Inviolate Belgium

( Originally Published 1915 )

THE YSER

" LESS than a year ago the region of the Yser was assuredly one of the most peaceful and one of the happiest countries under God's sun (34). A country of rich pastures, intersected by ditches and canals, sown with towns and villages. Here and there, hidden in the verdure, were low, white farmhouses capped by red tiles. Rows of tall poplars, bent by the sea-winds, denote the course followed by the roads. A few thick-set towers, rustic steeples, and adorable belfries, of sculptured lace-like stone, recalled the old traditions religious, corporative, communal, and artistic which are still dear to the meditative and industrious Flemish race. Along the western horizon ran the pleasant girdle of the dunes, hiding the fashionable sea-fronts of La Panne, Saint-Idesbald, Coxyde.

" To-day you must picture to yourself a bare, sinister plain, on which falls a rain of bombs and shells and shrapnel. The soil is broken by heavy traffic, ploughed up by projectiles, watered with blood. Here and there the inundations have produced great sheets of water (38), whence emerge the ruins of farm-houses, and on which all sorts of rubbish is floating, and often corpses (35). And on this soil, since the 16th of October, 1914, without respite, without interruption, men have been fighting, and destroying, and slaughtering one another."

While the 7th Division of the British troops, which had just disembarked in Flanders, fell back by way of Thourout toward Ypres, and a brigade of French Marine Fusiliers, which was sent to cover the retreat from Antwerp, and behaved so admirably at Quatrecht, fell back upon Dixmude, what was left of the Belgian Army reformed itself hastily on the Yser, between Nieuport and Dixmude, and once more faced the enemy.

For the Germans had been swiftly diverted in considerable numbers from the approaches of Antwerp to West Flanders, in the hope of turning the left wing of the Allies and reaching Calais.

" Reaching the Yser on the 15th of October,1 the Belgian Army was attacked on the following day. On this day, indeed, the Germans endeavoured to dislodge the Marine Fusiliers, who had no artillery, from Dixmude; it was the Belgian artillery, so renowned for the skill of its gun-layers and the efficiency of its fire, which supported the French. On the 17th German shells were falling on the whole line of the advanced Belgian positions between Dixmude and the sea. These attacks were the prelude to a terrible battle, which, lasting from the 18th to the 30th of October, was to make the heroic defence of the Yser by the Belgian Army for ever renowned in history.

" On the 18th the Germans, after a desperate struggle, succeeded in carrying the advanced positions of Keyem and Mannekensvere; but a brilliant attack by the Belgian Army recovered Keyem the same night.

" On the 19th the intensity of the struggle was redoubled along the entire front. The Kaiser had ordered his troops to break through, cost what it might. Three times the German hordes were repulsed. Nevertheless, in their furious impetuosity the Germans succeeded in carrying the advanced position of Beerst, while that of Keyem held out.

" The centre of the Belgian Army was the object of violent and repeated attacks. It was then that our Staff, in order to diminish the pressure on the centre, directed the French Marine Fusiliers and a Belgian division to make a sally from Dixmude, delivering a counter-attack on the Beerst Vladsloo front. On the evening of the 19th we held Vladsloo and the outskirts of Beerst, and were threatening the flank of the enemy army. But it was learned that important German reinforcements were arriving from the direction of Roulers, and we withdrew. Keyem was thus reoccupied by the Germans.

" The 20th was marked by a violent bombardment of our positions.

" At Nieuport the Germans captured the Bamburg farm. We retook it the same evening; after a fresh assault the Germans dislodged us yet again. The same day, at Dixmude, two German attacks were repelled.

" On the 21 St, in the morning, a fresh attempt to carry Dixmude; and another check. The Germans commenced a formidable general offensive. In the afternoon their attacks once again spent themselves upon Schoorbakke and Dixmude; they failed before the tenacity of our troops.

" From the sea the British Fleet, which had come to our rescue, enfiladed the German forces with the murderous fire of its guns. But our enemies are courageous, and they sacrificed themselves with the fury of despair. On the 22nd of October, after a terrible bombardment, they succeeded at night in setting foot upon the left bank of the Yser at Tervaete; but we drove them into the river.

" So many repeated attacks, and extremely violent attacks, delivered by a numerous and a desperate enemy would have got the upper hand of an army less brave than ours. French reinforcements had been promised us. Our men knew this, and they held out. But these reinforcements were long in coming. On the 23rd of October, however, the first French reinforcements arrived on our left, and on the 24th the six Belgian divisions were supported by one French division and a few battalions of Territorials. On the night of the 23rd a furious attack upon Dixmude was repelled by the Marine Fusiliers and a couple of Belgian regiments; this was the sixth time that the German Army had attacked Dixmude within a week, and at each of these repeated assaults there were frightful hand-to-hand combats and hecatombs of dead; and each time our valiant soldiers remained masters of the field.

" The area conquered by the Germans on the 23rd, lying within the bend of the Yser between Schoorbakke and Tervaete, was violently bombarded and recaptured. Here it was that a note book was found on a German corpse in which an officer of the XXIInd Reserve Corps recorded the dreadful moral and physical sufferings endured in that hell of bullets and fire and blood; companies reduced to half their strength, units mixed together, the officers nearly all killed, famine and thirst and a sense of the uselessness of all efforts against our redoubtable little Army: such was the balance-sheet on the German side.

