The town of Strassburg is a vast hospital.  I do not think I have ever seen so many Red Cross flags before.  They waved from the Imperial Palace, the public library, the large and excellent military hospitals, the schoolhouses, hotels, and private residences.  The Orangerie is thronged with convalescent wounded, and when hunger directed my steps to the extensive Park Restaurant I found it, too, converted into a hospital.  Even the large concert room was crowded with cots.

The glorious old sandstone Cathedral, with its gorgeous facade and lace-like spire, had a Red Cross flag waving over the nave while a wireless apparatus was installed on the spire.  Sentries paced backwards and forwards on the uncompleted tower, which dominates the region to the Vosges.

The whole object of Prussia is to eliminate every vestige of French influence in the two provinces.  The use of the French language, whether in speech or writing, is strictly forbidden.  To print, sell, offer for sale, or purchase anything in French is to commit a crime.  Detectives are everywhere on the alert to discover violations of the law.  All French trade names have been changed to their German equivalents.  For example, the sign Guillaume Rondee, Tailleur, has come down, and if the tradesman wants to continue in his business Wilhelm Rondee, Schneider, must go up.  He may have a quantity of valuable business forms or letter-heads in French—­even if they contain only one French word they must be destroyed.  And those intimate friends who are accustomed to address him by his first name must bear in mind that it is Wilhelm.

Eloise was a milliner at the outbreak of the war.  Today, if she desires to continue her business, she is obliged to remove the final “e” and thus Germanise her name.

After having been fed in Berlin on stories of Alsatian loyalty to the Kaiser, I was naturally puzzled by these things.  If Guillaume had rushed into the street to cheer the German colours when the French were driven back, and Eloise had hung upon the neck of the German Michael, was it not rather ungrateful of the Prussians subsequently to persecute them even to the stamping out of their names?  Not only that, but to be so efficient in hate that even inscriptions on tombstones may no longer be written in French?

Alsace-Lorraine is to be literally Elsass-Lothringen to the last detail.

The truth of the matter is that the Alsatians greeted the French as deliverers and were depressed when they fell back.  This, as might be expected, exasperated Prussia, for it was a slap in the face for her system of government by oppression.  Thus, at the very time that the Nachrichtendienst (News Service) connected with the Wilhelmstrasse was instructing Germans and neutrals that the Alsatians’ enthusiastic reception of German troops was evidence of their approval of German rule, the military authorities were posting quite a different kind of notice in Alsace, a notice which reveals the true story.