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Updated: June 12, 2025
"No, saar, he refused; he would not." Shafto flung open the door of his apartment with a gesture of annoyance and, to his profound amazement, discovered the pongye seated in easy comfort upon his bed. He was surrounded by an odd medicinal aromatic atmosphere, his sandals, begging-bowl and umbrella were carefully disposed beside him and he appeared to be thoroughly at home.
It was gradually dawning upon them that, instead of attacking the enemy in his country, they would have to defend their own. Rumor had it, that a strong army of the enemy had assembled between Mayence and Coblentz; instead of sending reinforcements from Metz to Strassburg, they were ordered to proceed from the Rhine to the Saar.
He passed Saint-Avold far to the south, too far to see anything of the division that lay encamped there; and presently he turned into the river road that follows the Saar until the great highway to Metz cuts it at an acute angle.
For fifteen years from the date of the treaty the government of the territory was put in the hands of the League of Nations as trustee; after fifteen years the population, entirely German, should be called to decide under what government they desired to live. Meanwhile the French douane rules in the Saar. It was open to the treaty to adopt or not to adopt the system of plebiscites.
Not a building was still whole; what had not been torn down in pointless rage had been razed by reasonless arson. Not one brick of the great openhearths had been left in place, not one girder of the great sheds remained erect. The Saar was in little better case and the mines of Alsace were useless for the next quartercentury.
Thus the French forces were spread over the wide area between the Nied and the Upper Rhine, while the Germans were advancing in compact masses on the Saar. This scattered state of the army finally induced the French leaders to divide their forces into two distinct armies. Marshal MacMahon took provisional command of the Ist, VIIth, and Vth Corps, the latter being withdrawn from Bitsch.
Like a hydra of three hideous heads the German army had pushed its course over the Saar, over the Rhine, over the Lauter; it sniffed at the frontier line; licked Wissembourg and the Spicheren with flaming tongues, shuddered, coiled, and glided over the boundary into the fair land of Lorraine.
The garrison of that place consisted of something less than four thousand men with six guns. The emperor attacked it with the corps of Frossard, eighteen battalions and four batteries. These compelled the slender German garrison to evacuate the place, but Frossard, though the bridges across the Saar were not defended, made no attempt to cross that river.
The diminution of production due to loss of territory is: Alsace-Lorraine 3,800,000 tons. Saar Basin 13,200,000 " Upper Silesia 43,800,000 " 60,800,000 "
American experts had felt inclined to grant a part of the Saar region to France as compensation for the wanton destruction of French mines at Lens and Valenciennes by the Germans; but both Wilson and Lloyd George were opposed to absolute annexation of the district which the French demanded, including, as it did, more than six hundred thousand Germans and no French.
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