Switzerland in War-Time

by Algernon Blackwood

There are villages, even within the radius of the London searchlights, where the remark is not uncommonly heard: “One almost forgets the war down here; it’s difficult to believe there is a war!”⁠—the speaker usually some tired worker snatching a few days’ rest, but prevented by limits of time and money from a longer journey. The truth of the remark is relative, of course; it shows how the realisation of war has become habitual. The village has grown accustomed to the lesser evidences of change: the woman driving a milk-cart, girls in breeches working on the fields, scarcity of matches, butter, sugar and so forth in the local shop, even to the boom of antiaircraft guns and the shifting of mysterious lights across the night skies; the incessant thudding of the Flanders artillery calls for no particular comment any longer. Such details cannot shock the nerves as once they did. Minds satiated with revolutions and disasters on a colossal scale are blunted and unresponsive. The morning newspaper once read, the latest Prussian treachery discussed, the length of the Casualty List appreciated, the villagers then go about their duties until the following morning (there is no evening paper) provides the daily excitement, now become as habitual as breakfast. The war is not forgotten; it has grown into the routine of life; its realisation is almost functional. “It is difficult to believe there is a war⁠—down here!”

Sometimes, however, the observation varies. This morning, for instance, an overworked woman, seeking a few days’ change and rest, but a woman still sensitive enough to dream of happier days in the careless Long Ago, mentioned her yearning for the peace of a beflowered valley of the Alps, where the glacier streams gush downwards from eternal snows, where the wind sighs softly through great pine woods, some quiet valley brimmed with crystal sunlight and lying beneath a dome of stainless blue.

“Just one week,” she sighed, “one little week in sight of the Eiger or the Blümlisalp! To see the stars round the crest of the Matterhorn again and hear the echoes of falling water all night long in the peaceful valleys. The dawns, the sunsets, the tinkling of the cowbells, the simple, happy peasants, and the children in the fields! If someone first would hypnotise me to forget⁠ ⁠… !” It was a natural longing that thousands feel today. Only the hypnotic forgetfulness would have to be very thoroughly managed. The speaker’s days in Bucharest, her share in the Romanian retreat, her experiences before that in Serbia. The hypnotic suggestion would have to be extremely competent, to say the least. And the fair Swiss valleys, haunted of our youth, bathed in clear sunshine and sweetened by fresh mountain winds⁠—these valleys cannot now give the peace and blessing that once they did. The spell is broken and the joy has fled. Even could hypnotism sponge away all memory of the past, the sojourner there just now would find too many reminders of pain and terror and cruelty⁠—ghastly reminders of Prussian frightfulness⁠—to snatch even the most meagre comfort from the scenery, the sunshine and the flowers. Switzerland is no playground any more. Even in the remotest mountain village it would be difficult to say, “One almost forgets there is a war; it is difficult to believe up here!”

For Switzerland, an oasis surrounded on all sides by the great belligerents, offers no escape today from sharp reminders that Europe lies soaked in blood, the valleys have lost their hint of otherworldliness, the mountain hotels their fun and laughter. Winter and summer sports both languish; there are no merry dances, the orchestras are dumb, and many a resort that in peacetime was unpleasantly overcrowded now experiences difficulty in keeping open at all. The question of State help is broached plaintively in the daily Press, and more than one popular hotel that filled its great salle à manger easily in 1913 now employs two or three waitresses at most for the handful of guests who occupy one corner only. The men⁠—guides, waiters, porters, sometimes the hotelier himself⁠—are mobilised and doing their service militaire on plain or frontier far away. Labour is as scarce as guests. In every department of her normal life Switzerland has suffered a violent, even a ruinous dislocation; and while the flow of tourist money has practically ceased, the cost of mobilising several divisions and keeping them on a war footing is a grave item in the national economy that must be met out of diminished revenues. Owing to the irregular supply, if not sometimes the actual lack, of fuel⁠—the country’s coal is derived from Germany⁠—more than one industry has been in peril and more than one factory, deprived of the necessary raw material, been shut down. Diminished income, scarcity of labour, of coal and raw material, combined with heavily increased expenses, have been among the great⁠—though not, perhaps, the greatest⁠—disabilities this little, enclosed country has suffered from the war.

