THE VOSGES

In one section only have the Marches something of a natural frontier; that section is the long line of rounded mountains spread with deep forest called the Vosges.

Very soon, I suppose, the Vosges will be well known. They will be visited by men of all nations, as to-day they are not, and as they have not been since railways first were laid down to their approach. Meanwhile, they still stand half apart, an attitude inherited from the abnormal fifty years, which only came to a close at the end of the Great War. From 1871 to 1919 an artificial frontier ran between the German conquests of the Franco-Prussian War and the territory of the French Republic. It followed the crest of these mountains; but that crest is not abrupt, and though it often (by no means everywhere) divides two forms of speech, it does not divide two races. These solemn, rounded hills, with their deep forests and leagues of solitude, their endless views to east and west over the Gauls and the Germanies, are altogether one thing; almost as much one in the soul of their people as in their physical structure, which is nowhere interrupted by the precipice or the ravine.

I do not mean that the outer stamp of German architecture and manner on one side, French on the other, do not form a sharp contrast, for they do; and that contrast is to-day accentuated by the political action of the last half-century. Put a man down in any one of the villages near the sources of the Moselle and he could not mistake a French village. Put him down in any village of the Munster or the Saverne valleys and he could not mistake an Alsatian one. But in the long formative centuries prior to the effects of central governments, in the great crucible of the Dark and Middle Ages and on, well into the seventeenth century, when countrysides formed naturally their own spirits and unities, the Vosges Mountains and their people were one thing, though cut by the boundaries of petty princedoms, of great dioceses and of monastic lands. The summer and the winter customs, the complex arrangement of water rights, forestry, pasture and the use of the streams were, and are, an inherited tradition throughout the range as much on the east as on the west side; and were one thing until the mechanical barrier of 1871 was established.

During all the time covered by the lives and memories of those who to-day are not over sixty-five years of age, travel, growing universal throughout western Europe, has missed the unity of, and largely avoided, the Vosges. For during all that time this countryside, as large as a couple of English counties, was the seat of a latent war. On the one side were the packed garrisons of the French, on the other of the Germans. The line in between was closely watched by sentinels and police and spies, as a line is watched when hostilities may break out at any moment. Every obstacle was placed to travel back and forth. No new tunnel through the range was pierced from those early days of the Second Empire, when the main line to Strasbourg had built for it the tunnel of Saverne, to the present day. No great new road even, that I can call to mind, during all those fifty years of French road-building, was allowed to link up with the system beyond. The few passes served by such roads (the Schlucht, the Bonhomme, and so forth) remained with no addition to their number of any new passage for wheels. What had been left a footpath or bridle track between the pines when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, remained one throughout to the tragedy of 1914. Moreover, everything was done to prevent international as well as local travel across the range. At a time when all were free to go from one country to another without hindrance, this line was blocked by passports. The object of the government of Berlin was to compel travel to pass—and only necessary travel at that—by the two railways, neither of which really touches the mass of mountains.

Even the coming of the motor car hardly affected this hindrance. Every foreigner wandering on foot on the east side was suspect, as, indeed, were most natives; while upon the French side, the turning of all that district into one great camp hampered its use for any more human purpose. It is true that a good deal of tourist traffic developed locally, on either side of the range, especially on the French side. There were mountain stations for the summer and a growing knowledge of these hills; but the interruption of common travel from east to west as a whole paralysed the district; and the higher valleys, and the great sweep of woods, which form their unbroken character for many days of wandering, were almost unknown to Englishmen.

That will now soon change, with the evils and advantages following on such a change. I shall, for my part, regret the old loneliness, but no one can regret the restoration of natural freedom which will have broken that loneliness down. Before the war it was my custom, from the time when I was an undergraduate, to cross this frontier without formalities. I did so pretty well every year. There was a certain adventure about getting down from the forests of the escarpment on the side towards the Rhine, without running into the curiosity of questioning men; and in risking one’s stay in the towns without a permit. It was especially amusing to watch the military manœuvres in the plains and to study discreetly the relations between the Alsatian people and the garrisons that kept them down with arms piled in the street; and their relations, also, with the new population which the German Government was steadily planting, especially in Strasbourg.

The sudden and great prosperity of Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, especially in the last half of the period, was nowhere felt more than in Alsace, and it was apparent that as time went on the work of transformation accelerated. There seemed to be here what you find throughout history, I think, and what historians so often neglect, that is, the effect of the unit of time formed by an average human life. Had the occupation continued for another generation, I believe that the old tradition would have been broken and that the crest of the Vosges would have come to separate two communities as sharply as an arm of the sea. As it is, the impress of those fifty years is still stamped upon the society of the Vosges. I saw it this year, in a singular experience in one of the higher eastern valleys, an experience you could not match in, say, the Cévennes (though there, also, two contrasting religions stand side by side), nor in the central Pyrenees, where you have two contrasting governments and languages.

Two villages stood upon either slope of a valley beneath the great forests which crown all the summits thereabouts. Between them ran a little mountain stream which had, I suppose, been the boundary of two lordships when the great religious quarrel settled down in the seventeenth century. The one of these villages, that one which was nearest to the crest, and, therefore, the nearest to the French-speaking people beyond, was Protestant. The other was Catholic. The separation in religion was sharper than you will get along the frontiers of the two religions in north-east Ireland, yet the relations between the two villages were familiar and intimate. The language of both was German; in both French was spoken and understood; in each it amused me to observe that the inscriptions upon tombs were German and in the Gothic script up to 1871, and after that in French and in the Latin script; a very typical form of protest. Upon the Sunday the inhabitants of either village packed each its parish church, following each its separate rite; and I noticed how the alien domination had not only preserved, but intensified, the religion of the Catholic village. At the High Mass everyone packed into the old building, the village _pompiers_ stood in uniform along the central aisle in military fashion. Just before the elevation of the Host, three men filed out of the church armed and, as the bell rang, a salvo of guns was fired outside. That was something—the crowd of villagers, men, women and children; no one missing; the salvo of guns—which you would not have heard or seen in any other French province between the Rhine and the Atlantic.

It will be curious to note in what places the new travel of the Vosges will fix its centres. Munster, I think, will be one; Thann another. Gerardmer will remain, of course, another; but I can imagine that with the new opening of the roads, the northern half of the district will most lose its isolation. They will make more of Rothau and Ste. Marie and, perhaps, of St. Dié. What I profoundly hope will be spared—what I think will be spared—(which is the reason I do not hesitate to speak of it here) is that heavenly valley in the extreme south, which goes up into the heart of the ‘Ballon d’Alsace,’ and recalls to me the hidden higher valleys of California. Here the French army built a road (under long-distance and desultory fire) in the course of the Great War. Before 1917 there had been nothing but an ill-distinguishable path threading its way across high pastures and down through the very steep beech woods that overhang the lake below.

I say I do not think that this delightful garden of the Vosges will be overrun, because the new road will not tempt travel. The motors will, as is their providential habit, follow the main great way down to Belfort, or, if their destination is Mulhouse, they will go by the Moselle valley and the Pass of Bussang. This diversion to the left will not serve their purpose, and I shall find it, I fancy, as much mine in ten years as I did not long ago, when I went down it with a companion, passing the emplacement of the battery by what is called the Black Rock, on the shoulder of the mountain, and looking down upon the lake and away towards the high side of the Black Forest, a day’s journey off, beyond the Rhine.

_Part VI_

_Tournai_