ACROSS the face of Europe stretched a great scar, even before the war; a scar that reached from Picardy and Artois across Brabant and the Rhineland far into Westphalia. It was an open wound, creeping gangrenously outward, and yearly involving more and more of what once was healthy and fair in its progressive putrefaction. It was an area of darkness that had taken the place of light; of burrowings far down in the earth where men (and women and children once) grubbed dully and breathlessly for poor wages on which to sustain life, life that was mostly the same dull grubbing above the surface as below. It was a place of warfare between an immemorial verdure of trees and flowers and grass, clear streams and pure air and, on the other hand, ever-growing heaps of slag and ashes and scoriÆ, of fat smoke and noxious gases. In place of old churches and quiet monasteries, of farms and flocks and forests, of delicate chÂteaux and vine-clad old ruined castles, of sleepy towns, of winding streets full of carved and gabled houses, grass-grown market-places, still canals under their arched bridges, ancient trees and forgotten gardens, with now and then a vast and mysterious church built out of many ages and crowded with old memories and the aroma of spent incense and vanished prayers—in place of this impractical, inefficient, and very admirable old land of a hundred years ago, had come a great noise, a greater activity, and a remarkable diminution of enduring results. The churches had been despoiled by the Huguenots, wrecked by the Revolutionists, and either sold for cash or restored out of pure delight in wickedness, coupled with a conceit that only accompanies the profoundest ignorance. Monstrous piles of brick, iron, and cement had blistered the land, while the woods and fields were scored and tangled by railway-lines, tram-lines, telegraph-lines. Machines everywhere, under and on and over the earth; noise, oil, gas, smoke, chemicals mingled in the making of a new civilisation, and the old was both forgotten and denied. It was a place where Efficiency was god and his First Commandment was lawfully obeyed; where old virtues were transmuted through exaggeration and over-emphasis into new sins, where souls shrivelled, brains atrophied, manners ceased, that ten might amass wealth they could not use, at the expense of a thousand who had claimed only a competence.

A land of coal and iron, and of what coal and iron can produce. Not happiness, not character, not culture; neither philosophy, nor religion, nor art. Machines—appalling and ingenious complications of wheels and cogs and valves and pistons, that made more of their kind, together with unheard-of engines of death and mutilation. And factories—emplacements for machines that roared and vibrated endlessly, spinning, weaving, fabricating night and day, turning out what the world needs, but craftily fashioning it so it would not last, or what the world does not need, but that lasted only too long. Turning out wealth, ugliness, hatred, power, ignorance, and revolt. A land of coal and iron, black and potential as the first; hard, inhuman, irresistible as the last.

The Heart of Europe has produced many things in its time, dynasties, empires, crusades; religious energy, new philosophies, industrial revolutions, immortal art. Three eras have owed it much: that of Charlemagne, that of the Middle Ages, that of the Renaissance-Reformation. Perhaps, after all, the latest is its greatest debtor, and for its culmination in that civilisation of irreligion, intellectualism, materialism, and unhampered force that is riding now for its fall, it may be that the self-destructive energy has issued from Lille, Maubeuge, and Charleville, from LiÉge and Charleroi, from Crefeld and Essen, Eschweiler and Elberfeld.

The Black Country of England, the southern counties of Wales; Pittsburgh, Chicago, Paterson, Lawrence, Manchester; cities innumerable in Great Britain and America, have joined in the great act of creating a new ideal and a new power, but the culmination that is its own antidote did not manifest itself there; instead it seems now to have developed in the raw scar across the face of Europe, and the malignant pustule that has burst at last formed itself at the far eastern end. Here, in the Rhineland and Westphalia, grew monstrously the wealth, the potency, and the material force that, made operative by the cold philosophy and the supreme efficiency of Prussia, have made possible, and even inevitable, the supreme attempt to bring to an end the outworn and discredited ideals and methods of ten centuries of Christian civilisation, and establish in unquestioned supremacy the ideals and the methods that have fought hiddenly for dominion in Charleroi and Essen, in Leeds and Birmingham, in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York.

