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 Broel 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 Musee, 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 Hotel 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.

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 Hotel 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 debris, 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.

The great mural decorations of the “Halles” were nearly completed by MM. Delbeke and Pauwels, when they both died within a few months of each other, in 1891. In these decorations the artists traced the history of Ypres from 1187 to 1383, the date of the great siege, showing taste and elegance in the compositions, notably in that called the “Wedding feast of Mahaut, daughter of Robert of Bethune, with Mathias of Lorraine (1314).”

One of the panels by M. Pauwels showed most vividly the progress of the “Pest,” under the title of the “Mort d’Ypres” (de Dood van Yperen, Flemish). It represented the “Fossoyeur” calling upon the citizens upon the tolling of the great bell of St. Martin’s, to bring out their dead for burial.

M. Delbeke’s talent was engaged upon scenes illustrating the civil life of the town, the gatherings in celebration of the philanthropic and intellectual events in its remarkable history, a task in which he was successful in spite of the carping of envious contemporaries.

A committee of artists was appointed to examine his work, and although this body decided in his favor, it may be that the criticism to which he was subjected hastened his death. At any rate the panels remained unfinished, no other painter having the courage to carry out the projected work.

The original sketches for these great compositions were preserved in the museum of the town, but the detailed drawings, some in color, were, up to the outbreak of the war in 1914, in the Museum of Decorative Arts in Brussels, together with the cartoons of another artist, Charles de Groux (1870), to whom the decoration of the Halles had been awarded by the State in competition. A most sumptuous Gothic apartment was that styled the “Salle Échevinale,” restored with great skill in recent years by a concurrence of Flemish artists, members of the Academy. Upon either side of a magnificent stone mantel, bearing statues in niches of kings, counts and countesses, bishops and high dignitaries, were large well executed frescoes by MM. Swerts and Guffens, showing figures of the evangelists St. Mark and St. John, surrounded by myriads of counts and countesses of Flanders, from the time of Louis de Nevers and Margaret of Artois to Charles the Bold, and Margaret of York, whose tombs are in the Cathedral at Bruges. The attribution of these frescoes to Melchior Broederlam does not, it would seem, accord with the style or the date of their production, M. Alph. van den Peereboom thinks, and he gives credit for the work to two painters who worked in Ypres in 1468 MM. Pennant and Floris Untenhoven.

In my search for the curious and picturesque, I came, one showery day, upon a passageway beneath the old belfry which led to the tower of St. Martin’s. Here one might believe himself back in the Middle Ages. On both sides of the narrow street were ancient wooden-fronted houses not a whit less interesting or well preserved than that front erected in the chamber of the “Halles.” This small dark street led to a vast and solitary square. On one side were lofty edifices called the Colonnade of the “Nieuwerck,” at the end of which was a quaint vista of the Grand’ Place. On the other side was a range of most wondrous ancient constructions; the conciergerie and its attendant offices, bearing finials and gables of astonishing richness of character, and ornamented with chefs-d’oeuvres of iron-work, marking the dates of erection, all of them prior to 1616. In this square not a soul appeared, nor was there a sound to be heard save the cooing of some doves upon a rooftree, although I sat there upon a stone coping for the better part of a half hour. Then all at once, out of a green doorway next the conciergerie, poured a throng of children, whose shrill cries and laughter brought me back to the present. One wonders where now are these merry light-hearted little ones, who thronged that gray grass-grown square behind the old Cloth Hall in 1912....

In this old square I studied the truly magnificent south portal and transept of St. Martin’s, the triple portal with its splendid polygonal rose window, and its two graceful slender side towers, connecting a long gallery between the two smaller side portals. One’s impression of this great edifice is that of a sense of noble proportions, rather than ornateness, and this is to be considered remarkable when one remembers the different epochs of its construction. That the choir was commenced in 1221 is established by the epitaph of Hugues, prévôt of St. Martin’s, whose ashes reposed in the church which he built: that the first stone of the nave transepts was laid with ceremony by Marguerite of Constantinople in 1254; that the south portal was of the fifteenth century and that a century later the chapel called the doyen toward the south wall at the foot of the tower, was erected. The tower itself, visible from all parts of the town, was the conception of Martin Untenhoven of Malines, and replaced a more primitive one in 1433. Of very severe character, its great bare bulk rose to an unfinished height of some hundred and seventy feet, and terminated in a squatty sort of pent-house roof of typical Flemish character. It was flanked by four smaller, unfinished towers, one at each corner. This tower, one may recall, figures in many of the pictures of Jean van Eyck. It is not without reason that Schayes, in his “Histoire de l’Architecture en Belgique,” speaks of the choir of St. Martin’s as “one of the most remarkable of the religious constructions of the epoch in Belgium.” Of most noble lines and proportion if it were not for the intruding altar screen in the Jesuit style, which mars the effect, the ensemble were well-nigh perfect.

