FROM LILLE TO NIEUPORT.
By far the most important place between the Aisne and the coast of Belgium is Lille, which is less than eight miles from Armentières. In Lille we find ourselves in a city of more than 200,000 inhabitants, which was formerly the capital of French Flanders. It stands in the well-watered and very fertile plain of the Deule,[11] a navigable tributary of the Lys, and is connected with all the rivers of the district by a bewildering network of canals. Formerly it was considered to be a fortress of the first class, and its citadel was said to be the masterpiece of Vauban,[12] the great military engineer. He was a soldier of the Spanish army, who was taken prisoner by the French, and was induced by them to join the French service. His life was chiefly spent in making and besieging fortresses. He conducted no less than forty sieges, took part in more than three hundred combats, and built or helped to build one hundred and sixty fortresses.
For ages Lille has been a storm-centre of war. It has been so frequently mishandled by besiegers that the Church of St. Maurice is the only building of importance which has survived from the Middle Ages. Lille is the greatest industrial centre of North France, and its linen, woollen, and cotton factories, its oil and sugar refineries, its chemical works and great engineering and motor shops are of the utmost importance. It is a handsome place, with many fine public buildings, and its picture gallery is famous all over Europe because it contains some of the best work of the Flemish and Dutch schools.
You can now understand why Lille is a great prize of war. We shall read later that it was captured by the Germans. Its loss was a great blow to the Allies, because it not only controls seven railway lines and a great network of roads, but contains engineering and motor shops, which enabled the enemy to carry out important repairs and to manufacture many necessary implements of war within a mile or two of his front. Further, when Lille was lost, the proceeds of its manufacturing activity went to the Germans, and this rich, busy city thenceforth contributed nothing to the war expenses of France.
A little to the north-east of Lille are two other large manufacturing towns in the midst of one of the busiest industrial districts of France. Roubaix[13] is the first of these, and Tourcoing[14] is the second. In Belgium, a few miles north-west of Tourcoing, is the much smaller industrial town of Menin,[15] which stands on the Lys where the main road from Bruges crosses the river on the way to Lille.
North of the Lys we are in another world. We have left behind us the ugly pit mounds, the grimy towns, and the smoke of factories. We are now in West Flanders, in a countryside of market gardens, where every inch of ground is closely tilled, and the fields are laid out like a chessboard. There are many patches of woodland, some of them, such as the Forest of Houthulst, six or seven miles north of Ypres, being fairly large. West Flanders is not naturally fertile, but its dairy farmers and market gardeners, by dint of the greatest industry, have turned it into a rich and productive land. Six or seven hundred years ago its wealth came from a different source. Its cities were then bustling hives, in which most of the woollen cloth used in Europe was spun and woven.
The Cloth Hall at Ypres before Bombardment.
The busiest and wealthiest of these cities was Ypres, which stands about twelve miles north of Armentières. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there were some four hundred guilds of cloth manufacturers in the place, and its people numbered more than 200,000. So famous was its cloth that we find the English poet Chaucer[16] referring to it in his Canterbury Tales. His Wife of Bath, who was one of the pilgrims, was a cloth manufacturer, and Chaucer tells us that her wares "passed them of Ypres and of Gaunt" (Ghent). Before the war broke out Ypres was a little town of less than 18,000 people, and its industries were represented by its butter market and its small manufactures of lace and linen. But within it, as in the other ancient cities of Belgium, were some of the most glorious old buildings in all the world—the houses of the rich old burghers, the halls in which they met to transact their business, and the churches in which they thanked God for their prosperity. They spent their money lavishly on these buildings and filled them with treasures of art.
The glory of Ypres, prior to the war, was the Cloth Hall, the largest and finest edifice of its kind in Belgium. It was begun in 1200, and was more than a hundred years a-building. The front was 433 feet in length, and the building consisted of three stories, with a high-pitched roof broken by dormer windows. The niches of the top story were filled with statues of Flemish counts and celebrated inhabitants of the city. On the south side rose a massive belfry, with pinnacles at the angles. The east side of the hall was formed by the so-called Nieuwerk, one of the most beautiful buildings of its kind. I am obliged to describe the Cloth Hall of Ypres in the past tense, for unhappily it is now in ruins. Ypres had also a very fine cathedral, a meat hall, and a large number of old houses with carved wooden fronts. They, too, have been destroyed, more or less, by shot and shell.
In the days of its greatness Ypres, like Manchester of to-day, needed a waterway to the sea, so that it could rapidly and cheaply import wool from abroad, and export its finished cloth to distant markets. Ypres stands on a little river which is a tributary of the river Yser, a stream almost unknown to Britons before the war began, but now inscribed on the pages of history. The Yser rises to the west of Cassel, and flows in a curving course to enter the sea near Nieuport. A canal was cut from Ypres to the Yser, which was itself canalized, and thus the city provided itself with a waterway to the sea.
On the canal, twelve or thirteen miles north of Ypres, is the village of Dixmude,[17] which is also one of the "dead cities" of Belgium. Its fine Grand' Place, its noble Church of St. Nicholas, its Gothic town hall, and its heavily shuttered stone houses, show us that it was formerly a place of wealth and importance. Now, says a recent writer, "its eleven hundred inhabitants might easily stand in a corner of the Grand' Place. The passer-by—there is rarely more than one—disturbs the silence, and one hears scarcely any sounds save the chimes in the tower or the cooing of doves on the cornices." Alas! since the tide of war rolled into this part of Belgium, those inhabitants who remain have continuously been deafened by the roar of great guns, and the towers from which the chimes rang out and the cornices on which the doves cooed have been levelled with the ground.
