Flemish is scarcely distinguishable from Dutch. Although philologically they may be regarded as twin dialects of one tongue, they are for practical purposes the same. There are, to be sure, a few slight differences of idiom, and numerous differences of vocabulary, even between standard written Flemish and standard written Dutch, but scarcely more important than those between the English of Mr. Howells and the English of Mr. Hardy. In popular speech the gap is naturally wider, and perhaps justifies the view that Flemish and Dutch are separate dialects of one language, though “dialect” may really be too strong a word. From my own observation in East Flanders, I should say that a Dutchman would be in about the same situation there with regard to difference of speech as a New Englander in Virginia.
According to the census of 1910, there were in Belgium about 3,832,000 persons speaking French or belonging to French-speaking families, and about 4,153,000 speaking Flemish or belonging to Flemish families. The Flemish population, being to a larger extent agricultural, has for many years been increasing faster than the Walloons. Yet French, being by acquisition or second-nature a language perfectly familiar to all educated Belgians, appears to have, and really has, an immense advantage over Flemish. The literature of the French language is enriched and glorified with the names of many great authors, from Jean Froissart and Philippe de Comines to Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, who belong by birth or residence to what we now call Belgium.
But the Flemish had, and probably always will have, a pride of their own. In the Middle Ages their cities were among the first in Northern Europe to emerge from obscurity. The names of Flemish towns strike the ear with a strange ruggedness in the liquid lapse of Dante’s lines, but a stranger thing it is that even in the thirteenth century these vigorous municipalities were looked to for independence, and called upon for vengeance on tyranny; we hear, in the Purgatorio, of “the evil plant that overshadows all the Christian land,” and are told that “if Douai, Lille, Ghent and Bruges had power, there would soon be vengeance taken.” A curious example this of “ancestral voices prophesying war.”
In the sixteenth century Flanders was the scene of tragic resistance to Spain and the Inquisition. Liberty was lost and recovered and lost again; but prosperity still bloomed from the ashes of destroyed commerce, the language and institutions of the land were redeemed with a fearful price, civilization was preserved with blood and sorrow, art flourished in the midst of horrors; and how all this came to pass is explained only by the stubbornness with which the people kept up their local patriotism. The visible signs of this municipal pride and glory were, until four years ago, and in part still are, the great churches, town-halls, and guild-houses of Flanders. Among the most impressive of these monuments were the Cloth Hall at Ypres, the Belfry of Bruges, the Town-halls of Audenarde, Alost, Termonde, Louvain, Brussels, and Ghent, the Cathedrals of Antwerp and Malines, the quaint Béguinages or cities of retirement for religious women, and many another less renowned but hardly less beautiful expression of ancient faith and community of enterprise.
The Austrian yoke was shaken off at the time of the French Revolution, and after a short period of republican government Belgium, together with France, came under the domination of Napoleon. At the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, Belgium and Holland were united under the name of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in an ill-assorted combination which lasted only till 1830, when the present Kingdom of Belgium was established. From that year to 1914 the Flemish people of Belgium, though more than satisfied to live in political union with the Walloons, and indeed being the more prosperous and rapidly growing part of the population, were solicitous to preserve their local customs and particularly their own language. Societies were formed for the cultivation of Flemish literature. Endowments for the same purpose were established. One of the parliamentary aims of political parties in the provinces of East and West Flanders and Antwerp and the northern sections of Brabant and Limbourg was the safe-guarding of Flemish as one of the official languages and a medium of instruction. There was not the slightest flavor of disloyalty in this desire. It was entirely constitutional. It expressed itself openly, and had no need for secrecy. The tendency thus created was called the Flamingant movement. No one connected with it, so far as I can discover, entertained the slightest notion of appealing to Germany for countenance or support. The Flemings in general and the Flamingants in particular would have been the last people in the world to admit that their language was a dialect of German or that their manifest destiny was absorption in the German Empire. The unity of Belgium was as precious to them as to the Walloons, and was placed above every consideration of race and speech. But there is no country under the sun in which local self-government and community interests are so highly developed as in Belgium. Under the Belgian constitution the communes enjoy the maximum of freedom. Civic pride nowhere else burns so bright. It is the habit of local self-government, the strong personalities developed under this system, and the spirit of the communes that have saved Belgium from starvation during the war. As every one of Mr. Hoover’s American delegates in Belgium will testify, the spectacle was and is magnificent. As early as October, 1914, when the wave of invasion had passed over Belgium, the communes stood firm, and in all of them committees with almost absolute power, and enjoying the perfect confidence of the people, were formed and got to work commandeering the visible supply of food and distributing it prudently.
