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Updated: June 12, 2025
If the disposition of the Saar basin, for example, proved to be so unwise or unjust as to cause danger of violence, the League would take cognizance of the peril and provide a remedy. If the boundaries of eastern Germany gave undue advantage to the Poles, the League would find ways and means of rectifying the frontier peacefully.
The French claimed in addition, the districts of the Saar, with their valuable coal-fields, a portion of which had been left to France after the first abdication of Napoleon but annexed to Prussia after his defeat at Waterloo; and they contended that if the German territories west of the Rhine were not to be annexed to France, they must at least be separated from Germany, which had secured a threatening military position mainly through their possession.
Not a word had ever been said about annexation of the Saar either in Government pronouncements or in any vote in the French Parliament, nor had it been discussed by any political party. No one had ever suggested such annexation, which certainly was a far more serious thing than the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany, as there was considerable German population in Alsace-Lorraine.
Already, through the constant rushing melody of bird music, his ears had distinguished another sound a low, incessant hum, monotonous, interminable as the noise of a stream in a gorge. It was not the river Saar moving over its bed of sand and yellow pebbles; it was not the breeze in the furze.
These gentry were rounded up after the Easter day disaster, but the oasis still needed a guard, because in the desert an area where drinkable water can be found is more valuable than Alsace Lorraine and the Saar Valley put together. The true infantry line of defence however was still further back.
It was determined, therefore, now to act on these hints and suggestions which had been repeated so often during the last twelve months; Benedetti was instructed to return with a draft treaty; the French demands were put in three forms; first of all he was to ask for the Saar Valley, Landau, Luxemburg, and Belgium; if this was too much, he was to be content with Belgium and Luxemburg, and if it seemed desirable he should offer that Antwerp be made a free city; by this perhaps the extreme hostility of England would be averted.
Although he refused the Rhine frontier to France, he had reluctantly given way to M. Clemenceau in the matter of the Saar Valley, assenting to a monstrous arrangement by which the German inhabitants of that region were to be handed over to the French Republic against their expressed will, as a set-off for a sum in gold which Germany would certainly be unable to pay.
It was a frightful nuisance, but anything would be better than sending for the police to take away Mr. Neefit. "Keep your eye on that man in the front room," said he, to his Swiss valet. "On Mr. Neefit, saar?" "Yes; on Mr. Neefit. He wants me to marry his daughter, and I can't oblige him. Let him have what he wants to eat and drink. Get rid of him if you can, but don't send for the police.
As to frontiers, the unbiased student will probably admit that full justice was done Germany when the aspirations of France for annexation of the Saar district and the provinces on the left bank of the Rhine were disappointed; it was the barest justice to France, on the other hand, that she should receive the coal mines of the former district and that the latter should be demilitarized.
He got that assurance, which, along with the French watch on the Rhine, the French in the Saar Valley and in Africa, with German money going into French coffers, makes him tolerably indulgent of the altruistic rhetoricians. "The English, the intelligent English, we know have their tongues in their cheeks.
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