METZ

Metz is the pendant of Aix-la-Chapelle. They are the two typical frontier towns of the Rhine March: Aix German-speaking, Metz originally French-speaking, neither of them more than on the fringe of the German culture, yet neither of them divorced from that long series of accidents whereby the civilisation of the Roman Empire and its Faith penetrated beyond the great river, created mediæval Germany, and left, oddly attached in theory to the mediæval imperial crown, broad belts of land—extending as far as Lyons—which had never had any neighbourhood or connection with the German tongue.

Metz was one of the ‘Three Bishoprics,’ all of them French-speaking, all of them fortified towns from the very beginnings of history, until the Great War; all of them showing the changes of fortification, phase after phase of that art, from the Roman wall of the later Empire to the ring of detached forts—‘the entrenched camp,’ as the French called it—which was the system of modern defence until the airplane (directing new artillery) destroyed it and has replaced it for the moment by field works.

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These three bishoprics are Verdun, Metz and Toul. The third (like Montreuil) escaped regular siege and fame in war for centuries, and the vast sums spent upon its use as a stronghold were thrown away, as they have been thrown away upon those successive modern navies which grow obsolete without engagement. But Verdun and Metz are of the first place in military history. The first most recent in our ears; the second equally famous to the generation before our own, through the battles and siege of 1870.

I have visited Metz over and over again during the last thirty-five years, ever since my boyhood: under the German occupation a score of times, and, since the Armistice, perhaps half-a-dozen.

What has struck me most there has been the effect of modern, compulsory education, a system universally applied in Western countries to the mass of the people, and only escaped by the well-to-do. Here in Metz it is possible to get an object lesson of what that crushing, uniform social machine can accomplish. Every building in Metz, save a few—artificial, deliberately intruded, to which I will allude in a moment—is as French as Nancy, Paris or Nantes. The cathedral is a typical piece of French Gothic, without a trace of other influence. You might find it in Amiens or Beauvais. The private houses have exactly the same mark. The cooking (that excellent test of popular culture) is, and has always been, French. The methods of agriculture around the city are French. The script in familiar writing is French—everything of men’s lives is French to the marrow. Yet in the streets of Metz to-day you continually hear German. The popular newspaper is printed in German, and I think it is true to say that the mass of the people now _think_ in German. If you were merely to count numbers and not influence, you might call Metz a half-German town in its speech. I may be wrong here, and those who know the town thoroughly can correct me if I am; but certainly the impression of a frequent visitor is at least of a half-Germanisation of local language.

Now this has been brought about by the steam-roller effect of the compulsory elementary school. I can remember Metz a French-speaking town.

To-day you have the unnatural picture of a town, perhaps mainly, or at any rate half, German-speaking, though it remains in everything but speech as French as ever. It has all come about in one generation. Of course, the work will be undone by the reversing of the engine, and French will again take the place of German. It is the work of exactly one generation to effect either change. But what a lesson in the socialistic powers of the modern state and the impotence of the private citizen under a modern executive! Metz is as French as Canterbury is English. If you came back to Canterbury after an interval of thirty years and found it mainly French-speaking, yet still drinking English beer and eating English eggs and bacon and playing English cricket—let alone showing in nearly all its buildings the unmistakable English type—you would have some parallel to what has happened at Metz; and the moral is not that a language easily changes, but that the modern state can do pretty well anything by compulsory education. We should do well to meditate upon that novel, arbitrary and tyrannical power.

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I have said that the cathedral of Metz is essentially French. It is also one of the finest in the world. It was not ruined during the German occupation—whether because the original official architect was kept on or not I cannot tell—but, at any rate, though some few of its details were badly coarsened by unintelligent restoration, the building as a whole remains a magnificent and typical monument of the French Middle Ages. The glass has been admirably preserved, and under the German administration the interior, in its lesser decorations, was (in my judgment) improved. What mars the whole effect is a new western front.

