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French resistance along the northwestern frontier was weak, though brave, because the French had not anticipated so wide a movement against them. While Kluck and Bülow drove through British resistance at Mons, the main French offensive, in the Ardennes, failed. The Third and Fourth German Armies crushed through on schedule, and the retreat to the Marne, though orderly, was saved from being a rout with Paris captured only because General Helmuth von Moltke, the German Commander in Chief: 1) weakened Kluck's Army by taking from it troops to police Belgium, 2) abandoned the classic outline of the Schlieffen Plan by letting Kluck swing east of Paris instead of west. Kluck further messed up the Plan by chasing the retreating French after Bülow, on his left, had halted, thus exposing his own flank. But for these errors Moltke might have accomplished the extraordinary feat of taking Paris in 26 days by the simple process of entering a neutral side door. As it was, he got so far in that it took the Allies, with U. S. help, four years to eject the invader.
This time the side door to France, while not so strong as her eastern portals, is doubly locked and bolted. Within France along the Belgian border runs an extension of the Maginot Line, not continuous but strategically clumped. Across the border is a Belgian Army, fully mobilized last week to 300,000 strong (instead of the 42,000 available in 1914). The Belgian fort system at Liége and southeast through Battice and Eupen to Malmédy backed up by another system along the Meuse around Namur, is rebuilt on modern lines and stands behind a frontier fringe of trenches and pillboxes. Behind the fort system runs a "Little Maginot Line" constructed with French engineering assistance and, back of that, all the way from Liége around to Antwerp, runs the new Albert Canal: 250 ft. wide, 15 to 20 ft. deep, built as a military obstacle with machine-gun and rapid-fire artillery emplacements along it. long the bank nearest Germany, all trees and underbrush have been removed to give a clear field for defensive fire. The confident Allied view is that if Germany should strike again from Aachen, the Belgians could hold her until French and British forces could come up at least to the canal and the secondary defense behind the Liége forts. In command of Belgian defense is General E. M. Van den Bergen, who has been busy on plans and works since the Belgian Parliament voted to intensify them in 1935.