Belgium - Geography
Belgium lies between 49°29' and 51°31' north latitude and 2°33' and 6°10' east longitude, and occupies an area of 11,373 square miles, or nearly twice the size of Yorkshire. It marches on the north and north-east with Holland, on the south-west with France, and on the east with the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg and the German state of North Rhine Westphalia [the former province of Rhenish Prussia]. Hardly any of the boundaries can be called natural. The Belgian frontier nowhere follows any great physical feature except along the Meuse, where, however, the narrowness of the strip of Holland (Dutch Limburg) intervening between Belgium and Prussia makes it impossible to regard this as a true natural frontier. The position of the Belgian boundary is everywhere due to intricate historical facts. The nearest approach to a natural frontier is on the east, where the frontier approximately follows a linguistic division.
Belgium possesses on the North Sea 42 miles of coast entirely unbroken by any natural openings. The Scheldt estuary, which forms the geographical key to all the water communications of Belgium, is in Dutch hands, and consequently the position of Antwerp as a Belgian port is ambiguous, owing to the fact that it can be approached only through Dutch waters. The same disability attaches to the considerable port of Ghent, which is connected with the Scheldt estuary at Terneuzen by a ship canal, of which the mouth and the northern half lie in Dutch territory.
Excluding the small rivers of the Flemish littoral, of which only the Yser is of any importance, the rivers of Belgium form two systems, those of the Scheldt and the Meuse. The Scheldt system drains the northern plain, the Meuse system the southern hills. The Scheldt system comprises, going from west to east, two slow navigable streams flowing eastwards from France, the Scheldt (Escaut) with its left-bank tributary the Lys, and four smaller rivers, the Dendre, Serine, Dyle, and Geete, which are not navigable. These last rise in the Hainaut-Hesbaye plateau and flow into the Scheldt estuary.
The trough of the Meuse system is the Sambre-Meuse valley from the French frontier to Liege. This is one of the most striking natural features of Belgium, and divides the country into the plains of the north and the hills of the south. It receives practically no drainage on its northern bank; the head-waters of the Scheldt tributaries here come quite close up to it, and are separated from it by a well-marked ridge.
The chief tributaries of the Meuse are, on the left (northern) bank, the Sambre, which joins the main stream at Namur; and on the right bank, the Semois, the Lesse, the Ourthe with its affluent the Ambleve, and the Vesdre. The two latter rivers join the Meuse at Liege. All these rivers of the Ardennes or Meuse system are tortuous and flow in narrow, deeply cut valleys at some distance below the plateau. With the exception of the Meuse they are shallow and rapid, more suited to supplying water-power than to navigation.
The south-west frontier may be so far said to have a physical basis, that it is due to the efforts of France to secure this portion of her own frontier by a line of fortresses lying out in the plain in front of and parallel to the ridge of chalk downs which runs from Cap Gris Nez to St. Quentin. In order to defend Picardy it was always necessary for France to have a foothold in the Flemish plain. Farther east again the French salient down the Meuse has a certain geographical fitness, as the Meuse valley divides at Givet into two widely different parts. The northern frontier is purely historical, its position being due to the peculiar circumstances in which the Belgian monarchy arose.
The geographical center of Belgium is the high plateau (about 1,500 ft. above the sea) of the Ardennes, which occupies the southern corner of the country. The axis of the plateau may be said to pass through Bastogne and Bouillon. From this line the country falls away on both sides: north-north-west to the North Sea and s uth-east through the extreme southern district of Belgium to Arlon. As a result of this slope, a number of zones may be distinguished, lying more or less parallel to the coast, and each stretching approximately from east-north-east to west- south-west.
The polders, land lying below the level of high tide, defended from the sea by a belt of sand-dunes, artificial dikes, and sluices, and drained partly by opening sluices at low tide and partly by pumping. The soil is peat, sand, and clay, mostly very rich and fertile; the whole district is intersected by drainage-canals.
The sand belt comprises East Flanders, and (across the Scheldt) the Campine, a vast plain extending from Antwerp to the Meuse, in the neighborhood of Maastricht. This district is all excessively flat and very wet; its soil is extremely barren, and the proverbial fortuity of the country is entirely due to human effort, without which nothing would grow at all. The same efforts are gradually being brought to bear on the Campine, which was long largely unpopulated waste marsh and heath.
The clay and loam belt extends across the country from Ypres to Liege. In the west this strip is clay; in the east it is loam, which in the Hesbaye, a region extending along the north bank of the Sambre and thence from Charleroi to Liege, gives a good and fertile agricultural soil. A transitional area may be found in the plains in the neighbourhood of Brussels, which collectively form a sandy plateau, passing to loam on the south and falling into the low plains of the sand belt on the north. This transitional district may be conveniently referred to as Brabant.
The limestone belt, the south bank of the Meuse from Namur to Liege, is formed by the Condroz, a system of parallel ridges mostly of limestone, with a clayey soil. The same general character is continued east of Liege by the Herve plateau, and west of Namur through the district known as the Entre-Sambre-et-Meuse down to Chimay. The whole belt is a tolerably good agricultural and stock-raising country with a fair amount of timber.
The Ardennes are a rolling plateau of Devonian and Cambrian rocks, deeply scored by narrow river-valleys, densely wooded in most parts, and having great tracts of peat-bog and marshy country. The soil is clayey, and the country is naturally unsuited to agriculture, but the scanty population thrives well, and the standard of prosperity is fairly high. Crossing the axis and descending on the other side is the Arlon or Jurassic belt, physically attached rather to Lorraine than to any part of Belgium. This district is hilly, but less so than the Ardennes, and is fairly good, though not rich, agricultural country.
