What further excited the bitter hatred of the Germans was the effort
of French generals and political agents to detach the loyalty of
the Rhineland from the German Empire by encouraging bodies of
“Separatists,” who proclaimed a Rhineland Republic. Led by a very
doubtful but plausible gentleman named Dr. Dorten, whom I met in the
early days of the British occupation, these “Separatists” were mostly
youths of the disorderly class and men of criminal type supported by a
few sincere fanatics. Many of them were in the pay of the French. Their
movement was regarded as black treachery by patriotic Germans, and when
the French troops stood by the Separatists while they seized public
buildings and murdered German police, previously disarmed by French
orders, fury was unrestrained among the German people. French policy,
in this matter at least, was a blunder, because from the first the
Separatist movement had no basis of reality nor any chance of success.
It was an illusion of French politicians who let their wish be father
to their thoughts.
“THE BLACK HORROR”
Another cause of hatred in Germany, amounting to a mad rage which made
them see red, was the use of coloured troops in the French zone of
occupation. Under the name of “The Black Horror,” German propaganda
exaggerated and falsified the hideous aspects of this last humiliation
to their pride. It was asserted that masses of African negroes had
been let loose in the Rhineland to assault white women and brutalise
white men. The French denied that they were using any black troops,
and this was perhaps technically true, although I saw with my own
eyes Seneghalese negroes on the banks of the Rhine. But they were not
fighting troops. They were transport men, lorry drivers, and ambulance
drivers, in the blue uniform and steel hat of the French _poilu_. I
saw the inhabitants of Bonn shudder and sicken at the sight of them.
But it was true that the French did employ large numbers of Moroccan
soldiers in German towns. They were not black, they were not even
“nearly black,” and in race they belonged to the same Mediterranean
peoples from which the French themselves have sprung. But that made
no difference in German psychology, and I sympathise with their
detestation of being controlled and put under the menace of Moroccan
troops who, whatever shade their colour and historical ancestry, do not
belong to our European type of civilisation, such as it is, and should
not be put in military power over European populations. The British use
of Indian troops in the white man’s war, and the American use of black
battalions, were, in my judgment, similar errors which may cost us
dear. But it was more than an error to use Moroccans in time of peace
among German citizens who resented their presence as a shameful insult.
These things are beyond argument. They belong to the realm of instinct.
It was handing the Germans another cause of hatred.