Alsace [antikvár]

In August 1914, the first French troops entered Alsace. A caricaturist of the day, George Scott, caught the spirit of the occasion in a drawing which showed an Alsatian woman in traditional costume and headdress flinging her arms around the neck of a young French lieutenant standing bareheaded at the frontier. The frontier post bearing the double-headed eagle lay broken on the ground as a sign that the forty-four years of Germán domination had at last come to an end. And below the picture were in fact the words "At last!" The writer of these lines was brought up in the unshakeable conviction that Alsace is French soil-historically speaking-and that notwithstanding the vicissitudes of history it is part of the property of one nation and must always come back to that nation simply because that is where it belongs. There are somé parts of Francé that one accepts as French without reflexion; no voice has ever been raised to dispute the fact, nor has any other occupant ever claimed them as its own. They can be described without frustration and their names conjure up no poignant memories of separation and reunion. But the very mention of Alsace has the power to fan a sudden flame of passión and jealousy. And a Frenchman can scarcely speak its name, or so it seems to me, without that same surge of desperate afFection that one feels for someone dearly loved but never totally possessed. Strasbourg and Colmar, Thann and Mulhouse have filled whole pages of the history of Francé-in anguish and in exaltation-somé with pride, others with sadness. And it is something of this past, as a background to the present, that we should teli before going on to describe the land itself and what men have built upon it. As the train from Paris leaves Lunéville for Sarrebourg and Saverne and the red gránité soil weathered from the bare rock flashes by the carriage window, the traveller is seized by a kind of romanticism that he is powerless to resist. The fortunes of Alsace-wherein lie both its greatness and its affliction-have been forged in times of change, and only as we understand these fortunes shall we discover its true character. For though landscapes are eternal they have no meaning but what is lent to them by humán destinies. STREET IN BOUXWILLER . 2 >