Documentary proof of Germany's contemplated initiative has hitherto been missing. Certain facts have, however, recently come to hand which enable one to review the German explanation. One of these facts embraces a project for railway expansion engineered and carried out on the Belgian frontier, which can leave no doubt in any reasonable mind that Germany deliberately planned to violate Belgium's neutrality the moment it became a military expediency to invade France.[8]
[Footnote 8: Compare the railway maps of Northern France and Northern Germany in "Cook's Continental Time Tables" for the years 1908 and 1914.
A confidential agent of the British Government examined the ground in May, 1914. Part of the results of his work has been published from time to time by the military correspondents of The Times and The Morning Post of London and all is particularly designated in the British Foreign Office Memorandum secured by Prof. Hibben of Princeton on Nov. 9, 1914, and published in THE NEW YORK TIMES of Nov. 25. In this memorandum it is stated:
"The strategic dispositions of Germany, especially as regards railways, have for some years given rise to the apprehension that Germany would attack France through Belgium."
The disposition of the Third, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Germany Army Corps and the First, Fourth, and Fifth Cavalry Divisions, from Aug. 2 to 5, shown on French war maps, reveals that the attack was so made.]
If, according to jurisprudence, the planning to commit crime is legally on a par with its achievement, then Germany, for five years prior to the war, had been guilty of violating Belgium's neutrality--guilty in such a manner as to leave no doubt in the minds of Belgian, French, and English statesmen and military experts that the actual commission of the crime would some day take place.
It was Belgium's peculiar duty, as will be seen, to prepare for that day. To have taken Germany into her confidence on a point on which Germany was already fully informed would very likely have hastened the day and the tragedy thereof.
In keeping up her forts facing Germany and building none on the French frontier, in exchanging ideas with English military experts as to how best her neutrality could be defended, Belgium was preparing for the inevitable. This inevitableness is no longer a matter of moral conjecture. It is a matter of material evidence.