" Yet the Kaiser's troops seemed to rise out of the ground. Fresh reinforcements came to fill the frightful gaps made by our fire and our bayonet attacks. Foot by foot the Belgian Army defended the soil lying between the left bank of the Yser and the railway from Nieuport to Dixmude,. behind which it organised a new line of defence. It was then that the Belgians, in this pitiless conflict, summoned to their aid a terrible and invincible assistant : the inundation of low-lying lands. The canals in the valley of the Yser spilled their water into the fields. The water rose and streamed along the German trenches; while on the left bank, where the level of the soil was higher, the Belgians heroic-ally defended their positions. The Germans, threatened with death by drowning, rushed forward in a terrible offensive, seeking to break our lines, to conquer the dry land (39). In this unprecedented attempt they succeeded; on the 30th of October, in capturing one of our points of support, the village of Ramscappelle; but this essential position was immeditely reccaptured by two Belgian divisions and a few French battalions. This was the coup de grâce. On the 31st, decimated, dejected, defeated, the Germans abandoned their project of crossing the Yser; they retreated, abandoning guns and mortars engulfed in mire, enormous quantities of weapons, thousands of corpses, and many wounded.

" In this epic struggle the Belgians, who numbered 60,000, lost a fourth part of their eff ectives ; but they killed and wounded more Germans than there were soldiers in the Belgian Army; they had covered the left wing of the Allies, and shattered the German effort which had threatened Dunkirk and Calais."

This long and heroic resistance of the Belgian Army enabled the Franco-British forces to establish a solid front to the south, and thus to form a barrier upon which were shattered all the German attacks delivered during the great battle which took place in the neighbourhood of Ypres at the end of October and during the first half of September, 1914.

After this the war of the trenches began. All operations were reduced to small advances or retirements.

" It was not a fresh army which confronted the Germans on the Yser," very justly remarked Colonel Repington in the Times of the 9th of December, 1914. " It was the remnant of an army, war-worn and weak in numbers. For two months and a half the Belgians at Liége, Namur, Louvain, Haelen, Aerschot, Malines, Termonde, and Antwerp had confronted the Germans almost alone, and it was only the shattered, but still unconquered, remains of the field army which drew up behind the Yser after the retreat from the Scheldt.

" In this fine defence, which did honour to all the troops and commanders engaged in it, the Belgians performed a signal service to the Allied cause."

As a matter of fact, our enemies, had other advantages over us than those conferred upon them by numerical superiority and the enthusiasm of their advance : they were connected with their base by our splendid network of railways, which they had had plenty of time to repair; their supply services could be organised at leisure in Belgium, which was still a wealthy country, and for the evacuation of their wounded they had at their disposal the excellent, capacious, and very numerous hospitals which we had installed at a short distance from one another at Bruges, Ostend, and all along the coast. Our exhausted troops had no base at all; and not only could they not count upon any immediate reinforcement, but their supply services had not had time, after their hasty retreat, to install or to reorganise themselves; and lastly, to fill the cup of misfortune, they could rely only upon distant hospitals, situated out of the country.

Compare the opposing forces, then, and their means of action; then add to the account, on the one side I need not tell you which contempt and continual disregard for all the laws and rules of humanity and honour, and, on the other side, an absolute and religious respect for the same, and you will, I firmly believe, be amazed and full of admiration for the " remnant, shattered but still unconquered," of this tiny Belgian Army, which checked, on the banks of the Yser, the formidable and all-powerful German Army.

I have just alluded to the fresh crimes which marked the German advance to the Yser. Here are some details

On the 20th of October, 1914, about 3 o'clock in the morning, the Abbé Van C , chaplain, and a few soldiers of the 12th Regiment of the Line, found on a bridge at Dixmude the body of Second Lieutenant Poncin, of their regiment. The unfortunate man had been bound " by means of an iron wire wound ten times round his legs at the level of the ankles. This operation completed, the victim was shot."

On the same day the two little hands of a child were found upon a German taken prisoner at Pervyse. Doubtless the monster intended to carry them home as glorious trophies of the war!

" The curés of Saint-Georges, Mannekensvere, and Vladsloo are dead; the Abbé Deman, aged twenty-eight, who was vicar of Eessen, near Dixmude, was shot in his parish burying ground; the burgomaster of Handzaeme was shot because he defended his daughter from the violence of the German soldiers," relates the Abbé V—, who was the vicar of Dixmude. . .

On the 19th of October the Germans bombarded the little town of Roulers, where there were a few French soldiers, for three hours. Then they entered the town, in great force, with fixed bayonets. Furious fighting ensued in the streets between the invaders and the retreating French. According to their favourite tactics, the Germans seized upon some unfortunate civilians, and, in order to protect themselves, forced them to march before them. " At the least recoil, at the slightest sign of flagging," says an inhabitant of Roulers, " they threatened us with their revolvers, shouting: `Kein Mitleiden! Vorwärts!' ( ' No pity ! Forward ! ') In this way several civilians of the middle and working classes were wounded."

Having rid themselves of the French, who had fallen back methodically, giving ground only foot by foot, the Germans avenged themselves for the losses which they had suffered upon the civilian population. A large number of houses were pillaged and afterwards burned, and a number of citizens were shot.

