The mystery of the “Sin against the Holy Ghost,” the mystery of “Antichrist” are mysteries no longer, but clear writings on an open page; blazing words on the walls of the banquet hall where the feast has broken up in sudden and searching terror.
Coal and iron. These territories are now the centres of greatest conflict: Poland, Galicia, and the Scar of Europe in the west. Each is the land of coal and iron. In the east the contest sweeps back and forth in Poland to rob Russia of her mines and manufactures, and add them to the resources of Germany; in the south to preserve to Austria the coal and iron and oil of Galicia; in the west to gain from France the coal and iron of Champagne, Artois, Picardy, as the coal and iron of Belgium were gained in the beginning at the price of paper treaties and a negligible honour, or to deprive Germany of the coal and iron that are the foundations of her empire (actual and potential) in the Rhineland and Westphalia. Was there any drama of Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe that matched the sombre theatricalism of life itself? Here in the west, far back in the Middle Ages, was the first great centre of manufacture and trade, Bruges, Ghent, Arras, great cities and world markets when London was a little river town, Paris a village, Berlin a frontier fort on the raw edge of a savage and heathen Prussia. Then later, after this first (and different) industrial civilisation had passed, came a new manifestation, and from Lille to Essen appeared the materialisation of a new madness, while Bruges and Courtrai and Aix were forgotten, with all they stood for, and other centres grew up—black, roaring, uncouth, but for men admirable and desired far beyond the restored churches and desecrated abbeys, the schools and universities, the dim and discredited philosophies, the decaying art and the vanished ideals of Fécamp and Reims, of Bruges and Louvain, of Aix and Trèves and Cologne. And now the Frankenstein monster gets him to his perfect work, and through the coal-fields and over the forges and factories, where he was fashioned, spreads death, devastation, and ruin that, nevertheless (and here the mystery and the wonder increase), may yet bring redemption, release, and restoration.
What has been in the immediate past needs no description: Crefeld and Lille are only Manchester and Pittsburgh, and their familiarity is sufficient to itself. What is now is equally common to all, and Louvain, Arras, and Reims in their blood-stained ruin are a part of the common consciousness. Meanwhile there were, and for the moment are, other cities and other regions, forgotten or endured, that are all Charleroi is not, or Crefeld or Maubeuge, and they are well worth a study, partly for what they are, partly for what they signify, partly for what they may forecast for a future beyond the present cataclysm.
There is hardly a more absorbingly interesting portion of France, historically, artistically, or picturesquely, than that wonderful quadrilateral, Compiègne-Noyon-Laon-Soissons, with its three great cathedrals; its finest castle ruin in France—Coucy, the pride of Enguerrand III—its fine old towns, as Laon and Noyon, with their groves and terraced paths; its great Forest of Compiègne; and only a few miles away on one hand or the other, châteaux such as Coucy and Ham, battle-fields of the significance of Crécy. It is all fought over now and may be again; no one knows how much is left, or may be left by and by, but it was a fair land, with many traces of a more spacious and balanced past, not in its great churches alone but as well in its quiet villages and its fine grey houses in old cities. A frontier, in a way, for already the creeping desolation of industrialism had reached close, working always down from the North of coal and iron, already absorbing St. Quentin and involving its ancient architecture in smoke and traffic, blotting out its streets of gabled houses, and turning it into a typical manufacturing centre—this, that was once the dowry of Mary Stuart.
North we enter into a general darkness, but on our way toward the dim old cities of Flanders and Brabant that hold even now the beauty of an elder day, forgotten by the world and outside the area of “great natural resources,” we may pause in spirit in Arras (it would not be well to be there in body, unless one were a soldier in the army of the Allies, when it would be perilous but touched with glory) for sight of an old, old city that gave a vision, better than almost any other in France, of what cities were in this region at the high-tide of the Renaissance. It is gone now, utterly, irremediably, and the ill work begun in the Revolution and continued under the empire, when the great and splendid Gothic cathedral was sold and utterly destroyed, has been finished by Prussian shells.
