CHAPTER XIIIN ALSACE
Neverhave 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 sucha 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 aboutruthlessly 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 oncecorrect 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 isthe 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 inPræteritathat 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 carefullyclosed 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 regardsthe 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 Germanelement 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 fromher 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 andtouch 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 isdoubtless 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 thegrim 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 themotor 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 Alsaceremains 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.