" The Hostens-Houtsaeger, Debeukelaere and Dumoulin oil refineries, as well as the Dammen-Croes workshops, are in ashes," says an eye-witness of these excesses. " The R brewery escaped destruction by paying the Germans of course, without an acknowledgment a sum of £800." And having enumerated houses and farms which were burned, this witness adds: " Among those shot I may mention M. Deboisere, M. Dubois, M. Reynaert, M. Prencel and his wife; Mme. Dekeukelaere, aged eighty years, was assassinated and her body thrown into the water; the proprietor of the 'De Tramstatie' café was disembowelled by bayonet thrusts, having first seen his son, aged sixteen, shot before his eyes. The café-keeper Borri was killed by a revolver bullet on the steps of his cellar. This done, the assassins forced his wife and his two children to look on at the burning of their house with all it contained. . . . Roulers was forced to pay a war contribution of £8,000; Rumbeke, one of £4,000. The Germans emp tied all the cellars, requisitioned all the flour, bicycles, horses, carriages, and waggons, and carried off the furniture of numbers of houses."

At Staden, a large village which the Germans entered on the 19th of October, at nightfall, more than 200 houses were given over to the flames and a number of civilians were shot.

At Eessen, some two miles east of Dixmude, 500 persons were imprisoned for some days in the underground vaults of a brewery. Ten of them were shot, and fifteen died of privation.

Always, too, there were infamous ruses, methods of warfare unworthy of a self-respecting army.

At Dixmude, during a night engagement, a German Officer, Graf von Pourtalès, cried to the French : " Don't fire; we are Belgians." Happily he was betrayed by two words of German spoken by one of his men, and was shot down.

" We have taken prisoners a captain, a lieutenant, and 200 men who ought to be shot, for it was found that they were carrying Dum-Dum bullets," writes a French combatant to M. Emile Vedel, who tells, in L'Illustration for the 17th of April, 1915, the wonderful epic of Admiral Ronarch's six battalions of marine fusiliers.

And always, and everywhere, there were spies.

" A curious thing," says M. Vedel, " the sails of windmills begin to turn again after the exodus of the millers, and this every time our marines are preparing for any sort of movement, for the enemy manages to have his spies everywhere."

Later a number of these individuals were unmasked. In particular, two German officers were arrested who, disguised as British doctors, were moving about Furnes unhindered. Two pretended pedlars were then arrested; one of them was an officer in the German Reserve, who had lived for many years on the banks of the Scheldt. Finally, two " Belgian " gendarmes were arrested just as they were going their rounds near Ramscapelle; they had carried their zeal to the length of soliciting their superiors to entrust them with the duty of watching the Allied lines during the night, " so as to hunt out any suspects who might have managed to slip into them." These zealous gendarmes were Germans, who had succeeded, no one knew how, in getting them-selves incorporated in the Belgian forces.

What shall we say of the villas which were built at various points of the Flemish coast, and which contained concrete platforms of extraordinary thickness, which were intended to sup-port the famous heavy howitzers (40) ?

What are we to say of all these clandestine preparations, save that they bear witness at once to our innocent blindness and the guilty premeditation of the Germans?

THE DEAD CITIES OF FLANDERS

" They were not dead; 1 they were only asleep. And what a delightful sleep! After a stirring life they slumbered in a peace which seemed as though it could never, never again be broken. They had retained exactly what was needful for our glory and our joy. Seven or eight centuries of the past lived again in these cities, and all the vicissitudes, all the revolutions, all the catastrophes of this past, disturbed as it was, had not been able to rob them of that which Germanic Kultur has but now destroyed brutally, radically, stupidly."

DIXMUDE: " It was a little town of 5,000 inhabitants, the capital of the arrondissement. Many people only learned of its existence from the newspapers which announced its destruction. The little town slumbered in the midst of green meadows; but this rural peace had not always been its portion; in olden times there was a famous harbour here, and an important fortress; sieges and fires desolated it; in the time of the wars of Louis XIV. its Austrian governor surrendered it without striking a blow. Since then peace had never ceased to reign there.

" After the withdrawal of the sea this flourishing maritime city of the Middle Ages gradually relapsed into the modest condition of a butter market, surrounded by rich and verdant meadows in which the milch-cows grazed. For Dixmude had come to this: it had in Flanders a renown like that of Isigny in the Norman country; its ' Boeter Markt,' in the angle of the great central Place, was indicated by a written sign affixed to a pole; all round was a crowd of black mantles and white bonnets, groups of grave, silent, motionless women, closely packed together, each having her basket resting on the stones before her, while waiting for customers with that resigned and obstinate patience which is a racial characteristic.

" In this Place rose the Hôtel de Ville; it was not an ancient monument; an architect of Bruges the creator of the pretty Gothic church at Ostend had built it about 1875, replacing the building burned in the time of Charles V. But authentic dwelling-houses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with stepped gables, had survived on either side of it. Many more might bd discovered upon exploring the silent streets and by-ways, and the Digue, which ran beside the canal, and was planted with venerable trees, afforded a bewitching view. A delightful Béguinage stood a little apart, discreetly, as though it had sought to conceal from the gaze of the profane the immaculate whiteness of its little houses, and the coolness of its gardens, still further accentuating the note of silence and religious peace of which the city itself gave an impression.

