NOTE
Since writing the above impressions of the Saar in April 1920, there has been serious trouble in that area. A dispute arose at the end of July between the Governing Commission and the German permanent officials, as to the conditions of service under which these officials should be taken over. Security of tenure is a matter of jealous concern to the Germans, for it is no secret that France is very anxious to see the last of some of the existing Prussian officials. The latter are no less determined to resist any doors being opened through which foreigners might enter. In the opinion of the officials, the new regulations rendered their position much less secure than formerly and offered wider scope for dismissal on other grounds than those of efficiency. The right of combination was also restricted. Further, they were required to take an oath of fidelity.
The officials objected to these provisions, and demanded that they should be confirmed in all rights and privileges in which they were possessed on November 11, 1918. No satisfactory settlement of the dispute was forthcoming, and the officials went on strike. Railways, posts, telegraphs were paralysed throughout the area. This action was followed by a general strike of the whole community. The French hurried up troops. Saarbrücken was patrolled by cavalry, infantry, machine guns, and tanks. House-to-house searchings took place. Many people were arrested, others left the district. The Governing Commission in a proclamation openly accused the Berlin Government of inciting the whole trouble, and of spending large sums of money for purposes of disloyal agitation. The Berlin Government retorted by a Note no less acrimonious. Each side charged the other with intrigue and breaches of the Peace Treaty. It must always be remembered the Governing Commission represents the League of Nations and that the League is involved in these proceedings. The strike dragged on for a time and then came to an end.
The position as I write is obscure. The censorship in the Saar is very severe. English papers publish little or no news from the area. A silence on the subject no less profound envelops periodically the German Press. It is difficult, therefore, to form any judgment as to the rights and wrongs of the dispute in view of the limited material available. But the strike itself is a symptom of the ugly spirit ruling in the Saar district, the dangers of which were obvious when we were in Saarbrücken. Probably both sides are right in their charges of mutual intrigue. It is clear that each Government has only one desire, namely, to exasperate and hinder the other. Germany protests loudly against the French attempt to change the German character of the district. France retorts that perfidy and bad faith are the true hall-marks of the Prussian. All this is inherent in the situation actually created, and if it causes surprise to the creators of that situation they must be simple-minded folk. The plan evolved is one that not only asks for but demands trouble, and the trouble is there.
Practical administration becomes a nightmare under such conditions, and that this particular nightmare should persist for the fifteen years contemplated by the Peace Treaty is a prospect sufficiently dismal for all who have to face the waking realities.
CHAPTER XI
FROM METZ TO VERDUN
There is something grim and forbidding about the name of Metz. The tragedy of shame and defeat with which it was connected during the Franco-Prussian War hangs round it like a sombre garment. I for one associated it always in my thoughts with a dark menacing fortress, the very stones of which cried aloud the tale of France’s humiliation and the ruthless might of her conquering foe. Historical events have the power of lending their own colour to the names of localities where great dramas have played themselves out. Sometimes the very nature of a place—I take three at random, Mycenae, Blois, Glencoe—harmonises completely with the sense of tragedy. No one could associate the shores of Lake Trasimene with the idea of trippers on the beach, or the plains of Borodino with swings and roundabouts. Yet to this rule, if it be a rule, Metz is a complete exception. Instead of a gloomy fortress it is a delightful French town, ideally situated in the basin of the Mosel. The Mosel breaks up at this point into several channels, and Metz disposes of itself in somewhat Venetian fashion among the various branches. The main portion of the town is situated on a low crest overlooking the stream. The crest falls away to the river below, gardens, houses, and terraces clinging to the slopes. To the west across the plain rises a range of hills. From the vantage point of the Esplanade—the beautiful public gardens on the terraces above the Mosel—the view of the surrounding country is very fine. The fortifications of Metz, being of the latest type, are naturally not in evidence. But the distant hills which rise in such calm beauty from the plain are honeycombed with everything that is deadly in modern military equipment. Villages and vineyards may be on their surface, but the hand of man has been concerned there with other matters than those of the plough or winepress. No traveller surely can look at the hills beyond Metz without a catch in the throat? For through them runs the road to Gravelotte and Mars-la-Tour, and so beyond to a place of glory and endurance greater than theirs—Verdun, shattered and destroyed, but inviolate and unconquered in the midst of her ruins.
Few districts in Europe are so important in military history as the country which lies in the neighbourhood of Metz. We came by train from Saarbrücken, our car being under repair, and nearly every mile of the way had been a path of destiny for France in 1870. A French customs official, not a genial specimen of his kind, charged us roundly with having contraband concealed under the maps spread about the carriage. We assured him our business at the moment was concerned with history and geography and not illicit trading, and after shaking the offending sheets he disappeared with an unfriendly grunt.
The heights of Spicheren are within sight of Saarbrücken. Here on August 6, 1870, was fought one of the early battles in the Franco-Prussian War—an indecisive action which was to prove, however, a strand in the great coil spread round the French armies. To the east of Metz lies the fateful battlefield of August 14, when after a desperate struggle centring in particular round Colombey and Nouilly, the French were forced to give way and the German pincers began to close in on the doomed city. The history of the 1870 war, that tale of heroism and mismanagement, is painful beyond bearing to read. It moves with the precision and inevitableness of a Greek tragedy—France, so sound at heart, yet superficially so rotten, matched against the supreme technical skill of a painstaking people guided by the wholly non-moral purpose of a Bismarck. From the conflict, as it was then, of the iron with the earthenware pot, only one end could result. Yet
“Nor kind nor coinage buys
Aught above its rate.”
