"...to the point that Stephane Clement recommended Augusta Victoria and the children head to Spain to be with her father and brothers; the Laeken was skeptical of that, with some fears that Spain might join the war on the side of the Germans and Italians (whom King Carlos Jose and his government each respectively clearly sympathized with) and hold the family hostage if there were hostilities, but the Black Prince overruled such concerns and dispatched her across the Pyrenees. Augusta Victoria would never return to Belgium, and from 1919 onwards her children were effectively raised as Spaniards in her father's court. [1]
The matter of his family's physical security was not the only dispute between Stephane Clement and his father's government. Despite his experience as an observer with both the Confederate States and Mexico during the Great American War, he was not given a full army command like his brother the Duke of Brabant was; instead, he was assigned the II Congo Corps, a five-division component of soldiers recruited from the Congo, many with experience in the Force Publique, brought to Europe essentially as cannon fodder to operate at the tip of the Belgian Army's spear in pressing towards the Rhine. As the second son of King Leopold, Stephane Clement was given broad discretion in how he conducted war by his nominal superior General Emile Dossin; in practice, the II Congo Corps operated as its own unit at his discretion.
Stephane Clement in July of 1919 was a man committed wholly to, in his own words, "changing my fate." For all one could say of him, he was not stupid, and had become well aware that much of European royalty and elite opinion blamed his behavior for the war having broken out, and he was eager bordering on desperate to prove that he was not the "degenerate animal," as one British newspaper phrased it, that he had been portrayed at after over a decade of being dismissed as a violent, entitled dilettante. He was furious at reports circulating within the Belgian command structure praising the Duke of Brabant's tactical nous in pressing the 2nd Army successfully through the Ardennes in the direction of Bitburg; making matters worse was the arrival of Belgian-born British aristocrat Adrian Carton de Wiart, who quickly ingratiated himself into the Belgian Army and in the course of a few months became a folk hero to Belgian soldiers who had his own press team following his exploits, which by the end of the war would include a myriad of injuries that he chipperly bounced back from. Stephane Clement finally found a way to make his mark on history, and in the campaigns of July and August, he did so.
The II Congo Corps launched at attack through Huckelhoven on July 18, advancing seven kilometers in three days despite taking heavy casualties, and the Battle of Huckelhoven would prove the opening of the last gasp of the Race to the Rhine. The breakthrough, which pinned several divisions of German soldiers against the Dutch border and forced a haphazard evacuation eastwards, was the first major change in the lines north of Aachen in two months, and Stephane Clement made sure to milk the public relations boost for all it was worth. He posed with comrades in pith hats and declared that "the German is unprepared for the savagery of the African," intimating that his Congolese fighters were the best for shock attacks and demanding that more Congolese forces be drawn up to Europe rather than be kept to fight the low-intensity guerilla war across the southern Congo against Lettow-Vorbeck's askari. The breakthrough at Huckelhoven opened up the ground for larger French forces to push through as well, with major successful victories at Lovenich (July 24), Erkelenz (July 25), and in a more southeasterly sector, Titz (July 28). This secondary but more critical offensive concluded on August 2 with the French capture of Bedburg and Bergheim, two villages roughly eight kilometers apart that sat immediately behind a ridgeline just twenty kilometers west of Cologne. In the north, German defenders were able to regroup on the outskirts of Monchengladbach, but after ten days of heavy fighting, the city fell, with the depleted II Congo Corps among those who seized it on August 7.
This "Race to the Rhine" left Franco-Belgian forces in mid-August, when they needed to stop, regroup and fortify their supply lines, with control of a line of hills overlooking the Rhine, even if critical German cities remained just a hair outside of artillery range. Cologne was now directly threatened, and French CASD bombers could be safely placed in Aachen for sorties towards Dusseldorf and Dortmund, too. Stephane Clement returned from the front to Brussels with a number of chief commanders to briefly bask in his glory - had he not taken Hucklehoven, none of the Race would have been possible. The bender that went on in Brussels in August 1919 by the Black Prince and his closest confidants is the stuff of legend, and not in a good way.
The reality on the ground was despite the successful push, the Belgian forces were utterly exhausted, and tensions within the ranks were beginning to emerge. The officer corps was heavily Walloon, and if not Walloon, then drawn from the Francophone Flemish landowning elite; while the enlisted infantry was split more evenly, orders were uniformly given in French, and Flemings noticed that they were often given the most dangerous tasks and received the harshest discipline while favoritism was doled out by senior officers to their friends and relatives in a way that would have put the elitist, aristocratic German Army to shame. The Congo Corps, for that matter, had seen close to fifty percent casualties as Stephane Clement pushed and pushed; the most capable Force Publique veterans had been killed or maimed by the end of the Race to the Rhine, and it would be weeks before more Congolese conscripts, few if any having any combat experience in colonial service, were trained at the Bruges barracks where they were based out of and ready for the front. While glory was, for that fleeting moment, his, the Black Prince had reached the limits of what he could achieve with his corps, and the inherent issues within the Belgian Army were about to become a hindrance in the conduct of the war..."
- The Black Prince of Belgium: The Dark and Turbulent Life of Stephane Clement
[1] Gotta give Steffie's poor wife and kids a happy out
). But more importantly, because it strikes me that the first seeds of universal healthcare in the United States could follow a similar model - they would initially start in the western plains states, possibly at the hands of Democratic or Socialist governors there during the 1920s or 1930s. After the system is shown to work, other states outside of the Plains begin to adopt their own systems, because it goes national.