The French were moving up a large number of men to relieve and to support their lines between Dixmude and Ypres.  Every little village seemed to be crowded with troops, for in this weather “the poorest village is better than the best bivouac,” and the contrasts of the uniforms were very striking.  Every type was represented—­the smart French officer, the Zouave, the Turco, and the Arab, and one could not help wondering what the Senegalese and the Algerians thought of this soaking rain, or how they would fare in the rigours of a Belgian winter.

Like so many of the towns of Belgium, Ypres is a town of the past, and it is only in the light of its history that the meaning of its wonderful buildings can be realized, or an estimate formed of the vandalism of its destroyers.  Its records date back to the year 900, and in the twelfth century it was already famous for its cloth.  By the thirteenth century it was the richest and the most powerful city in Flanders, and four thousand looms gave occupation to its two hundred thousand inhabitants.  These great commercial cities were also great military organizations, and there were few wars in the turbulence of the Middle Ages in which Ypres did not have a share.  In fact, it was almost always engaged in fighting either England, or France, or one of the other Flemish towns.

After a century of wars, to which Ypres once contributed no fewer than five thousand troops, the town was besieged by the English, led by Henry Spencer, Bishop of Norwich, with the help of the burghers of Ghent and Bruges.  The town was surrounded by earthen ramparts planted with thick hedges of thorn, and by wide ditches and wooden palisades, and these were held by some ten thousand men.  They were attacked, in 1383, by seventeen thousand English and twenty thousand Flemish.  For two months Ypres was defended against almost daily attacks in one of the fiercest and most bloody sieges in history.  At last Spencer saw that it was impossible to take the town by assault, and in view of the advance of a large French army he withdrew.  Ypres was saved, but its prosperity was gone, for the bulk of its population had fled.  The suburbs, where large numbers of the weavers worked, had been destroyed by the besiegers and the looms had been burnt.  The tide of trade turned to Bruges and Ghent, though they did not enjoy for long the prosperity they had stolen.

The commercial madness of the fourteenth century gave way to the religious madness of the sixteenth.  Men’s ideas were changing, and it is a very dangerous thing to change the ideas of men.  For the momentum of the change is out of all proportion to its importance, and the barriers of human reason may melt before it.  It is a mere matter of historical fact that no oppression has half the dangers of an obvious reform.  At Ypres the Reformers were first in the field.  They had swept through Flanders, destroying all the beauty and wealth that the piety of ages had accumulated, and here was rich plunder for these apostles of the ugly.  There is real tragedy in the thought that the Reformer is sometimes sincere.