" The monument whose disappearance is most of all to be regretted, is the church ; not so much for its own sake, although it offered a curious specimen of the successive periods of the Pointed style, but on account of two masterpieces to which it gave shelter: its sixteenth-century rood-screen and its picture by Jordaens. The latter the Adoration of the Magi which adorned the chief altar, was one of the noble religious productions of the powerful Naturalist, who, even in his sacred subjects, expressed only the exuberance of life and the glory of the flesh. . .

" All this is reduced to fragments, to dust, to smoke. It required the latest productions of science to effect such destruction."

NIEUPORT. " A glorious old fortress,1 and a famous old port, Nieuport was an adorable example of the deserted, silent, melancholy city, meditating, in a peace henceforth assured, upon the memories of a warlike history.

" Heine said of the dogs of Aix-la-Chapelle that they had the air of imploring the traveller to kick them, in order to obtain a little distraction. Heine never knew Nieuport. But if the dogs there were bored, the mind attuned to dreams found absolute freedom and the full scope of its receptive powers, and no voice rose above that of the witnesses of the past.

" Of these witnesses the most famous was the church of Notre Dame. Its three spacious naves retained the traces of innumerable mutilations, and on its ancient walls the tombstones of all ages, with their suggested epitaphs, told the story of the city under its different rulers through a period of six centuries.

The iconoclasts of the sixteenth century left only the bare walls; but it survived all disasters. However, the soldiers of Wilhelm II. got the better of it.

" The neighbouring market-hall, a monument of the prosperity of Nieuport during the Burgundian period which preceded the Spanish domination, was built between 1480 and 1484. It was a curious and delightful building of whitish brick, which was cut and moulded, with a high-pitched roof with a rail and a double row of dormer windows. Its lateral front, which faced the market-place, presented a series of projecting gables. In the midst of the principal front rose a square belfry with a graceful outline. The market-hall shared the fate of the church.

" The Hotel de Ville, in the Grand' Rue, dated from 1513. It contained precious pictures, portraits, and documents relating to the ancient Nieuport. I think these objects may have been preserved, but the Hotel is in ruins, with the majority of the houses round about it. Many of them still had the stepped gables of the Renaissance period. The Orphanage and the Hotel de l'Espérance were among the number. Others were examples of the old fishermen's dwellings simple one-storied buildings with tiled roofs, from which rose tall dormer windows which seem natural products of the soil, so well do they adapt themselves to it and harmonise with it. But all contributed to the exquisite vision which a brutal aggression has now destroyed.

" Only the Templar's Tower the remnant of the ancient convent of the Order the only relic of the primitive city, created and fortified in the twelfth century by the Count of Flanders, Philip of Alsace seems to have resisted the supreme aggression. Its massive structure, the thickness of its walls, have always pre-served it. It rises, isolated, from the ancient rampart; a path leads to it across the shorn grass of the glacis. From the fifteenth century it formed a portion of the enclosing walls. In 1826 the Dutch, providing the town with a new system of bastions, used it as an arsenal. In 1856 the fortress was dismantled and the old town was abandoned. It now represents the phantom of a remote past in the midst of ruins."

YPRES.—". . The indisputable queen.1 of these beautiful forsaken cities was Ypres, with its enormous market-place, bordered by little dwelling-houses with stepped gables, and its prodigious market buildings, which occupied one whole side of the immense oblong. This market-place haunted for ever the memory of those who had seen it, were it but once, while waiting to change trains; it was so unexpected, so magical, so dream-like almost, in its disproportion to the rest of the town. While the ancient city, whose life had withdrawn itself from century to century, was gradually shrinking all round it, the Grand' Place itself remained an immovable, gigantic, magnifcent witness to the might and opulence of old, when Ypres was, with Gand and Bruges, one of the three queens of the Western world, one of the most strenuous centres of human industry and activity and the cradle of our great liberties. Such as it was yesterday alas, that I cannot say as it is today! this great square, with the enormous, unspeakably harmonious mass of these market buildings, at once powerful and graceful, wild, gloomy, proud, yet genial, was one of the most wonderful and perfect spectacles that could be seen in any town on this old earth of ours. While of a different order of architecture, built of other elements and standing under sterner skies, it should have been as precious to man, as sacred, and as intangible as the Piazza di San Marco in Venice, the Signoria in Florence, or the Piazza del Duomo in Pisa. It constituted a peerless specimen of art, which at all times wrung a cry of admiration from the most indifferent an ornament which men hoped was imperishable, one of those things of beauty which, in the words of the poet, are a joy for ever.

" The doorway of the Halles is a good hundred feet longer than Notre-Dame de Paris, seen from the side," says Michelet. " And there is something which we do not find in Notre Dame, nor in any other monument of the Middle Ages: this is, that all the windows and all the ornaments of the Market-Hall of Ypres are rigorously of the same style the triple-rose style of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries so that all this fairyland of stone seems to have gushed forth from a single source. . . . A structure so spacious, so colossal as this would not have been intelligible had it been only a simple municipal hotel, or the seat of sovereignty, or even a place of popular assembly in this rainy climate. The arrangement of the building in itself indicates a different function; it is in two storeys. The first floor was intended to house the handicrafts of weaving the weaving of cloths and serges. The ground floor was occupied by the combers, carders, clothworkes, fullers, and dyers. The commune, at once the protector and the judge of their work, approved or rejected it without appeal.

" In the year 1200 the tower of Ypres was commenced. In 1304, over a century later, the whole colossal building was thrown open to industry."

