Watching on the Rhine

by Violet R. Markham

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?