Its decoration, too, was remarkable. A fresco at the left of the choir, with a portrait of Robert de Bethune, Count of Flanders, who died at Ypres in 1322 and was buried in the church, was uncovered early in the eighties during a restoration; this had been most villainously repainted by a local “artist"(?); and I mortally offended the young priest who showed it to me, by the vehemence of my comments.

The stalls of the choir, in two banks or ranges, twenty-seven above, twenty-four below, bore the date of 1598, and the signature of d’Urbain Taillebert, a native sculptor of great merit, who also carved the great Jube of Dixmude (see drawing). Other works of Taillebert are no less remarkable, notably the superb arcade with the Christ triumphant suspended between the columns at the principal entrance. He was also the sculptor of the mausoleum of Bishop Antoine de Hennin, erected in 1622 in the choir.

In the pavement before the altar a plain stone marked the resting place of the famous Corneille Jansen (Cornelius Jansenius), seventh Bishop of Ypres, who died of the pest the 6th of May, 1638. One recalls that the doctrine of Jansen gave birth to the sect of that name which still flourishes in Holland.

Following the Rue de Lille one came upon the old tower of St. Pierre, massed among tall straight lines of picturesque poplars, its bulk recalling vaguely the belfry of the Cloth Hall. In this church was shown a curious little picture, representing the devil setting fire to the tower, which was destroyed in 1638, but was later rebuilt after the original plans. The interior had no dignity of style whatever. There were, however, some figures of the saints Peter and Paul attributed to Carel Van Yper, which merited the examination of connoisseurs. They are believed by experts to have been the “volets” of a triptych of which the center panel was missing.

The Place St. Pierre was picturesque and smiling. Following this route we found on the right at the end of a small street the hospital St. Jean, with an octagonal tower, which enshrined some pictures attributed to the prolific Carel Van Yper, comment upon which would be perhaps out of place here. On the corner of this street was a most charming old façade in process of demolishment, which we deplored.

Now we reached the Porte de Lille again and the remains of the old walls of the town. Again and again we followed this same route, each time finding some new beauty or hidden antiquity which well repaid us for such persistence. Few of the towns of Flanders presented such treasures as were to be found in Ypres. Following the walk on the ramparts, past the caserne or infantry barracks, one came upon the place of the ancient chateau of the counts, a vast construction under the name of “de Zaalhof.” Here was an antique building called the “Lombard,” dated 1616, covered with old iron “ancres” and crosses between the high small-paned windows.

By the Rue de Beurre one regained the Grand’ Place, passing through the silent old Place Van den Peereboom in the center of which was the statue of the old Burgomaster of that name.

The aspect of this silent grass-grown square behind the Cloth Hall was most impressive. Here thronged the burghers of old, notably on the occasion of the entry of Charles the Bold and his daughter Marguerite, all clad in fur, lace, and velvet to astonish the inhabitants, who instead of being impressed, so outshone the visitors, by their own and their wives’ magnificence of apparel, that Marguerite was reported to have left the banquet hall in pique. The belfry quite dominated the square at the eastern angle, where were the houses forming the conciergerie.

Turning to the right by way of the Chemin de St. Martin, one found the ancient Béguinage latterly used by the gendarmerie as a station, the lovely old chapel turned into a stable! In this old town were hundreds of remarkable ancient houses, each of which merits description in this book. But perhaps in this brief and very fragmentary description the reader may find reason for the author’s enthusiasm, and agree with him that Ypres was perhaps the most unique and interesting of all the destroyed towns in Flanders.