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A muddy, unshaven Brittany sailor, out of his few sous a week, bought us cigars. The less men have, the more generous they are. That is an old saying, but it drove home to me when I had poor men do me courtesy day by day for five months. As we motored in and out of Nieuport in the dark of the night, we passed hundreds of silent men trudging through the mud of the gutter.
It was by the forts erected on the coast of Flanders in the neighbourhood of Ostend that this important possession of the States was rendered nearly valueless. It was by privateers swarming from the ports of Flanders, especially from Nieuport and Dunkirk, that the foreign trade of the republic was crippled, and its intercommunications by river and estuary rendered unsafe.
I am exceedingly glad to think that we did pay this visit, for it was not only most picturesque but also most deeply interesting from a military point of view. The greater part of the Belgian line and the whole of the part we visited runs parallel to the course of the canalised river Yser, which empties itself into the sea at Nieuport.
Time was to show whether it would be a profitable one, or whether Maurice, who was the preceptor of Europe in the art of war, would continue to be a docile pupil of the great Advocate even in military affairs. It is probable that the alienation between the statesman and the general, which was to widen as time advanced, may be dated from the day of Nieuport.
Their plan was to land an army near Ostend, which was held by the English, and to besiege the town of Nieuport, west of Ostend, and after that to attack Dunkirk.
If the trees of a cannonaded wood are of strong inland growth their fallen trunks have the majesty of a ruined temple; but there was something humanly pitiful in the frail trunks of the Bois Triangulaire, lying there like slaughtered rows of immature troops. A few miles more brought us to Nieuport, most lamentable of the victim towns.
And now in an instant these visions were fading like a mirage. The archduke, whom poverty and mutiny were to render powerless against invasion, was following close up upon the heels of the triumphant army of the stadholder. A decision was immediately necessary. The siege of Nieuport was over before it had begun.
That warrior, remembering perhaps too distinctly his disasters at Nieuport, or feeling conscious that his military genius was more fitly displayed in burning towns and villages in neutral territory, robbing the peasantry, plundering gentlemen's castles and murdering the proprietors, than it was like to be in a pitched battle with the first general of the age, remained sullenly within his entrenchments.
The noble young Chatillon, grandson of Coligny, who had distinguished himself at Nieuport, fell in the Porcupine fort, his head carried off by a cannon-ball, which destroyed another officer at his side, and just grazed the ear of the distinguished Colonel Uchtenbroek.
It had been planned to show me first a detail map of the places I was to visit, and with this map before me to explain the present position of the Belgian line along the embankment of the railroad from Nieuport to Dixmude. The map was ready on a table in the officers' mess, a bare room with three long tables of planks, to which a flight of half a dozen steps led from the headquarters room below.
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