TOURNAI AND THE FIELD OF FONTENOY

There is an old town lying on the edges of the Teutonic-Flemish country northward of the French-speaking people and just within the modern boundaries of the modern State of Belgium. A sluggish river goes past its venerable quays; its streets are inhabited by decent repose which only now and then a market or a fair disturbs. Its buildings have the dignity of the centuries; grey houses of stone of the just proportions in which our fathers knew how to build. Its plan is of that irregularity which you find in all the undisturbed cities of Europe, and which grew up very slowly like an undergrowth of the original strict Roman parallels, right angles and squares. From far off its higher roofs stand against the sky in a fine outline and are framed in tall trees which dignify all that flat country land of Flanders. But in particular its ancient belfry shows against the grey sky of the north, and next against it five gaunt, enormous towers which mark the chief glory of the place, and, to me, the most interesting, I think, of all northern structures, the cathedral; vastly more in scale than anything which a modern town of such a clime would erect; a sort of town of itself within a town; a spiritual keep, round which all the place gathers and up to which all its lines lead.

The name of this place is Tournai. It is forgotten; it is little more than a railway station to the chance travellers; it has achieved none of the fame which the later miracle of the Gothic has bestowed upon Amiens, upon Rheims, upon Rouen, upon Chartres, and twenty other towns. It might be thought hardly to count even in history, so little do men now remember it. The great industrial hive of Lille close by quite shoulders it out from the modern eye, for that is only a long day’s march away, and those who pass it by have Brussels or Paris in their mind, or the Straits to which they are going and the crossing over to England.

It is well that it should be thus passed by and remain intact and unvulgarised in this time of ours when everything that is changed is changed for the worse. Thus it remains for the delight of such few as can take in the full pleasure of it and become one with its spirit; for the place is steeped in history and counts in a fashion more as a starting for the transition between Pagan and Christian times than any other of the North, while, centuries after that origin, it is the town of Fontenoy. Yet those who must concern themselves with the transition between the Roman society of antiquity and the Christian Europe which spread eastward thence, converted the Germanies, Hungary, the Poles, the Bohemians, Scandinavia, East England and built up what has since been Christendom, have forgotten Tournai and the Irish exiles, and do not hear the name of Fontenoy.

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I have said that Tournai was the starting point of the great change from a Pagan to a Christian Gaul. It holds such a place in history for this reason: that it was the seat of government of the Merovingian kings. Here lies buried the father of Clovis, who here commanded the Roman garrison of the place, the King of the Franks, and here his tomb was found two hundred years ago, all Roman in design and spirit and the soldier within it Roman in his accoutrements.

When the universal society of the Empire had grown old and was losing vigour, when the seat of authority had been transferred to its distant Greek-speaking half and Constantinople had usurped the place of the Eternal City, the two great marks of the new time were the transformation of the army and the gradual establishment of the Catholic Church as the soul of civilised mankind.

The transformation of the army, very gradual, lasting over centuries, had changed it from an Italian to a provincial, and from a provincial to a half-barbaric thing.

Its recruitment had been drawn at first from the citizens of Rome alone, and by universal levy. That was in the very old times when the city was beginning its first steps towards universal rule and had gone no further than to extend a power over near neighbouring towns and tribes which were rather allies than subjects. That mastering army, as it vastly increased, still remained Italian in recruitment during the struggle with Semitic Carthage, which it destroyed, and during the sudden expansion over Gaul and Spain and the fierce civil wars between the great rival leaders of the Republic. Already in those civil wars there had appeared a certain foreign element; small bands of Germans hired by the competing generals had been seen in the field; certain Slavs, the Moors of the North African coast and Orientals too—it would seem here and there even some few Mongols. But the great bulk of the armed men were of Italian stock or Gallic. The great bulk of them had been born in the full tradition of civilisation and the army retained the character of that civilisation. But with the advent of the Empire, its peace, security and wealth, its vast extent, its preoccupation with frontiers against barbarism and the East, the nature of the Roman armies changed. Very gradually, imperceptibly, in a process which covers four hundred years, the legions grew sedentary, found their recruits from the men of the countryside wherein they were stationed, pensioned off their veterans with local land; continued the service with those veterans’ sons. And, side by side with these, as the population now wholly civilian and increasingly averse to arms, gradually abandoned military force, there were enrolled ‘federates,’ as they were called, groups of half-civilised men from beyond the frontiers, barbarians, who desired nothing better than to enjoy the high civilisation which they interpenetrated but which they could not build. These bands, organised under their tribal chiefs as a rule, for the most part German in their origin and speech (though there were many other stocks among them, Mongol, Slav, Berber and the rest) come very gradually to be the main vital stock of the imperial forces. In the very end of ordered and united social rule, the two Roman generals who stood on Italian soil, now allied, now engaged in civil war one against the other—Stilicho and Alaric—were, the one a Vandal (that is, presumably a Slav with German admixture), the other a Goth. And all up and down the Empire you found, wherever you turned, garrisons and armies commanded by barbarians.

