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Show ALSACE BEGINNING TO LIVE Writer Finds a Feeling of Relief Pervading the PeepU of the Province, With Reason. It ia a strange, yet stimulating experience ex-perience for anyone who Is Interested in the relations between peoples to visit the much-contested strip of land known as Alsace. The last time I was la Alsace was more than twenty years ago. It was the day after Blnmarck'a death, and everywhere the black-white-red flags were hanging out at half-mast in honor of the man who had made the two provinces a Itelsch-land Itelsch-land part of the new German empire. em-pire. Today Bismarck's work is undone; gone, even from Germany Itself, Is the black-white-red flag; gono aro tho Prussian officers and officials, the red-hatted red-hatted Htatlon masters, and all tho other oth-er paraphernalia of imperial Gcnnan routine. The older order survives but here and there, In the great official buildings erected and arranged on the grandiose German (or, as the Germans Ger-mans now call It, Wlihelmlan) scale, la the familiar square blue German letter boxes, In tho neat blue street signs which have been left standing .with a neat new French lgn affixed above or beneath. No doubt the minor ociala have been but llttlo changed. The village station master and the Boatman have but doffed their German Insignia to don Its more easy-fitting French equivalent But If the men are the same, the faces, as well as the uniforms, are different There Is a feeling of relief, of detente, In the air. One has the sense of a people that has returned to the normal. At last, after a long ordeal, they can be themselves. They are free to settle down and to begin to live. Alfred B Zlmraern in the Manchester Guardian. |