Seeing France’s paralysis, Belgium’s King Leopold III, who had succeeded his father, the heroic Albert, in 1934, declared neutrality and scrapped the Franco-Belgian alliance of 1920—“with the optimism of the imprudent little pigs, ‘This policy should aim resolutely at keeping us apart from the quarrels of our neighbors.’”53 As the Maginot Line ended at Belgium, France’s northern border was now as exposed as it had been in 1914, when French generals had to watch and wait as von Kluck’s armies drove through Belgium. “In one stroke,” writes British military historian Alistair Horne, “the whole of
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