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 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