"...of his three sons - Jean Albert's homosexuality of course kept him several arms' lengths from affairs of state - it was always said that Leopold III and Stephane Clement butted heads so often because they were so alike. Crown Prince Leopold, the Duke of Brabant, of course had inherited his father's ultra-reactionary politics and contempt for democracy, which he displayed perhaps more than anybody else; Philippe was the cleverest of the bunch, with the same calculating mind that had kept his father alive and on the throne for three decades, but his penchant for drink and morphine and reputation for telling people what they wanted to hear diminished his considerable logical and intellectual talents. But it was Stephane Clement who was most like the King, who had the same volatile temperament, the same lust for pleasures of the flesh, and the same paranoia and impression that death was around every corner, and it was that erraticism that Stephane Clement indulged at the most crucial hour of Belgian history since 1830.
For eighty-eight years, Belgian independence had been underwritten by a concordat of the Great Powers; it had been carved free of the House of Orange by Britain, France and Prussia with Austrian and Russian acceptance, and at both the London Conference of 1830 and the signing of the Treaty of London in 1839, the liberty of Belgium had been agreed upon by the Great Powers and the Netherlands herself on condition of Belgian neutrality in the affairs of Europe. This set of circumstances had, for nine decades, suited Belgium just fine; it was through her benevolent neutrality that she had been allowed so much of the Congo, a vastness that Britain and France would have never allowed new Germany or Italy retain in the heart of Africa. And it was Belgian intermediation that had helped resolve a number of European disputes in those years since.
To traditional Belgian thinking - including Leopold III, who despite his Francophilia was astute enough to understand how the terms of 1830 and 1839 benefitted rather than held back his country - there was nothing more sacrosanct than the Treaty of London. It was Belgium's geopolitical Magna Carta, more important as a founding document than a constitution. It was what made sure that Belgium was not partitioned by nationalists in France and Holland, or what prevented it and its critical port at Antwerp from falling under the domination of an ambitious Germany. So long as little, neutral and well-armed Belgium sat astride the most obvious path of invasion from Germany into France, it was the lock that kept the monsters of war within its cage.
This was of course naive; Prussia had, after all, invaded France via Lorraine and Luxemburg in 1867. But it was a straightforward strategic calculation that had nonetheless served Belgium well for nearly a century and had helped deliver a small, ethnically divided country the second-highest GDP per capita in Europe behind only Britain and one of its most densely industrialized economies, with a financial system and colonial empire that far punched outside of its weight. How much this relative success for little Belgium weighed on the decisions that Leopold III was about to countenance is unclear, but at that critical hour in July 1918, the Treaty of London suddenly seemed to be just a piece of paper.
It is hard not to read a number of intersection factors into Leopold III's decision-making between July 6, when he gathered his sons at Laeken, and July 9, when he gave the go-ahead to the Delacroix government to sign a secret military alliance with France and begin a process of attempting to goad Germany into war to trigger its defensive clauses. There was the instability of 1915 which had nearly brought the country to civil conflict and which augured a future of syndicalist agitation and Flemish nationalism; there was a government that had nearly stripped him of his precious Congo and a Germany that he was convinced, now that it controlled the entirety of the Congo's southern frontier, sought to press north and seize as much of it as they could. And there was also the very fact that this embattled, bitter man was nearly sixty years of age, increasingly aware of his mortality, and seeing more enemies around every corner than ever.
Stephane Clement had already made one of his three major contributions to pushing Europe closer to war in L'affaire Piquet; now he would make his second, in coolly persuading his father that Germany sought to destroy Belgium, seize the Congo for itself, and puppetize a Kingdom of Flanders that would inevitably have a German prince crowned atop it. "Does exile in Biarritz suit you?" he asked pointedly. If Belgium survived such a conflagration it would be as a rump state, likely with the pliant and Anglophile Baudouin - whom the King had suspected, without evidence, of plotting against him for decades. Only in pressing the case first, with French support, could Belgium head off Berlin's "unquenchable appetite for land, resources, and vassals." Philippe was aghast at this suggestion, reminding his father that an outright alliance with France would abrogate Article VII of the Treaty of London, thus foreclosing on any British support in the event of a war with Germany and thus putting France in violation of the legally-binding treaty; this alone was a cassus bellum that would likely involve an immediate violent German response.
