Fifteen years ago Saarbruecken had the aspect of a French garrison town. Those avera the days of the occupation, and the little Saarland, with its mixed and rather turbulent industrial population, some 500,000 strong, appeared to be causing some anxiety to the French authorities.
Horizon-blue everywhere. The visiter, coming out of the railway sta-t [tion and looking across the broad space which leads down to the main street, might have been pardoned if he himself on the banks of jo Danube which had decided to live blue streak was composed of French to its legendary colour. But the
poilus, and when the crowded main street curved and dipped and at last erossed the river by the bridge which gives the town its name, the traveller found himself looking down on a stream of wholly unromantic tinge.
Saarbruecken today is mainly the creation of the 19th century, though the number and variety of its churches, which include/at least one good example of restrained baroque, are evidence of the coalfields when the miseries of the Thirty Years War were past and industry could once more develop. The place wears an Staff cir of rather sombre magnificence suited to town which is now the social centre of an industrial region but was once a Residenzstadt with its little Court,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.