In the finest of the halls of the Clothmarket there was a vast mural painting, which was strikingly effective. It represented the terrible plague which, in the middle of the fourteenth century, desolated, ravaged, and destroyed this flourishing city, which then contained 200,000 inhabitants. In this painting one saw a man, one of the few survivors who, with haggard eyes and terror-stricken face, is fleeing at the top of his speed, casting a last glance at the accursed city where no living person would henceforth linger. The title of the fresco was ` The Death of Ypres.'

" The Death of Ypres I have just seen it take place before my eyes. The Kaiser's shells and the savagery of his army have at last attained the desired result. The Cloth Hall and the magnificent Cathedral of St. Martin, which stood close by, and which were coldly and ferociously aimed at by the German guns, have been set on fire, and are now only a heap of ruins.

" It was 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and was returning from forwarding an order some distance to the north of Ypres, when my attention was drawn to a high column of very dense smoke which was rising into the heavens.

" Astonished and anxious, I made for the town as quickly as possible. At the entrance of one of the suburbs, at the railway-crossing, there was, trailing on the ground, a quantity of iron wire torn from the telegraph poles. As I slackened my pace an old man appeared on a doorstep. ` They have burned the Cloth Hall,' (4.1) he told me, with an expression of infinite sadness.

" Now I was in the Grand' Place, and the horror of the thing was suddenly apparent. The whole of the interior of the building was nothing but a gigantic furnace. Only the outer shell, the Gothic side-walls, with the delicate curves of their arches, their mullioned windows, the statues which adorned the facades, and the light turrets which flanked the angles, were still resisting. But how long would this last? For the whole roof, outer and inner, was afire. It was a rare and precious example of carpenters' work, such as the artists of the Middle Ages knew how to construct; a prodigious forest of beams, skilfully clamped and jointed, of joists and rafters. . . .

". . . Now the fire was gaining more and more. . . . The flames bit greedily at the ancient stones, which were all disjointed; through the thousand openings of the facade they began to lick at the statues, which seemed to be bound upon some infernal pyre. From time to time one of the huge beams would detach itself from the roof and collapse with a great crash.

" A cloud of sparks escaped from the furnace, whirling in eddies. These sparks, falling upon the houses opposite, did their work. It was not long before the conflagration was raging on every side.

After this first bombardment Ypres was subjected to several others, which were equally devoid of any strategic interest. But it was not until the latter part of April, 1915, that the Germans gave it the coup de grâce, and finally murdered the dying city, which for five months they had been slowly and scientifically torturing with occasional projectiles.

Mr. Arnold Bennett terminates by the following reflections a striking description of this " dead city," through which he wandered for several hours without encountering a living soul:

Ypres is entitled to rank as the very symbol of the German achievement in Beligum. It stood upon the path to Calais ; but that was not its crime. Even if German guns had not left one brick upon another in Ypres, the path to Calais would not thereby have been made any easier for the well-shod feet of the apostles of might, for Ypres never served as a military stronghold and could not possibly have so served ; and had the Germans known how to beat the British Army in front of Ypres, they could have marched through the City as easily as a hyena through a rice-crop. The crime of Ypres was that it lay handy for the extreme irritation of an army which, with three times the men and three times the guns, and thirty times the vainglorious conceit, could not shift the trifling force opposed to it last autumn. Quite naturally the boasters were enraged. In the end, something had to give way. And the Cathedral and Cloth Hall and other defenceless splendours of Ypres gave way, not the tren ches. The yearners after Calais did themselves no good by exterminating fine architecture and breaking up innocent homes, but they did experience the relief of smashing something. Therein lies the psychology of the affair of Ypres, and the reason why the Ypres of history has come to a sudden close.

A few miles on the opposite sides of the town were the German artillery positions, with guns well calculated to destroy Cathedrals and Cloth Halls. Around these guns were educated men who had spent years indeed, most of their lives in the scientific study of destruction. Under these men were slaves who, solely for the purposes of destruction, had ceased to be the free citizens they once were. These slaves were compelled to carry out any order given to them, under pain of death. They had, indeed, been explicitly told on the highest earthly authority that, if the order came to destroy their fathers and their brothers, they must destroy their fathers and their brothers: the instruction was public and historic. .

The whole organism has worked and worked well, for the destruction of all that was beautiful in Ypres, and for the break-up of an honourable tradition extending over at least eight centuries. The operation was the direct result of an order. The -order had been carefully weighed and considered. The successful execution-of it brought joy into many hearts high and low. " Another shell in the Cathedral! " And men shook hands ecstatically around the excellent guns. " A hole in the tower of the Cloth Hall! " General rejoicing! " The population has fled, and Ypres is a desert!" Inexpressible enthusiasm among specially educated men, from the highest to the lowest. So it must have been. There was no hazard about the treatment of Ypres. The shells did not come into Ypres out of nowhere. Each was the climax of a long, deliberate effort originating in the brains of the responsible leaders).

FURNES. Of the four venerable cities drowsing in the plain of the Yser Furnes alone was as yet not mortally wounded. Completely aroused by the uproar close at hand, suddenly animated by an intense life, this little town of 6,500 inhabitants enjoyed for some months the assuredly unforeseen privilege of being, in a sense, the capital of independent Belgium. Furnes became acquainted with military convoys, With motor-cars passing at full speed, with the incessant coming and going of troops, with convoys of prisoners. Its Grand' Place exquisitely contained by the Hotel de Ville and the Palais de Justice, delightful specimens of Flemish architecture, and by delicious gabled dwellinghouses-was often the scene of fascinating and exciting reviews, in which Belgian troops marched past, and also French or British troops, both English and Colonial.

