Qualla: Battle of Halen

Battle of Halen: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Essen, Léon van der, Public domain. When the Belgians walked the fields after the battle on 12 August 1914, they kept finding the helmets. Polished German cuirassier helmets, the kind topped with a brass eagle and meant to glitter on parade, lay among the dead horses and the dropped sabres in the wheat south of Halen. They picked enough of them up to give the day its name. Belgians called the action the Battle of the Silver Helmets, deliberately echoing the medieval Battle of the Golden Spurs of 1302, when Flemish militiamen had stripped golden spurs from the bodies of routed French knights. Six centuries apart, in the same flat country, infantry on foot had broken the most prestigious cavalry of Europe. The battle was a Belgian victory. It changed almost nothing.

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Image: Essen, Léon van der | Public domain

Battle of Halen: A bridge on the road to Brussels

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Belgian army, Public domain. Halen was a market town in Limburg with a couple of bridges over a small river called the Gete. In normal years no one would have cared about it. But the German Schlieffen Plan required a fast push across central Belgium to fall on Paris from the north, and Liège was holding out ...

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Image: Belgian army | Public domain

Battle of Halen: The bridge they could not blow

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The fighting began at dawn. German Jäger infantry, supported by field artillery, drove the Belgian cyclists guarding the bridge until the position became untenable. The defenders tried to blow the bridge and only partly succeeded; the powder was bad. The German command was euphor...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Battle of Halen: Charge after charge

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frans90245, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the early afternoon, two squadrons of the 17th Dragoon Regiment came up the Diestersteenweg toward the Bokkenberg hill. The road was lined with hedges and strung with barbed wire. Forced into a frontal charge, the dragoons were cut down. Over the next two hours, regiments of d...

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Image: Frans90245 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Battle of Halen: A victory that mattered very little

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JH-man, CC BY-SA 3.0. Marwitz's cavalry had failed to penetrate the Belgian front line and had not learned anything new about the dispositions behind it. The German 4th Cavalry Division suffered casualty rates of 16 and 28 percent in its two regiments. Belgian losses were lower. King Albert had been a...

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Image: JH-man | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battle of Halen: Forty-four helmets in concrete

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gérald Garitan, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the hundredth anniversary of the war, the town of Halen placed forty-four concrete sculptures shaped like German cuirassier helmets in fields and parks around the battlefield. Each represents one of the towns of Belgian Limburg, and together they mark the four years of occupat...

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Image: Gérald Garitan | CC BY-SA 4.0