Germany in the person of her rulers bartered in 1870 the first principles of justice and morality between states. To-day she is paying the price of that moral treachery on a level of humiliation to which 1870 held no parallel, while a ruined world also bears its testimony to the eternal truth that, as members one of another, the sin and failure of the one involves confusion and disaster for all.
Lorraine is a smiling land with rolling plains and hills. Villages, solid and well-built, lie among their orchards in the folds of the undulating fields. Important though the mineral wealth of the province, agriculture plays a part hardly second in value as regards its resources. The rich red soil is highly cultivated, and farming is carried on with the thoroughness one associates, alas, with continental methods alone. The red-tiled roofs of the farmhouses lend a sense of warmth and colour to the landscape. Especially beautiful is the contrast when the warm madder-coloured gables rise out of a foam of fruit blossom. Truly a land to win and to hold the affections of its children. To see it for the first time, no longer under alien rule but liberated and restored to the Motherland, was a glad experience of travel. Indefensible though the German rape of the protesting provinces in 1870, the case of Lorraine, predominantly and overwhelmingly French in population and sentiment, was perhaps the greater outrage. A people annexed against their will are not easy citizens to handle, as for over forty years French resistance passive and active taught Prussian officialism.
Thiers fought desperately for the retention of Metz in the peace negotiations following on the 1870 war. Bismarck, whose ends were attained by the war itself, was not implacable on the subject. Personally he favoured the payment of a larger indemnity in lieu of the city. Military opinion was violently hostile to this proposal, and with cynical indifference the Chancellor let the soldiers have their way. To visit Metz in 1920 is to realise how the soul of the city kept itself free and aloof, heavy though the material yoke imposed on it. The town is French in every respect. The Germans have added solid public buildings of practical value in the shape of an excellent railway station, post office, banks, etc. As a material proposition, Metz returns to France much richer than when torn away. But the purely French character of the streets and houses defied all efforts of the conqueror at any true absorption within the German Reich. The new buildings lie, like scorned and wealthy parvenus, on the outskirts. Within are narrow streets, tall houses and shuttered windows—all the indefinable genre and elegance which French taste and French architecture bring with them. When the hour of liberation came, Metz reverted to her natural allegiance with as little difficulty as a prisoner casts off some hated garment of servitude.
Sign painters must have driven a brisk trade after the Armistice. Not only have all the names of the streets become French again, but the names of shops have undergone a similar transformation. So hastily has the work been done in many cases that the half-obliterated German letters may be seen under the new paint. Business was clearly urgent in those early days and the transfer of names to the winning side permitted of no delay.
The fine fourteenth-century Gothic cathedral is a great adornment to Metz. The lofty windows, slender and austere, and the splendid glass still speak of the soul of the Middle Ages no less than of the skill and cunning hand of the mediaeval builder and craftsman. Yet not these abiding beauties but a freak decoration of the exterior is what attracts the average traveller to Metz Cathedral to-day. Under German rule the church had undergone a “thorough restoration,” ominous words which, as I have said elsewhere, are the knell of doom to many a fine building in Germany. French skill was apparently successful in staving off the barbarisms common in the Rhineland, and the interior has not suffered. But the addition of a Gothic west portal in 1903 gave William II. a priceless opportunity of masquerading among saints and holy men on the new façade. Such a chance possibly did not often come his way. Certainly he availed himself of it eagerly. He appears, therefore, on the façade in the guise of the prophet Daniel. The statue is well executed, though the sculptor, whether or not intentionally, has endowed the prophet with a sinister expression, especially when viewed from certain angles. The statue has been allowed to remain, but after the Armistice the hands were fettered with chains, and in that felon’s guise William II. still surveys the cathedral square from under the cowl of his prophet’s cloak.
I have referred in another chapter to the problem presented to Republican Germany by the redundance of Hohenzollern statues. Metz had been endowed with more than its fair share of Prussian effigies. “If you do not like your conquerors, you shall at least have plenty of them too look at” seems to have been the principle adopted. Hohenzollerns major and minor abounded therefore in every public place. A huge equestrian statue of William I. had been erected in the centre of the Esplanade. The Emperor, with whiskers of a particularly bristling and aggressive order, flourished a baton in the direction of the French border. It was certainly not by accident that the statue was designed to look across the hills to the west, and to convey a challenge to which France on her side was not slow to reply.
Whatever the embarrassments of a reformed Germany as regards its former reigning house, naturally they did not weigh with the people of Metz. The inhabitants after the Armistice rose en masse, tore down the statues of the Hohenzollerns, and generally destroyed every outer symbol of Prussian domination. The effigy of William I. was overthrown by an excited crowd, and pictures of the event show the monarch on the ground while men, women, and children shake their fists at the prostrate form. The plinth, stripped of its ornaments and inscriptions, was allowed to remain, and with every possible haste the temporary figure of a victorious poilu was erected in order to replace that of the Kaiser. This figure was no longer in situ at the time of our visit, and the plinth awaits its permanent memorial. The hard-worked German phrase, “Von seinem dankbaren Volk,” is still visible though half effaced on the plinth, but on the west side looking towards Verdun the Hohenzollern devices have been replaced by the three electric words crisp with victory, “On les a.”
