Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders

by George Wharton Edwards

This medieval and most picturesque of all the towns of Flanders had not felt the effect of the wave of restoration, which took place in Belgium during the decade preceding the outbreak of the world war, owing to the fact that its monuments of the past were perhaps finer and in a better state of preservation than those of any of the other ancient towns. Ypres in the early days had treated the neighboring town of Poperinghe with great severity through jealousy, but she in turn suffered heavily at the hands of Ghent in 1383–84 when the vast body of weavers fled, taking refuge in England, and taking with them all hope of the town's future prosperity.

Its decline thenceforward was rapid, and it never recovered its former place in the councils of Flanders. Its two great memorials of the olden times were the great Cloth Hall, in the Grand' Place, and the Cathedral of Saint Martin, both dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The Cloth Hall, begun by Count Baldwin IX of Flanders, was perhaps the best preserved and oldest specimen of its kind in the Netherlands, and was practically complete up to the middle of August, 1915, when the great guns of the iconoclastic invader shot away the top of the immense clock tower, and unroofed the entire structure. Its façade was nearly five hundred feet long, of most severe and simple lines, and presented a double row of ogival windows, surmounted by niches containing thirty-one finely executed statues of counts and countesses of Flanders. There were small, graceful turrets at each end, and a lofty belfry some two hundred and thirty feet in height in the center, containing a fine set of bells connected with the mechanism of a carillon.

No. 4, Rue de Dixmude: Ypres

The interior of the hall was of noble proportions, running the full length, its walls decorated by a series of paintings by two modern Flemish painters, which were not of the highest merit, yet good withal. At the market-place end was a highly ornate structure called the New Work (Nieuwerke), erected by the burghers as a guild-hall in the fifteenth century. This was the first part of the edifice to be ruined by a German shell.

The destruction of this exquisite work of art seems entirely wanton and unnecessary. It produced no result whatever of advantage. There were neither English, French, nor Belgian soldiers in Ypres at the time. The populace consisted of about ten thousand peaceful peasants and shopkeepers, who, trusting in the fact that the town was unarmed and unfortified, remained in their homes. The town was battered and destroyed, leveled in ashes. The bombardment destroyed also the great Cathedral of Saint Martin adjoining the Cloth Hall, which dated from the thirteenth century [although the tower was not added until the fifteenth century]. It formed a very fine specimen of late Gothic, the interior containing some fine oak carving and a richly carved and decorated organ loft. Bishop Jansenius, the founder of the sect of Jansenists, is buried in a Gothic cloister which formed a part of the older church that occupied the site.

Another interesting monument of past greatness was the Hôtel de Ville, erected in the sixteenth century, and containing a large collection of modern paintings by French and Belgian artists. Of this structure not a trace remains save a vast blackened pile of crumbled stones and mortar. In the market-place now roam bands of half-starved dogs in search of food; not a roof remains intact. A couple of sentries pace before the hospital at the end of the Grand' Place. A recent photograph in the Illustrated London News taken from an aeroplane shows the ruined town like a vast honeycomb uncovered, the streets and squares filled with débris, the fragments of upstanding walls showing where a few months ago dwelt in peace and prosperity an innocent, happy people, now scattered to the four winds—paupers, subsisting upon charity. Their valiant and noble king and queen are living with the remnant of the Belgian army in the small fishing village of La Panne on the sand dunes of the North Sea.

The unique character of the half-forgotten town was exemplified by the number of ancient, wooden-faced houses to be found in the side streets. The most curious of these, perhaps, was that situated near the Porte de Lille, which I have mentioned in another page, and which noted architects of Brussels and Antwerp vainly petitioned the State to protect, or to remove bodily the façade and erect it in one of the vast "Salles" of the Cloth Hall. Both MM. Pauwels and Delbeke, the mural painters, then engaged in the decorations of the Cloth Hall, joined in protests to the authorities against their neglect of this remarkable example of medieval construction, but all these petitions were pigeonholed, and nothing resulted but vain empty promises, so the matter rested, and now this beautiful house has vanished forever.