have I watched the tower against the dim sky, and seen the light of the
"_veilleur_," shining in the topmost window, where he keeps watch over
the sleeping town, and sounds two strokes upon a small bell after each
quarter is struck, to show that he is on watch. And so passed the time
in this peaceful land until that fatal day in August, 1914.
Dixmude
Dixmude
There is no longer a Grand' Place at Dixmude. Of the town, the great
squat church of St. Martin, and the quaint town hall adjoining it, now
not one stone remains upon another. The old mossy walls and bastion are
level with the soil, and even the course of the small sluggishly flowing
river Yser is changed by the ruin that chokes it.
I found it to be a melancholy, faded-out kind of place in 1910, when I
last saw it. I came down from Antwerp especially to see old St.
Martin's, which enshrined a most wondrous _Jube_, or altar screen, and a
chime of bells from the workshop of the Van den Gheyns. There was
likewise on the Grand' Place, a fine old prison of the fourteenth
century, its windows all closed with rusty iron bars, most of which were
loose in the stones. I tried them, to the manifest indignation of the
solitary gendarme, who saw me from a distance across the Grand' Place
and hurried over to place me under arrest. I had to show him not only my
passport but my letter of credit and my sketch book before he would
believe that I was what I claimed to be, a curious American, and
something of an antiquary. But it was the sketch book that won him, for
he told me that he had a son studying painting in Antwerp at the
academy. So we smoked together on a bench over the bridge of the "Pape
Gaei" and he related the story of his life, while I made a sketch of the
silent, grass-grown Grand' Place and the squat tower of old St.
Martin's, and the Town Hall beside it.
While we sat there on the bench only two people crossed the square, that
same square that witnessed the entry of Charles the Fifth amid the
silk-and velvet-clad nobles and burghers, and the members of the great
and powerful guilds, which he regarded and treated with such respect. In
those days the town had a population of thirty thousand or more. On this
day my friend the gendarme told me that there were about eleven hundred
in the town. Of this eleven hundred I saw twelve market people, the
_custode_ of the church of St. Martin; ditto that of the Town Hall; the
gendarme; one baby in the arms of a crippled girl, and two gaunt cats.
The great docks to which merchantmen from all parts of the earth came in
ships in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had now vanished, and
long green grass waved in the meadows where the channel had been.
[Illustration: The Ancient Place: Dixmude]
The ancient corporations and brotherhood, formerly of such power and
renown, had likewise long since vanished, and nought remained but here
and there on the silent, grass-grown streets gray, ancient palaces with
barred and shuttered windows. The very names of those who once dwelt
there could be found only in the musty archives in Bruges or Brussels. A
small _estaminet_ across the bridge bore the sign "In den Pape Gaei,"
and to this I fared and wrote my notes, while the crippled girl carrying
the baby seated herself where she could watch me, and then lapsed into a
sort of trance, with wide open eyes which evidently saw not.
In company with a large, black, savage-looking dog which traveled
side-ways regarding me threateningly, I thought, and gloweringly refused
my offers of friendship, I crossed the Grand' Place to the Hôtel de
Ville, or Town Hall, the door of which stood open. Inside, no living
soul responded to my knock. The rooms were rather bare of furniture,
many of them of noble proportions, and a few desks and chairs showed
that they were used by the town officers, wherever they were.
St. Martin's was closed, and I skirted its walls, hoping to find
somewhere a door unfastened that I might enter and see the great _Jube_
or altar screen. In a small, evil-smelling alley-way, where there was a
patch of green grass, I saw low down in the wall a grated window, which
I fancied must be at the back of the altar. I got down on my knees and,
parting the grass which grew there rankly, I put my face in against the
iron bars that closed it. For a moment I could see nothing, then when my
eyes became accustomed to the light I saw a tall candle burning on an
iron ring on the wall; then a heavy black cross beside it, and finally a
figure in some sort of heavy dark robe kneeling prostrate before it,
only the tightly clasped white hands gleaming in the dim candle light;
almost holding my breath I withdrew my head, feeling that I was almost
committing sacrilege. Unfortunately for me, I dislodged some loose
mortar, and I heard this rattle noisily into the chamber below. Then I
fled as rapidly as I could down the dim alley-way to the silent sunlit
Grand' Place. Here I found the verger, and he admitted me to the great
old church, in return for a one-franc piece, and brought me a
rush-bottom chair to a choice spot before the wondrous _Jube_, where I
made my drawing.
