German invasion of Belgium (1914)

The German invasion of Belgium (1914) brought the First World War into Belgium and onward into France, as about 60,000 German troops crossed the Belgian border at Liège in the first week of August. The book sets the invasion’s rapid advance against the narrow, immediate concerns recorded in Harry S. Truman’s letters: although the war filled the newspapers, he wrote to Bess Wallace about his own life rather than the conflict reshaping Europe.

The invasion and its advance

The invasion began in early August, when German forces crossed into Belgium at Liège. By September, German armies had swept through Belgium and advanced into France as far as the Marne River, where French forces were making a stand. The account gives the campaign a compressed but forceful shape: a crossing, a rapid sweep, and an advance checked at the Marne.

War reaches the wheat-growing countryside

The invasion’s significance in the narrative extends beyond the movement of armies. Farmers had been saying throughout the summer that wheat prices would rise further if war came; now war had arrived. The siege guns before Liège, as Willa Gather’s description presents them, threatened not people’s immediate safety or property but the settled habits of thought of quiet wheat-growing communities. The distant conflict became a disruption of ordinary expectations even before the account turns to its military course.

Truman’s silence and the later dream

The book emphasizes the contrast between the war’s scale and Truman’s recorded attention. Given his interest in military heroes and his earlier service in the National Guard, the European fighting might have seemed likely to command his attention. Yet his letters to Bess Wallace did not mention it. The 1912 presidential contest was the only subject beyond his immediate life that the account identifies as drawing his attention outward; he admired Woodrow Wilson, who became the first Democrat to win the presidency since Grover Cleveland.

Two years after the invasion, Truman referred to the war only in a dream: he fell from a plane over France, ended up in a hospital, and cried because he could not see Bess. The dream does not establish that he had followed or consciously reflected on the invasion. Instead, the narrative places it beside the earlier silence as a rare point where the war’s geography enters his private correspondence, through imagined separation from the person to whom he wrote.

Narrative significance

The invasion is presented both as a historical rupture and as a test of what reaches an individual’s attention. Its armies move swiftly across national borders, while Truman’s letters remain close to family, farm, and personal feeling. That contrast does not show that he was untouched by the war; the later dream suggests a fleeting imaginative encounter with it. But the account carefully distinguishes the public scale of the European crisis from the limited evidence of Truman’s own response.