We went first to Alost itself, the center of the area, where, however, modern industries have won their already oft-repeated victory over the lace. It was in Alost, the 16th of November, 1918, that my car had scarcely been able to push its way between the two lines of Belgian soldiers of deliverance holding back the smiling, tearful population, and where, too, I passed Burgomaster Max free after four years in prison in Germany, on his way to King Albert at the Army Headquarters near Ghent.
A short distance south of Alost we passed Haltaert, from which this lace section might more justly take its name, since in Haltaert there is scarcely a household without its needle or bobbin workers. And but a little farther south lay Kerxken, which even in the rain, looked a friendly village and where beside fully three-fourths of the windows women were plying their needles.
Before the war companies of the men of this region went to France to work in the harvest, as many as 40,000 migrating annually, because even before the war, France was short-handed agriculturally and the French fields offered higher wages than their own. The women and girls helped those who remained to gather the crops, and in the fall, when the men came back and the season for working the farms had passed, whole families turned to lace-making as a means of piecing out the gains of the summer. Sometimes the men cared for the children or assisted with the housework so that the women might sit uninterruptedly before their patterns, and in certain instances they themselves made lace—the census of 1896 lists 117 men lace-workers in Belgium. In Kerxken we found that thirty young men who had been silk weavers before the war had during the occupation been able to make lace—not true lace, but such imitations as filet, really a form of embroidery. They made, too, Application, not genuine Application where true lace details, made either with the bobbin or needle, are sewed upon the tulle base, but tulle ornamented with machine-made lacets, narrow braids of various sorts that come to the region from Calais. Lacets usually have a strong thread along one edge, which can be drawn so that the braid may be more swiftly fashioned into curving leaves or flowers. These distressing imitations, which unfortunately pay much better than the true laces, since they can be made with great speed and find a ready market, are a constant menace to them. “_Voilà notre ennemie!_” said Madame Allard, as we looked into a work-room where the table showed little piles of lacet collars. The only method of fighting this enemy is through higher wages for the genuine lace.