The upper or well-to-do classes were tied to France by family
connections and by religion. The bourgeois remained mildly
anti-German, more properly speaking, anti-government, for similar
reasons, and the working men were opposed to the government on
social and economic grounds. The farming population, not troubling
much about the politics, but being affected by the campaign of
the nationalistic press, were in sympathy with France; so the
atmosphere was well prepared for the coming storm.
Zabern, or in French, Saverne, is a little town of between eight
and nine thousand inhabitants, beautifully situated at the foot
of the Vosges Mountains on the banks of the Rhine-Marne Canal.
Its garrison comprised the staff and two battalions of Infantry
Regiment, Number Ninety-nine, commanded by von Reuter, and among
its officers was a Lieutenant von Forstner, a young man only
twenty years old, whose boyish appearance had excited the school
children and boys working in nearby iron factories to ridicule
him. It became known that this young officer, while instructing
his men, had insulted the French flag and had called the Alsatian
recruits _Wackes_, a nick-name meaning "square-head," and
frequently used by the people of Alsace-Lorraine in a jocular
way, but hotly resented by them if used towards them by others.
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