All around the gabled houses are abandoned in their last agony. They are those pointed houses, dwellings of a distant epoch, which give an ineffable impression of familiar calm and patriarchal life, buildings with faces inexpressibly benevolent, paternal, sweet and grave. Through the broken windows our gaze penetrates into corners which recall certain interiors of Flemish art.
In these interiors, until yesterday, close to the windows, with their little leaded panes, the placid ladies of Ypres wove in traditional calm their arabesques of lace. Their agile and sapient fingers produced white, flowery patterns that were as light as foam. For Ghent had taken from Ypres the industry of its linens, England that of its cloths, Paris that of its damasks, but no country had had the power, the placidity, the patience, and the taste to imitate its lace. Here the old industry lived, modest and silent.
The mediæval city slept its great sleep amidst the tumult of the outside world as if the Kasteelgracht and the Majoorgracht, the wide canals which encircle it and were its gates, were enchanted and had isolated it from swift innovations.
In the war between Germany and the Halles of Ypres, in the war between Germany and the Library of Louvain, between Germany and the cathedral of Rheims, it is not possible to remain neutral.
CHAPTER IX
THE WINTER CAMPAIGN
The first purpose of the Allies' scheme of military envelopment was to arrest and eventually to break the German offensive. Even after their losses in the battle of Ypres and the concurrent Battle on the Yser, the Germans still had on the West a superiority in numbers. The shock of those defeats was bitter. That is sufficiently proved by the proclamation which soon afterwards the Emperor of Germany issued to his troops. A cruel hour, he told them, had struck for them and for the Fatherland. He exhorted them to meet it with a greater determination. For a time Germany became a land of mourning. The German newspapers of this date, the later part of November, appeared day by day with pages of private obituary advertisements. The dream of conquest, except as regarded Belgium, was shattered, and it was realised that even to keep that country as a reward of what were called the sacrifices made, Germany would have to face a struggle to the death with Powers whose united superiority was now only too manifest.
That mood, however, soon passed, and feeling, directed at the outset of the war against Russia, was with a redoubled intensity excited against England. The reasons are not far to seek. Extraordinary efforts had become necessary, not only on the East to repair the disaster of the Battle of the Vistula, and to furnish General von Hindenburg with the forces for his great "drive" towards Warsaw, but to make good the wastage on the West.
It is a recognised axiom among military men that for such a scheme as the Germans had in view in France, the lowest superiority in numbers necessary is a proportion of four to three. Even that assumes equal training and equipment, and equal skill in leadership. The last factor, skill in leadership, which is in war the most difficult to estimate beforehand, is, at the same time, as this struggle has proved, tremendously important. In regard to it the odds were heavily against the Germans. The Battle of Ypres, it has become evident, was on their part a series of bad mistakes—mistakes which were not seen until too late. After the defeat at Reims Count von Moltke was removed from his place as Chief of the Staff and Baron von Falkenheyn appointed. The strategical scheme of Baron von Falkenheyn was sound and bold enough if Antwerp had not got into the way of it, and if, too, the tactical blunders of Ypres had not ruined its execution.
Besides defects in leadership, the Germans had to face the striking comparative deficiency of their field artillery, and the fact that their gunnery had not turned out so practically sound as that of the French. It followed that to resume the offensive they must have a superiority of even more than four to three. They had begun with a superiority of two to one. Yet through the unexpected skill in their opponents' leadership they had been foiled and had had their initiative wrested from them. In view, however, of the demands of the campaign on the East, this necessary weight of numbers they could not on the West supply. One resource was to make it up by an appeal to the spirit of the army. That took the form of an unusually liberal distribution of rewards for individual valour.