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MAP OF BELGIUM AND THE NETHERLANDS,
SHOWING THE OLD FLEMISH PRINCIPALITY

THE SPELL OF FLANDERS

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCING FLANDERS AND THE FOUR PILGRIMS

“Flanders! Why, where is Flanders?”

“There! I told you she’d ask that question. You’ll have to start right at the beginning with her, and explain everything as you go along.”

We were planning our next vacation tour in Europe, which we had long before agreed to “do” together this year. That meant a party of four—the “Professor,” as I always called him, and his charming young wife, my wife, and myself. Like the plays in which the characters appear on the stage in the order that their names are printed on the programme, the arrangement I have just given is significant. The Professor is always first, a born[Pg 1]
[Pg 2] leader-of-the-way. And I am usually last, carrying the heavy bundles.

Not that I am complaining. No doubt I was born to do it. Moreover, the Professor and I have been chums since boyhood. We worked our way through “prep” school and college together, came to New York together, and—in a modest way—have prospered together. At least, we felt prosperous enough to think of going to Europe. For some years he has been the head of the department of history in an important educational institution within the boundaries of the greater city, while I have devoted myself to journalism—and am therefore dubbed “the Editor,” whenever he wishes to refer to me as a personage instead of a human being, which, happily, is not very often. Of the two ladies in the proposed party I do not need to speak—not because there is nothing to say, but because they can speak for themselves. In fact, one of them has just spoken, has asked a question, and it has not yet been answered.

“Flanders, my dear,” said the Professor, speaking in his most sententious manner—as if delivering a lecture in his classroom—“is the most interesting and the least visited corner of Europe. It has more battle-fields and more Gothic churches per square mile than can be found anywhere else. In other parts of Europe you can see mediæval houses, here and there—usually in charge of a smirking caretaker, with his little guidebook for sale, and hungrily anticipating his little fee. In Flanders there are whole streets of them, whole towns that date from the sixteenth century or earlier—but for the costumes of the people, you could easily imagine yourself transported by some enchantment back to the days of Charles the Bold, or even to the time of the Crusaders.”

“Yes,” I added, “and there is no region in the world where the history of the past seems more real, more instinct with the emotions that govern human conduct to-day, than these quaint old Flemish towns. You stand in front of a marble skyscraper on Fifth Avenue and read a bronze tablet that tells you that here the Revolutionary forces under old Colonel Putnam, or whoever it was, delayed the advancing British and covered General Washington’s retreat. Now, does that tablet help you to reconstruct your history? No, you are quite aware that the fight took place when Fifth Avenue was open country, but your imagination will not work when you try to make it picture that scene for you right there on Fifth Avenue where the tablet says it happened.

“Now, it’s different in Flanders. You read in the history about how the burghers of Bruges, when the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, tried to overawe the city by placing an army of archers in the market-place, swarmed out of their houses and down the narrow, crooked streets like so many angry bees. There are the same old houses, the identical narrow, crooked streets—a bit of an effort and you can picture it all—and how the Duke and his archers were driven back and back, while the burghers swarmed in ever increasing numbers, and the great tocsin in the belfry shrieked and clanged to tell the valiant weavers that their liberties were in danger.

“And take that other famous event, when they flung the murderers of Count Charles the Good—who lived and died five hundred years before the other Prince who, like him, was surnamed “the Good”—from the tower of the very cathedral in which they had murdered him. Why, you can climb the tower and look off across the same sea of red-roofed houses and down upon the same square, paved with cruelly jagged stones, as did the condemned men when, one by one, they were led to the edge of the parapet and sent hurtling down.”

“The point is well taken,” interrupted the Professor, “only that particular church is no longer standing—it was destroyed during the French Revolution. But really that makes little difference—there are plenty of other towers in Bruges that have witnessed stirring scenes. And all over Flanders it is the same way—nothing is easier than to make your history live again, for everywhere you have the original setting practically unchanged.”

“It’s all very well for you men,” observed Mrs. Professor, when her husband and I paused to get our breath, “who admire, or pretend to admire, battles and executions and that sort of thing, but if there is nothing else to see except places with such dreadfully unpleasant associations I, for one,