We English, who for centuries have never known the bitterness of alien conquest—among whom no tradition even survives of its sting and misery—can enter very faintly either into the anguish or the joy of countries conquered and then subsequently redeemed. Few stories of the war are more moving than the tales told of the entry of the French troops into Metz and Strasbourg. Indescribable enthusiasm prevailed among the French population. Not only were the liberating legions greeted with garlands and banners, but weeping men and women followed the French generals and prayed to be allowed to kiss their hands or touch the hem of their garments. On the Porte Serpinoise, the ancient gateway of the city, a long inscription has recently been erected which tells the tale of Metz in recent times from the treachery of Bazaine to the reunion with France in 1918. About this inscription there is little of the calm and measured language of the message usually carved in stone. The words are burning and passionate, torn from the heart of suffering, turned though it be at the last to joy. That the years of “separation cruelle” to which the gateway bears testimony were bitter indeed no one could doubt who has stood by the Porte Serpinoise and read its record of both defeat and victory. But has the world even yet laid to heart the moral of the German seizure of these provinces? Has France herself, greatest of all sufferers, applied the lesson to her own circumstances? Coming to Metz from Saarbrücken with a vivid recollection of all we had seen and heard there, I turned from the Porte Serpinoise with an uneasy question in my mind. When the first enthusiasms subside and the flowers and the garlands have faded, the practical business of life remains. The government of a mixed population is never an easy task, and the redeemed provinces will make heavy demands on the wisdom and generosity of France.
Alsace-Lorraine was in fact indulging in all the joys of a general strike at the time of our visit. Post, telegraph, railway service, everything was at a standstill the day after our arrival. The trouble had arisen apparently over the replacement of German employés, now French subjects, by other French workmen. The long and stubborn resistance offered by the provinces to German rule is sufficient proof of the healthy spirit of independence which inspires the population. But even under the new order, the people of Alsace-Lorraine are likely to show a spirit no less vigorous in all that concerns their local affairs. Bureaucratic interference even with the German side of the population may easily give rise to resentment throughout the whole community. German bureaucracy, heavy handed though it was, had the merit of being efficient. French administration would do well to avoid situations in which irritated citizens begin to make comparisons not always favourable to those at present in authority.
We hired a car which took us, or rather shook us, to Verdun. The road crosses some of the most famous of the 1870 battlefields, especially Gravelotte and Mars-la-Tour. The road first climbs the lofty ridge of hills lying to the west of Metz, on the top of which lies an open plateau. Fortifications and defences were obvious everywhere. It was clear, from the masses of barbed-wire entanglements which we passed at various points, that the Germans had intended to defend Metz if necessary in the last war. Further, the road along which we travelled must have been their main artery of supply to Verdun. We saw the remains of their light railways running in various directions. Dumps of wire still remained and traces of dumps of ammunition. The light railways had been ploughed up by the returning peasantry. Yet as we approached the area of devastation an obvious question arose—why were these railways not preserved for the task of reconstruction and the demands on transport reconstruction involves?
We halted at the famous ravine of Gravelotte, where on August 18, 1870, the terrible struggle took place which decided the fate of Metz. Here, as everywhere else on the 1870 battlefields, all traces of the German monuments to the dead have disappeared. The graves in the cemeteries were untouched, but the eagles had been knocked off the monuments. Unquestionably the presence of these German memorials on land robbed from France presented the French Government with a difficult problem. No doubt many of the “Denkmals” were boastful and vainglorious, after the usual German fashion in these matters. Clearly they had no place on redeemed French soil. I could not feel, however, the situation had been handled very wisely as regards the memorials to the fallen soldiers. Nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to have pulled at the rope which dragged William I. from his plinth. The ignominious overthrow of statues of kings and princes of a ruling house so directly responsible for the miseries of Europe is a symbol of victory over the evil principles for which they stood.
But the soldiers who died doing their duty do not belong to the same category as the men who plotted the war. Many of the monuments blown up were merely records of regiments who fought and fell, and had their historical value. Their destruction has caused great bitterness among the German section in the province, and no end is served by the further creation of bad blood between people who are forced to live together. The 1870 war and its terrible consequences are not to be wiped out by blowing up a few obelisks. The man who dies fighting bravely for his country, however much duped as to the righteousness of the cause for which he gives his life, has a claim to consideration at the hands of a generous foe. The dignified way out of the difficulty would have been for the French to call upon the Germans to remove their monuments. We felt this the more on reaching Mars-la-Tour, the scene of another fierce battle. The frontier fixed after 1870 ran between Gravelotte and Mars-la-Tour. On the Mars-la-Tour side of the frontier stands a wonderful French monument which commemorates the heroism and tragedy of 1870. A woman symbolising France holds in her arms a dying soldier, whose head she crowns with laurel. But she is in no way concerned with the agony gathered next her heart. Her eyes are fixed, not on the dying man, but grimly, steadily across the frontier. She looks across the hills of her own lost province, and the fixity of her gaze conveys a spiritual challenge to that other statue on the crest above the Mosel—the statue of William I. conquering and insolent. Further, from the hand of the dying man falls a musket. But two babes playing at the woman’s feet catch the musket before it lies in the dust and raise it once more in the air.
This monument, a striking example of its class, is executed with a full measure of French skill and artistic power. But there cannot be the least misunderstanding as to its meaning. Every line breathes revenge and a day of reckoning to come. Mars-la-Tour was occupied by the Germans in the first days of the recent war. It must, I think, be put to the credit of the military authorities that, during the four and a half years that this memorial was in their power, no damage of any kind was done to it.
