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Updated: June 15, 2025
The cardinal event of the period is the Battle of Courtrai , also called the Battle of the Golden Spurs, owing to the great number of these spurs collected on the battlefield after the defeat of the French knights by the Flemish militia.
During the course of the action in this district they took 150 unwounded prisoners and ten machine guns. British air squadrons numbering sixty-eight machines on August 12, 1916, bombed airship sheds at Brussels and Namur, and railway sidings and stations at Mons, Namur, Busigny, and Courtrai. Of the British machines engaged in these attacks, all but two returned safely.
Neither was their armor nor their weapons of a perfect kind, the latter being a lance like a boar-spear, or a knotted stick pointed with iron, and called in Flemish a "good day." The princes of Juliers and Namur posted their combatants on the road which leads from Courtrai to Ghent, behind a canal that communicated with the river Lys.
The first V.C. of the Royal Flying Corps was obtained at the Second Battle of Ypres by Lieutenant W. B. Rhodes-Moorhouse, who in bombing Courtrai came down to three or four hundred feet, under heavy fire, but piloted his machine 35 miles back to Merville at the height of a few hundred feet, and died a few days later from his wounds.
In reality four new German Corps were already at Brussels or Courtrai mainly from Württemberg and Bavaria, and although the presence in them of men with grey beards and boys with none gave rise to some ill-timed satisfaction in the British press, these Landsturm troops were not to be despised.
This part of the country bordering the fifty mile stretch of coast line on the North Sea was given over latterly to the populous bathing establishments and their new communities, but the other localities, such as Tournai, Courtrai, Oudenaarde or Alost, were seldom visited by strangers, whose advent created almost as much excitement as it would in Timbuctoo.
In addition to Bruges and Ostend, this province of West Flanders includes such towns as Poperinghe, Ypres and Courtrai; and so subtly subdivided is the West-Flemish dialect that there are words which a man of Bruges will use to a man of Poperinghe and not be understood.
The King's troops entered the Netherlands in 1667, without meeting with any serious opposition, and hostilities only came to an end when, after concluding a hasty peace and enlisting the support of Sweden, the United Provinces and England concluded the Triple Alliance . By the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, France nevertheless obtained the fortified towns of Bergues, Furnes, Armentières, Courtrai, Lille, Oudenarde, Tournai, Ath, Douai, Binche and Charleroi, strengthening her position still further on the borders of Walloon Flanders and in Hainault.
The Flemings went to meet them not only the burghers of Bruges, led by De Coninck and Breidel, marching under the banners of their guilds, but men from every part of Flanders and on July 11, near Courtrai, the Battle of the Golden Spurs was fought.
The Austrians, attacked in Flanders, and threatened with a surprise in the rear by Jourdan, soon abandoned their positions on the Somme. Clairfait and the duke of York allowed themselves to be beaten at Courtrai and Hooglede by the army of Pichegru; Coburg at Fleurus by that of Jourdan, who had just taken Charleroi. The two victorious generals rapidly completed the invasion of the Netherlands.
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