y 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