There are far sharper reminders of the war, however, than these general trade and economic conditions, and the lady who yearned for the peace and seclusion of her favourite haunted mountain valleys would find them at her elbow everywhere. Swiss hospitality has become proverbial; Switzerland has opened her gates to the wounded and disabled; the grands blessés from the prison camps of Germany fill the streets of her towns and crowd the inns and chalets of even remote upland villages. Khaki from every corner of the British Empire, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, kilts from Scotland, Gurkhas from India, the uniforms of Belgium and of France are met in field and forest, on mountain paths, in rowing boats and steamers on the lakes, in shops and churches and cinemas of the towns. In every train and tram is khaki or the poilus blue, in the village café, at the Kursaal concert, halfway up some dizzy height, or in the shady nook of some hotel or villa garden, is seen at every hour of the day that symbol of a fighting world⁠—the military salute. The interiors of clinique and convalescent home, of doctors’ consulting rooms and private nursing quarters, are not, of course, so easily seen, but it needs no imagination to divine that they, too, are full. The crutches, the empty sleeves, the limping legs and shaded eyes are everywhere, and few of their owners, men and officers, but languished two years at least in one of the miserable German prison camps that have stained the name of Germany beyond all cleansing. Switzerland, indeed, is one vast hospital and convalescent home; you cannot pluck a gentian of the higher slopes nor a narcissus of the lush meadows in the valley without a stern reminder that happiness has fled, for a time at any rate, this once-radiant, careless playground we associate with youth and holidays. The sun goes down in wonder behind the lonely heights as before, but goes down in blood; rising beyond the snowfields tipped with gold, it but reminds you of the too familiar “we attacked at dawn.” The mountain winds are fresh and keen as of old; indeed, the forests rustle as sweetly, the cowbells float and tinkle down the air, the falling water echoes; there is no change in Nature; but these are as memories of another day, almost, it seems, of another life. Switzerland is no playground now, but rather a great camp for medical treatment for the heroes of 1914 broken by the war. Her natural beauty serves as painful contrast between the careless happiness of former years and the pain and suffering of today. Sadness casts its shadow on her fairest scenery, and though her loveliness remains as of old, it is poignant now with the tears and sighs of memories that no one can escape.

Yet, equally, there are compensations that no imaginative mind can fail to note; there are striking contrasts. The Red Cross flag that first waved from a Geneva tower now seems to stream from the summit of Mont Blanc itself, covering the entire land with its gracious and beneficent meaning. And, thanks to its protection, these khaki figures, officers and men, heroes all from Le Château, Mons and the rest, take their fill of the sunshine and the mountain wind, enjoying themselves at last, and trying to forget their vile captivity. Strange sights may be seen⁠—is this the Switzerland that we remembered, or some dream with happiness and nightmare oddly mixed? Elderly, bronzed officers, beribboned and beclasped, chasing swallowtails with homemade nets and killing-bottles, and with the zest of eager boyhood! A first-lieutenant, one sleeve empty, casting a rod over a mountain stream for trout, a flying man behind him, limping badly, picking flowers as though he saw them for the first time in his life! Three others, with shaded eyes, or possibly with three sound eyes among the party, climbing trees for birds’ nests as though home for the summer holidays in Kent or Surrey! A Tommy, or a Jock in kilts, struggling with his dictionary in a grocery, a teashop or a railway booking office; while down the sun-drenched street outside a New Zealander and two Australians stump to the bathing-house, hang up their crutches (on the hotel billiard table later in the evening to be used as cue rests) and prove to all and sundry that a man with only one leg can swim as well as a man with two! Laughter, whistling, singing, cracking jokes alternately with “grousing,” this handful of the Old Contemptibles take their Swiss convalescence as cheerily as they took their other fate in the autumn of 1914. Switzerland today is full of the heroes of that first immortal batch. The lady in search of her quiet mountain valley in the shadow of the Eiger or the Blümlisalp would suffer poignant emotions as she crossed the Cantons of Vaud and Valais to reach it. She would meet sharp reminders of the war at every turn. At St. Maurice, too, she might be just in time to see the daily train of évacués from Northern France arrive with its charged cargo of human pain and suffering en route for Evian and distribution thence among the southern departments. The faces at the windows, the children especially, would not contribute to her later peace of mind. She would more probably decide to stay on the St. Maurice platform and help the kindly Swiss in their distribution of welcome material comforts among this daily consignment of sorely afflicted humanity.