Gravelotte and Mars-la-Tour are both dirty ramshackle villages, with middens out in the street blocking the entrance to the houses. Perhaps the inhabitants of frontier villages are inspired by a justifiable pessimism as to the futility of building decent dwelling-houses. Certainly the standard of life seems unusually low. Shortly after leaving Mars-la-Tour we began to pick up occasional signs of war, signs which, of course, multiplied as we entered the plain of the Woevre, and began to draw near the ridge of hills to the west on the far side of which Verdun lies. One battlefield is painfully like another. The destroyed villages and desolate fields told the same tale of death and suffering which is impressed on the long belt of devastation running across the Continent. Yet to me in future a cowslip field will always bring with it memories of Verdun. The familiar yellow flowers were growing in sheets by the roadside, striving, as it were, pathetically to throw the cover of their freshness and grace across the stricken land.
The interest of Verdun, apart from its heroic defence, lies in the fact that the line of attack being very intensive was relatively small, and owing to the hilly and varied nature of the ground it is possible to visualise more or less accurately the various attacks and counter attacks. We approached Verdun from the south-west, a point from which the damage was relatively small. The whole of the Verdun ridge on which the forts are situated runs north and south, and commands the plain of the Woevre to the east and the valley of the Meuse to the west. All this district was formerly a great forest. On the southern slopes we found the trees practically intact. We turned to the right and, keeping along the top of the ridge, had our first view of the valley of the Meuse, and Verdun with its twin towers lying far below us in the plain.
Verdun, never a considerable city, has nevertheless emerged into fame on more than one occasion in the course of its long history. It gives its name to the one event of capital importance in the evolution of modern Europe. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 may be taken as the starting point of the long struggle between France and Germany. Under this Treaty the united empire of Charlemagne was broken up between his three grandsons. France and Germany parted company, never to meet again during the course of the next thousand years but on terms of fire and sword. Revolutionary France offered its own example of frightfulness at Verdun. The city was taken by the Prussians in 1792. The struggle was not of an embittered character, and some young ladies of the city not only welcomed the conquerors but presented them with sweets. Fraternising with the enemy was not included apparently in the then revolutionary interpretation of fraternity, and three of the girls were sent to the scaffold when the French retook Verdun after Valmy. The little place sustained a siege of three weeks in 1870, and surrendered with the full honours of war after a gallant resistance.
But at Verdun as elsewhere the scale of events has been flung utterly out of focus by the recent struggle, to which history has no parallel. The town itself has suffered cruelly. Every other house is a ruin. But at least it never yielded, never bowed the head to the conqueror. How near, terribly near, the Germans came to complete success, we appreciated better on the spot than anything we had been led to believe by the official communiqués issued at the time. A discreet veil was flung over the German capture of Fort Douaumont. As a matter of fact not only was the fort taken, but the Germans penetrated for a mile and a half further westward beyond that point. One remaining fort alone lay between them and their prey. Heroic though the defence, it is clear that but for the Somme offensive and the diversion of forces it entailed, Verdun itself must have fallen.
Fort Vaux and Fort Douaumont are the central points of interest in the defence, but every yard of the district is full of poignant and tragic association. Trees and vegetation had disappeared before we reached Fort Vaux. The ground had become a mere crater field. It was almost impossible to believe that this blasted hillside and neighbouring ravines had once formed part of a beautiful forest. As to Douaumont, little of the fort remains beyond a heap of rubble and rubbish. Imagination stumbles and halts as to what the bombardment must have been which could blast fortress and land alike out of being. Still more impossible is it to gauge the human endurance which could survive any experience so hideous as the fighting which raged round these key points. Just below Douaumont is a trench where a French platoon was overwhelmed and enfiladed by German fire. The ground fell in, burying the men where they stood. The bodies have not been removed, and the tops of the rifles can still be seen sticking out of the ground. The trench is enclosed by barbed wire to keep the tourist at bay, but I hope that this gruesome sight may not be perpetuated for the benefit of the tripper. The tourist invasion of the battlefields is inevitable, but it is intolerable if they bring with them to soil which is sacred anything of the orange peel and ginger-beer bottle atmosphere. Two or three chars-à-bancs filled with visitors were already on the ground, early though the season. However, they were mercifully cowed into silence by the all-pervading desolation.
All the hillsides round Verdun are scarred with the marks of trenches. Every name, every ridge in the district is famous. We looked on a given heap of ruins and remembered with what anxiety and suspense the name of this or that obscure village filled half the world a few years since. There was a tangle of wire in many places, though much clearance of the battlefield has gone on. Here and there the roots of the unconquerable trees had begun to throw up a sort of scrub. Here and there coarse grass and coarser brambles were hiding the shell holes. But on the hillsides about Vaux and Douaumont, Froide Terre, Poivre, and Haudromont, there was no sign of life. The subsoil had been blasted out of existence, and vegetation had not been able up till then to reassert itself.
The area of destruction round Verdun extends for a long distance, and the general impression left by the ruined villages is painful in the extreme. In the area of moving battle the land is not destroyed, but the houses are mostly in ruins. The task of reconstruction is formidable indeed, and there were few signs in April 1920 that it was being grappled with on adequate lines. People were beginning to creep back, it is true, to their ruined homes, but under circumstances which seemed very undesirable. The ruins had been patched up in some places, and the owners were living among them in a state of indescribable and insanitary squalor. There were no signs of a big scheme of reparation, which should have aimed first and foremost at the scrapping of these small dirty centres and starting new villages on fresh sites. The average French village is apt to be a dirty place. The sanitary conditions left by a bombardment are better imagined than described.