The change was fundamental, for Roman society was held together by the army and was governed as a military state. The word ‘Emperor’ itself means nothing more than commander-in-chief; and title after title, to descend at last in much later times into other meanings, the duke, the count, the centurian, later the centenarius, were terms of military command and titles of military rank in the Roman service.

Before the end of the fifth century, between the years 400 and 500, just as the last powers of rule and taxation from Rome were ebbing away, when the Empire had ceased to renew the garrisons in Britain and later had ceased to send its officials into Gaul and Spain, government was taken over by the heads of these barbaric troops, Goth, Burgundian, Vandal and the rest. Nothing could have seemed more natural and more inevitable to the time. They were part of the Empire as they had always been, though that Empire had ceased to be a political unity. Its coins, its laws, the whole structure of its society, went on uninterrupted, but the executive power had passed to these local chiefs and, among them, one in the North particularly concerns us and Tournai.

He was the general in command of some small ‘federal’ force consisting in recruitment of ‘Franks’—a term which does not stand for any particular stock or race, but for a confederation, probably loose, and varying widely in size at different times, of armed bands along the lower Rhine and on the course of the Meuse and of the Scheldt. Such of them as lay beyond the Empire had often raided it and had suffered for their temerity, cut to pieces, thrown to the beasts of the arena, sold into slavery. Others had accepted Roman service as federates, and of these that group which was to be of most moment to the story of the world lay here round about Tournai, from which citadel the tribal chief or ‘rex’—as the Romans called him—ruled. He was a Pagan and we know his name. His name was Childeric. He died and left a son, Clovis, no more than a lad in his sixteenth year, but accepted as leader and general through hereditary right. The general fought with another general of another band to the west of him, a certain Syragius, defeated him and joined the government of all that lay beyond the Somme to his own. It was from Tournai then that the great adventure started which was to lead to the final triumph of the Catholic Church.

For though Roman society was now in the mass Catholic, though there were now bishops in all the chief towns and the hierarchic organisation of the West was fully founded, yet by a curious historical accident, at first deplorable but destined to lead to the best of results, most of the local governments, their rulers and their courts, were Arian, that is, opponents and persecutors of the Catholic name, somewhat after the fashion in which the Irish garrison has been its opponent and persecutor.

These barbaric chiefs had got such a taint from the fact that the Emperor himself, his court and influence had been Arian at the moment when the great change came. The new rising power in the far north, the army led by Clovis, the influence which had sprung from Tournai, was an exception. Its commander was Pagan. The few thousands of his command were a mixed body of Pagan Franks speaking the Flemish tongue, of Gallo-Romans and of ordinary citizens and barbarians. The ruler himself was not yet of the Faith.

In that he was married to a Catholic wife from the South, he was spared the hatred and animosity which the population and its leaders, the bishops, felt for the Arian rulers elsewhere in the West. While he was taking up the perpetual Roman task of driving out the barbaric raiders, the ceaseless Roman task of defending the Rhine frontier, he gained a victory at Tolbiac in the Rhineland (it would seem to be Zulpich) which he put down to the God of the Christians, upon whom he had called. On Christmas Day of the year 496 he was baptised with the Pagans of his little army, and from that moment there was a Catholic sword in Europe. The populace demanded Clovis. He marched south to their aid, he overthrew the Arian governments of the South, he began the reuniting of Gaul, and he died possessed of, and leaving to his sons, the enormous field of that quadrilateral between the Pyrenees and the Channel, the Atlantic and the Rhine, which was the heir of Rome, contained its living traditions and carried on its mission. He was still but a part of the Empire; he thought it before his death a great honour to be given by the Emperor at Constantinople a subordinate title, but he was the sole true ruler of Gaul. It was from such a new foundation that the later universal rule of another house, the house of Charlemagne, was to spring, and it was from such a platform that the conversion and the subjugation and the gradual civilisation of all countries beyond the Rhine was to be made, until at last Christendom appeared in its fulness: Christendom which is to-day in peril.

And the point of origin of all this was Tournai.

It is no wonder that with such thoughts in mind a man approaches with awe, across the long cornlands of the plain, the five high towers, standing up towards the northern clouds. They mark, as I have said, the great church which rose upon the foundations of that earlier basilica wherein had been buried the founder of the French monarchy—of the ‘men of the first race,’ as the French call them (the second being the Carolingian, the third the Capetian).

It was not the Merovingian blood from Tournai which continued the line down through the centuries uninterrupted. The family decayed; within three centuries another had supplanted it; within three centuries again a third had taken over the rule of Gaul. But it was the ruling family at Tournai which started the tradition, which began the spread of the French realm and from which the crown of France had taken its rise.

