A new actor was about to appear on the scene, a new ally, slower, but
infinitely more effectual, than the best reinforcements.
Last November the _Moniteur Belge_ published a royal decree conferring
the Order of Leopold upon M. Charles Louis Kogge, _garde wateringue_ of
the north of Furnes, for his courageous and devoted services in the work
of inundation in the Yser region.
It was, we have been told, this M. Kogge who first conceived the idea of
calling the waters to our aid. A more romantic version has it that the
notion was suggested to the Headquarters Staff by the singularly
opportune discovery of a bundle of old revolutionary documents bearing
upon the action brought in 1795 by a Flemish farmer against his landlord
"to recover damages for the loss he had suffered through the inundation
of his land during the defence of Nieuport." Be this as it may, on the
evening of October 25 the Belgian General Headquarters Staff informed
the Admiral that it had just taken measures to inundate the left bank of
the Yser between that river and the railway line from Dixmude to
Nieuport.
The effects of this inundation could not, however, be felt for the first
day or two, or even for those immediately following. The word inundation
generally suggests to the mind the image of a torrential rush of water,
a great charge of marine or fluvial cavalry which sweeps all before it.
There was nothing of the sort in this case. We were in Western Belgium,
in an invertebrate country, without relief of any sort, where everything
proceeds slowly and phlegmatically, even cataclysms. It is, perhaps, a
pity that there is not another word in the language to describe the
hydrographic operation we were about to witness; but in default of a
substantive there is a verb, which surprised most readers of the
_communiques_ as a neologism, but which, as a fact, has been used in
Flanders from time immemorial, and has the advantage of expressing the
nature of the operation most admirably. It is the verb _tendre_ (to
spread or stretch). They _spread_ an inundation there as fishermen
spread a net. No image could be more exact. The _spreader_, in this
case, was at the locks of Nieuport. He is a head _wateringue_,
commanding a dozen men armed with levers to manipulate the
lifting-jacks. At high tide he had the flood-gates raised; the sea
entered, forcing back the fresh water of the canal and its tributaries;
and the sea did not run out again, for the flood-gates had been lowered.
Henceforth the fresh water which flowed on every side into the basin of
the Yser will find no outlet; "without haste and without rest" it will
add its contribution to that of the tide; it will gradually overflow the
dykes of the collecting canals, will reach the _watergands_, and cover
the whole _schoore_ with its meshes. Slily, noiselessly, unceasingly, it
will rise on a soil already saturated like a sponge and incapable of
absorbing another drop of water. All that falls there, whether it come
from the sky in the form of rain, or from the hills of Cassel in the
form of torrents, will remain on the surface. There is no way of
checking the inundation as long as the flood-gates are not raised. He
who holds Nieuport holds the entire district by means of its locks. This
explains the persistence of the Germans in their attempts to capture it.
Fortunately, these attempts were somewhat belated; they tried a surprise
by the dunes of Lombaertzide and Middelkerke, which might perhaps have
succeeded but for the timely co-operation of the Anglo-French fleet with
the Belgian troops: the German attack was driven back by the fire of the
monitors, and failed to carry the locks of Nieuport. The inundation
continued. When its last meshes were woven and all its web complete, it
was to spread in a semicircle on a zone of 30 kilometres, and this
immense artificial lagoon, from four to five kilometres wide and from
three to four feet deep, in which light squadrons and batteries might
have engaged if hard pressed, but for the abrupt depressions of the
_watergands_ and collecting canals, forming invisible traps at every
step, was to constitute the most impregnable defensive front, a liquid
barrier defying all attacks. Dixmude, at the extremity of this lagoon,
in the blind alley here formed by the Yser, the Handzaeme Canal, and the
railway embankment, might aptly be compared to Quiberon; like Quiberon,
it would be, were its bridges destroyed, a sort of thin, low peninsula;
but it is a Flemish Quiberon anchored upon a motionless sea, without
waves and without tides, studded with tree-tops and telegraph poles, and
bearing on its dead waters the drifting corpses of soldiers and animals,
pointed helmets, empty cartridge-cases and food-tins.