The Two Maps of Europe, and Some Other Aspects of the Great War

by Hilaire Belloc

All German-speaking men and women with the exception of:

(a) The bulk of the annexed provinces of Alsace-Lorraine (a matter of sentiment), and

(b) The German-speaking cantons of Switzerland (a matter of political boundaries).

Now the boundaries of this “German feeling” group in Europe are curiously involved and tortuous. Beginning at the Baltic, roughly at the mouth of the River Niemen (which the Germans call the Memel), the true frontier of the German type runs southward for a short distance until it reaches what is called the Region of the Lakes, where the Russian frontier begins to turn west. There the boundary turns west also, and begins to run north again, nearly reaching the Baltic Sea in the neighbourhood of Dantzig. It then turns south by west, goes far west of Thorn and even of Posen, which are Polish towns, and comes round not far east of Frankfort-on-Oder. Then it goes south and east again, coming right through the middle of German Silesia, but, on reaching the mountains that here bound Bohemia, it curls round northwestward again, leaving the mountainous part of the barrier of Bohemia all German, but excluding the Slavonic true Bohemian people in the centre of that isolated region. The Upper Valley of the Elbe is not German. Having thus gone all the way round Bohemia proper, the boundaries of the German type run eastward again, very nearly following the watershed of the Danube until they strike the March River about thirty miles from Vienna. Vienna is thus not a centre, but, like Berlin, an outpost of German speech and civilization. From Vienna the true frontier of the German folk runs south, more or less corresponding to the existing boundary between Austria and Hungary, until it passes the point of Gratz—which counts as German. Thence the boundary turns due west again, taking in the greater part of the Tyrol, and so to the Swiss frontier and on to the Rhine opposite Belfort. Thence it follows the Rhine to a point south of Spiers, and after that follows the existing boundaries (excepting Luxembourg), and is confined by the Dutch and Belgian frontier and the North and Baltic Seas with the exception of the Danish belt north of the Kiel Canal, which is mainly Danish.

Within that curiously twisted line nearly all speech and all feeling is German. There are many States within that line, there is much confusion of historic tradition, a sharp division in religion—roughly Catholic in the south and west, Protestant in the north and east. But the national group is, especially as against the Slav and even as against western and southern Europe, one body; and within that body Prussia, with its capital of Berlin, is the organizing and directing centre.

Are there anomalies to be discovered with regard to this curiously shaped body? There are; but they are of less importance than is often imagined. Thus there are beyond Eastern Prussia and within the Russian boundary the so-called “German” Baltic provinces of Russia. But the term is a misnomer. The leaders of industry are largely German, most of the towns, and the greater landed aristocracy for the most part. But the mass of the population is not German-speaking, and even of the German-speaking minority only a minority again are in any sympathy with the united German feeling to the west.

There are colonies of German speech far eastward of Vienna under the political dominion of Hungary; a particularly large one being discoverable right up in the south-eastern Carpathians next to the Roumanian border. But these colonies could never be included in any united Germany. Nor could the considerable number of similar isolated colonies of Germans in southern and western Russia. Finally, you have on the extreme west the little province of Luxembourg, which is German-speaking, which has its railways and most of its industries controlled by Germans, but which would in any perfectly free system certainly refuse incorporation with any new German unity, for it has an historic tradition of independence which has proved very valuable to it, and may be compared with that of the Swiss German-speaking cantons.

(6) We next have to consider the Slavs, and these fall into two groups, northern and southern, which two groups are thus separated by the great Mongolian invasion of Eastern Europe in the Dark Ages. There is further among the Slavs a cross-section of great importance, that of religion. It separates the Slavs not into northern and southern, but, roughly, into eastern or Greek church, and western or Catholic. With the northern Slavs we count the Bohemians or Czechs, the Poles, and the Russians—using the latter term, of course, for many distinct but connected groups, for it is certain that Russia proper must remain a unity.

There are also just north of the Carpathians two minor northern Slavonic groups, the Slovacs and the Ruthenians. These northern Slavs are divided into Catholic Slavs and Slavs of the Greek Church, or Orthodox, by a vague belt of territory running, roughly, from the town of Vilna down to the borders of the Bukovina; the Poles and Czechs, etc., being in communion with Rome, while the Russians are of the Greek Church.

The southern Slavs are again divided into Catholic and Orthodox by a very sharp and bitter division. The Slovenes and the Croats stand for the Catholic group, the Serbian nation, as a whole, for the Orthodox group; a part of the Serbians and all the Slovenes and Croats are in the Austro-Hungarian dominions, and it is the Serbian element which is in rebellion. The rest of the Serbians are now independent. And so complicated are population and religion in this region that nearly a third of Bosnia and Herzegovina, while Slav in race, are Mohammedan in religion.