Alsace Lorraine Part 2

A very suggestive fact on this subject is that, in the electoral struggles between the natives, the different parties did not hesitate to mutually reproach each other with the desire to lean on the will or the influence of Germany.

The first demonstration against the Germans was the exodus of a part of the population. The annual emigration continued until the War of 1914. Another sign of protest was the considerable number of _refractaires_ (defaulting conscripts) who up to that day had annually left the country by the hundreds to avoid German military service.

Their property was seized and they never could return to the country.

The greater number entered the Foreign Legion to fight for France.

The French language continued to be spoken in the family, notwithstanding all the governmental precautions to insure its disuse.

Families continued to send their children to France to learn French, young girls particularly being placed in French boarding schools to complete their instruction and education. Up to that time commercial books had been published in French; bookkeeping was done in francs, even in those houses where the circ.u.mstances made it necessary to use the German language simultaneously. The condemnation of seditious utterances and the wearing of seditious emblems were no longer noticed and never ceased. The public has specially marked the case of conspicuous persons who have been implicated in prosecutions (the Samain brothers, Hausi and Zislin, the caricaturists, the Abbe Wetterlie), but alongside of these cases, thousands of obscure soldiers of the Alsace-Lorraine cause, victims of their attachment to France, have paid their tribute to their country. For shouting "_Vive la France!_", for singing of the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_, for showing a tri-colour ribbon, innumerable sentences, in some cases running into years of imprisonment, have been p.r.o.nounced. When, in 1887, the situation in France, under the influence of the Boulanger movement, disclosed the possibility of a conflict at arms with Germany, the election of the Reichstag for that year resulted in sending to Berlin a protesting deputation, notwithstanding the tremendous governmental pressure put upon the electors. That was the signal for increased persecutions in Alsace-Lorraine. Student societies, singing cla.s.ses, athletic a.s.sociations, people suspected of cultivating French sympathies, newspapers showing French tendencies, all of these were suppressed and the members of the League of Patriots were betrayed and condemned for high treason. Bismarck introduced the regime of pa.s.sports to cut off all relations between Alsace-Lorraine and France.

The _Statthalter_ of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfurst, at that moment governor of Alsace-Lorraine, has said in his _Memoires_ that he had the impression that Bismarck wished to drive the population to insurrection. This plan fell through, thanks to the wisdom of the people who knew how to resist such a provocation. The result was simply to strengthen French patriotism. The rising generation which had gone through the German schools and German army fooled the German statesmen who had counted on them for the a.s.similation of German _Kultur_. On the contrary, these young people were most ardent in manifesting their devotion to France. Better prepared for the struggle than their elders, knowing the German language perfectly, familiarized by their studies with the Teuton dialects, they became most formidable adversaries. My comrade in combat, Jacques Preiss, killed during this war, a victim of German persecutions, has very well described the character and role of the youth in a discourse given in the Reichstag in 1894. He said: "We young fellows, we are not of the generation of 1870 whom choice and emigration have deprived of elements which are the firmest and most unresisting. If you do not introduce a more liberal regime, you will find by experience that this new generation is much more energetically opposed to fusion than has been the case since 1870."

In fact, not only has Germanization made no progress, but the Alsatians become each day more impatient of the German yoke. The two populations, the native and immigrant, have never had social intercourse. The native societies or clubs have always been closed to the immigrant. On the National Fete, July 14th, the Alsatians will cross the frontier by tens of thousands to partake communion under the religion of their own land and with their brothers of France. They return with the tri-colour ribbon in their b.u.t.tonholes, and this creates each year a number of unpleasant incidents. In vain Germany wished to change the appearance of things by trying to win the ma.s.ses, by means of a lower chamber elected by general suffrage. We have shown the fact.i.tious value of this concession, which as a consequence only increased opposition. The affair of Grafenstaden, and the trouble at Saverne caused by the attempt to cover up the exactions of a young lieutenant, brought indignation to a climax. The military authorities arrested haphazard the civilian natives and even the German immigrants, inst.i.tuting in the midst of peace, a military dictatorship and aroused the irreconcilable antagonism between the German mentality and that of Alsace-Lorraine. After some slight attempts of independence on the part of the Alsace-Lorraine government and the Reichstag _vis-a-vis_ the military, the whole German world fell upon the obstinate and hard-headed Alsatians who, according to them, were the cause of all the trouble because they refused to admire the beauty of the German _Kultur_. The Saverne affair resulted in the dismissal of the government of Alsace-Lorraine which had among its officials two won-over Alsatians, and the replacing this by a group of Prussians of rank.