Nieuport, the outport of Ypres, is the last of the towns in this region to which I shall call your attention. It stands about two miles from the mouth of the Yser, and, like Ypres and Dixmude, is only a relic of what it once was. About 4,000 people were dwelling in it before the war broke out, but its long, silent streets, with their massive houses, showed plainly that it was formerly a populous and busy place. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries its quays were thronged with ships discharging wool from England for the looms of Ypres, or filling their holds with the fine cloth made in the old city. Before the war, Nieuport still retained its cloth hall, town hall, and venerable Gothic church as memorials of this busy and prosperous time. When the trade of Ypres departed, Nieuport fell into decline. Prior to the war it was a small, quiet place, visited by a few ships and by occasional tourists. Everybody knows it now as the scene of battles which will change the destiny of the world. Beyond Nieuport are the great sand dunes which line the coast of Belgium, and extend as far west as Calais. From the top of the dunes we look out on the restless and shallow waters of the North Sea.
We have now traversed the region over which warfare was to rage for many months to come.
Before I close this chapter, let me remind you that the whole region between Arras and the North Sea is filled with historical memories of former warfare. This is by no means the first time that the British have fought in West Flanders and Artois. Marlborough,[18] for example, fought the greatest of his campaigns in this region, during the long struggle between Louis XIV. of France and the allied forces of England, Holland, and Austria. I am going to tell you about these campaigns in some detail, because they have features greatly resembling those of the present struggle.
Marlborough's great aim, was to recapture the valleys of the Lys and the Scheldt, which in the year 1708 were in the possession of the French. These rivers were then all-important, because they were the great lines of communication for armies fighting in Flanders and North France. It was by means of the rivers that food and munitions were brought to the soldiers and the heavy guns were moved from place to place. What railways are to modern commanders, navigable rivers were to generals in the long ages before steam.
All the fortresses on the Scheldt were in the hands of the French, except Oudenarde,[19] which you will find on the accompanying map, thirty miles to the east of Ypres. At the time when our story opens, Oudenarde was about to be attacked by the French. Marlborough made a wonderful forced march, and fell upon them as they were advancing towards the fortress. By nightfall on July 11, 1708, he had won a great victory, and the remnants of the French army had fallen back in disorder to Ghent. While Marlborough was waiting for reinforcements to come up, some of his troops seized a French position near Ypres, and his main army encamped near Menin.
Marlborough now proposed to besiege Lille, the greatest fortress on the road to Paris. He could not bring his siege train by way of the river, so it had to lumber slowly along the roads, and while doing so was in great danger of being captured by the enemy. Thanks, however, to his skilful arrangements, his heavy guns arrived safely, and then the siege began in real earnest. Lille was very strongly fortified, and was garrisoned by 15,000 men. While the siege was in progress a French army of more than 100,000 men marched to its succour; but so strongly was Marlborough posted that it did not dare to attack him. Instead of doing so it fell back behind the Scheldt, so as to cut off Marlborough's forces from Brussels. As, however, he still held Ostend, he was able to get supplies from England.
The French now tried to seize Ostend, so that Marlborough might be cut off from the sea and bottled up. He sent forces against them; but the French fell back before him and opened the sluices of the canals, thus flooding much of the country between him and the sea. A little later they succeeded in capturing Nieuport, and Marlborough was cut off from Ostend.
On 9th December Lille surrendered after the garrison had lost 8,000 men, and the besiegers not less than 14,000. Marlborough also captured Ghent, and at the end of December 1708 the French left Flanders altogether, and retired into their own territory. Thus the valleys of the Lys and Scheldt were recovered.
Map illustrating Marlborough's Campaigns in Artois and West Flanders.
Before I proceed with the story of Marlborough's campaigns, let me point out that during the race to the sea there was a similar struggle between the Allies and the Germans for the possession of the same valleys. The Allies were hastening north in order to push across the Lys and Scheldt and cut the German communications. Unhappily the Germans moved northwards so rapidly that this was impossible. Further, when Antwerp fell, a German army was released which made a great effort to outflank the Allies by way of the coast. Each side foiled the other, and the result was the long trench war which will be described in future pages.
Now let us return to our muttons. In the spring of 1709 Marlborough, who was now in possession of Lille proposed to march on Paris. The French knew that if he could seize Arras he would possess the gate to the capital. They therefore prepared to block his way by strongly entrenching themselves on a line extending from Douai,[20] which lies on the Scarpe about fourteen miles north-east of Arras, to Béthune. These trenches passed through La Bassée, where, as you know, the French and the British joined hands during the race to the sea in October 1914. Marlborough found these lines too strong to be carried by direct assault, so he turned aside and besieged Tournai, the town in which French Territorials, assisted by a British battery, made a very gallant stand on August 24, 1914.[21] Tournai surrendered after a siege of about thirty-seven days, and then Marlborough marched on Mons, the place where von Kluck, on August 23, 1914, vainly endeavoured to overwhelm the British.[22]