I cannot help feeling that the inhabitants of the devastated areas have a most real grievance as regards this question of reconstruction. The French Government has wholly failed to deal with it up to the present on a big scale. Progress has been made with areas in the north; other districts, of which Verdun is an example, remain practically untouched. The French complain that they cannot get work-people or materials. I cannot say from what causes the deadlock springs, but the evidences of deadlock in the Verdun district are complete. One feels this state of affairs to be a terrible hardship for the poor people concerned. One of the reparation proposals put forward by the German Government is a scheme for rebuilding and re-equipping the devastated areas. It excites, naturally, a chorus of disapproval from greedy contractors and other people who would like the money allocated for houses, furniture, and implements to go into their pockets. But in the interests of the inhabitants—surely the paramount interest—any scheme which would deal promptly with the problems concerned with the return to normal life among the ruined villages should be examined closely.
Further, England and America ought not to miss their opportunities in this respect. The movement for the adoption by English centres of French towns and villages is wise and generous, and if widely spread through the United States as well as our own country should result in substantial assistance to the victims of the war. The basis of any adequate reparation scheme must be national. But destruction so great leaves ample scope for additional voluntary assistance. It is often whispered—one of the unfriendly whispers which circulate in corners—that the French are over-willing to let other people shoulder the burthen of the devastated areas. Whether or not the wealthy French could have made greater efforts on behalf of their compatriots, the position of England and America in this matter remains unaffected. They cannot err on the side of over-generosity. The sufferings of the poor and humble in the devastated areas have been atrocious. In so far as we render France every material assistance within our power, our position is the stronger if from time to time we are forced to cry halt about matters concerning her general policy. Between the Allies there may be, indeed there must be at times, differences which are fundamental as regards their outlook on post-war problems. But on one point there can only be complete unity of feeling and idea—sympathy for the innocent victims on whom the material brunt of the war has fallen in its most acute form; whole-hearted desire to make good the losses endured.
CHAPTER XII
IN ALSACE
Never have I appreciated more fully than during the months I have lived in Germany the many advantages of an island people. No more detestable fate can exist than to be a border state of mixed population, snatched as the chances of fate and history may dictate from one domination to another. With the unhappy example of Ireland before our eyes, we are not lacking in experience of the difficulties which arise from the presence of two races and two religions in one country. When to these internal differences are added the ambitions and intrigues of warring Powers, each hungrily desirous of increasing its coast at the expense of its neighbors, the lot of the inhabitants of the debatable zone is seen to be unenviable indeed. National self-aggressiveness is always accentuated when unhappily yoked with the rival claims of another stock. Temperaments and points of view may be irreconcilable, but each side is forced to contend for its daily bread in the same area and to clash hourly or daily over the task. The problem in government presented by such a situation is at the best of times distracting. When inflamed by old memories of grievances and suffering, of wrongs given, wrongs endured, it becomes almost insoluble. Only a being from another planet endowed with infinite wisdom might be able to deal justly and impartially with so great a tangle. But the very fact that such a being would be remote from the passions surging round him, would rob him of knowledge essential to their understanding. The hard-worked phrase, self-determination, beloved by the sloppy-minded, never touches the root of real bi-racial difficulties. When two sets of people in one place wish to self-determine themselves in opposite senses, what then? Only along the lines, not of self-aggression, but of loyalty to a common ideal of justice and fair play, can reasonable men on both sides grope towards some sort of compromise. But almost invariably the actual course of events has been to destroy the very possibility of mutual forbearance. Hatred, sinister child of arrogance and injustice, stifles men and women within the evil circle it has forged. And the circle continues pitilessly to revolve, the oppressors of to-day being sometimes the oppressed of yesterday, but, whichever side is uppermost, the bond of hatred remaining close and unbroken.
The German wrong done to France in 1870 was at the same time a supreme political blunder. At the time of the Franco-Prussian War, Alsace-Lorraine had been French for nearly two hundred years and was strongly French in sentiment. There was no real case for restitution to Germany on geographical or historical grounds. For generations life in the border provinces touching the Rhine had been in a state of flux. The rigid territorial demarcations of our own time were then non-existent. Frontiers and population were both fluid. Baedeker, whose national bias in matters both of art and history makes the Handbook on Germany often very unreliable, writes of the “seizing” of Strasbourg by Louis XIV. and the “restoration” of the city after 1870. Cities and provinces, according to our modern ideas, were tossed about ruthlessly in the seventeenth century, but Alsace-Lorraine having become thoroughly French had no wish to find itself restored to the Fatherland and brought within the circle of Prussian philanthropic effort. Even Alsace, more predominantly German in origin than Lorraine, had in 1870 no desire for other allegiance but that of France. The provinces were torn, protesting and unhappy, from the motherland of their adoption. Bismarck, great and unscrupulous genius, whose clear-sighted vision in matters of practical statecraft was only equalled by his entire lack of moral sense, knew that a bad mistake had been made. “I do not like the idea of so many Frenchmen being in our house against their will,” he remarked uneasily. But Bismarck, whose time and thoughts had been devoted with devilish ingenuity and success to manœuvering France into war and putting her in the wrong over the process, had at the critical point, so it would seem, not sufficient energy left to resist the annexationist clamour of the Prussian generals. He yielded to military pressure, thus leaving an open sore in the side of Europe, which in the end was to involve his own creation of the new-made German Empire in ruin.
To-day the provinces are French again, while the conscience of the world applauds a righteous act of restitution. It would be foolish, however, to deny that the return of Alsace-Lorraine after forty-seven years of German rule, with a German population very largely increased, does not present an administrative problem to France of exceptional difficulty. Lorraine, as I have said elsewhere, has kept its French character very much intact throughout the years of oppression. The problem of Alsace is harder to solve.