Although the whole is strewn with the relics of castles and fortified churches, there had been little military history enacted within this area before 1914. The Ardennes and Eifel are extensions of the Westerwald, blending almost insensibly into each other and sharing many of the same characteristics. The Eifel is the complex of hill ranges-they can hardly be called mountains-lying between the Rhine, the Moselle, and the Roer Rivers, mostly in Germany.
The Ardennes, like the Eifel, is not a single and well-defined bloc. The general area may be defined as a wedge with the point between Aachen and Düren. The northern edge is a diagonal: Aachen, Liège, Maubeuge, Landrecis. The southern edge (much debated by geologists) is a more pronounced diagonal running from Aachen southwest to Arlon. The base, formed by the Forêt des Ardennes or French Ardennes, roughly coincides with the Franco-Belgian frontier and the Semois River. The Ardennes has three recognized subdepartments: the High Ardennes in the south, the Famenne Depression in the middle, and the Low Ardennes in the north. The Low Ardennes tends to be open and rolling, but includes two plateaus: that of Herve, between Liège and Aachen, and Condroz, between the lower Ourthe and the Meuse in the vicinity of Dinant. This sector is more readily traversed than is the High Ardennes, but it is relatively narrow, maneuver is constricted by the flanking line of the Meuse River, and entrance from the east presupposes that the invader has possession of Aachen and the roads circling north or south of the Hohes Venn.
The High Ardennes is often called the "True Ardennes." It is not properly mountainous, nor yet a forest; rather it is a wide plateau or high plain out of which rise elevations in the form of ridges or higher plateaus erupting from the main mass. These elevations generally are unrelated to one another and combine with large forests to form isolated and independent compartments in which tactical domination of one hill mass seldom provides domination of another. The mass structure extends on a northeast-southwest axis, forming a watershed which drains away to the Meuse in the north and the Moselle in the southeast. Perhaps a third of the area is covered with forest, much of which is coniferous. This timber, however, is scattered all over the High Ardennes and presents a patchwork picture rather than a series of large forested preserves. The main mass is cut in zigzag patterns by winding, deeply eroded rivers and streams, some flowing parallel to the higher ridges, others crossing so as to chop the ridges and the welts on the plateau into separate sections. In some places the watercourses run through narrow, almost canyonlike depressions with steep walls rising from a hundred to three hundred feet. Even the wider valleys are narrow when compared with the western European norm.
The geography of the Ardennes led inevitably to the channelization of large troop movements east to west, will tend to force larger units to "pile up" on each other, and restricts freedom of maneuver once the direction of attack and order of battle are fixed. To a marked degree the military problem posed by the terrain is that of movement control rather than maneuver in the classic sense. For the smaller tactical units, the chopped-up nature of the ground plus the peculiar timber formations in which dense wood lots are interspersed with natural or manmade clearings, indicates the development of a series of small, semi-independent engagements once the larger battle is joined.
Throughout this whole area military routes of movement in the mid-20th Century, regardless of the weather, were synonymous with the road system. The roads of the Ardennes proliferate in accordance with the geological compartments incised in the high plateau by rivers and streams as they recede downward. The main roads tend to follow a north-south axis. A straight line between Paris and Berlin will bisect the Eifel and Ardennes, but the movement of armies during the centuries normally had followed the easier roads going around this area: in the north via Liège-Maubeuge or the Flanders plains, in the south via the Metz gateway. On occasion the Ardennes and Eifel had been used by large forces for movement without fighting, battle being joined at the natural defense lines of the Meuse River west of the Ardennes, or the Rhine River east of the Eifel.
In 1914, as part of the Schlieffen Plan, three of the Imperial German armies marched from the Eifel through the Ardennes. Schlieffen had predicted that the French would react to the pressure of the heavy German right wing as it swung through northern Belgium by counterattacking into the flank via southeastern Belgium. It was an integral part of the famous plan, therefore, that the German right wing would be covered by an extension through southern Belgium and Luxembourg, and that the Ardennes massif would be used, if needed, as a bastion from which the French flanking attack would be repelled.
In 1940 the Ardennes once again was invaded and crossed by German troops, the jangle of Richthofen's squadrons giving way to the roar and grind of Kleist's tanks. This time, at Hitler's insistence, the German maneuver departed from the classic concept of Schlieffen, the weight of the German attack being thrown south of Liège rather than north, while a narrow thrust replaced the bludgeon strokes of a massive wheeling movement. This main effort toward a decisive breakthrough was launched through a narrow corridor marked approximately by Bastogne in the north and Arlon in the south; but the bulk of three German armies debouched from the Eifel and marched across the Ardennes. As in 1914 the crossing of the Ardennes massif was little more than a route march.
The events of 1940 proved that mechanized forces could move speedily through the Ardennes. In 1944, as a result, it was known that the terrain in the Eifel and Ardennes was not so bad but that it could be quickly negotiated by modern mechanized armies under conditions of good weather and little or no enemy resistance. What history could not demonstrate, for the lessons were lacking, was whether modern, mechanized armies could attack through the Ardennes and speedily overcome a combination of stubborn enemy defense, difficult ground, and poor weather.
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