Switzerland, indeed, today is changed beyond recognition. Prices are high and food is scarce. Rationing runs its difficult course, as elsewhere in our dislocated world. Trains are reduced, and railway, as also amusement, tickets heavily taxed. Instead of cheese and butter, the rule, strictly enforced, is cheese or butter, while one lump of sugar and one speck of saccharine is the sweetening allowance with thé or café complet. Eggs at 3.50frs. a dozen are a luxury, and cream is unobtainable; it is forbidden even for cakes and pastries in the ubiquitous confiseries. Thursday in every week is an unhappy day for people with sweet tastes, since no sweetened article, not even a cup of chocolate, may be bought at all. And the hotels, to add to their other troubles, are anxious for their supply of fuel. A chilly winter is a probability all have to face. The easygoing, happy Switzerland of former days exists no more. Even a homecoming traveller as he leaves Geneva by the single daily train⁠—he must book his seat days, and his sleeper even weeks, in advance⁠—is searched to see that he carries no foodstuffs out of the country with him. Matches, at any rate, so far, are obtainable in abundance, though not so cigarettes, which it is one of their purposes to light!

It is good to know that many of our own men and officers have come home now from Château d Oex, with its attendant villages of Rougemont and Rossiniéres, from Mürren in the Oberland and other places. The majority of these have not seen England for three years at least. Their evacuation will make room for others to come in from Germany, and no one can be more grateful for this than those whose places in Switzerland will thus be filled. Many may reach this haven just in time. The French exchanges came into effect befere our own, but Champéry in the Valais, Salvan, above the Rhone Valley, on the cold familiar route to Chamonix, and many other mountain villages known to us all as summer and winter resorts in happier days, or as climbing centres, still hum and buzz with busy poilus working in the vines, active with the sawmills whose produce is now taken by their mother country, or occupied by various lesser trades and duties that make the time of waiting less wearisome and long. The ingenuity of these occupations is considerable. There was, in Champéry, one poilu who turned the big nails used for building chalets into paper-knives, with sharp curved blades and delicate tapering points. His sole tool was a common hammer, and the nails sold at the Depot des Internés for 2frs., 3frs. and even 4frs. apiece. Wooden paper-knives, carved to represent soldiers of the Allies, and cleverly coloured, were another very popular employment. A very interesting collection of souvenirs might be made among the ingenious products of interned soldiers at the various villages. The French, in this respect it must be admitted, showed far more resource and ingenuity than the English.

There is another aspect of life in Switzerland today that is less accessible to the public, as well as less free for the journalist to write about. Though the resorts are somewhat deserted, and the villages handed over to interned soldiers chiefly, the towns are crowded, and some of them are booming. Geneva, Bern, Zurich and Lausanne are packed with strange humanity, and rooms not easily to be had. Lucerne is thriving; Lugano very busy. Every nationality is represented, every shade of colour. Germans are ubiquitous, of course, making themselves at home even in French Switzerland, which does not welcome them, and whose newspapers can hardly be pleasant reading for them just now. At Montreux, for instance, they frequent certain hotels, spend money freely, and make themselves at home. The little country has distinguished visitors, some of them undesirably notorious these troubled days. Prince von Buelow showed his fondness for Lucerne, whose climate appealed equally to the famous Erzberger; while King Tino, still hoping probably against hope, nurses that treachery to which alone his soul is faithful in the seclusion of a sumptuous country villa. Near Clarens, in an expensive château, lived for a long time the ex-Khedive of Egypt, fearful, it was currently reported, of assassination, and so rarely, if ever, visible abroad; and von Gerlach, though the papers denied it later, was said to have found a haven of safety, after his audacious activities as a spy in the Vatican, with the monks of a monastery near Coire. Lenin, arch-reactionary, lived quietly in the country until the German interest whisked him across the Fatherland by a special train into Russia, and is now reported back again safely in his neutral home. Strange and various are the people from every country in the world who seek the salubrious climate of Switzerland today. They, with their retinues, doubtless bring money in. Judging, however, by the outspoken comments of the native Press, their absence, even in these hard times, would be preferable to their gold.