My first vivid recollection of Paris as a child is being taken to the Place de la Concorde to see the figure of Strasbourg draped in her mourning weeds. It was with real emotion that after the Armistice I saw the statue, all symbols of loss and servitude removed, throned equally with her sister cities who encircle the great square. A visit to Strasbourg itself in the dawn of its liberation is a satisfactory and stimulating experience. The many vicissitudes of its history have left a clear architectural mark on the town. Strasbourg lies, a little way removed from the left bank of the Rhine, in the centre of a fertile plain. Looking southwards, the line of the Vosges mountains stretches far away to the right; equally far to the left across the river runs the line of the Black Forest. So near the borders of Switzerland, it is something of a surprise to find the Rhine flowing tranquilly through this wide flat land already far removed from the mountains of its birth. Before railways and modern methods of communication had made light of rivers and mountains, Strasbourg, commanding the gap of Belfort between the Vosges and the Jura, was a key point of the highest importance. Here lay the broad and easy highway from France to Germany. Along this path swept Napoleon in his invasions of the Rhineland. The strategical value of the position was recognised by the Romans, who had a camp at this point. No less important was it commercially in the Middle Ages, for thanks to its position, Strasbourg was a necessary centre of exchange for the trade of France, Germany, and Switzerland. Manufactures have been developed on some scale by the Germans since 1870, but it is as one of the great marts of Central Europe that Strasbourg has achieved its fame.
The mediaeval character of the buildings survives to an unexpected extent in many of the narrow streets. A small canalised stream, the Ill, encloses the centre of the town, and the gabled houses which cluster on the water’s edge, sadly insanitary though they must be, are wholly satisfying to the eye. May health experts and social reformers long be kept at bay from the old quarters of Strasbourg! The type of house which lends unique character to the city has a deep-pitched slanting roof broken by small dormer windows. The red tiles, flecked with green, have been mellowed by age into a subdued colour of great beauty. The houses, with wide lattice windows, are often decorated with wood carvings, sometimes old, often restored. The gables which lend so much character to this class of architecture are treated with considerable freedom and variety; the crow’s-foot gable introduced by the Dutch to South Africa is not uncommon here. The beautiful colour of the tiles which glow and shimmer in the sunshine is like a warm and rosy cloak flung over the town. Flowers not infrequently decorate the broad window ledges, and give life and colour to the narrow streets and passages. Striking indeed is the framework of such a house for an Alsatian woman wearing the national headdress with its voluminous black bows, when she appears at the window to tend her geraniums and marguerites, or to pass the time of day with neighbours in the street below.
The influence of mediaeval Germany on the old streets and buildings of Strasbourg can be seen at a glance. Superimposed on this foundation is a town essentially French in character and architecture. Eighteenth-century France has left behind it the type of high French house, elegant and well-proportioned, characteristic of a period at once correct and dignified. It is curious to notice how Strasbourg and Metz adopted a similar attitude to the architectural improvements of the conqueror. The spirit of both cities is identical in this respect. Like Metz, pre-1870, Strasbourg keeps itself to itself, aloof and reserved, within the confines of the surrounding Ill. On the further banks, the modern German buildings encircle the old kernel with all the material comfort and ugliness of the latter-day German town. The solid reinforced-concrete houses, the large public buildings, the wide streets and squares breathe a spirit from which the older Strasbourg seems to remove the hem of her garment with fastidious contempt—“What mean ye by these stones?”—and it is not fantastic to read the moral and political struggles of this oft-disputed city of the marches in the vivid contrasts of its architecture. Between mediaeval and seventeenth-century Strasbourg there is no strife. But pre-1870 Strasbourg, humiliated, aristocratic, reveals a passionate antagonism towards the conquering parvenu to whom the city owes its present material prosperity. The Kaiser’s palace, a building, monotonous and vulgar, of the type which reproduces itself in a dozen German cities, adorns one of the modern squares. As at Metz, the empty plinths of destroyed statues testify to the passing of the Hohenzollerns. Allegorical figures on one or two modern buildings, bereft of their heads, were something of a puzzle. I could only conclude that the former reigning house, with its mania for self-portraiture, had disguised themselves in such cases as Virtues or Graces.
I have spoken of the beauty of the tiled roofs. The famous cathedral built of red sandstone strikes a similar note of warmth and colour. Incredibly fine and delicate is the work on arch and buttress; too fine, too delicate perhaps, for ornament is surely at its best in that wonderful moment of Gothic at once austere and noble when ornament serves a strictly architectural end. The famous west front of Strasbourg Cathedral, for all the individual beauty of its carving—the Wise and the Foolish Virgins alone well repay a long journey—is a decorative façade entirely divorced from any architectural end. Similarly with the gossamer-like tracery of the spire. The lines are beautiful, but somehow you feel that the Kingdom of Heaven must be stormed by more violent means than those of so fairy-like an inspiration. Can such a structure really survive the next storm? The question springs involuntarily to the mind, and in it lies a point of reproach. It is one you would never ask yourself when looking at the spires at Chartres. The fine apse of the minster testifies to the Romanesque plan on which the building was begun. Then it was captured by Gothic in its most airy and fantastic mood. It ranks, and ranks rightly, among the great cathedrals of Europe. Yet, since buildings and human beings tend to reproduce each other’s characteristics in a strange and intimate way, it leaves the impression that, as may happen with some character of real value and worth, its feet are a little off the ground, and so the quality of the whole suffers. Ruskin, who first saw Strasbourg when a boy of fourteen, writes in Præterita that with all its “miracles of building” he was “already wise enough to feel the Cathedral stiff and ironworky.” But the high roofs and rich wooden fronts of the houses excited and impressed him greatly.
