A few steps from us, we fight; three or four races, three or four languages, three or four civilizations clash; Poussin fights Dürer and Wagner, Moussorgsky; Shakespeare himself takes part in the fight; where there was a straight line on the atlases, there will be a curved line, and, where a curved line, a straight line; centuries of history are there to which one says: "You will no longer be"; not only do men die by the thousands, but ideas die by the thousands, and beliefs by the thousands.
- Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz
The Encyclopædia Brittanica describes August 1914: “Germany declares war on Russia, France, and Belgium. Britain declares war on Germany. Austria declares war on Russia. Montenegro declares war on Austria. France declares war on Austria. Britain declares war on Austria. Montenegro declares war on Germany. Japan declares war on Germany. Austria declares war on Belgium.”
Absent from that list is Switzerland. Switzerland’s reputation for neutrality is as firmly established in our collective consciousness as their reputation for luxurious chocolates and quality timepieces. Independence had been embedded in the Swiss culture for centuries prior to the First Peace of Paris in 1814, which officially recognized Switzerland as self-governing, and the following year’s Congress of Vienna, which officially recognized Swiss neutrality.
The very existence of Switzerland is something of a miracle given her geography, cultural and religious differences, and governmental structure. But don’t take my word for it. Algernon Sidney, English politician and author, used the same term (less miraculous for Sidney was when he was executed for writing a book called Discourses Concerning Government). Andreas Ryff, City Captain of Basel and the man who negotiated the end of the Rappenkrieg, which translates roughly as “Cents War,” a peasant uprising by merchants who were upset about a small increase in the sales tax of wine and meat in Basel in 1594, invoked divine providence to explain Switzerland. Even contemporary historians have used the word “miracle” to describe the place, including William Martin in his expansive Histoire de la Suisse. For the more secular-minded, the Swiss success was mostly thought of as chance, as if 100 societies could try to live this way and only one would survive. A cursory examination of the country’s history shows why this is not particularly hyperbolic.
Dating as far back as the 13th Century, Switzerland has been comprised of cantons, which are nothing more than territorial divisions, as well as allied cantons and subject territories. Three such cantons formed a confederation in 1291 and signed the Eternal Alliance of the League of the Three Forest Cantons, which is now considered to be the founding document of Switzerland. In 1332, the city-state of Luzern was added to the group and by 1353 two additional cantons and two additional city-states, Zürich and Bern, were added. This confederation lasted for nearly 130 years and spent a not insignificant portion of that time aggressively expanding territory, signing treaties with neighbors, and kicking the asses of people who didn’t like it, those people frequently being the Habsburgs. There were significant victories against the Hapsburgs in the Battle of Sempach, in which the Swiss killed Duke Leopold III and a host of other nobles, and the Battle of Näfels, in which a large number of Habsburg soldiers drowned after the bridge they were on collapsed into a river during the course of a disorganized retreat. These were bookended by the Burgundian Wars, culminating in the Battle of Nancy in 1477, in which the Swiss and the forces of the Duke of Lorraine routed the soldiers of Charles the Bold, a battle which was the subject of several works of art, including a painting by Eugéne Delacroix. As an aside, the victors mutilated the corpse of Charles the Bold, which should perhaps remind us once again that the concept of savagery that Western powers used to denigrate cultures encountered in new lands was awfully hypocritical.
Two city-states, Fribourg and Solothurn, were added in 1481, and this group of ten cantons fought the Swabian War in 1499, presumably to remind the Habsburgs who may have forgotten about what happened 100 years prior that they were not to be trifled with. Two years later, two additional city-states were added in Schaffhausen and Basel and Appenzell, the thirteenth member of the league, was added in 1513.
Two things are remarkable about this group, the Old Swiss Confederation. The first is that the cantons each had their own cultural and religious traditions, some being Cathlolic, some being Reformed, and some being both. The second is that they all had their own constitutional structures, some being democratic, some guild-based, some patrician, with no centralized entity to link them. The cantons executed at least a dozen treaties in and amongst themselves while maintaining independence otherwise. Thus, the aforementioned battles with the Habsburgs were not initiated by actions of the entire confederation, but rather individual cantons or city-states within the group, who then had the backing of the rest of the gang.