The King clearly found Stephane Clement's emotionally-charged argument that bordered on outright manipulation compelling, but his son's plain logic was hard to argue with, and Leopold III had always been more cautious in foreign matters than his aggressiveness with domestic enemies. Thus it fell to the Duke of Brabant to make his own case. The Crown Prince, who chose his words carefully around his family and hated his younger brothers and had plotted more than once to see to it that they befell accidents, replied that Philippe's point was hard to argue, but that Belgium clearly was in "the hour of the choice." What he meant by that word was that Brussels faced a binary problem; they could either back down in the face of a clear German provocation in Africa and invite future escalations while also opening "unwieldy" Austria to similar, or they could stand fast in the face of German aggression and refuse to back down, even if it meant general war. "The choice" was either prideful or practical; there was no way to do both. The Duke of Brabant's suggestion, however, was to do everything in Brussels' power to make its machinations secret; it would sign military clauses with the French "at the dead of midnight, in the most hidden tower" - Prince Leopold was fond of flowery language when he got going - and invite explicit French support designed to be portrayed as a defense of Belgian neutrality. This was a high-wire game, but one that the King was confident he could play, having played such games his entire life. The plan was given his support; Belgium would abandon neutrality in 1918, fully embrace its connections to France, and thus underwrite its security permanently, but secretly.
Stephane Clement's belligerency and smooth-talking of his father at the moment the King felt most vulnerable, most besieged, had worked; it was only downhill from there..."
- The Black Prince of Belgium: The Dark and Turbulent Life of Stephane Clement
"...mediocrity of German spycraft with the exception of lessons in signals intelligence learned by the Colonial Office in Aruba, lessons which had still not been entirely incorporated into military doctrine (the Abwehr would not be formally made a division of the Prussian Army until spring 1920). The events of July 18, 1918 were thus much more luck than skill, and the type of comedy of errors that history turns upon.
The decision at the height of the "July Crisis" - where Europe waited with baited breathe to see if Germany and Belgium would come to blows over their dispute in the Congo, and France made loud, angry noises that she would defend Belgian neutrality with "her own blood and arms" - by King Leopold III to throw his lot in with the Iron Triangle and form a formal, but secret, military alliance with France and Austria was the decision in which lay the Central European War. All choices that came thereafter, all the maneuvers that eventually ended in bloodshed when the armies of Europe mobilized in March 1919, stemmed from that one critical decision by one man. The secrecy which this decision required, however, was crucial; for Belgium to prevail, any provocation by France had to be seen as being done to defend Belgium's direct neutrality and protect the terms of the Treaty of London, and portray a belligerent Germany as tearing apart the treaties that protected European peace.
That Heinz Lutzenfelder, a middle-aged German civil servant who worked at the embassy in Brussels and also doubled as a spy for the Prussian Foreign Office, was at Brussels-South (Midi) station on July 18 was an accident; he had the next day off and first meant to meet a former colleague for lunch, and he was unceremoniously stood up. As such, he found himself at the station, debating whether to make a spur-of-the-moment trip to Paris instead for a long weekend and looking at the timetable before buying a ticket for later in the evening. That Stephane Clement and Philippe were both heading out of Brussels-South the same day was also an accident; the younger brother was already to have left for Paris days earlier, and had simply been delayed. That both younger sons of the Belgian King were at the station, without an entourage, and dressed as civilians led Lutzenfelder, who saw them purely by accident, to deduce that they were there in disguise; considering the tensions engulfing Belgo-German relations at the time, he was immediately intrigued, and followed them at a distance. They both seemed to make their way towards a train for Paris, until at the last moment Stephane Clement stopped to double-check his ticket with a station porter, who confirmed that he was booked through to Nancy and then Geneva and on to Zurich and Vienna on his itinerary.
Why Stephane Clement was taking that circuitous of a route to Vienna raised Lutzenfelder's concerns even more (to say nothing of his stupidity in booking all of it on one ticket rather than several, and talking loudly about it so that a German spy could overhear); he immediately returned to the embassy, packed his bags, and went this time to Brussels-North, to catch the train to Liege and then Aachen, where he met up with two frontier guards whom he was expecting after sending a coded message to Berlin. Once back in Germany, Lutzenfelder was whisked by train to the nearest Army camp, where he described what he had seen and postulated a theory - that Leopold was secretly sending his sons to Paris and Vienna to seal an agreement with France and Austria to align fully with them, militarily.
In Berlin, Chancellor Furstenburg called a small council of close advisors before discussing this with the Kaiser. The evidence was compelling, but circumstantial, a position that Heinrich agreed with; a war with Belgium could not be started over the observations of one man at a train station. Nonetheless, it did help explain Belgium's confidence in the past several weeks and France's willingness to back them to the hilt; as of July 1918, Germany's plans in both military preparations and foreign policy assumed Belgium was a future combatant and that they had already broken their neutrality, they just chose - to Belgium's surprise - to keep that information to themselves until the moment was ripe.
Perhaps, then, Germany's poor reputation in subterfuge was unfair..."
- Shadow Wars: A History of Espionage and Counterintelligence
en.wikipedia.org