It was at Furnes that the King of Belgium, on the 2nd of November, 1914, received a visit from the President of the French Republic, and here again, two days later, he received at the hands of King George the investiture of the Order of the Garter. It was in the midst of the Grand' Place a scene well worthy of such ceremonies that our Sovereign conferred the National Order upon the colours of the most intrepid of his regiments, while at the same time he decorated the officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers who, brave among the brave, had displayed most valour in the course of the " affairs " in which these regiments had distinguished themselves.

Since November, 1914, Furnes has frequently experienced the horrors of bombardment, and finally had to be almost completely evacuated. The troops avoid it now, in order to give the Germans no least pretext for fresh bombardments, and there are barely a few hundred inhabitants remaining: tenacious, not to be uprooted. Furnes has relapsed into slumber.

THE BELGIAN ARMY OF TODAY

After the sanguinary battle of the Yser the Belgian military authorities left no stone unturned to reconstitute our Army after its cruel ordeal.

The efforts of the King and his lieutenants were crowned with success. The Belgian Army, which entered the field on the 4th of August, 1914, with six divisions of infantry and one division of cavalry, has consisted, since the first few months of 1915, of six divisions of infantry and two divisions of cavalry. Each unit possesses its normal effective and the necessary cadre. The artillery is at its full strength; it has even been reinforced by guns of large calibre; and. the number of machine-guns has been sensibly increased. All the supply services are perfectly organised, and, lastly, many thousands of young men, many of whom have already risked their lives in escaping from occupied Belgium, are now trained in our instruction camps, which are situated in Brittany and in Normandy.

Here is what a neutral observer, M. Georges Batault, says of our troops : " The Belgian Army, whose moral condition is excellent one cannot imagine more resolute and energetic troops is admirably revictualled and abundantly provided with artillery and munitions.

" I expected to find an army diminished by privations, decimated by the terrible battles which it has had to sustain, and by the rigours of winter; I found an army composed of vigorous and resolute men, perfectly equipped, animated by a spirit of valour and heroism which never belies itself.

" On the other hand, thanks to the patriotism of the young Belgians and the measures taken by the Government, recruiting continues, and fresh troops are being trained in several camps, which makes it possible to fill gaps as they are formed and to maintain effectives at full strength.

" Despite all obstacles and menaces, the Belgian Army continues to exist, stronger than it has ever been, proving the vitality of the country and the indomitable tenacity of its sons.

" The spectacle which it offers to humanity is a noble one, and one encouraging to small nations, for it proves that courage and determination are always stronger than adversity." 1

Even when it was reduced to half its strength, this valiant little army never failed for a moment to hold its place in the van.

Since the Battle of the Yser it has been occupying and guarding, without faltering, its share of the " Western front." At the time of the violent thrust which the Germans made toward Ypres behind a curtain of poison-gas the Belgians played a most effectual part in the defence.

Yes; as my eminent friend, M. Carton de Wiart, recently remarked, with patriotic pride, it is there, on the Yser, " on this strip of sacred soil to which all our vital energy and all our certitude of victory cling, that our little army, whose gaps are daily filled by fresh recruits, must be seen. What a determination to hold out, an unshakable determination, transferred like a torch from the hand of the dying to that of the survivor. . . . And what pride to serve under a young King who never, on the Yser any more than at Antwerp or at Hofstade, leaves his army for a clay nor an hour (44), who has no better palace for the moment than a modest presbytery; but who braves with his soldiers the dangers of the front and the trenches, and whose name will be blessed so long as honour shall blossom in the hearts of men."

The youngest soldier of this national army is Prince Léopold Duke of Brabant, born in Brussels on the 3rd of November, 190 1, who enlisted in the ranks as a simple infantry soldier at the beginning of April, 1915.

It was the 12th Regiment of the Line--a wonderful regiment which has covered itself with glory in many and many a battle —which the young Prince joined, at his own entreaty, on the occasion of the King his father's birthday. Do not imagine that this was the result of a mere juvenile caprice, nor even that of a very touching filial regard. Prince Léopold of Belgium is the worthy son of this model King, who is the very incarnation of civic duty; this philologist and sociologist of whom Bergson could say that because of him " We shall henceforth feel prouder of being a philosopher." The children of Albert and Elizabeth of Belgium never " played at soldiers," never wore any sort of uniform; and if the eldest has decided, although so young, to become a soldier, it was due to a decision which was duly deliberated; because he was moved by a very high sence of civic duty. This is why the ceremony of the enrolment of the young Prince was, despite a great simplicity of form, imbued with a very profound and very moving moral significance.

An eye-witness of this noble patriotic manifestation gave a charming account of it in the XXe Siècle, from which I quote these few lines :—" The King spoke. He spoke the proud words of a general who is giving a soldier to the army, and also the words, full of feeling, of a father who is entrusting his young son to his elders. And when the King had finished speaking, and the Prince, with a deliberate step, leaving his parents, had taken his place in the ranks of the 1st Company, ah! then indeed their heads remained erect, and the soldiers continued to gaze straight in front; but there were tears in their eyes, and their lips vibrated with a hoarse acclamation. . . ."