The first treaty that was signed by all thirteen cantons was in 1513, when Appenzell was added. The only confederate body to which all Swiss cantons belonged was the Tagsatzung, the Swiss Diet but not the “Swiss Diet” that calls for eating “traditional foods, the foods of our Grandmothers and Great Grandmothers,” which appears to include all manner of cakes that are apparently fine to eat as long as the ingredients aren’t processed. What a country! Each canton had one vote in matters before THAT Diet, distinguishing it from the typical monarchic structure of its neighbors. That the Diet did not itself descend into chaos is itself an achievement as the populations of the cantons were not remotely equal, Bern having the same voting power as Zug while possessing forty times the number of residents. Even the Electoral College in the United States seems rational by comparison.
This is not to suggest that the cantons did not fight amongst themselves. Battles over territory and treaties with allied cantons were a regular feature of the confederacy. The French claim their share of the credit for the success of the Swiss, with Napoleon commenting in 1802, “[y]our history proves that your civil wars could never have been re-solved without efficient French intervention.” Perhaps that is true, although Napoleon was biased given his takeover of the country, destruction of the Old Swiss Confederation (the thirteen cantons), and subsequent creation of the Helvetic Republic, which made the cantons subject to Napoleonic rule. Switzerland became a theater of war in Napoleon’s adventures against the Austrians and Russians.
The Helvetic Republic lasted a mere five years. The Act of Mediation, which Napoleon negotiated after a series of coups d’état in the Helvetic Republic, restored the cantons to their previous positions and added six additional autonomous cantons which had previously been allies or subjects of the confederacy, including Vaud. As the Napoleonic Wars came to an end in 1815, two additional cantons and the city-state of Geneva were added to the Swiss Confederation. Economic expansion began to make the cantonal system unwieldy, as each canton had their own currency, units of weight and measurement, and tariffs. The twenty-two cantons became split almost evenly between those wanting a centralized government and those wanting to maintain the current structure. Tensions between these two sides simmered for more than three decades before the outbreak of the Sonderbund War in 1847.
The Sonderbund was an alliance of seven cantons, conservative and Catholic, which formed in 1845 to protect against the centralization of power. The Diet declared this alliance unconstitutional in October 1847 and November 1847 saw the Sonderbund put down by the force of the federal army, led by Guillaume Henri Dufour. This is the war which was the inspiration for La Grande Guerre du Sondrebond, Ramuz’s first collaboration with Auberjonois. Dufour’s treatment of enemy soldiers proved to be humane beyond all expectation, with fewer than 100 casualties and demands from General Dufour that the federal troops care for their injured opponents. It is likely no accident, then, that in 1864 Dufour would be chosen to preside over the First Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field, at which the International Committee of the Red Cross was officially formed.
A federal state, modeled on the United States, was created in 1848 and a Federal Council was created. Notwithstanding changes to the Constitution made in the latter half of the 19th century and continued economic expansion, this was the Switzerland which lay at the center of madness in August 1914. The Swiss independence that had existed ALMOST uninterrupted for more than 600 years was facing a stress test like never before. The French wanted Alsace. The Italians wanted South Tyrol. The Austrians wanted to hold on for dear life from the encroaching Pan-Slavic movement. The Germans wanted…actually, they themselves are still in disagreement about exactly what.
Throughout the centuries since the cantons had formed their first alliances, Swiss soldiers served as mercenaries in the armies of the various European monarchies, but any lingering mercenary mentality was not apparent to observers in the early 20th century. In 1911, American Major General George Bell, Jr., who would lead the 16th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army at El Paso during the Pancho Villa Expedition – did you know that Pancho Villa and his crew of Villistas attacked a small border town in New Mexico in 1916, set a bunch of buildings ablaze, and killed two dozen people and that, in response, President Wilson sent an expeditionary force led by “Black Jack” Pershing and his right hand man, George Patton, to chase Pancho Villa around Mexico and bring him to justice but the mission ultimately failed? Wha wha what?! – remarked that the Swiss had “a love of country unsurpassed by any known people.” The Swiss army, then, was comprised of soldiers of intense patriotism, rigorous discipline, longstanding tradition, and, I can only assume, incredibly handy utility knives that also had tiny scissors and nail files (alright, alright, the knife Swiss soldiers in World War I would have had was designed in 1908 and included a blade, a screwdriver, a can opener, and an awl). Their real strength, however, was that they were lousy with expert marksman.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, visiting Switzerland the same year to observe Swiss Army maneuvers, was told in no uncertain terms by President Ludwig Forrer that Swiss neutrality would be protected at all costs: “We have the resolute intention of protecting our independence against any attack…and of upholding our neutrality against anyone who fails to respect it.” As the awfully apocryphal-sounding but hella cool story found in numerous history books tells it, the Kaiser asked what would happen if the Swiss Army of 250,000 was confronted with half a million German infantry, to which a Swiss soldier replied, “"Shoot twice and go home, your Majesty!"