Coal and iron. When the first bituminous lump blazed unexpectedly on the hearth of the amazed cottager, the iron that had been man’s servant for so long, stirred in its first waking to mastership, a mastery achieved at last, incredible in its degree, incredible in its potentiality. Creatures of its own, and allies brought into being before or since, but now taking a new force and applied with new motives, gunpowder, steam, electricity, join with it in plausibly offering their services as beneficent agents toward the annihilating of life; and, as agent and controller of the vast hegemony, wealth, desired above all things, powerful beyond all things, after many days “Lord of the World.”

Nations and men have tried for world-mastery, time out of mind, relying on brute strength of muscle, on craft of brain, on indomitable will, and everlasting fear. Have tried and failed—after a little—and the empires of Alexander, CÆsar, Charlemagne, Louis, Philip, Napoleon have crumbled and become a memory. Failure was inevitable for strength of arm, of brain, of will, was not, and could not be made, exclusive possession of any race or people, nor could terror be confined within territorial limits; in the end revolt; the rising of new tribes, intrusion of fear, weakness, degeneration amongst the victors, their ominous evanishment from amongst the conquered.

But how now, with these new aids, these untried forces and potentialities? Suppose that the unestimated energy of a million years, stored in the bowels of the earth, be applied to the dull iron and to the harnessing of the mysterious electrical force, under the stimulus of Will emancipated from the hampering influence of a discredited religion and a superstitious ethic; suppose a new demiurge be created, given supreme direction over soul and mind and body, and named Efficiency, and suppose for two generations the energy employed blindly and to no consistent end by dull nations, half-hearted in their devotion and still bound by the memory of dying creeds and moribund old morals, be applied by the highest and most self-sacrificing intelligence to the creation of a supreme, perfect, and absolutely co-ordinated engine that, at the well-conceived moment, shall be brought to bear without pity and without pause on the inferior nations of the globe. What then?

The answer is still withheld, for the trial is in process. It was a magnificent conception, and inevitable, for the great sequence of spiritual and material happenings that has followed from the first weakening of Christian civilisation and Catholic culture at the very beginning of the fourteenth century was bound to have issue in its logical and dramatic crest, and in the final test of its efficiency. There is nothing half-way in its effort, nothing indifferently accomplished or insecure at any point. Essen, Wilhelmshaven, Berlin have forgotten nothing, failed in nothing. Every material agency, potential on the earth and under, has been developed, harnessed, and applied; every hampering stumbling-block of an old righteousness, an old religion, an old philosophy is removed; coal, iron, steam, electricity, chemistry are built up into a great and puissant unity, made operative by the wealth they themselves have created and energised by the dynamic force of intensive intellect no longer hampered by fear of God or charity for man, or an ancient sense of honour that came out of feudalism, the Crusades, and a Church that held the state in thrall and should have perished with the things she had made.

The mystery of the “Sin against the Holy Ghost,” the mystery of “Antichrist” are mysteries no longer, but clear writings on an open page; blazing words on the walls of the banquet hall where the feast has broken up in sudden and searching terror.

Coal and iron. These territories are now the centres of greatest conflict: Poland, Galicia, and the Scar of Europe in the west. Each is the land of coal and iron. In the east the contest sweeps back and forth in Poland to rob Russia of her mines and manufactures, and add them to the resources of Germany; in the south to preserve to Austria the coal and iron and oil of Galicia; in the west to gain from France the coal and iron of Champagne, Artois, Picardy, as the coal and iron of Belgium were gained in the beginning at the price of paper treaties and a negligible honour, or to deprive Germany of the coal and iron that are the foundations of her empire (actual and potential) in the Rhineland and Westphalia. Was there any drama of Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe that matched the sombre theatricalism of life itself? Here in the west, far back in the Middle Ages, was the first great centre of manufacture and trade, Bruges, Ghent, Arras, great cities and world markets when London was a little river town, Paris a village, Berlin a frontier fort on the raw edge of a savage and heathen Prussia. Then later, after this first (and different) industrial civilisation had passed, came a new manifestation, and from Lille to Essen appeared the materialisation of a new madness, while Bruges and Courtrai and Aix were forgotten, with all they stood for, and other centres grew up—black, roaring, uncouth, but for men admirable and desired far beyond the restored churches and desecrated abbeys, the schools and universities, the dim and discredited philosophies, the decaying art and the vanished ideals of FÉcamp and Reims, of Bruges and Louvain, of Aix and TrÈves and Cologne. And now the Frankenstein monster gets him to his perfect work, and through the coal-fields and over the forges and factories, where he was fashioned, spreads death, devastation, and ruin that, nevertheless (and here the mystery and the wonder increase), may yet bring redemption, release, and restoration.

