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.