Is Alsace German or French? - Part 6

All the arguments in the world will change nothing.  You can invoke ethnicity and philology all you want.  We are not taking a university course.  We are in the midst of facts and the human heart.  If your reasoning tells you that Alsace should have a German heart; my eyes and ears assure me she has a French one.  You assert from afar that "She has a spirit of provincial opposition against France,"; I have seen her up close; I know men of all classes, all religions, all political parties and I have found this spirit of opposition nowhere.  You insinuate that she is antipathetic towards the men of Paris; I know all too well with what sympathy she welcomes them.  By heart and mind, Alsace is one of the most French of our provinces.  The Strasbourgeois has, like each of us, two fatherlands: his city of birth first, then, over it, France.  As for Germany, there is not even the thought that it ever could be her country,

Your have observed it well for two months.  On the sixth of August, France was defeated.  Alsace, bereft of troops, was open to the Germans.  How did she receive them?  The Alsatian peasants took their old guns and shovels to fight the foreigners.  Many, unable to tolerate the enemy's presence in their villages, sought refuge in the mountains, where even now they defend every ridge and ravine. The Prussians have demanded that Strasbourg surrender and you know how it responded.  But note this:  Strasbourg only had 2,500 French soldiers and the sixth artillery regiment composed of Alsatians serving as garrison.  It is the population of Strasbourg that resisted the Germans.  It was an Alsatian general that led the city.  The bishop, whose advances were so rudely rejected from the German side, was Alsatian.  Those who fought so valiantly, those who struck the enemy in such rude sorties, were Alsatians.  All these men undoubtedly spoke your language but they certainly did not consider themselves your compatriots.  And the German soldiers who launched bombs at Strasbourg, who aimed at the Cathedral, who burned the Temple-Neuf, the library, the houses, the hospital, who, while respecting the ramparts and managing the garrison, were pitiless only towards the inhabitants, state frankly, hand on heart, did they feel themselves compatriots?  Speak no more of nationality, and above all, refrain from telling the Italians: Strasbourg is ours by the same right by which Milan and Venice are yours; because the Italians would reply that they bombarded neither Milan nor Venice.  If one could still have had some doubt on the true nationality of Strasbourg and of Alsace, the doubt is no longer possible today.  The cruelty of the attack and the energy of the defense has caused the truth to flash before all eyes.  What stronger proof do you want?  As the first Christians confessed their faith, Strasbourg, by her martyrdom, has confessed that she is French.