ALSACE – LORRAINE

Evening Post, Volume XCVII, Issue 37, 14 February 1919, Page 2

ALSACE - LORRAINE

RETURN OF THE LOST

PROVINCES

GREAT SCENES IN PARIS

The trees of Paris have stripped themselves of the cloth of gold in which they welcomed the coming of the herald of peace, wrote Mr. Percival Landon on 18th November. Along the Champs Elysees and the Tuileries Garden the carpenters worked all last night beneath the' silhouette of myriads of stripped branches, darkly outlined against the brilliant haze of a moonlit sky. This morning their work is nearly done : the chalets, each named after a town or commune in the recovered provinces, are setting up the last touch of decoration; the gilt and crimson of the Presidential enclosure glittering in the bright, hard light of a sun that has not even yet melted the ice-covered gutters or the Cartier—like jewellery of frost that last night hung upon every twig and blade of grass. Of course, the real -work of decoration was done weeks ago, when the vast avenues and circles of guns were manhandled into their places with their muzzles depressed and their power for evil gone. These, not the flags and the festoons, are the real witnesses to the Allied victory—these and the long routes. of the cortege that will pass to-day between them, from which no class or work of interest, in, all Paris or all France will be left without its representatives. And among them the eyes of all Paris-in-attendance will follow one section till it .is out of sight, for the men of Alsace and Lorraine are coming home to-day after an imprisonment of forty-seven years. The great and bitter protest that they made in 1871 against their slavery has been the charter of their life from that day to this, and in the sure and certain hope of this return, I however slow its footsteps, they steeled their hearts in their captivity. _ The nightmare is ended, and in spirit all Lorraine and all Alsace will to-day be present when the Chief Magistrate of the French nation welcomes back her long-lost children. ON THE PLACE DE LA CONCORDE. It would be difficult for the most inveterate boulevardier to recognise tho Place de la Concorde to-day. Besides the sand-" bagged humps which protect the statues of Renown and Mercury at the gardens gate—these,. by the way, ' have been studded all over with rusty German helmets, and bring back a sudden and significant memory of the towers of victory built by Persian conquerors, each pigeonhole of which contained a human head— the captured guns over the surface of the square everywhere except upon tha roads, and even these are encroached upon by the sulky muzzles and futurist patterns of the screens. A long row of German aeroplanes, almost intact, are aligned, a-tiptoe and ready for flight, along the wall of the Tuileries Garden, and trophies of flags have made alive with bunting tho fronts of the Ministry of Marine and its* companion building. The statue of Lille is almost smothered with flags and garlands, ; conspicuous among which is the little motor flag of General Haking, the man who secured the evacuation of Lille, and then stood aside to let the French enter their own loved city first. Hard by, the statue of Strasbourg is even more ornamented. There has been no scheme of decoration. The individual has set uppn the great monuments his own little token as seemed good to -him. And this want of careful prevision is characteristic of the significant and splendid spontaneity of all the celebration and ceremony of to-day.. Paris is enjoying herself in her own .fashion. There is a place and time for all things, and to-day Paris, in the'name of France, has gathered her lost ones to her breast in her own -way, and the Allies feel with her to the full the poignant joy of the great redemption. A GIGANTIC GATHERING. Before 11 o'clock there was already a sprinkling of men and women along the processional route, though the coldness of the weather increased, and except for a flash'of sun about half-past 12 the day settled down cloudy and cold. By noon all the coigns of vantage had been taken up, and the crowd, six or seven deep from end to end of the two-mile course, seemed almost to prevent the chance of others seeing much of the great event. Half an hour after noon the real import-' ance of tho crowd began to be visible. From north and south, from east and west, all Paris moved slowly inwards upon the Champs- Elysees and the Gardens of the Tuileries. ' The great fountains of the Place de la Concorde burst out with a rush such as they had not known for years, and the first harbingers of the aeroplane squadron purred over our heads. As th« crowd increased all temporary barriers were swept away; the aeroplanes manning the wall of the Garden "of the Tuileriers were scrambled over and in most cases broken to pieces by the crowd that would not be denied ; every statue had its, nest of human beings and every tree, however weak, held up its human load. One o'clock came and went; but the continual tramp of Paris went on remorselessly. It was the strangest contrast in crowds that ever was seen. There was a deep happiness in every face, too/profound for crying aloud, yet the crowd wore one unvarying colour —black. Of course, it is true that on his holidays the Frenchman, and to a great degree the Frenchwoman also, wears black; but this was not the reason of the sablo crowd of hu-', nianity that welcomed the home-coming of Alsace and Lorraine to-day. It was mourning, none deeper and none more profound; but it was mourning transfigured for the day, and there was not a man or woman there who did not wear black with a deeper sense that in each- home some part of the great sacrifice that victory complete and final demanded had been paid as a gift to France. A GREAT PROCESSION. At 2 o'clock salvos of guns announced the starting of the great procession, and the bronze whirring of the aeroplanes overhead increased to a continuous chord —the ground bass that accompanied the service of the day. Perhaps the details of the procession as one by one they., entered the Place de l'Etoile and slowly took their course down the most famous triumphal- way on earth would seem to an outsider to havo differed little save in magnitude from those which in the old days used to parade in Paris from time to time. There were, of course, tho obvious differences of sex, of military service, and, in one case, of childhood also. But it was in reality such a gathering not merely of Frenchmen, but of all that France stands for, as even Paris was almost awestruck to behold. The start of the procession was well handled, and tho first ranks of the descending flood reached the Place de la Concorde in fairly good time. Here there were gathered to meet them the President of the Republic, the Presidents of the two Chambers, and all the ■ great officers and Ministers of State, together with the representatives of foreign Powers. The waiting was long, and the cold increased in bitterness as tho afternoon wore oiij but no one seemed to notice it oi' care. Not one in ten thousand could hear the words of the President's speech, but all Paris knew what it wished M. Poimiwa to say, and they trusted him

implicitly to say it. So when the great moment came, and the guns and the released pigeons told the great message to city and country alike, Paris may well have thought the misery of the long exile of their compatriots worth the completeness of their enemy's overthrow and the triumph of this glorious welcome home.