The Swiss loved guns, and they were committed to teaching young men to shoot. George Wood Wingate, a General in the Union Army during the American Civil War, observed just how widely practiced shooting was in Switzerland in 1912: “Out of a population of but three million – less than that of the City of New York in 1904 – she had 3,656 rifle clubs with a membership of 218,815, who shot twenty-one million cartridges with the army rifle.” Wingate had long dreamed of achieving this same level of commitment to training riflemen in America after his experiences with soldiers in the Union Army. General Ambrose Burnside described the Union Army soldier’s gun skills as less than ideal: “Out of ten soldiers who are perfect in drill and the manual of arms, only one knows the purpose of the sights on his gun or can hit the broad side of a barn.” This lack of skill is why, forty years prior to his visit to Switzerland, Wingate had co-founded the National Rifle Association and named Burnside as its first president.
OK, so. August 1914 rolls around. All hell breaks loose. The Swiss Federal Council informed its neighbors that it would remain “faithful to its centuries-old tradition not to depart in any way from the principles of neutrality.” The Swiss notion of neutrality differed from that of countries like Belgium or Luxembourg, whose neutrality was ultimately only as good as the word of the regional powers to respect it. Switzerland, on the other hand, enforced their neutrality with an army that had demonstrated their prowess in Europe for the better part of 500 years. And so, upon the outbreak of the war, the Federal Council mobilized the entire Swiss Army to defend its neutrality. 450,000 men answered the call and deployed to guard Switzerland’s frontiers against, well, everybody.
Among those who would see the front was Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, who had only returned to Switzerland from Paris in July 1914, settling at Treytorrens, an isolated little village of 160 or so people in the northeast corner of Vaud, nearer Lake Neuchâtel than Lake Geneva. Within weeks of war being declared, however, Ramuz brought his family to live with his mother in Lausanne. Because of his long absence from the country in the decade prior, Ramuz was not on the active list for mobilization. Nevertheless, he put himself to good use by publishing commentary on what he observed while embedded with soldiers in a column entitled Journal de ces temps difficiles, or “Diary of These Difficult Times.”
Ramuz’s Journal chronicled the early days of the war with incredible beauty, his observations poetic, his prose thrilling. Within days of mobilization, Ramuz wrote in the Journal:
There was, it seems, a comet, but nobody saw it. There was neither sword of fire, neither rain of blood, nor abortions in women, nor apparitions like that of the Dragon or like that of the Angel, whereby we say that wars (among other wonders) are announced.
Yet the preliminary signs, for those who knew how to see, were not lacking. What to admire is the extreme sensitivity of nature, much more "intuitive" than us. When we need the facts and when, on these facts, we slowly start to build superimposing reasoning, like the mason's stones, to the fragile roof of the conclusion, it is suddenly, magnetically, that she envisions and embraces. Her reaction is immediate: she convulses or blossoms.
The telegraph was still silent as the lake was already agitated: it knew. The wind had risen from the southwest; the lake was rolling huge waves. Savoy had disappeared under a bead of white clouds; the lake no longer offered to the eyes but a green immensity, hollowed out and regrooved like a covered field, but each furrow of which was in motion, and hemmed at its crest with an efflorescence of foam.
In the same entry, Ramuz identified perhaps the most significant drawback to a nation pledging armed neutrality with total war in the proximity:
An oppressive uncertainty fell on the minds. The nerves of a people, said to be solid, are put to the test for the first time, and they resist it badly, because they lack training. Elsewhere, at this same hour (in the countries where one fights), there are everywhere brass bands, the regiments parade in the streets; battery after battery, the hustle and bustle of cannons shakes the pavement; everywhere flowers are raining from the windows, the men are screaming absurd things, the women are waving handkerchiefs; it is the slightly false enthusiasm of the start, but a useful intoxication, a universal belief in victory, an emotion so strong that it takes you away from yourself. We have no enemy. And it may well be that we are forced to fight, but we cannot know in advance with whom. We have nothing to support us, neither anger nor hope, and neither love nor hate, and not even this sense of justice, which we know as well as everyone does the job he likes, but which, coinciding with special interests, can be of such powerful help.