With the great astronomical clock, beloved of sightseers, I was frankly a little bored. The cathedral is carefully closed at 11.30, so that you are forced to pay for a ticket to come in at 12 o’clock when the twelve apostles and the cock perform. A series of little figures creak in and out, while two rather aggressive Suisses shout explanations and thrust picture-postcards on the spectators. More satisfactory is the museum, where a small collection of pictures, admirable for a provincial town, can be visited. A delightful park called the Orangerie ministers to those social amenities of life the secret of which is so much better understood on the Continent than in Great Britain. The numerous cafés and beer gardens of the continental town make the partaking of food and drink—especially of drink—a simple respectable affair, wholly robbed of the vicious and degrading associations which invest the liquor trade at home.
The crowds gathered in the cafés on a Sunday afternoon gave us a good opportunity of studying the men and women of Strasbourg. I had the impression of a mixed type special to itself and largely independent of its parent stocks. It is wholly different from that of the tall blond men and women we see in Cologne. Neither is it entirely French. The Alsatians tend to be dark and short, somewhat solid too in build, though the unmistakable elegance of French clothes lends a frequent touch of distinction to passers-by in the streets. Such elegance is unknown in Germany proper. Appalling too in its confusion of tongues is the language spoken: a bastard jumble of French and German which has ceased to have any resemblance to either. You speak in French, the people reply in German; you try German, only to be countered in the vilest of patois. In the end I fell back on English as the least unintelligible of the three languages. As regards the difficult bilingual question, I do not know on what ultimate policy the French have decided. For the moment both French and German names appear in the streets, and public places such as the railway station. It is to be hoped there will be no departure from this policy. Suppress a language, and it flourishes with that zest and vigour derived from persecution alone. The Germans, being stupid people, never learnt this lesson either in Poland or Alsace-Lorraine. The French, as a really intelligent race, are in a better position to avoid what is at all times a gross mistake. The lessons of history are usually disregarded, and it would appear that politicians as a body are singularly inept as regards the application of past precedents to present events. Yet the great moral of the pacification of South Africa and the principles it illustrates is one on which Europe in its present chaos would do well to reflect.
The general appearance of the town throughout Sunday was merry and light-hearted. Bands and processions were the order of the day. A parade of ancient firemen during the morning must have included all the surviving heroes of 1870. Young Alsace was bringing itself up no less vigorously on Boy Scout lines. Every organisation which could march was marching to a fanfare of trumpets and a flying of flags. Strasbourg is the stronghold of the German section of Alsace, yet even among individuals I did not notice any appearance of discontent or hostility. The sullen black looks we had seen in the Saar were absent here.
The proposition in government, however, with which the French find themselves confronted is a difficult one. The problem of population is specially intricate. The German element preponderates considerably in Alsace, but a German name may often conceal French sympathies. Every effort was made by the conquerors after 1870 to stimulate immigration from German stocks of whose loyalty there could be no doubt. Many Germans have come into the country during the last forty years, but the line of demarcation between them and the German Alsatians proper is an impossible one to draw administratively. The type of shrill voice which on all and every occasion clamours for policies which would aggravate the existing confusion of Europe is loud in its demands that the Germans should be turned out. The French Government have had the good sense up to the present not to pursue so mad a course. The friction which has arisen over the inevitable replacement of German by French officials has been a warning, no doubt, as to the consequences likely to follow from any attempt at wholesale expulsion. During the spring changes in personnel on the Alsace-Lorraine railways led, as I have mentioned in the previous chapter, to a general strike in both provinces.
The question of military service is tangled and difficult. Germany is now free from conscription, a blessing whole-heartedly appreciated by her working population. Alsace-Lorraine, on the contrary, has to contribute its quota to the French armies. Thousands of ex-German soldiers have already been called upon to serve with the French colours. The cruel fate of French Alsatians, conscripted by Germany and forced to fight against France, has harrowed the conscience of European public opinion for many years past. France must see to it that she does not pursue a policy towards the German Alsatians which will sooner or later alienate the sympathy of Europe from her as surely as it was alienated from Prussia. At the moment she holds all the cards in her hand. She can afford to play the big game, the generous game, which is the only one capable of meeting the present situation. Forty-seven years of German bullying and efficiency left the sentiment of Alsace-Lorraine predominantly French. The rape of the provinces had long been regarded as an injury to the comity of nations. Outside the Central Empires and their adherents the whole world rejoiced with France in the hour of restitution. Now she has exchanged the position of the person wronged, to that of the person in possession, something of romance and sympathy evaporates inevitably. The test is no longer that of sentiment and feeling, but of the hard facts of government, well or ill handled.
Under the heel of the oppressor, France taught the world how firm and enduring national sentiment can become. No material benefits of Prussian rule, considerable though they were, could reconcile the Alsatians to the injury done to their rights as free people. Now that a large German population passes under French control, France will be wise to give no opportunity for the cultivation of a national sentiment among the German Alsatians as bitter as that of the last forty years among the French. In all that concerns the practical and material organisation of life, German efficiency is much greater than French. They understand the gas and water affairs of life thoroughly. France’s advantage lies in the keenness and admirable clarity of her spirit, her powers of wit and of intuition, her fine sense in all that concerns the heart and mind of man. Wholly devoid of sentimentality, no nation can approach the French clearness of vision and touch when at their best. But on the administrative side the Frenchman is often less happy. The German is painstaking and very thorough; the Englishmen has a natural instinct for finding a way out of serious difficulties through the application of a rough-and-ready code of behaving decently to decent people. The Frenchman is apt to tie himself up in red tape. A French bank in Metz refused to give us any money on a French draft especially arranged for our tour. We were told to call again in a fortnight. A German bank in Saarbrücken gave us all the money we wanted on the draft scorned by the Metz gentlemen, six of whom were brought to look at us before we were turned down. As a method of conducting business the proceedings did not strike us as efficient.