The Minister of War, General von Falkenhayn, announced to the Reichstag: "We want to uproot from the people's mind the feeling that has been manifested up to this time and which has provoked the Saverne incident." And this feeling is none other than the French democratic, republican spirit of the Alsatians, incompatible with Prussian militarism.

On the same occasion, Deputy von Calker, unfortunate candidate from Strasbourg, but elected in a Prussian district, and an exceptionally friendly immigrant, confessed in the following fashion the defeat of Germanization in Alsace-Lorraine, shouting aloud in the Reichstag: "I cry out in anguish. For sixteen years I have worked to wipe out misunderstanding and to reconcile the natives and the immigrants, and now we have arrived at the point where we can say, It all again amounts to nothing (_Kaput_)." The conservatives very wisely answered this undeceived elector that if it was merely the Saverne incident that had caused this failure, it was evident that the desired harmony had rested on a very slender foundation.

Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg was conscious of the great mistake that had been made in annexing Alsace-Lorraine and had a foreboding of the coming loss of the Reichsland. He thus expresses himself in a letter written June 21, 1903, to Professor Lamprecht at Leipzig: "We are a young nation; we have yet perhaps too much nave faith in force, we make too little importance of subtle measures, and we do not understand that those who are conquered by force cannot be kept by force alone."

The prefect of police at Berlin, von Jagow, declared in January, 1914, in relation to the Saverne affair: "The Germans in Alsace are in an enemy country." And during this war more than one German general has said to his troops at the time of marching into Alsace-Lorraine: "Now we will march into the enemy country."

It is easy to imagine what has been the fate of the country since the opening of hostilities. It is the reign of terror. In the first place persons inscribed on the black list, that is to say, those most suspected, have been arrested and imprisoned. Those, who like the author, have succeeded in escaping the talons of the Germans, have been the objects of prosecution for so-called high treason, liable to capital punishment. They have had their property seized and--supreme misfortune--they have been declared to have forfeited their German nationality. The future only will tell us the fate of those who were captured. The suspects not on the list and the families of the imprisoned were by thousands deported into Germany. The Council of War was in permanent operation. It gave sentences of thousands of years of imprisonment with hard labour against Alsatians guilty of the slightest anti-German manifestation or for the simplest token of sympathy given the French prisoners or the wounded. All cla.s.ses of society fill the prisons. The penalties imposed on persons having committed the crime of speaking French have been so numerous that a facetious jailor said to a lady, who with tears in her eyes appeared at the prison door: "Do not weep, Madam, you will be in good society here, for this is the only spot where one still speaks French." The summary executions can no longer be counted. Only the crimes committed by the Germans in Belgium can surpa.s.s the horrors practised in Alsace-Lorraine.

The French sentiment showed its greatest strength in the wholesale desertion of the Alsatians to take service in the French army; and also by the fact that the Alsace-Lorrainers, made prisoners of war by the French, have asked to be enrolled in the French army. Many of the Alsatians, who had the chance to go to the colonies so as not to run the risk of being shot as "traitors" in case of being captured by the Germans, have begged to be sent to the front to fight the Germans, thus risking their lives twice in the service of France. I think I am understating the truth in estimating at 30,000, the number of Alsatians who were mobilized in the German forces and who have gone over to the ranks of the French army. The latter has always had a great attraction for the Alsatian, and whereas the number of Alsatians serving as officers in the German army does not amount to a dozen, of whom only one is a brigadier-general, the French army has thousands of Alsatian officers among whom are hundreds of generals. It is the same thing among the civilians. Many office-holders of all grades are of Alsatian origin, whereas the Alsatian who has accepted an office or looked for any general position in Germany is exceptional. Wherever the French troops have been able to penetrate into Alsace-Lorraine, they have been received with enthusiasm, and when they were obliged to retreat many people followed them into France in order to escape the reprisals which were waiting for them.