Capital of Artois, it had a vivid and eventful history, reaching back to pre-Roman times, continuing under Baldwin of the Iron Arm, who became the first Count of Arras; then being halved between the Count of Flanders and the King of France; given by St. Louis to his brother Robert, passing to the Counts of Burgundy, reverting to Louis de Mâle of Flemish fame, abandoned to the Emperor, won back by France; then acquiring the sinister distinction of having produced Robespierre and, finally, coming now to its end at the hands of the German hosts. What Arras must have been before the Revolution we can only guess, but with its glorious cathedral, its Chapelle des Ardents, and its “Pyramid of the Holy Candle” added to its surviving town hall with its fantastically beautiful spire, and its miraculously preserved streets and squares lined with fancifully gabled and arcaded houses, it must have been a sanctuary of old delights. The cathedral was of all styles from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, while the chapel and the “pyramid,” were models of mediæval art in its richest state. Both were destroyed by one Lebon, a human demon and apostate priest, who organised a “terror” of his own in his city and has gone down to infamy for his pestilential crimes.
Both the destroyed monuments were votive offerings in gratitude to Our Lady for her miraculous intervention in the case of a fearful plague in the twelfth century, the instrument of preservation being a certain holy candle, the melted wax from which was effective in preserving the life of all it touched. The pyramid was a slender Gothic tabernacle and spire, ninety feet high, standing in the Petite Place, a masterpiece of carved and painted and gilded sculptures, unique of its kind. Every vestige has vanished except a few relics preserved, together with that most precious memorial, the blood-stained rochet of St. Thomas à Becket, in the modern cathedral which Berlin has just announced has been completely and intentionally destroyed by gun-fire.
Until its recent destruction, Arras was one of the few territorially French towns in this region that could and did take one back into the atmosphere of the pre-coal-and-iron era of Europe, though with a difference. The fine vigour and riotous life of the Renaissance, the gaiety and spontaneousness of mediævalism were gone, with the colour and gold of the carved and painted shrines and houses, the fanciful costumes, the alert civic life; and instead was a grey shadow, a slowly dissolving memory. Still the pale simulacrum could stimulate the imagination, as the rose jar renews the memory of the rose. Now the jar is shattered and the scented leaves are trodden in the red mire, and we must make our way across the frontier if we are to find and enjoy what once Arras could in a measure give. God grant we may always be able to do so, and that Audenaarde and Tournai, Bruges and Malines, and Courtrai, with the still little villages in between, may remain to us after coal and iron have achieved their perfect work and been replaced in that position in life to which it pleased God to call them, so surrendering the more dominating place to which man had called them in his turn.
Of Ypres and Dixmude it is better to say little. Of the first of these, and its vanished glory, the solemn and single great Cloth Hall, I have said an inadequate something, but there was also St. Martin’s, once a cathedral, with its delicate type of Gothic, its rich Renaissance woodwork, its tombs and screens and treasures of ecclesiastical art; there were its old guild-houses and its quaint dwellings, carved and gabled and with wonderful old brickwork. And in Dixmude there was the Church of St. Nicholas with its jubé, or rood-loft, as gorgeous a piece of flamboyant art as one could find anywhere in Belgium or France. All this is gone, but a little farther on, behind the present battle lines, are more wonderful cities still—or are at this writing, in July, 1915.
This little Flanders, from the Scheldt to the sea, was a veritable garden of dreams. Nieuport, Furnes, Ypres, Dixmude, Courtrai, Tournai, Bruges, Ghent, Audenaarde—all are haunted by infinite old memories, and most of them have preserved their souls through seclusion and commercial oblivion, but around and between lie endless little villages of delicate old houses, grey Gothic churches that have not been secularised or abandoned (for Flanders always was a Catholic country), gardens, slow canals and brooks under their low stone bridges, and an ingratiating quiet that gives the lie to the progressive, practical, efficient, and wealthy strip of inordinate activity that “disquieteth itself in vain” from Lille to Liége through Mons and Courcelles, Charleroi and Namur.