Fields of Victory

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Before we left Strasbourg on our way to the "front de Champagne," armed with General Gouraud's maps and directions, an hour or two of most interesting conversation threw great light for me on that other "field of victory"—Alsace-Lorraine.

We brought an introduction to Dr. Pierre Bucher, a gentleman in whom Alsatian patriotism, both before the war and since the Armistice, has found one of its most effective and eloquent representatives. A man of a singularly winning and magnetic presence,—with dark, melancholy eyes, and the look of one in whom the flame of life has burnt in the past with a bitter intensity, fanned by winds of revolt and suffering. Before the war Dr. Bucher was a well-known and popular doctor in Strasbourg, recognised by Alsatian and German alike as a champion of the French spirit and French traditions in the lost provinces. He belonged to that jeunesse of the nineties, which, in the absence of any reasonable grounds for expecting a reversal of the events of 1871, came to the conclusion that autonomous liberties would be at any rate preferable to the naked repression, at the hands of Bismarck and Manteuffel, of the eighties and early nineties. The young men of his date decided that the whole government of the province could not any longer be left to the German bureaucrat, and a certain small number of them entered the German administration, which was imposed on the province after 1871 and had been boycotted thence-forward up to nearly the end of the century by all true Alsatians. But this line of action, where it was adopted, was taken entirely without prejudice to the national demand, which remained as firm as ever, supposing circumstances should ever admit of reunion with France.

Two causes in particular contributed to the irreconcilable attitude of the provinces:—first, the liberal tendencies of the population, the general sympathy, especially in Alsace, with the revolutionary and Napoleonic doctrines of Liberal France from 1789 onward; and secondly, the amazing lack of political intelligence shown by their new masters. "Even if you could ever have annexed us with success"—said Dr. Bucher long before the war, to a German publicist with whom he was on friendly terms—"you came, as it was, a hundred years too late. We had taken our stand with France at the Revolution. Her spirit and her traditions were ours. We were not affected by her passing fits of reaction, which never really interfered with us or our local life. Substantially the revolutionary and Napoleonic era laid the foundations of modern France, and on them we stand. They have little or nothing in common with an aristocratic and militarist Germany. Our sympathies, our traditions, our political tendencies are all French—you cannot alter them."

"But, finally—what do you expect or wish for?" said the German man of letters, after he and Dr. Bucher had talked through a great part of the night, and the German had listened to the Alsatian with an evident wish to understand Alsatian grievances.

Dr. Bucher's answer was prompt and apparently unexpected.

"Reunion with France," he said quietly—"no true Alsatian wishes anything else."

The German first stared and then threw himself back with a good-natured laugh.

"Then indeed there's nothing to be done." (Dann ist ja freilich gar nichts zu machen!)

The tone was that of a strong man's patience with a dreamer; so confident did the Germans feel in their possession of the "Reichsland."

But whatever chance the Germany of Bismarck and William II. might have had of winning over Alsace-Lorriane—and it could never have been a good one—was ruined by the daily and tyrannous blundering of the German Government. The prohibition of the teaching of French in the primary schools, the immediate imposition of German military service on the newly-annexed territories, the constant espionage on all those known to hold strong sympathies with France, or views antagonistic to the German administration, the infamous passport regulations, and a hundred other grievances, deepened year by year the regret for France, and the dislike for Germany. After the first period of "protestation," marked by the constant election of "protesting" deputies to the Reichstag, came the period of repression—the "graveyard peace" of the late eighties and early nineties—followed by an apparent acquiescence of the native population. "Our young people in those years no longer sang the 'Marseillaise,'" said Dr. Bucher. Politically, the Alsatians despaired and—"we had to live together, bon gré, mal gré. But deep in our hearts lay our French sympathies. When I was a young student, hating my German teachers, the love for France beat in my pulses, like a ground wave" (comme une vague de fond).