Content area
Full text
Rehearsals: The German Army in Belgium, August 1914. By Jeff Lipkes. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-90-5867-596-5. Map. Photographs. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 815. $129.50. Distributed in the USA by Cornell University Press.
The German invasion of Belgium in August 1914, with the hideous atrocities against the civil population that accompanied it, has become the focal point of a small historical debate. It centres around the behavior of a highly disciplined army in a small country it needed to cross quickly to reach its operational goals and the more fundamental question of the continuity of brutal acts against civilians by the German Army. Was 1914, to put it more bluntly, a rehearsal for the more appalling cruelties of the Second World War? Lipkes takes a firm position on this. For him the deaths of 6,000 Belgian men, women and...