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Show territory between the Scheldt and the Belgian border, the Belgian provinces of L-Iasl and West Flanders and the extreme northwestern corner of France, comprised in portions of the Departments du Nord and Pas de Calais. It is the home of the Flemings, a people peo-ple of low German origin, closeiv akin in blood and speech with the Dntch. the people of Pchleswig. the Plattdeutschers and the English. They speak the Flemish Flem-ish language, a tongue so widelv used in Belgium that every, official is required to know both Flemish and French. The common speech of Vpres is not French, but Flemish. , The name "Flanders," in Flemish 'VTaenderen," was1 anclentlv "Ylae-land." "Ylae-land." meaning submerged land, and the country is in large part a continuation of the flat lands of Holland, reclaimed half from marshes, half from the sea. It is still growing "by the silting up of the shallow waters along the shore, and inland in-land towns like Bruges. Nieuport and Fumes were great ports centuries ac,o. Nieuport itself was founded after the bar-' hor of Lombartzyde had- become useless, but thj "New Port" is now two or three miles from the sea. Flanders, with Holland, comprises the i region known through the middle ages I and up almost to the present as "the Low Countries." Not now a single national entity. Flanders Flan-ders was once the dominion of the counts of Flanders, princes in their dav more I powerful than most of the kings of Europe Eu-rope around them. For centuries it was the richest country of Europe. At the time of the Crusades, Ypres had 200,000 inhabitants when London had a popula- I tion of only 35,000. Ghent, according to I Jean Froissart. writing toward the end of the fourteenth century, could put 80,000 men in the field. Pixmude was one of the important cities of Eurppe, and Nieu-port Nieu-port and Fumes were the chief ports of the northern Atlantic. Industry was the secret of Flemish power and wealth, as it wasthe secret of Belgian wealth before the war. The cities of Flanders were the chief manufacturing manu-facturing cities of Europe. The Flemish weavers were so numerous In the middle ages that they composed whole armies, dictated policies, humbled kings and made the great cities of Ghent. Bruges, Ypres and Arras almost independent even of 4heir immediate overlords, the counts of Flanders. It was Flemish weavers who overwhelmed over-whelmed a French army at Bruges in 1302, ' slaughtering 2000 knights, and in the same year, at the "Battle of the. Spurs" at Courtrai. crushed the power of Philip of France, slaying 20,000 Frenchmen, French-men, Including 7001 knights, ltoo nobles. 700 lords and 63 counts, dukes and princes. The Flemings have always heen a proud, brave and freedom-loving people. They have been thorns in the side of every tyrant who has tried, to master them, from French kings and dukes of Burgundy, down through Spanish sovereigns sov-ereigns and Dutch princes to the kaiser himself. It was the Flemings in Antwerp Ant-werp who began the rebellion that won Belgium her freedom from Holland' in 1832. and it was the stubborn Flemish spirit that made a large part of the obstinacy with which the Belgians resisted resist-ed the German attack in 1914-. t The great wealth of Flanders in. the middle ages is reflected in the wonderful smild halls and churches of her cities. The Cloth Hall at. Ypres, now reduced to powder by German shells, was one of the world's largest buildings, '133 feet long by more than 200 in width. 1trger than San Francisco's citv hall, incongruously surrounded by a little town that stood before be-fore the war, the Cloth Hall was a monument monu-ment to the greatness of the weavers' guild that built it in the thirteenth century. cen-tury. San Francisco Chronicle. 1 Miscdlcmv Flanders. Flanders, that word in every newspaper, news-paper, on at)ie tongue of every speaker, sung the poets, familiar to everyone, a geographical name, but not on the ordinary maps what does it maii ? Flanders is a well-defined region, though it does not coincide with the national na-tional boun-laries of either Belgium, France or Holland. It takes in portions of all three of them, stretching along the shore of the North sen, and the channel chan-nel from the river Scneldt to the river Aa, between Dunkirk and Calais, and extending ex-tending inland on the north to Antwerp, thence southwest along the river Scheldt, where its windings roughly parallel the coast, and south far enough to take in the cities of Vallenciennes, Doual and Arras. It Includes, therefore, the strip of Dutch |