Through shattered ranks and severed files and trampled flags they tore.
The English strove with desperate strength; paused, rallied, staggered, fled;
The green hillside is matted close with dying and with dead.
Across the plain and far away passed on that hideous wrack
While cavalier and Fantassin rush in upon their track.
On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, like eagles in the sun,
With bloody plumes the Irish stand—the field is fought and won!”
On our first day’s visit the Professor devoted most of the time to the cathedral and the remains that still exist of the earliest period of Tournai’s long and varied history. As we approached the city, past the vast excavations around Antoing connected with the lime pits and kilns and cement works that there abound, we could see the five spires of the cathedral in the distance. Antoing is only a mile and a half from Fontenoy, and the battlefield—marked by a monument erected in 1907—is happily free from the pits that scar so much of the countryside thereabouts, and no doubt looks to-day very much as it did on the day of the great fight.
The cathedral of Tournai is the oldest, the most vast, and decidedly the most imposing religious edifice in Belgium. Its five great towers dominate the entire city and are visible for miles across the surrounding plains. The oldest portions of the present structure date from about 880, when the inhabitants of Tournai returned after the invasion of the Norsemen. The side porches of the naves belong to this earliest period. In 1054 a fire destroyed the upper part of the cathedral and it was shortly after this that the towers were built. There were originally seven of these, the one in the centre being a gigantic square structure rising above all the others. The group as it then stood was without a rival in Europe, but the two towers to the east of the central one were removed with the ancient choir and the height of the central tower reduced. In their present form, however, the towers compose a magnificent assemblage.