The Battle of the Frontiers, the first major showdown of the war, consumed August. The first Battle of the Marne raged in early September, with a division each from France and Gemany taking positions about fifty kilometers from Basel, but no closer. The enemy became boredom, the greatest difficulty maintaining vigilance on the chance that events may come closer:
Everywhere I find compatriots very happy to be "at the border", because they were a little bored, as they end up admitting, in these rear camps where they have just spent more than a month. The service here is not less painful, but it is more interesting. It flatters the taste for adventures and this need for emotion that there is in the heart of each man, all the more that when one is a soldier, if one cannot make war, one at least likes to be not far from where others do it.
Ramuz was embedded with the army through October and made his last entry in the Journal in “mid-October,” at which point he returned to his home in Treytorrens. Over the course of the next year, Ramuz would work on his novel La guérison des maladies (The Healing of Illnesses), finishing the first version in June 1915. While Ramuz worked in solitude, Switzerland’s commitment to guns and the massive mobilization to defend their neutrality was forever justified when, in ostensibly neutral Belgium, the first of three battles at Ypres commenced.
The “Race to the Sea” began in mid-September as the Entente forces and the Germans both sought the northern flank and Ypres had the great misfortune of being on the way from Germany to Calais and Dunkirk. The first battle lasted over a month and resulted in around 230,000 total deaths. The second battle, in April 1915, also just over a month long, had far fewer casualties but still managed to sadly distinguish itself by being the first successful attack using poison gas after the Germans released chlorine gas into the air and, with the aid of the wind, overwhelmed opposing forces. April 1915 also saw the beginning of the Allied attempt to take control of the Dardanelles Straits at the Gallipoli Peninsula in order to link up with Russia via the Black Sea, an absolutely preposterous idea for anyone who ever a) knew what the Ottoman Empire was and b) looked at a map. Seriously, go look at a map of the Gallipoli Peninsula and the Dardanelles Straits and see for yourself. Spurred on by First Lord of the British Admiralty Winston Churchill, in direct contravention of the wishes of First Sea Lord Admiral John Fisher, a failed naval invasion was followed by a failed land invasion lasting nine months and costing hundreds of thousands of lives. This was followed a month later by the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat.
Where Journal illustrates Ramuz’s great humility about man at war with himself and, more importantly, at war with nature, Stravinsky, in a letter to legendary pacifist and famous author Romain Rolland, reveals himself to be both thoughtful and perceptive…
My dear colleague, I hurry to respond to your noble appeal to protest against the unprecedented barbarism of the German hordes. Barbarism! Is this really the word? What is barbarism? It seems the word implies another conception of culture from ours. And that, as well as being something completely different from ours, it does not exclude a value as great as ours. But Germany today cannot be considered the bearer of a new culture. This country is part of the ancient world, and its culture is as old as that of the other peoples of Western Europe. And for this reason I must affirm that a nation which in time of peace constructed a series of monuments such as those on the Sieges Allee in Berlin, and that in time of war sends hordes to destroy cities such as Louvain and monuments such as the Reims Cathedral, is a nation to be ranked neither among the barbarians nor among the civilized peoples.
…and, in a letter to the less pacifist artist Leon Bakst, utterly delusional.
Lord, what a terrible and at the same time magnificent period we are living through. I am not one of those lucky ones – how I envy them – who can rush into battle without a backward glance. My hatred for the Germans grows not by the day but by the hour, and I burn with even more envy when I see our friends, Ravel, Delage, Schmitt, all at war.”
It is perhaps no surprise that Stravinsky’s music of this period exists largely absent the specter of war while Ramuz’s works are all downright apocalyptic. Without a mutual friend in Ansermet, it is hard to imagine a less likely artistic pairing in terms of temperament and experience. Nevertheless, these two men, the juggernaut cosmopolitan known the world over and the man in nature’s thrall known in a couple parts of Switzerland, began the process of forever intertwining their destinies over wine in the hills near the train station.
Also, if you can figure out what World War I was about, let me know. I’ve read a zillion books and still don’t totally get it.
Great political and military history here. Switzerland’s current domestic governance structure is also miraculous, or at the very least unique. The national parliament uses a “magic bullet” formula for calculating the number of cabinet slots each of the four major political parties get as part of a quasi-permanent coalition, but the real governance takes place mostly by popular referendum and at the canton level.