The Seward gateway daily edition, and the Alaska weekly post., 1919-05-08
THE SAAR VALLEY MENTIONED IN THE
 TREATY FOR PEACE
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Readers of the Gateway, who care fully read the peace treaty. as con- tained in yesterdays edition, found mentioned several times, the Saar val ley and the coal fields.
 The Saar valley is one of those districts, otherwise obScurity, upon main in comparative obscurity, upon which the war has thrust greatness, or at any rate, notoriety. In the days be- fore the war, the river Saar, as 1t wound it's way, first little tumbling brook amidst the foothills of the Vos- gcs, and, later. a creditable stream spreading itself out in the valley. was little known outside the circles of com mercial Germany and, maybe, com mercial France. Today who has not heard of the Saar and its valley with its coal fields and its great resources? ?
 And yet the Saar valley had his tory. and a by no means uneventful one. long centuries before the onset of the great struggle in August of 1914. What is more, in the controversy which is going on today as its final ownership, it is but repeating its his tory, for the Saar valley, in the course of it's l.,,s, rccrd. has changed hands many times and has known many rul- CTS, Roman governors, the bishops of Metz, the counts of Saargau, the counts of the ArdenneS, the counts of Nassau-Saar-brucken, France under Napoleon, and Prussia for the last hundred years. Of course. not all Of the Saar valley is in dispute today. for the Saar, in the first part of it's jour ney to Konz, where it joins the Mos. elle, passes through Lorraine. It is, however, largely after it has entered purely German territory that it flows through lands of great industrial val re. For the land is no respecter of frontiers, and the Saarbrucken coal fields, spreading themselves out for seventy miles in all directions, march incontinently out of Lorraine into Rhenish Prussia, or into the Palati- nate.
 Five years ago, Germany owned and mined it all. Today France, with a part of it in her possession, viewing her ruined coalfields around Lens, claims to own a part, and at any rate to mine all for the present. To return to the Saar valley, and to its most important town, Saarbrucken has very special memories for the French. It was here, in the early hours of the short sharp struggle of 1S70-71, that the French achieved their first success when the Emperor Napoleon, advanc .. ing across the frontier from Metz, planted his cannon on the heights above Saarbrucken, and compelled the Prussians to retire. To be sure, they returned again, four days later, and France, overwhelmed by the long drilled Prussian forces, never got be- yond her frontiers again. But the few days in Sasrbrucken afforded the Elm peror time to send to the Empress in Paris his famous dispatch, in which he told of how the Prince Imperial had received his baptism of fire" Just a month later came Sedan. AS to the the other towns of the Saar valley, Saarburg, Saargemund, and Saarlouis two of them are in the old French ter ritory of Lorraine. Saarburg, or Saar- bourg, as it IS now, with it's history stretching back to the days when the Romans called it Pons Saravi, came into the possession of France in 1861, saargemund, or Sareguemines, as the French call it, passed to France with Lorraine in 1766. Saarlouis is iu Rhenish Prussia. And yet it is, per. haps, the most French of them all and they are all very French. For WIS not Saarlouis founded by Le Grand Monarque in 1881, and was it not fort. flied by vauban? By the p>see of Psr,