What has been in the immediate past needs no description: Crefeld and Lille are only Manchester and Pittsburgh, and their familiarity is sufficient to itself. What is now is equally common to all, and Louvain, Arras, and Reims in their blood-stained ruin are a part of the common consciousness. Meanwhile there were, and for the moment are, other cities and other regions, forgotten or endured, that are all Charleroi is not, or Crefeld or Maubeuge, and they are well worth a study, partly for what they are, partly for what they signify, partly for what they may forecast for a future beyond the present cataclysm.

There is hardly a more absorbingly interesting portion of France, historically, artistically, or picturesquely, than that wonderful quadrilateral, CompiÈgne-Noyon-Laon-Soissons, with its three great cathedrals; its finest castle ruin in France—Coucy, the pride of Enguerrand III—its fine old towns, as Laon and Noyon, with their groves and terraced paths; its great Forest of CompiÈgne; and only a few miles away on one hand or the other, chÂteaux such as Coucy and Ham, battle-fields of the significance of CrÉcy. It is all fought over now and may be again; no one knows how much is left, or may be left by and by, but it was a fair land, with many traces of a more spacious and balanced past, not in its great churches alone but as well in its quiet villages and its fine grey houses in old cities. A frontier, in a way, for already the creeping desolation of industrialism had reached close, working always down from the North of coal and iron, already absorbing St. Quentin and involving its ancient architecture in smoke and traffic, blotting out its streets of gabled houses, and turning it into a typical manufacturing centre—this, that was once the dowry of Mary Stuart.

North we enter into a general darkness, but on our way toward the dim old cities of Flanders and Brabant that hold even now the beauty of an elder day, forgotten by the world and outside the area of “great natural resources,” we may pause in spirit in Arras (it would not be well to be there in body, unless one were a soldier in the army of the Allies, when it would be perilous but touched with glory) for sight of an old, old city that gave a vision, better than almost any other in France, of what cities were in this region at the high-tide of the Renaissance. It is gone now, utterly, irremediably, and the ill work begun in the Revolution and continued under the empire, when the great and splendid Gothic cathedral was sold and utterly destroyed, has been finished by Prussian shells.

Capital of Artois, it had a vivid and eventful history, reaching back to pre-Roman times, continuing under Baldwin of the Iron Arm, who became the first Count of Arras; then being halved between the Count of Flanders and the King of France; given by St. Louis to his brother Robert, passing to the Counts of Burgundy, reverting to Louis de MÂle of Flemish fame, abandoned to the Emperor, won back by France; then acquiring the sinister distinction of having produced Robespierre and, finally, coming now to its end at the hands of the German hosts. What Arras must have been before the Revolution we can only guess, but with its glorious cathedral, its Chapelle des Ardents, and its “Pyramid of the Holy Candle” added to its surviving town hall with its fantastically beautiful spire, and its miraculously preserved streets and squares lined with fancifully gabled and arcaded houses, it must have been a sanctuary of old delights. The cathedral was of all styles from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, while the chapel and the “pyramid,” were models of mediÆval art in its richest state. Both were destroyed by one Lebon, a human demon and apostate priest, who organised a “terror” of his own in his city and has gone down to infamy for his pestilential crimes.

