Ypres: Flemish, Yperen; German, Ypern. A town in Belgium, situated on the Yperlee river, 35 miles south of Ostend. In the battles of 1914 and 1915 when the Germans unsuccessfully attempted to wrest its possession from the Allied forces, the town was reduced by shell fire to a heap of ruins. It contained a celebrated Cloth Hall, begun in 1201, and a Gothic cathedral erected in the thirteenth century when Ypres was the largest city in West Flanders.

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