Within a very short time after the invasion the Germans showed that they intended to take advantage of the difference between Flemings and Walloons, a difference which, as we have seen, was purely domestic, and concerned with no really vital political issue. Among the offices of his hated administration, Governor-General von Bissing established a bureau for dealing with “the Flemish question,” a bureau consisting of German specialists in philology and discord. For about seven months, this commission, which was working in secret, attracted hardly any attention. Then it began to operate visibly. In the summer of 1915, I was stationed, as delegate of the Hoover commission, in Ghent, the capital of East Flanders, and witnessed the beginning of German coquetry. As may be imagined, it was very clumsy and ineffectual. One day an attempt would be made to flatter the local pride of the peasants by printing official notices and war bulletins in Flemish and German only, instead of Flemish, German, and French, as had previously been the practice; the next day they would be informed, in these same posters, that they must surrender their hay-crop to the German military authorities. The Germans appeared to be as much detested in Flanders as anywhere else in Belgium. I saw the wife of a distinguished citizen of Ghent burst into tears of vexation and anxiety because a German officer of high rank spoke to her in a restaurant. She said she feared she would be distrusted for the rest of her life by her fellow-citizens for having listened to a German officer. Yet he was evidently a gentleman, behaved with propriety, and had the excuse for addressing her that he was quartered in her house. I have known persons in Ghent to go willingly to prison rather than comply with German rules or pay fines into the German treasury. “Do you see that man?” said to me an acquaintance in Ghent one day, pointing to a German in uniform who was speaking Flemish to some peasants. “He lived here before the war; he will not be able to live here after the war; his life will not be safe.”
Before the war there were four universities in Belgium: the Catholic university of Louvain, the liberal or non-sectarian university of Brussels, and the two state universities of Liége and Ghent. The instruction was given entirely in French, except that there were certain courses at Louvain and Ghent which were paralleled, rather expensively, one would think, by courses in Flemish. In 1911 a bill was introduced in the Belgian Parliament looking to the gradual transformation of the University of Ghent into an institution completely Flemish. In 1912 this proposal was again discussed, and was reported favorably in the Chamber of Representatives. The war of course put an end to the project.
Now the Germans have taken it up with enthusiasm, trying to harvest for their own purposes the sympathies that were formerly cultivated in its favor. Whether they annex all or part or none of Belgium, they desire to pose as the liberators of Flanders, and to foment a permanent jealousy between the Flemish-speaking people and the rest of the Belgian population. This is precisely like their conduct in the south of Ireland, in the Province of Quebec, and in Russia. They have their eye on Antwerp, which they intend to keep, whatever happens, and they realize that Flanders would be a good basis for the eventual absorption of Holland.
On December 2, 1915, it became known in Belgium that the German authorities purposed to reopen the University of Ghent, which of course had been closed, and to make Flemish the language of instruction. Their design was instantly understood by everybody, including the leaders of the old Flamingant movement, who, instead of falling in with it, met it with a vigorous protest. This was disregarded, and on the 31st of December the decree was promulgated. A commission of German professors was empowered to draw up regulations for carrying out the plan of transformation. Meanwhile, in order to encourage as many Belgian young men as possible to escape from the country and find their way into the Belgian army, the real authorities of the four universities were keeping these institutions closed. Their passive resistance enraged the Germans, who, on March 18, 1916, arrested the two most celebrated professors of Ghent, Henri Pirenne, and Paul Frédéricq, eminent historians, and sent them to prison-camps in Germany, where they have been treated with disgusting brutality. The colleagues of these two brave men were not less courageous themselves, and signed a second protest. Thereupon the Germans made up a ridiculous little faculty of their own, and imposed it upon the university, which, we must remember had no students. There were at first seven of these professors, of whom one was a German, another a native of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and five were Belgians without distinction in the learned world or respectability as citizens. To these were later added a number of equally insignificant Dutch and German teachers of minor rank, and a very few Belgians. Opinion in Holland rose in disgust, and an unpleasant life awaits the Dutch instructors if they ever dare return to the land of their birth. They have been canny enough to make sure of pensions from the German government, in view of the probability that they will in the near future be men without a country.
On April 5, 1916, the German Chancellor, making a curious mixture of cynicism and hypocrisy, in a speech before the Reichstag, promised that the Imperial Government would help the Flemish population to free itself from “the preponderance of French culture.” The Germans no doubt expected some backing from the Flamingant societies, the trustees of the Flemish endowment funds, and the former political supporters of the Flemish movement. In this they have been disappointed, for their conduct has aroused protest upon protest from all these quarters. It is difficult to determine, from the boasts in the German newspapers and the denials of exiled Belgians, just how many teachers and students had been scraped together by the beginning of 1917, but the faculty was a motley collection of German, Dutch and Belgian nonentities, and there were less than three students for every teacher. To-day there is only one student in agriculture, the subject that would naturally be most sought in a Flemish university. Of all the war-babies, this University of Ghent is surely the most anæmic. Yet if we are to believe General von Bissing in the speech in which he declared it alive and viable, “The God of War held it at the baptismal font with naked sword in hand!” This is echt Deutsch in taste and feeling. And while these proceedings were solemnly going on, the deportation of workmen from Ghent was beginning; on the very day of inauguration, husbands and fathers were being torn from their families to suffocate in German salt-mines, to sweat and faint in German collieries, to dig and die in German trenches. Has the world ever seen a more revolting instance of hypocrisy? I happened to be in Courtrai one morning when a number of Flemish wives and mothers were herded into the jail there, from the village of Sweveghem, because their men had refused to make barbed wire for the Germans. International law forbids a conqueror to compel the vanquished to produce munitions of war, but what of that!