Both the destroyed monuments were votive offerings in gratitude to Our Lady for her miraculous intervention in the case of a fearful plague in the twelfth century, the instrument of preservation being a certain holy candle, the melted wax from which was effective in preserving the life of all it touched. The pyramid was a slender Gothic tabernacle and spire, ninety feet high, standing in the Petite Place, a masterpiece of carved and painted and gilded sculptures, unique of its kind. Every vestige has vanished except a few relics preserved, together with that most precious memorial, the blood-stained rochet of St. Thomas À Becket, in the modern cathedral which Berlin has just announced has been completely and intentionally destroyed by gun-fire.

Until its recent destruction, Arras was one of the few territorially French towns in this region that could and did take one back into the atmosphere of the pre-coal-and-iron era of Europe, though with a difference. The fine vigour and riotous life of the Renaissance, the gaiety and spontaneousness of mediÆvalism were gone, with the colour and gold of the carved and painted shrines and houses, the fanciful costumes, the alert civic life; and instead was a grey shadow, a slowly dissolving memory. Still the pale simulacrum could stimulate the imagination, as the rose jar renews the memory of the rose. Now the jar is shattered and the scented leaves are trodden in the red mire, and we must make our way across the frontier if we are to find and enjoy what once Arras could in a measure give. God grant we may always be able to do so, and that Audenaarde and Tournai, Bruges and Malines, and Courtrai, with the still little villages in between, may remain to us after coal and iron have achieved their perfect work and been replaced in that position in life to which it pleased God to call them, so surrendering the more dominating place to which man had called them in his turn.

Of Ypres and Dixmude it is better to say little. Of the first of these, and its vanished glory, the solemn and single great Cloth Hall, I have said an inadequate something, but there was also St. Martin’s, once a cathedral, with its delicate type of Gothic, its rich Renaissance woodwork, its tombs and screens and treasures of ecclesiastical art; there were its old guild-houses and its quaint dwellings, carved and gabled and with wonderful old brickwork. And in Dixmude there was the Church of St. Nicholas with its jubÉ, or rood-loft, as gorgeous a piece of flamboyant art as one could find anywhere in Belgium or France. All this is gone, but a little farther on, behind the present battle lines, are more wonderful cities still—or are at this writing, in July, 1915.

This little Flanders, from the Scheldt to the sea, was a veritable garden of dreams. Nieuport, Furnes, Ypres, Dixmude, Courtrai, Tournai, Bruges, Ghent, Audenaarde—all are haunted by infinite old memories, and most of them have preserved their souls through seclusion and commercial oblivion, but around and between lie endless little villages of delicate old houses, grey Gothic churches that have not been secularised or abandoned (for Flanders always was a Catholic country), gardens, slow canals and brooks under their low stone bridges, and an ingratiating quiet that gives the lie to the progressive, practical, efficient, and wealthy strip of inordinate activity that “disquieteth itself in vain” from Lille to LiÉge through Mons and Courcelles, Charleroi and Namur.

As the old names come forward again in rumours and reports from the front, in death lists and hideous narratives of outrage and destruction, indestructible memories, dormant for thirty years, take form and shape again, and daily the gentle charm of a forgotten land becomes living, and the dull fear of an unpredictable and sinister future grows more ominous and intense. There is no other land quite like it; no place where the old has been spared by the new to such a degree, and where the old has remained so altogether lovely.

Of course Bruges is the Holy of Holies in this sanctuary of lost ideals, but on the way stop to consider the outer ring of a better kind of fortresses that circle her inner citadel.

Nieuport, Dixmude, and Ypres once held their stations from the sea to the Lys, but their ramparts and bastions were not proof against the siege-guns of Essen and they have fallen. Next to the east and farther down the Lys, is Courtrai, under whose walls in 1302 was fought that battle of the burghers of Flanders against the French, when 1,200 of the flower of French knighthood, not to speak of the men-at-arms, were slain, and 600 golden spurs were gathered from the field and hung in triumph in the abbey church.

A CHIMNEY-PIECE FROM COURTRAI