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Updated: June 15, 2025
Meanwhile Antwerp seemed safe for the time and I returned to Ghent, got a train next day as far south as Deynze, where the owner of a two-wheeled Belgian cart was induced to take me another thirty kilometres on down to Courtrai. It was rumored that there had been a battle at Courtrai it was, at any rate, close to the border and the German right wing and in the general line of their advance.
James Van Artevelde in his youth accompanied Count Charles of Valois, brother of Philip the Handsome, upon his adventurous expeditions in Italy, Sicily, and Greece, and to the Island of Rhodes; and it had been close by the spots where the soldiers of Marathon and Salamis had beaten the armies of Darius and Xerxes that he had heard of the victory of the Flemish burghers and workmen attacked in 1302, at Courtrai, by the splendid army of Philip the Handsome.
At one table Arthur H. Frazier, of the American embassy, would be telling an English officer that a captain of his regiment who was supposed to have been killed at Courtrai had, like a homing pigeon, found his way to the hospital at Neuilly and wanted to be reported "safe" at Lloyds.
According to the English monarch, France ought to restore to the Spaniards, first Sicily, and, further, the towns of Charleroi, Ath, Courtrai, Condo, Saint Guilain, Tournai, and Valenciennes, as a condition of retaining Franche-Comte; moreover, France was compelled to give up Lorraine to the Duke Charles, and places in German Alsace to the Emperor. The King replied that "too much was too much."
On the 28th of November the two armies found themselves close together at Rosebecque, between Ypres and Courtrai. In the evening Van Artevelde assembled his captains at supper, and, "Comrades," said he, "we shall to-morrow have rough work, for the King of France is here all agog for fighting. But have no fear; we are defending our good right and the liberties of Flanders.
The center of the place is therefore appropriately occupied by a colossal statue group, modern, of Pieter de Coninck and Jan Breidel, the leaders of the citizens of Bruges at the Battle of the Spurs before the walls of Courtrai in 1302, a conflict which secured the freedom of Flanders from the interference of the Kings of France. The group is by Devigne.
Philip had been long involved in a controversy with Pope Boniface VIII, and the quarrel still continued. It was not till some time after the battle of Courtrai that the King at last, delivered from the menacing hostility of Rome, had leisure to turn his mind and efforts again toward Flanders.
The King, satisfied with this trial, allowed him to go and prove his valour at the sieges of Digmude and Courtrai. All the staff officers recognised soon in his conversation, his zeal, his methods, a worthy rival of the Vendomes. They wrote charming things of him to the Court.
They dropped bombs on the stations of Courtrai, Roubaix, Thielt, and Staden. They discovered near Langemarck an armored train with the result that it was shelled and thus forced to return. And they forced a German aviator to the ground at Roulers.
In this chamber is a remarkable Renaissance mantelpiece, which is embellished with the arms of the Allied Towns of Bruges and Ghent, between which are the standard bearers of the doughty Knights of Courtrai, and two statues of the Archduke Albert and his Lady, all surrounding a statue of the Holy Virgin.
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