[Illustration: The Great Jube, or Altar Screen: Dixmude]
In the silence of the great gray old church I labored over the exquisite
Gothic detail, all unmindful of the passing time, when all at once I
became conscious that a small green door beside the right hand low
_retable_ was moving outward. I ceased working and watched it; then the
solitary candle before the statue of the Virgin guttered and flared up;
then the small door opened wide and forth came an old man in a priest's
cassock, with a staff in his hand. The small, green, baize-covered door
closed noiselessly; the old man slowly opened the gate before the
altar and came down the step toward me. Without a word he walked behind
my chair and peered over my shoulder at the drawing I was making of the
great _Jube_.
He tapped the floor with his staff, placed it under his arm, sought his
pocket somewhere beneath his cassock, from which he produced a snuff
box. From this he took a generous pinch, and a moment later was blowing
vigorously that note of satisfaction that only a devotee of the powder
can render an effective adjunct of emotion.
"Bien faite, M'sieur," he exclaimed at length, wiping his eyes on a
rather suspicious looking handkerchief. "T-r-r-r-r-es bien faite! J'vous
fais mes compliments." "Admirable! You have certainly rendered the
spirit of our great and wondrous altar screen."
A little later we passed out of the old church through a side door
leading into a small green enclosure, now gloomy in the shade of the old
stone walls. At one end was a tangle of briar, and here were some old
graves, each with a tinsel wreath or two on the iron cross. And
presiding over these was the limp figure of a one-legged man on two
crutches, who saluted us. We passed along to the end of the inclosure,
where lay a chance beam of sunshine like a bar of dusty gold against the
rich green grass.
"Oui, M'sieur," said the priest, as if continuing a sentence he was
running over in his mind. "Cassé! Pauvre Pierre, un peu cassé, le pauvre
bonhomme, but then, he's good for several years yet; cracked he is, but
only cracked like a good old basin, and (in the idiom) he'll still hold
well his bowl of soup."
He laughed at his wit, became grave, then shook out another laugh.
"See," he added, pointing to the ground all about us strewn with morsels
of tile; "the roof cracks, but it still holds," he added, pointing
upwards at the old tower of St. Martin's. "And now, M'sieur, I shall
take you to my house; _tenez_, figure to yourself," and he laid a fine,
richly veined, strong old hand upon my arm with a charming gesture. "I
have been here twenty-five years; I bought all the antique furniture of
my predecessor. I said to myself, 'Yes, I shall buy the furniture for
five hundred francs, and then, later I shall sell to a wealthy amateur
for one thousand francs, perhaps in a year or two.' Twenty-five years
ago, and I have it yet. And now it creaks and creaks and snaps in the
night. We all creak and creak thus as we grow old; ah, you should hear
my wardrobes. 'Elles cassent les dos,' and I lie in my warm bed in the
winter nights and listen to my antiques groan and complain. Poor old
things, they belonged to the 'Empire' Period; no wonder they groan.
[Illustration: The Fish Market: Dixmude]
"And when my friend the notaire comes to play chess with me, you should
see him eye my antiques, ah, so covetously; I see him, but I never let
on. Such a collection of antiques as we all are, M'sieur." Then he
became serious, and lifting his cane he pointed to a gravestone at one
side, "My old servant lies there, M'sieur; we are all old here now, but
still we do not die. Alas! we never die. There is plenty of room here
for us, but we die hard. See, myotis, heliotrope, hare bells, and
mignonette, a bed of perfume, and there lies my old servant. A restless
old soul she was, and she took such a long time to die. She was
eighty-five when she finally made up her mind."
I had a cup of wine with the old man in his small _salle à manger_. His
house was indeed a mine of wealth for the antiquary and collector, more
like a shop than a house. I lingered with him for nearly an hour,
telling him of the great world lying beyond Dixmude, of London and
Paris, and of New York and some of its wonders, of which I fancied he
was rather sceptical. And then I came away, after shaking hands with him
at his doorstep in the dim alley-way, with the bar of golden sunlight
shining at the entrance to the Grand' Place and the noise of the rooks
cawing on the roof.
