72 The Great War In the days since Sedan French explorers, soldiers and civilians alike, have carried the tricolor to the heart of Africa and to the capitals of the Shereefian Empire and Timbuktu on the southern edge of the great Sahara has its Boulevard d' Alsace-Lorraine and Casablanca its Rue de Strasbourg. All over the Kabyle highlands of Algeria, where a handful of French colonists are taking up the task of creating a new France, the names of the cities and towns of Alsace and Lorraine, Bitche, Metz, Colmar appear as frequently as those of fortunate battlefields in the happier history of France. Something there has been of grandeur, something almost commanding the sympathy of the least Francophile of observers in the forty-three years of fidelity to an idea and an ideal. German writers, Von Buelow, Bernhardi himself, with all his an- tagonism, have not hesitated to pay tribute to the sacrifices, the burdens that a great nation has volun- tarily laid upon itself that it might still hope to re- gain the surrendered Rhineland. The least observing travellers in France, wander- ing in districts as far from Lorraine as the Pyrenees or the Riviera, have not failed to report that even there the unconquered and unconquerable longing for the redemption of " the lost provinces," was dis- cernible, in fact hardly to be escaped, at every turn. A whole nation, amidst all the eddies and tides of ephemeral political excitement and passion, some- thing in the spirit of Gambetta, who bade French-