Watching on the Rhine

by Violet R. Markham

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.