Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [180]
Demonstrations followed almost daily, with cries of “Vive la France.” Colonel Reuter warned the municipal government that if it did not keep order, he would impose martial law. He then left for an undisclosed destination, pleading ill health. Lieutenant Forstner was overheard telling recruits, “As far as I am concerned, you can shit on the French flag.” This was too much for his superior officers, who disciplined him with six days’ house arrest. Police contained the situation until 17 November, when Reuter returned and announced that he did so “by order of his Majesty the Emperor and King.”
By now, l’affaire Zabern had attracted the attention of international observers, who saw it as a showdown between German and French nationalism, more fraught with strategic implications than the scare over Serbia. Reporters and photographers from as far away as Bloomington, Indiana, poured into the little town. Demonstrations against the Ninety-ninth Regiment resumed. On 28 November, a huge crowd assembled in the square outside the barracks, as if miming the attack on the Bastille. Reuter finally lost patience. He sent sixty bayoneted troopers into the mob and arrested twenty-seven Alsatians, including three members of the Zabern judiciary. The offenders, judges and all, were thrown into jail overnight, and accounts of the incident telegraphed to Berlin.
The anti-Prussian majority in the Reichstag was sufficiently alarmed to demand an explanation from Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and his war minister, General Erich von Falkenhayn. When Bethmann-Hollweg rose in response on 3 December, the situation in Zabern had deteriorated further. Lieutenant Forstner, freed from house arrest, was accused of molesting a fourteen-year-old girl, and, for good measure, befouling the linen of a local hostelry. Enraged by shouts of “Bettscheisser,”* he had slashed one Alsatian across the face.
The Chancellor, sounding old and weary, announced that the lieutenant was to be court-martialed. Citizens of the Reichsland would, he promised, no longer be referred to as Wackes. On the other hand, they had no more right to complain about ethnic discrimination “than any other branch of our people.” He hedged his way through a defensive review of the situation, over roars of contempt from socialists and centrists. General Falkenhayn—every bit as bristling as his Austrian counterpart—followed with a speech praising Forstner as a young Prussian of the best military type. The majority needed no further excuse to move that Germany’s entire military government be censured.
During the debate that followed, Bethmann-Hollweg tried to forestall what was in effect a vote of no confidence by offering to withdraw the ninety-ninth Regiment from Zabern. But his conciliatory gesture was ignored, and on the evening of 4 December the Reichstag demanded his resignation by a vote of 293 to 54.
TO THE AMAZEMENT of democracies around the world, the Chancellor declined to step down. He stated that he served the Kaiser, and would continue in office, with Falkenhayn at his elbow, as long as His Majesty needed him. Court-martial proceedings against Reuter and Forstner were intitiated, but their ultimate acquittals, given Prussian solidarity, were not in doubt. Socialist demonstrations of rage and shame broke out in seventeen German cities, including Leipzig and Berlin. The government’s only reaction was to punish two