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.
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.
The scenery of the Col de Schlücht is very fine. A country to be really
appreciated must be seen on foot, and motoring is at best but an
unsatisfactory makeshift for the busy. To the true vagabond, as Borrow
and Robert Louis Stevenson understood the term, the friendly hills of
the Vosges must offer many attractions as a wandering ground. Our time
being limited, we were grateful to the motor for the cinematograph
impression we were able to carry away. Fighting of a more serious
character had taken place on the Col de Schlücht than at Saales. It
was along this road the French made their original thrust into Alsace
at the beginning of the war, when for a brief period they occupied
Colmar in the plain below. Driven back by the Germans with heavy
losses, the line was stabilised for some years at a point near the head
of the pass. Even so the unfailing test of the trees showed that the
destruction had not been complete. Münster at the foot of the pass was
a heap of ruins. Here for a time artillery fire must have been heavy.
But we passed rapidly out of the zone of battle; a great contrast in
this respect to the plain of the Woevre where, mile after mile before
Verdun is reached, the aspect of the landscape along the road from Metz
is desolate and desolating in the extreme.
The agricultural value of the great plain of Alsace must be
considerable. The land is rich and well cultivated. Corn, potatoes,
and beetroot flourish. Crops of maize and fields of tobacco point to
the warmth of the climate. Hops and vines are grown on a scale which
does not indicate much enthusiasm for the Pussyfoot movement. Hops are
trained on rather a different principle from that usual in Kent, and
the long trailing festoons of leaves and flowers languish one towards
another like so many elegant and swooning beauties. Tobacco factories
and breweries have been established in Strasbourg by the Germans;
engine works and foundries also contribute to its wealth. But despite
the commercial and manufacturing activities which have turned a city
of 78,000 people in 1870 to one of 170,000 in 1911, the strength
of Alsace remains rooted in its agriculture and its agricultural
population. Except Strasbourg, and in a lesser degree Mülhausen,
there are no big towns. From the land has come in the main the brave
spirit which carried the people through years of gloom and foreign
domination. That the same spirit will triumph over the difficulties of
reconstruction must be the hope of all friends of France.