"_Au revoir_, M'sieur le Peintre, _et bon voyage_, and remember, 'Ask,
and it shall be given, seek and you shall find,'" and with these cryptic
words, he stood with uplifted hands, a smile irradiating his fine
ascetic face glowing like that of a saint. Behind the faded black of his
old _soutane_ I could see his treasures of blue china and ancient
cabinets, and a chance light illumined a mirror behind his head, and
aureoled him like unto one of the saints behind the great "Jube," and
thus I left him.
And now Dixmude is in formless heaps of ashes and burnt timbers. Hardly
one stone now remains upon another. There is no longer a Grand'
Place--and the very course of the river Yser is changed.
Ypres
Ypres
Ypres as a town grew out of a rude sort of stronghold built, says M.
Vereeke in his "Histoire Militaire d'Ypres," in the year 900, on a small
island in the river Yperlee. It was in the shape of a triangle with a
tower on each corner, and was known to the inhabitants as the "Castle of
the three Turrets."
Its establishment was followed by a collection of small huts on the
banks of the stream, built by those who craved the protection of the
fortress. They built a rampart of earth and a wide ditch to defend it,
and to this they added from time to time until the works became so
extensive that a town sprang into being, which from its strategic
position on the borders of France soon became of great importance in the
wars that constantly occurred. Probably no other Flemish town has seen
its defenses so altered and enlarged as Ypres has between the primitive
days when the crusading Thierry d'Alsace planted hedges of live thorns
to strengthen the towers, and the formation of the great works of
Vauban. We have been so accustomed to regarding the Fleming as a
sluggish boor, that it comes in the nature of a surprise when we read of
the part these burghers, these weavers and spinners, took in the great
events that distinguished Flemish history. "In July, 1302, a contingent
of twelve hundred chosen men, five hundred of them clothed in scarlet
and the rest in black, were set to watch the town and castle of
Courtrai, and the old Roman Broël bridge, during the battle of the
'Golden Spurs,' and the following year saw the celebration of the
establishment of the confraternity of the Archers of St. Sebastian,
which still existed in Ypres when I was there in 1910. This was the last
survivor of the famed, armed societies of archers which flourished in
the Middle Ages. Seven hundred of these men of Ypres embarked in the
Flemish ships which so harassed the French fleet in the great naval
engagement of June, 1340."
Forty years later five thousand men of Ypres fought upon the battlefield
with the French, on that momentous day which witnessed the death of
Philip Van Artevelde and the triumph of Leliarts. Later, when the Allies
laid siege to the town, defended by Leliarts and Louis of Maele, it was
maintained by a force of ten thousand men, and on June 8, 1383, these
were joined by seventeen thousand English and twenty thousand Flemings,
these latter from Bruges and Ghent.
At this time the gateways were the only part of the fortifications
built of stone. The ramparts were of earth, planted with thorn bushes
and interlaced with beams. Outside were additional works of wooden posts
and stockades, behind the dyke, which was also palisaded. The English,
believing that the town would not strongly resist their numbers, tried
to carry it by assault. They were easily repulsed, to their great
astonishment, with great losses.
At last they built three great wooden towers on wheels filled with
soldiers, which they pushed up to the walls, but the valiant garrison
swarmed upon these towers, set fire to them, and either killed or
captured those who manned them.
All the proposals of Spencer demanding the surrender of Ypres were met
with scorn, and the English were repeatedly repulsed with great losses
of men whenever they attempted assaults.
The English turned upon the Flemish of Ghent with fury, saying that they
had deceived them as to the strength of the garrison of Ypres, and
Spencer, realizing that it was impossible to take the town before the
French army arrived, retired from the field with his soldiers. This left
Flanders at the mercy of the French. But now ensued the death of Count
Louis of Maele (1384) and this brought Flanders under the rule of the
House of Burgundy, which resulted in prosperity and well nigh complete
independence for the Flemings.
