I also just ran in to a similar problem, that is service apache2 reload
fails but prints no useful information. This is because the script in /etc/init.d/apache
(on Debian, at least) eats the output of the apache2ctl configtest
command it runs to sanitize the Apache config.
An easy solution to get a more meaningful explanation for the failure is to run apache2ctl configtest
again yourself, which will print the (hopefully useful) error messages to the console.