The old western front was incongruous—but it was historical—it was a heavy, false Renaissance, French classical front, plastered on to the Gothic of the rest; much as the front of St. Eustache in Paris was plastered on to the fine earlier marriage of Renaissance and Gothic in that Parish church. The addition was made to commemorate the voyage—which was half a pilgrimage—made by Louis XV. to Metz in offering thanks for his recovery from illness. The Germans thought the incongruity must be removed, in spite of its historical meaning—or perhaps on account of that historical meaning. At any rate, they replaced it by a Gothic west front in the ordinary Gothic style, of which nothing need be said save that it appears much worse in combination with the ancient Gothic than did its utterly different predecessor: for the one was good in its own style and the other is not.

But what is enormous, unforgivable, grotesque and all the same exceedingly instructive in this new west front, and what ought to make it famous throughout the world, is a certain detail the like of which you will not see matched in Christendom. Of four figures of the Old Testament prophets (figures of heroic size which decorate this front), one, that of the Prophet Daniel, is the deliberately executed portrait of the Emperor William II! There he is, with his ultra-modern face, his curled-up moustache, all the signs of what would be normal enough in a suit of dittos or the uniform of a Prussian general officer, but is absolutely stupefying in the robes and hood of a major prophet, and in the convention of the Middle Ages.

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The German occupation made other less eccentric, but equally artificial, things. It planted a garrison church in the island suburb on the river, designed after a modern idea of the Rhenish roofs and towers. It put up one or two big shops in the dreadful fashion of Berlin; a well-organised and hideous railway station; and, opposite it, a huge post office in that same fashion of a monstrous Aztec sort of carving which has been affected throughout the German Empire, and which I have seen polluting architecture in the heart of Switzerland, and even as far south as Pola and Trieste.

One feature Metz has, and one only, which not only recalls the domestic and military architects of the Middle Ages, but has been, upon the whole, not so badly restored by the alien Government which held it for so many years. It is the old gate of the ramparts to the east, known as the _Porte d’Allemagne_, spanning an affluent of the Moselle and the deep ditch which formerly defended the city. It is a fine piece of work sufficiently preserved; the modern reinforcement, made with fresh stone, has not really spoilt it, and (what is important) no new stone has been added where the old stone would serve.

But Metz has a meaning and a lesson for the statesman other than that to be drawn from its language, or from its external being. For it was the policy adopted with regard to Metz after the war of 1870 which led to the final disaster of Prussia and to that new arrangement of the German peoples which is not yet concluded, and the formation of which we are now witnessing.

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For after the sudden and complete victories of the German armies under Prussian leadership fifty-seven years ago, the military party clamoured that, in the terms of peace, the annexation of Metz should be included. It is as certain as anything in modern history can be (and perhaps that is not saying much, seeing how secretly all things have been accomplished in our time) that the genius of Bismarck foresaw the perils that would result from this error. He threw all his weight into the scale against such a policy, but without avail. That great man, whom we may call the Prussian Richelieu, had grasped all the factors of the problem before him for the creation of a new Reich under the mastership of Prussia. He had luck, of course, as well; for without luck a great man cannot make his mark in international politics. But he had even more talent than good fortune. He grasped, before his time, the unifying effect upon the modern mind of a common language. He knew the gradual use to which so superficial a test of unity could be put. He would have made the new frontier coincident with the language frontier, and that line runs a few miles east of Metz. All the rest of Lorraine east of that line is German in speech, and so is the whole of Alsace. After one lifetime the welding would have been accomplished and the violent political partition forgotten. Unfortunately for the Hohenzollerns, the soldiers prevailed over the diplomat. A purely French town was included in the annexation, and it was this nucleus of anomaly which weakened the whole structure of German Alsace-Lorraine.

I know not how many morals may be drawn from that one incident, but the greatest of them is this: One man’s work must be left to one man’s brain and to one man’s decision; a single interference in his scheme may destroy the whole.