FLANDERS

THE place names of Flemish towns ring like bugles. They tell of bloody and costly battles in wars over the centuries: Courtrai, Passendale, Ypres ("Wipers" to the Tommy of World War I), and Armentieres (whose "Mademoiselle" was invented to wipe out the memory of grimmer realities). In World War II, the tragedy and heroism of Dunkirk were played out on a Flemish beach.

Flanders is bloody ground, and its history a story of violence: for centuries the alien peoples of Europe have swarmed over her rich, open plain, to pillage, plunder and fight battles: Caesar's legions from the south; Viking raiders from the north, who left their word for landing-stage (bryggja) behind in the name of the Flemish city of Bruges; from the east fierce Germanic tribesmen, whose rough gutturals are reflected in the language of Flanders; from close at hand the troops of Louis XI, Napoleon, Wellington.

When their fellow Europeans left them in peace, the people of Flanders, Celtic in origin, were kept busy fending off the onslaughts of a still more implacable foe--the grey, pounding rollers of the North Sea, which time and again broke over Flanders' beaches to flood the low-lying flatlands behind. From earliest times the people of Flanders were forced so often to seek refuge with their northern neighbors, the Frisians, that they came at last to be known as Vlaming, the Frisian word for refugee. Their land was Vlandria, land of the refugees.

Neighborly Dependence. Yet, despite the violence through which they lived, no province in Europe today seems more blessed with tranquil beauty than Flanders. The soft greys and greens of sand dune, marsh and meadow blend imperceptibly with the pale blues of the sky's rim, along an endlessly level horizon. Ornate old cities, which have known and outgrown greatness, nurse their memories amid a neat patchwork of fields where golden wheat and rye shimmer at each passing breeze. Turning idly in the same soft breeze, the sails of windmills urge the sluggish water along a network of canals which are the province's vital arteries, moving its traffic, draining and feeding its rich black soil.

These canals, and the age-old necessity of keeping them well dug and free of snags, played a large part in introducing the democratic way to Europe, for from earliest times they made each Flemish peasant dependent on his neighbor. In the same way, the constant need to keep his dikes repaired against the attacks of the sea, and to fend off his many greedy enemies with unified effort, gave the Fleming a sense of community responsibility not yet shared by other Europeans. A hundred years before the signing of the Magna Carta in a tent on a British meadow, the burghers of Saint-Omer forced their feudal overlords to recognize the rights and privileges of individual citizens in that tiny Flemish town. Many other such charters were granted in Flanders during the Middle Ages and kept secure in strong boxes in town halls topped by belfries. The proudest possession of any Flemish town came to be its bell tower, where bronze voices hung always ready to clarion forth any abuse of local rights and privileges.

Today, the nearly 4,000 square miles of territory once ruled over by the medieval Counts of Flanders are split among three nations. Dutch Flanders is only a sliver at the bottom of Zeeland. French Flanders has largely lost its old identity with the rest of the province. But the spirit of the old County is still preserved almost intact in the present-day Belgian provinces of East and West Flanders, where ancient Flemish is still the main language, and Roman Catholicism the dominant faith.

Culture & Commerce. Rivaled perhaps only by Venice, the Flemish city of Bruges during the 14th and 15th centuries was, like modern Manhattan, a thriving center of culture and commerce to which all the world thronged. Wealthy Lombards, Venetians and Germans, English wool merchants and Russian fur traders jostled one another in its crowded, cobbled streets. Worsteds from England, cotton from Egypt, and silk threads from the Orient were spun and woven into fine fabrics in the busy mills of Bruges, Ghent and Ypres. Sturdy Flemish artists, among them Memling, Van Eyck, Bruegel, Bosch and Van der Weyden, learned there a trick of grinding pigments in oil that gave their paintings a shine which has not faded through the centuries. In the portraits of Renaissance Flanders, gallerygoers the world over can find living reflections of the ruggedly honest, hardfisted and hard-faced merchant kings of Flanders.

In time, Bruges' greatness passed away: the relentless sea silted up her harbor so that only smaller and smaller ships could come through. Today Bruges is a quiet market town of 52,000, grateful for the tourists who come to see the "Venice of the North" and cruise along her scenic canals. Ghent, her sister in glory, is now weaving fabrics of modern nylon and rayon, and is Europe's leading grower of camellias and azaleas. Ypres, the third great town of old Flanders, was so badly damaged in World War I that it took years to repair.

Stubborn People. "God made us Flemish; only politics made us Belgian," says a Bruges poet; and the inheritors of a turbulent and bloody history are combatively proud of their identity to this day, even to the point of threatening secession. Rivalry between the Flemings and the French-speaking Walloons still enlivens Belgian history. The people who were once called the Refugees have learned to find refuge in their own patience and persistence. This persistence was rewarded when, after years of offensive bilingualism, Belgian authorities consented to print all road signs and street markers in Flanders exclusively in Flemish.

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