Watching on the Rhine

by Violet R. Markham

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.