[45] "There is not a single uninjured church in the deanery," declared the Abbé Vanryckeghem, Vicaire of Dixmude. "Nearly forty churches between Nieuport and Ypres have been destroyed." VIII. THE INUNDATION A new actor was about to appear on the scene, a new ally, slower, but infinitely more effectual, than the best reinforcements. Last November the _Moniteur Belge_ published a royal decree conferring the Order of Leopold upon M. Charles Louis Kogge, _garde wateringue_ of the north of Furnes, for his courageous and devoted services in the work of inundation in the Yser region. It was, we have been told, this M. Kogge who first conceived the idea of calling the waters to our aid. A more romantic version has it that the notion was suggested to the Headquarters Staff by the singularly opportune discovery of a bundle of old revolutionary documents bearing upon the action brought in 1795 by a Flemish farmer against his landlord "to recover damages for the loss he had suffered through the inundation of his land during the defence of Nieuport." Be this as it may, on the evening of October 25 the Belgian General Headquarters Staff informed the Admiral that it had just taken measures to inundate the left bank of the Yser between that river and the railway line from Dixmude to Nieuport. The effects of this inundation could not, however, be felt for the first day or two, or even for those immediately following. The word inundation generally suggests to the mind the image of a torrential rush of water, a great charge of marine or fluvial cavalry which sweeps all before it. There was nothing of the sort in this case. We were in Western Belgium, in an invertebrate country, without relief of any sort, where everything proceeds slowly and phlegmatically, even cataclysms. It is, perhaps, a pity that there is not another word in the language to describe the hydrographic operation we were about to witness; but in default of a substantive there is a verb, which surprised most readers of the _communiqués_ as a neologism, but which, as a fact, has been used in Flanders from time immemorial, and has the advantage of expressing the nature of the operation most admirably. It is the verb _tendre_ (to spread or stretch). They _spread_ an inundation there as fishermen spread a net. No image could be more exact. The _spreader_, in this case, was at the locks of Nieuport. He is a head _wateringue_, commanding a dozen men armed with levers to manipulate the lifting-jacks. At high tide he had the flood-gates raised; the sea entered, forcing back the fresh water of the canal and its tributaries; and the sea did not run out again, for the flood-gates had been lowered. Henceforth the fresh water which flowed on every side into the basin of the Yser will find no outlet; "without haste and without rest" it will add its contribution to that of the tide; it will gradually overflow the dykes of the collecting canals, will reach the _watergands_, and cover