The Great Kermesse of Our Lady of the Garden (Notre Dame de Thuine) was
then inaugurated because the townspeople believe that Ypres had been
saved by the intercession of the Virgin Mary--the word Thuin meaning in
Flemish "an enclosed space, such as a garden plot," an allusion to the
barrier of thorns which had so well kept the enemy away from the
walls--a sort of predecessor of the barbed-wire entanglements used in
the present great world war.
The Kermesse was held by the people of Ypres on the first Sunday in
August every year, called most affectionately "Thuindag," and while
there in 1910 I saw the celebration in the great square before the Cloth
Hall, and listened to the ringing of the chimes; the day being ushered
in at sunrise by a fanfare of trumpets on the parapet of the tower by
the members of a local association, who played ancient patriotic airs
with great skill and enthusiasm.
In the Place de Musée, a quiet, gray corner of this old town, was an
ancient Gothic house containing a really priceless collection of medals
and instruments of torture used during the terrible days of the Spanish
Inquisition. I spent long hours in these old musty rooms alone, and I
might have stolen away whatever took my fancy had I been so minded, for
the _custode_ left me quite alone to wander at will, and the cases
containing the seals, parchments, and small objects were all unfastened.
I saw the other day another wonderful panorama photograph taken from an
aeroplane showing Ypres as it now is, a vast heap of ruins, the Cloth
Hall gutted; the Cathedral leveled, and the site of the little old
museum a vast blackened hole in the earth where a shell had landed. The
photograph, taken by an Englishman, was dated September, 1915.
The great Hanseatic League, that extensive system of monopolies, was the
cause of great dissatisfaction and many wars because of jealousy and bad
feeling. Ypres, Ghent, and Bruges, while defending their rights and
privileges against all other towns, fought among themselves. The
monopoly enjoyed by the merchant weavers of Ypres forbade all weaving
for "three leagues around the walls of Ypres, under penalty of
confiscation of the looms and all of the linen thus woven."
Constant friction was thus engendered between the towns of Ypres and
Poperinghe, resulting in bloody battles and the burning and destruction
of much property. Even within the walls of the town this bickering went
on from year to year. When they were not quarreling with their neighbors
over slights or attacks, either actual or fancied, they fought among
themselves over the eternal question of capital _versus_ labor. A sharp
line was drawn between the workingman and the members of the guilds who
sold his output. The artisans, whose industry contributed so greatly to
the prosperity of these towns, resented any infringement of their legal
rights. The merchant magistrates were annually elected, and on one
occasion, in 1361, to be exact, because this was omitted, the people
arose in their might against the governors, who were assembled in the
Nieuwerck of the Hôtel de Ville. The Baillie, one Jean Deprysenaere,
haughty in his supposed power, and trusting in his office, as local
representative of the Court of Flanders, appeared before the insurgent
weavers and endeavored to appease them. "They fell upon him and slew
him" (Vereeke). Then, rushing into the council chamber, they seized the
other magistrates and confined them in the belfry of the Cloth Hall.
"Then the leaders in council resolved to kill the magistrates, and
beheaded the Burgomaster and two sheriffs in the place before the Cloth
Hall in the presence of their colleagues" (Vereeke).
Following the custom of the Netherlands, each town acted for itself
alone. The popular form of government was that of gatherings in the
market-place where laws were discussed and made by and for the people.
The spirit of commercial jealousy, however, kept them apart and
nullified their power. Consumed by the thirst for commercial, material
prosperity, they had no faith in each other, no bond of union, each
being ready and willing to foster its own interest at its rival's
expense. Thus neither against foreign nor internal difficulties were
they really united. The motto of modern Belgium, "L'Union fait la
Force," was not yet invented, and there was no great and powerful
authority in which they believed and about which they could gather.
This history presents the picture of Ghent assisting an army of English
soldiers to lay siege to Ypres. So the distrustful people dwelt amid
perpetual quarreling, trade pitted against trade, town against town,
fostering weakness of government and shameful submission in defeat. No
town suffered as did Ypres during this distracted state of affairs in
Flanders of the sixteenth century, which saw it reduced from a place of
first importance to a dead town with the population of a village. And so
it remained up to the outbreak of the world war in 1914.
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.
[Illustration: 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.