An inhabitant of Alsace-Lorraine can not mail his letters in Germany.
For example, Wissembourg is on the border of the Palatinate. There is
a great temptation for the citizens of this town to assure a rapid
delivery of their letters and their escape from annoying censorship by
making use of the German mail system. A music teacher, Mlle. Lina
Sch---- was sentenced to pay a fine of one hundred marks in March,
1917, for an infraction of this sort. The war council at Saarbruck,
which pronounced this sentence, had already, in June, 1916, sentenced
for like cause, the Spanish Consul, to the payment of a fine of eighty
marks because he had allowed a citizen of Sarreguimine to have letters
to his sons, who were refugees at Lausanne, addressed to the Spanish
Consulate.
In addition, German hostility to the Alsatians is shown by a number of
childish measures against Alsatian uniforms and costumes, in
proportion as they resemble the French.
In all seriousness the question arose of forbidding the Catholic
Clergy to wear the soutane, as it was the custom in the Latin
countries. It was given up; but steps were taken in the case of the
firemen.
The _Nouvelle Gazette_ of Strassburg published an official notice,
dated the ninth of December, 1915, which emphasized an order
suppressing the uniforms worn by the Alsatian firemen because the cut
was French, as was the cap, and complained that this order was not
everywhere observed:
Recently, in the course of a fire which broke out near
Molsheim, it is an established fact that the firemen wore
their old Alsatian uniforms, and that the fire alarm was
sounded by means of the old clarions of the type in use in
France. The _Kreisdirection_ finds itself obliged to insist
that the suppressed uniforms disappear, and that the
clarions do likewise; and to ask that it be informed of
contraventions that happen in the future.
Other societies and associations, such as the singing
societies which frequently still wear uniforms recalling
those of the French collegians, ought to lay aside the
forbidden garments, which are to be entrusted to the guard
of the police.
But these puerilities seem insignificant compared to other things to
which the people of Alsace-Lorraine have been subjected, things which
unite them more firmly than ever to the French and the Belgians of the
invaded regions.
The great deportations which have been practiced in France and Belgium
have been repeated in Alsace as recently as January, 1917. The
inhabitants of Muelhausen between the ages of seventeen and sixty years
were assembled in the barracks at that place, whence they were sent
into the interior of Germany.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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