylvania, with one-fourth the area. In spite of a highly intensive cultivation, the soil is unable to produce sufficient food, so that sixty per cent of the consumption of cereals is imported. For this large importation Belgium is unable to pay in minerals, its only considerable underground resource being coal, of which there has been no surplus for export since 1910. It must consequently pay for its imports by exports of manufactured products, for which the raw materials are likewise for the most part imported.

Belgium is thus a highly industrialized country, with a large manufacturing population. Its principal industries are iron furnaces and rolling mills, zinc works, machinery, arms, and tools; textiles, especially cotton goods; glass, cement, and ceramic wares; leather; and chemical products. Commerce is also of the highest importance in the economic life of Belgium. She requires foreign imports of raw materials and foreign markets for her manufactured articles. She has a very large transit trade, en route to and from Germany and northern France. In volume of trade Antwerp is one of the greatest of European ports, abreast of Hamburg and London. The system of railways and canals is elaborate, with the highest per capita mileage in Europe.

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Of the territorial adjustments desired by Belgium, the least considerable concerned her Prussian frontier. Belgium (or at that time the Belgian part of Holland) and Prussia became neighbors in 1815, in consequence of the Prussian annexations on the left bank of the Rhine. The boundary then drawn was not based upon considerations of language or history, still less upon any expressed desire of the inhabitants, but was fixed primarily so as to give Prussia a certain number of people as compensation for her failure to receive Saxony. She thus acquired the eastern part of the lands of the abbey of Stavelot-Malmedy; the territory of St. Vith, which had belonged to Luxemburg; and a portion of Limburg in the region of Eupen. This land was largely hill and forest, of no great economic value, and it was used by Prussia chiefly for military purposes. Strategic railroads, of little importance in time of peace, were constructed along the Belgian and Luxemburg frontiers, and the great military camp of Elsenborn was built in this very region to serve for the concentration of troops against the invasion of Belgium. Liège, Belgium’s great industrial center, was only eighteen miles from the German border, and the taking of Liège in 1914 opened up the whole valley of the Meuse.

Belgium asked a minimum of protection for the future. It was plain that such protection could not come from any considerable advance of the frontier on the part of so small a state, but must be found chiefly in the demilitarization of the Left Bank and in measures for general peace. At least, however, Belgium might ask control over some of the military railroads and over the camp of Elsenborn.

If purely strategic arguments had prevailed, they would have carried the Belgian frontier forward to the Rhine or to the mountain range of the Eiffel. Within the narrower limits chosen, the strategic considerations were reënforced by others: the economic orientation of this region toward Belgium rather than toward Germany; the historic connection before 1815; and the opportunity for reparation, for this sparsely peopled territory was rich in forests, which might serve to replace the Belgian forests which had been systematically destroyed by Germany during the war, leaving a frontier line which can be followed for miles by the standing timber on the German side and its absence on the Belgian. The linguistic line was less sharp. German was spoken in certain districts on the Belgian side; while, in spite of a century of Germanization, Walloon still prevailed in Malmedy and the neighboring Prussian villages. Indeed, Malmedy was in many ways like a Belgian town, and German troops in 1914 are said to have begun pillaging here under the impression that they were already in Belgium.

The actual wishes of the population in the ceded districts had not been expressed, so it was provided in the treaty that during the six months after its coming into force the Belgian authorities should open registers in which the inhabitants might record a desire to have any part of the ceded territory remain under German sovereignty, the results to be passed upon by the League of Nations. It would have been more consistent with the rest of the treaty if the League had also been entrusted with securing the original expression of opinion. The territory transferred by the treaty comprised 376 square miles with a population of 61,000, constituting the Kreise of Malmedy and Eupen, whose administrative limits were preserved in order to interfere as little as possible with local conditions.[11]

The treaty also settled an old controversy in this region respecting the district of Moresnet, disputed between Belgium (until 1839 Holland) and Prussia since 1815, when two inconsistent boundary lines of the treaty of Vienna left in doubt the sovereignty over a triangular area of about 900 acres which contained the valuable zinc mine of Vieille Montagne. Neither side would yield, and a convention of 1816 which provided for the neutralization of the area under a _condominium_ or joint administration lasted until the war. With the exhaustion of the mine the district has declined in importance, but the anomaly needed clearing up, as the Germans had frequently declared. The treaty assigns the disputed territory to Belgium, and adds a square mile or so in Prussian Moresnet, comprising the domanial and communal woods.[12]

Far more important for Belgium was the question of her relations with another eastern neighbor, the duchy of Luxemburg. An integral part of the southern Netherlands until the French Revolution, Luxemburg had in 1815 been made into a grand duchy and handed over to the king of Holland. It revolted with Belgium in 1830 and sent members to the Belgian Parliament, but on the final separation of Belgium and Holland in 1839 it was divided, the western or Walloon portion going to Belgium, and the eastern or German-speaking portion continuing as the grand duchy. The dynastic union with Holland came to an end in 1890, when a divergence in the laws of succession established a separate line of grand dukes.