The administrative problem of Alsace-Lorraine can only be a difficult one. French bureaucrats admittedly can be both corrupt and unwise, and it is on the enduring qualities of the French spirit that France must draw if she is to make a success of the government of her restored provinces. A true pacification of the German elements resulting in a general loyalty to France would be a signal victory for French statesmanship.
The question of the compensating advantages presented by Alsace-Lorraine as against the devastations in Northern France, raises an issue about which French opinion is peculiarly sensitive. On this delicate ground any English writer is bound to tread warily. France will never admit, or permit it to be said, that any element of compensation enters into the case. The provinces were stolen from her; now they have been restored at the cost of over a million French lives and untold sufferings. From the point of view of abstract justice and ideal right this contention is doubtless true. But it breaks down before the humdrum questions presented by population, trade, revenue. The provinces were irretrievably lost to France and could only be regained at the price of a successful war. It must be a considerable satisfaction to any friend of France to feel that the crater holes of the devastated areas are at least set off by the recovery of two rich and prosperous provinces, 5605 square miles in extent, with a population of 1,874,014 people. The case of France otherwise would have been aggravated to a desperate degree. She at least enters here and now into possession of an undevastated area, bringing with it considerable compensations in population, minerals, agriculture, and all that these imply as regards trade and taxation. The provinces return vastly improved in their material equipment, thanks to the German capital spent on them. The asset restored is far richer than the asset lost. The set-off, of course, is in no sense equal to what has been destroyed, but it is a substantial element in the case, and one to which, frankly, too little attention is ever paid when questions of war losses are discussed.
It is an interesting experience to motor through the Vosges at a point where the line, so fiercely contended in the north, peters out, so to speak, under conditions which by contrast seem mild if not actually ladylike. We motored to St. Dié by way of the Odilienberg and Saales, returning over the Col de Schlücht to Münster and Colmar, and so back to Strasbourg. Our chauffeur, an Alsatian, warned us we must expect terrible scenes on reaching Saales: since 1870 the French frontier. The warning proved how little experience he had had of the grim business of war on the main lines of attack and defence.
The rampart of the Vosges falls away sharply to the plain on its eastern side, and from the convent crowning the heights of the Odilienberg a wonderful bird’s-eye view exists of the mountains and the plain: Strasbourg and the silver streak of the Rhine dimly visible in the distance, far, far away beyond, the still dimmer line of the Black Forest mountains. The convent itself, a favourite “viewpoint” for trippers to the Vosges, has, thanks to its restaurant and café, a curiously secular appearance. The good nuns apparently drive a brisk trade in souvenirs and picture-postcards, the restaurant catering as much for the needs of the body as the prayers of the faithful for the soul. The wooded heights of the Vosges, sometimes beech, sometimes pine, varied by splendid scarlet patches of mountain-ash berries at their best, are threaded by excellent roads. In the neighbourhood of Saales we braced ourselves, thanks to the exhortations of the driver, to resume our acquaintance with the horrors of the line. But a few damaged houses, and here and there a shattered tree, proved how lightly by comparison this district had escaped. Woods and fields were in a normal condition, and vigorous efforts had clearly been made to deal with the shattered houses.
The scenery of the Col de Schlücht is very fine. A country to be really appreciated must be seen on foot, and motoring is at best but an unsatisfactory makeshift for the busy. To the true vagabond, as Borrow and Robert Louis Stevenson understood the term, the friendly hills of the Vosges must offer many attractions as a wandering ground. Our time being limited, we were grateful to the motor for the cinematograph impression we were able to carry away. Fighting of a more serious character had taken place on the Col de Schlücht than at Saales. It was along this road the French made their original thrust into Alsace at the beginning of the war, when for a brief period they occupied Colmar in the plain below. Driven back by the Germans with heavy losses, the line was stabilised for some years at a point near the head of the pass. Even so the unfailing test of the trees showed that the destruction had not been complete. Münster at the foot of the pass was a heap of ruins. Here for a time artillery fire must have been heavy. But we passed rapidly out of the zone of battle; a great contrast in this respect to the plain of the Woevre where, mile after mile before Verdun is reached, the aspect of the landscape along the road from Metz is desolate and desolating in the extreme.
The agricultural value of the great plain of Alsace must be considerable. The land is rich and well cultivated. Corn, potatoes, and beetroot flourish. Crops of maize and fields of tobacco point to the warmth of the climate. Hops and vines are grown on a scale which does not indicate much enthusiasm for the Pussyfoot movement. Hops are trained on rather a different principle from that usual in Kent, and the long trailing festoons of leaves and flowers languish one towards another like so many elegant and swooning beauties. Tobacco factories and breweries have been established in Strasbourg by the Germans; engine works and foundries also contribute to its wealth. But despite the commercial and manufacturing activities which have turned a city of 78,000 people in 1870 to one of 170,000 in 1911, the strength of Alsace remains rooted in its agriculture and its agricultural population. Except Strasbourg, and in a lesser degree Mülhausen, there are no big towns. From the land has come in the main the brave spirit which carried the people through years of gloom and foreign domination. That the same spirit will triumph over the difficulties of reconstruction must be the hope of all friends of France.