Belgium had been a neutral country since 1839, its neutrality guarded by what were reputed to be among the strongest fortifications in Europe. Liège, for example, near the German border, was protected in 1914 by twelve forts (six on each side of the Meuse river), with a total of 400 retractable guns, the forts manned by an estimated 70,000 troops. It was at this point that the German Second Army, with something like 320,000 men, entered Belgium on August 5, in the first land battle of World War I. The forts themselves held out for 12 days; the city was brought to surrender on August 7 after the Germans called in a fleet of zeppelins, which by-passed the forts and rained aerial bombs on the city from above.
A tiny group of Latter-day Saints lived at Liège – so tiny that their entire priesthood corps consisted of one teacher and two deacons. Miles away at Seraing, another branch was home to a solitary elder, a priest, and two deacons. A few scattered Saints lived in the countryside. The Belgian Saints endured the bombardment, followed by what one member recalled as “a fortnight or more” of terror, when the invaders “bombarded the fort, burned the houses, and plundered and shot the inhabitants.” Even though the Saints at Liège had a rented hall, they were forbidden from gathering for ten months, until the city had settled down into a “wartime normalcy” of unemployment, famine, and occupation.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, hundreds of Mormon boys hurried to enlist. The largest concentration of Mormons was to be found in the Utah National Guard, soon converted to the 145th Field Artillery as the Guard was called into federal service. The 145th, together with their beloved chaplain Brigham H. Roberts were sent to Camp Kearny, California, for training.
The Baltic seaport of Klaipėda, Lithuania, was under the political control of Prussia/Germany for much of its 800-year history, when it was known as Memel. During the 19th century and up to the end of World War I its inhabitants were mostly ethnic Germans rather than Lithuanians. Political realignments after the Treaty of Versailles caused most of Memel’s German inhabitants to migrate to Germany proper; the ethnic shift was virtually complete at the end of World War II.
Our great-grandparents laughed in the face of danger and whistled past the graveyard in these Juvenile Instructor jokes from the last year of the Great War. Will we pull humor from the hard times of our own era?