Though there remains very little of that original Roman church in which the Childeric lay dead, clothed and armed for the tomb, yet the cathedral at Tournai, rebuilt, carries on most strongly its very ancient tradition of building. The round arch is everywhere, the small low door, the hugely thick wall, and, although it came so many centuries later, a man looking from the north, against the stern naked height of unrelieved stone which soars up in the growth of the transept, is reminded of that Roman gate in Treves. This impression of antiquity and of a solid Roman thing is not destroyed by the later apse, and though that apse has copied the pointed arch of the Gothic, the general spirit of Tournai still remains that of stones much older than the spirit of the thirteenth century and conforms, visibly stamped with limitation, the certitude, the strength, of the Dark Ages. But there is even very much later work within Tournai cathedral which still does not detract from that weight of a simpler past; notably there has been flung across the front of the choir a rood screen of the Renaissance, exquisitely worked, and the side chapels have altar glass, but though a man has curiously noted each of these details in their excellence, there still remains with him as a permanent memory of the place those stark, exceedingly ancient walls, those small, round, weathered arches of lasting stone, those wholly simple short pillars which support them, and all the feeling of the time when Europe was standing at siege, yet hammering out against the North and the East the centuries before the great crusading march, the centuries of endurance and of perennial fortitude.

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From four to three miles south-east of what were once the city ramparts, lies the famous battlefield of Fontenoy; the whole meaning of which turns again upon the town of Tournai, though under conditions wholly changed by the passage of so many centuries—1300 years since the place was the capital of Childeric’s garrison and his little Roman army of Frankish soldiery.

Tournai was invested by the French armies in the great war of the Spanish Succession in 1745. There marched to its relief a large mixed force of English, Hanoverian and Dutch and a contingent of troops of Austria. They were met upon the rising ground east of the Scheldt. Louis XV., the King, was there with his heir, in the angle formed by the front of the defence which lay in right angle thrust forward against the attack, so that one side, to the right, was exposed to the Dutch advance; the other, that to the left and the north, to the English, Hanoverian and Austrian. Westward, beyond the river, high batteries could just reach the enemy, and either end of the French right angle reposed upon the river. At the apex of that front was the little village of Fontenoy, which gives the battle its name, but it should more justly be called ‘the Battle of Tournai’; for upon its issue depended the fate of the siege of the campaign. The French strength in artillery was so great, their defensive organisation was so strong, that it seemed after the first attacks of that famous morning as though nothing could shake the line. All the first efforts against it broke down and that with heavy loss when a final effort was made by the English and Hanoverian troops. It stands out as the most vivid episode perhaps in all European fighting between the Wars of Marlborough and those of the Revolution, and which still, in particular, remain fixed in the tenacious memory of the Irish because of the part they took in the final stroke which decided the day. The English and Hanoverian column, very dense and deep and dragging its few pieces with it by men’s labour, attempted the apparently impossible task of forcing that defensive front after such heavy and murderous failure during the preceding hours. The effect of their advance was profound and unexpected. Their discipline was so strong, their fire so accurate and sustained, that they had begun to throw their enemy into confusion within the first half-hour of their advance. The battle, which had seemed already won for the French King, was imperilled, and might have been thought at one moment lost, so heavy were the casualties, so rapidly increasing the confusion in the line. There was a critical moment when it seemed indeed as though nothing could coordinate the spasmodic centres of resistance still remaining, but there entered into the action just at that decisive point the factor which Marshal Foch put tersely enough when he said that ‘it was the last quarter of an hour.’

The attack all but succeeded, and it deserved to succeed, if only for the iron binding of the English and Hanoverian forces, and for that highest of the silent military virtues which it had displayed. Already the King of France had been warned to seek safety and had refused, and already the last efforts seemed upon the French side to be failing when Saxe, tortured as he was by the illness which killed him and only carried from place to place in his wicker chair at the cost of excessive pain, attempting to rally the dissipated and separate last forces of resistance, could see that the enemy advanced itself, the strict column which had not hitherto wavered and which had so penetrated as almost to dislocate his line, had not only reached but passed its breaking point of strain. It had all but conquered. It could not conquer because its bleeding and exhaustion was just in that turn of fate too much for it. Against it, thus wavering, Saxe managed to rally and coordinate all that he had beneath his hand and to organise and to let loose a converging fire. The opposing column was on the point of breaking. Then did he launch the cavalry, and among them was that Irish brigade which has taken its place in legend. They were near the wood to the extreme left of the French line, and they covered the interval of fields at the trot, they charged on the now failing opponent with all the rest of the horse serving the King of France, and it was this cavalry charge which ended rather than decided the day.

The field lies to-day as do most of our European battlefields, deserted and silent. Its small woods are what they were so long ago—nearly two hundred years—its little villages are grown no larger. The sluggish narrow water of the Upper Scheldt crawls now as it did then up to the city northward and through its quiet quays; and from the highest points to the stage upon which all that carnage was played out, one sees against the northern sky much what one would have seen so long ago, specially those five giant towers of the cathedral. You find upon Fontenoy, as you find upon the land of Waterloo, of Crécy, of Blenheim and of nearly all the great battles, a peculiar and haunting silence and a vivid absence of men which makes the memory of the place the more inhabited by the past.

Nearly all the great battlefields affect me thus, none more than this open, windy place under the Flemish sky, with the shafts of the cathedral to the north and the quiet of Flanders all around.

_Part VII_

_Three Towns of Life and Death_