William Marvel: Prelude to Apocalypse

In early September of 1979, while Germans held peace rallies to observe the 40th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, I headed west from Düsseldorf on a pilgrimage to the scenes of an earlier conflict. Almost exactly 65 years before, German armies had swept across pesky little Belgium on their way to France, bringing the British into what would be known — for all too brief a time — as the Great War. The Germans had not completely traversed Belgium before they ran into the harbingers of the British army, and their first clash came at Mons, about 20 miles from the French border. The Western Front swung deep into France a few days afterward, and oscillated for the next fifty months, until those two armies were fighting outside of Mons again by Armistice Day.