Not only is our Army not annihilated, as our treacherous and implacable enemies have so often rumoured, but it has been possible to spare from it, and to send to Russia, the best of our gunsmiths, whose reputation is world-wide. The skilled technique and the methodical spirit of these Belgian auxiliaries are disciplining the Russian effort, and their assistance is enabling our Allies on the Eastern front very largely to increase their output of arms and munitions.

What is more, a large detachment of the Belgian corps of armoured motor-cars, armed with machine-guns and guns of larger calibre, is also with the Russian Army, where it will strike the Germans many a blow !

THE QUEEN'S HOSPITAL

During the tragic days at the end of October, 1914, the majority of the Belgian wounded had to be transported to Calais, where Dr. Depage, the eminent Brussels surgeon, had hastily installed the Jeanne d'Arc Hospital. Now Calais is over forty miles from the Yser, and one may imagine the suffering that some of our brave fellows endured in the course of this long and difficult journey.

In addition to the splendid hospitals which are at our disposal in France and England, it was therefore important that we should have a well-organised hospital close to the front, where major operations could be performed and serious and urgent cases treated. Accordingly the " Ocean " Hospital was installed in a huge hotel standing by the sea-shore at La Panne. It was established as a result of the beneficent initiative of the Queen (45), and our soldiers call it the " Queen's Hospital."

This hospital, by adding improvement to improvement, has become a model of its kind. It now comprises, in addition to the principal building, which contains 150 beds, a number of portable wards, which contain altogether nearly a thousand beds, ten villas, which have been turned into wards for contagious diseases, a pharmacy, a laboratory, a linen-store, a laundry, a clothing-store, and various other stores. Simple but well-arranged baths have been installed close at hand; nearly a thousand soldiers can be accommodated in the course of the day. " Every where," writes M. Georges Paquot, who has examined this fine hospital in detail, " we find the same love of order and hygiene, combined with the most delicate sense of philanthropy. Thus, while the wounded are in hospital, their torn and bloody garments are disinfected with formol in an oven, washed, repaired, and at need replaced. Professor R. Petrucci, secretary to Dr. Depage, showed us a room in which, arranged in rows upon sets of shelves, there were more than 15o sacks containing the clothing of patients now under treatment in the hospital; there was not the slightest odour. Each soldier, as he leaves, receives his little bundle of clothes thoroughly cleansed and in perfect order; he understands that he is being looked after, that his services are appreciated, and his heart is warmed by the knowledge and his enthusiasm stimulated."

Dr. Depage was at first actively assisted by his wife. Then Mme. Depage courageously departed to America, where she wished to collect funds for the Belgian Red Cross, and particularly for the Queen's Hospital.

Active, enterprising, and a good organiser, she had already collected nearly 100,000 dollars, when a Belgian friend who was in the States, and who was returning to Europe, urged her to return with her. " I should very much like to do so," replied Mme. Depage, " because I am anxious to see my husband and my children again; but I consider that my task will not be finished until I can take home a round sum of 500,000 francs for our wounded."

The noble and courageous woman finally obtained her £20,000, and sailed on the 1st of May, 1915, on the Lusitania.

Today she is at rest for ever in that little corner of free Belgium in which she had worked so much and so well. . . . Her name will always be mentioned with emotion among those of the noblest heroes of our great epic, for she was heroic to the end; after the first explosion which was already fatal instead of throwing herself into a lifeboat, as she was urged to do, she lingered to dress the wounds of a sailor who had just been wounded by her side. . . .

It was in the Queen's Hospital that my dear brother died, after long sufferings. He was wounded by a shell-splinter on the 5th of May; he died on the 2nd of August, 1915. He had remained only three weeks at Cherbourg; as soon as he could he rejoined his beloved Carabineers on the Yser. He had just been appointed Officer of the Order of Léopold, for having as the " Golden Book of the Belgian People " relates—" from the 5th to the 7th of April, 1915, without a moment of repose, commanded his battalion, engaged before Noordschote, Drie-Grachten, and the position of La Nacelle, in a hurricane of machine-gun fire."

Many of the wounded, alas! lose, for the rest of their lives, all physical aptitude for the calling which was theirs before the war.

The " Belgian School for those Seriously Wounded in the War," established on a large estate at Port-Villez, near Vernon, the " Belgian Depot for War Cripples " at Sainte-Adresse, and another institute of the kind at Mortain for crippled " intellectuals," look after these unfortunate men from the moment they leave hospital, give them asylum, and, having with- discernment assisted them to make choice of a new trade, make them follow this or that course of professional instruction. And thanks to these institutions, which in some sort form a corollary to the work of the Queen, the majority of these victims of duty will be able, while earning an honourable living, to contribute, with their more fortunate compatriots, to the material renovation of the country. They will still be useful citizens.

THE UNINVADED BELGIAN TERRITORY

The uninvaded Belgian territories are not limited to the region of the Yser where the German offensive has been broken. They also include the small enclave of Baerle-Duc and our vast African domain.

Baerle-Duc is a small Belgian commune enclosed by Dutch territory, about two miles from the frontier. It is adjacent to Baerle-Nassau, which is Dutch, and through which the railway from Turnhout to Tilbourg passes. A strange situation, in truth, and infinitely more abnormal than it appears on the map here reproduced. In reality the two communes are dovetailed together in such a manner that it is impossible for the burgomaster of Baerle-Duc to go from his villa to the communal offices with out several times crossing Dutch territory. The railway station is Dutch, but the stationmaster's garden is on Belgian soil; while some houses are even partly Belgian and partly Dutch !