The neutrality of Luxemburg was specially and perpetually guaranteed by the Powers, Prussia included, in 1867; but the state was not in every respect independent. Cut off from its Belgian markets by the separation of 1839, it entered three years later the German Zollverein, of which it continued a member until the close of the World War. Its railroads also passed under German control in 1871, with a proviso that they should not be used for military purposes. They were nevertheless extended and double-tracked in the direction of France and Belgium, for military reasons which became clearly apparent in 1914. August 1 of that year the German occupation of Luxemburg began, and the country remained a base of military operations throughout the war. Unlike Belgium, Luxemburg made no resistance. Indeed, its government was considered very friendly to Germany--_une dynastie boche_, the French called it--and the final victory of the Allies was followed January 15 by the abdication of the grand duchess, Marie Adelheid, in favor of her sister Charlotte.

It was plain that the Allies, Belgium and France most of all, could not permit a return of Luxemburg to German control; and it was equally plain that, whatever political independence the grand duchy retained, it could not stand economically alone. With but 260,000 people and 1000 square miles of territory, it was not large enough for that; and its principal industry, iron, needed the coal and the markets of adjacent lands. Belgium felt that Luxemburg would naturally turn to her. The people were Catholic; the language of government and of the educated classes was French; there were strong ties of tradition and sentiment between the two countries. Belgium counted, counted too confidently, on the result. She forgot the strong feeling for local independence among the Luxemburgers, who, as their national song runs, ‘want to remain what they are’; she forgot the strength of dynastic tradition and clerical influence. For any union with Belgium spelled the end of the local dynasty and of national identity, and might, it was feared, mean the swallowing up of a conservative Catholic people by a larger and more Socialistic neighbor.

France also wanted Luxemburg. She wanted it for purposes of defence, so as to prevent a repetition of 1914; she wanted its iron mines and blast furnaces. And, unlike the Belgians, she knew how to wait. The treaty of peace merely insisted upon the permanent detachment of Luxemburg from the Zollverein, and the abandonment of all German control over its railways.[13] It did not touch the dynasty; it compelled no new attachments. Meanwhile France, in the full glamor of victory, with a brilliant staff quartered in the duchy itself, dazzled the imagination of the Luxemburgers. They were brought to think that, while any arrangement with Belgium threatened their independence, this could be amply safeguarded in a merely economic union with France. In the winter French troops even suppressed a little revolution against the dynasty. And when the plebiscite came, September 28, 1919, a decided majority pronounced for the reigning duchess and for a customs union with France. Women voted for the first time in this election, and while no separate returns were made of their votes, it is not likely that they diminished the proportion of votes for the duchess.

Of all the German ruling families which were in power in 1918, the sole survivor today is that of the grand duchess of Luxemburg. And the only surviving Austrian prince is her consort, Prince Felix of Bourbon-Parma, naturalized as a Luxemburger November 5, 1919, by a close vote in the Chamber and married the following day. And if some time these two should disappear in another revolution, the republic which would follow seems likely to seek support from France rather than from Belgium.

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Belgium’s chief territorial difficulties lie on the side of Holland, which controls the lower courses of her two great rivers, the Scheldt and the Meuse, and hems in Belgium on her northeast corner in Limburg and on her northwest corner in Flanders. The embarrassment is partly strategic, limiting Belgium’s freedom in time of war, partly economic, restricting the foreign commerce which is the lifeblood of the Belgian people. From any point of view, the Dutch-Belgian frontier is unnatural. It requires explanation as soon as you see it on the map. No one would draw such a frontier if he were starting afresh. But it is an historic frontier, and the ancient frontiers of a neutral power are hard things for a peace congress to disturb.

The long tongue of land which constitutes the southern prolongation of Dutch Limburg has diverse historical origins. Its chief town, Maestricht, with parts of the adjacent country, has been Dutch since the seventeenth century. Other parts belonged to the southern Netherlands, and were acquired by the king of Holland as ‘compensation’ in 1839. Like Luxemburg, Limburg joined in the Belgian revolution of 1830 and had representatives in the Belgian parliament until 1839. But in the final separation the peninsula was given to Holland, greatly to Belgium’s dissatisfaction. An outlying region, it complained of neglect by the Dutch government, and its economic relations were rather with the adjacent lands of Belgium and Germany on either side. Recently, with the development of its important coal mines, the Dutch have taken much more interest in Limburg, and active efforts have been made to counteract pro-Belgian tendencies.

The grievances of the Belgians respecting Limburg are twofold. From a military point of view, it cannot be defended by Holland, whose troops were withdrawn therefrom early in the late war. The Dutch claimed that its neutrality was a protection for Belgium. The Belgians, with no illusions as to German respect for neutral territory, replied that they had no permanent assurance of this, and that Limburg would have been crossed in 1914 if a breach had not finally been forced at Liège. They made much of the fact that after the armistice German troops, to the number of some 80,000, had been allowed to go home with their booty by this route, thus escaping capture or internment in Holland. The explanations of the Dutch were lame, but the offence could hardly be said to merit severe punishment. The economic grievances of the Belgians were more serious. Astride the Meuse at Maestricht, the Dutch have delayed improvement and hindered canal navigation. In eight miles of canal there are four sets of customs formalities, consuming several days. Moreover, the best route for a Rhine-Scheldt canal, to the construction of which Germany consented in the treaty,[14] lies via Limburg, the levels across the region of the upper Meuse being too difficult. If Belgium could not have Limburg, she at least wanted military guarantees and economic facilities.