With the press muzzled and the severe censorship of letters, it will be only after the war that we shall have exact knowledge of what Alsace-Lorraine has pa.s.sed through during this dreadful period. But what we are certain of at present is that the att.i.tude of the people is the same now as in the past. The Alsatians, faithful in their devotion to France, await with a patriotic impatience, but with an unshaken faith in the victory of their holy cause, their deliverance from the German yoke.

Deputy Preiss, already quoted, was able to say to the Reichstag, June 30, 1896: "The a.s.similation, the germanization has not taken a single step forward.... It is terror that governs and poisons our political life. The government does not understand the people and the people do not understand the government.... History will say, The German Empire was able to conquer Alsace-Lorraine materially, but was not able to conquer her morally; she has not known how to win the heart and the soul of the people."

Is it not like a paraphrase of the celebrated verse so often sung all through the country:

"Vous n'aurez pas l'Alsace et la Lorraine Et malgre vous nous resterons Francais!

Vous avez pu germaniser la plaine, Mais notre coeur, vous ne l'aurez jamais!"

"Alsace-Lorraine ne'er will you own, In spite of you, Frenchmen are we, Others may serve with a curse and a groan, But ever our hearts shall be free!"?

The situation has never changed. This is what one could read a short time before the war in a book of Professor Forster's of Munich in a study on the failure of German policy in the frontier provinces: "Alsace, a country of arch-German origin, forty years after her return to Germany, has still to an astonishing degree French sympathies, or at least it has no German sympathies. After more than forty years, we have not been able to re-Germanize this population."

Let us finish by another German testimony. This is how, from the _Matin_, July 18, 1917, the _Kieler Zeitung_ expresses itself on the results of the germanization of Alsace-Lorraine: "The wise conservatives thought that thanks to the reunion under the established rule of the Empire, they could reconcile two provinces different from each other, and having in common only an arrogant defiance of the ambitions of the Empire."

This confidence was an ignominious mistake. Lorraine bound itself solidly and stubbornly to French congenial ideas, vigorously developed in her in a large measure by the mother tongue; while, as to Alsace, she was like the twig of a German bough strayed away from its ethnic tree and rotted to the core by French climate. They can be reclaimed neither by benevolence nor by force.

One understands why the German press and the German government are interested in the dismemberment of Alsace-Lorraine and their division between the Confederated States without thought of taking the opinion of the people. Such opinion counts for nothing with the rulers of the country, because the sentiments of the people are already well known.

They are French and for that reason Alsace-Lorraine will, without the slightest difficulty, again become French. In an article of the _Revue de Paris_, January, 1914 ("The Sentiments of Alsace-Lorraine"), at a time when the question seemed to have only a theoretical interest, I attempted to make this clear.

That which the author of the article in the _Kieler Zeitung_, in his ill-tempered German hatred, calls "rottenness" is, I contend, the gentle radiance of the French spirit. It is the bloom of a civilization in which the savage adherent of _Kultur_ recognizes a lasting antagonist.

Yes, Alsace-Lorraine has suffered under the Prussian rule of Germany.

This rule has weakened the strength of the country but could not kill the spirit of its people. There is but one way in which the two provinces can regain their health. They must again be united to France, their mother country, their rightful home.

We depend upon America, strong and generous, to help to bring about this great result. It is America which will give the decisive aid required for the Allies in their great struggle to preserve against the barbarous a.s.saults of German militarism, right, justice, and civilization.

THE END