Baerle-Duc, which, administratively speaking, is a portion of the arrondissement of Turnhout (province of Antwerp), has an area of about four square miles. Before the war it contained about 250 houses, which sheltered a thousand inhabittants; but since the invasion of the province of Antwerp the population of this curious enclave is largely increased.

And since the 4th of August, 1914, the black, yellow, and red flag has never ceased to float above the " communal house " of this Belgian village, whose peculiar geographical situation makes it, in a somewhat ironical manner, immune from the abhorred occupation.

BELGIAN CONGO

Actuated by a fine sense of humanity, our rulers did not wish our conflict with Germany to spread to Africa.

On the 7th of August, 1914, M. Davignon telegraphed to this effect to the Belgian Ministers in Paris and London, and on the same day he despatched a letter, which was more explicit, and of which I quote the essential portion:—

While instructing the Governor-General of the Congo to take measures of defence upon the common frontiers of the Belgian colony and the German colonies of East Africa and the Cameroons, the King's Government has requested that high official to abstain from all offensive action against these colonies.

Considering the civilising mission common to the colonising nations, the Belgian Government desires, indeed, out of regard for humanity, not to extend the field of hostilities to Central Africa. It will not, therefore, take the initiative in inflicting such an ordeal upon civilisation in this region, and the military forces which it possesses there will not enter into action unless they are obliged to repel a direct attack upon its African possessions.

I should be extremely glad to know if the Government of the Republic (or of His Britannic Majesty) sees matters in the same light, and in that case whether it intends, on the occasion of the present conflict, to avail itself of Article 2 of the Berlin Act to place those of its colonies which are included in the Congo basin (as delimited by convention) in a condition of neutrality.

But in Africa, as in Europe, we were drawn into the struggle despite ourselves. In Africa, as in Europe, it was the Germans who struck the first blow. Only, by a just restitution, while Germany lost all her colonies one by one, ours is left to us, and re-mains intact. Not only have all the attempts hitherto made by the German colonial forces to enter the Belgian Congo been attended by pitiful failure, but the Belgo-Congolese troops have participated, with valour and success, in the French and British operations in the Cameroons and in German East Africa.

"At the end of October, 1914," we read in a French official Note, " the Belgian steamer Luxemburg, manned by a detachment of 130 sharpshooters, with three guns and a machine-gun, played a very important part in the operations which were developing against the Sangha at N'dzimon. . . . The steamer, proceeding less than 150 yards from the enemy's trenches, under a veritable hail of projectiles, stopped at a suitable point to disembark the Belgian sharpshooters. The fight was desperate; it was necessary to struggle for three days and a night before we could hoist our flag over the position. . . . It was by a furious bayonet charge that the Allied troops eventually forced the enemy to evacuate his last trenches. In this superb charge, under the fire of machine-guns, and despite the impediments of a marshy soil, the Belgian detachment was admirable. . . . The capture of the post of N'dzimon was the fortunate completion of the series of operations carried out in the Sangha, which made us the masters of almost the entire region. From this moment the assistance of the Belgians became permanent. The Belgian contingent attached to the Sangha column was continually reinforced. It increased from 8o to 430, the effective total of the column being ',too men; then, at the beginning of January, it rose to 580. It took part in all the important operations which ensued along the Middle N'goko, terminating in the capture of Tiboundi and Molundu, and recently of Lernié, after the severe battles of Monso and Besam." 1

On the 8th of February, 1916, an official Belgian communiqué from Havre stated:

" The Commandant of the Belgian troops which are participating in the Cameroons campaign announces that a detachment under his orders reached Yaoundé on the 28th of January last, when it effected its junction with the French and British forces.

" The flags of the three nations have been run up over the fort and military honours rendered to them."

On the side of East Africa our colonial troops are defending a frontier of more than 320 miles. They have repelled the German troops in more than ten actions, although the latter had made excellent preparations and were very well armed, and at present they have penetrated into German territory at a number of points. On the southern portion of Lake Tanganyika a Belgian steamer recently took part, with British steamers, in the capture of the German steamer Kingani.

As for the Belgian Congo, it is in-tact, and it therefore follows that, in spite of all, the Belgian colours are still floating above a territory four times as large as that of the predatory Empire which intended to commence the conquest of the world with Belgium !

Once transferred to Havre, the bureaux of our Colonial Office got busily to work again. Under the vigorous impetus given by the King and the Minister, M. Renkin, they have done so much and so excellently that it will soon be necessary to open a branch in London, the present centre of the great Belgo-Congolese enterprises. Thus, in spite of the unspeakable difficulties which have enveloped the mother-country, the administration of the colony and the progress of colonial affairs have not been sensibly affected. To read the Tribune Congolaise, which now appears in London instead of Antwerp, one would hardly realise that Belgium is in the midst of a war with the most formidable military Power which has ever existed. The fine steamers of the Compagnie belge maritime du Congo continue their sailings, with the sole difference that Hull is for the time the home port of the line. The Congo railways and river services are still running. Officials, officers, missionaries, and business men come and go as before. In a word, the Belgian Congo is doing " business as usual."