3.21.2017 THE SWISS AND THEIR MOUNTAINS (1963) by Arnold Lunn

Chapter 1 - The Mountain Matrix

Switzerland is today an independent country not because her mountains are a barrier to the invader, for no mountains separate Geneva from France of Basile from germany, but because a passion for independence seems a natural growth in mountain valleys and because it has always been far easier for emperors and other rulers to assert their authority over the dwellers in the lowlands than over the natives of remote mountain valleys.  it was therefore no accident that the revolt which laid the foundation of what we now know as SWitzerland should have begun on the shores of a lake ringed round with rugged peaks.
the role of the mountains in the creation of an independent country was not restricted to that spirit of independence which the mountains foster, but also, as we shall see, to the historic accident that the men of Uri controlled the pass of the St Gotthard, and to the fact that the decisive battle of Morgarten was fought in a mountain pass by mountain men.
the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons (Vierwaldstattersee), known to the English as Lake Lucerne, derives its name from the Cantons of Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden and Lucerne, the first three being the founders of the SWiss Confederation, and the Canton of Lucerne being the first Canton to join the young Confederation after their successful revolt against the Habsbugs.

the relations between the Holy Roman Empire and the founders of the SW confederation were, as we shall see, of decisive importance, the Empire was something more than a mere system of government. it was 'a fashion of conceiving the world', an assertion of the fact that the unity of Christendom was not only spiritual but political.  the Pope was the spiritual,  the Emperor the political head of Christendom. Una chiesa in uno stato. the german king only became Holy Roman Emperor

14 after his coronation by the pope. it was only after the reign of MaximilianI of Austria that the Imperial Crown became hereditary and was assumed by the Emperor of Austria on his succession. when Rudolf of Habsburg, who took his name from a castle the ruins of which can be reached in an hour from Lucerne, was elected German king in 1273,  the crown was not hereditary but elective, and the chief object of the electors was to prevent the German king and Holy Roman Emperor from acquiring real power. Rudolf of Habsburg was not an obscure member of the minor nobility of Aarou, as historians once believed, for even at that time the Habsburg were already in possession of great estates in Alsace,  but the electors probably felt that they would be better able to safeguard their interests if they elected a SW noble rather than a powerful german prince.

as german king, Rudolf of Habsburg was able to invest his son Albrecht with the Duchy of Austria and thereafter the Habsburgs became identified with Austria. Rudolf's son, Albrecht, was elected german king in 1298 and was murdered in 1308 by his nephew, Johannes, Duke of Austria. from 1308 to 1438 no Habsburg again wore the Imperial Crown, a fact which is of decisive importance in the history of SW,  for it was by exploiting the rivalry between the Habsburgs and the Emperor that the men of Uri and Schwyz and Unterwalden were able to lay the foundations of their independence.

the first object of the forest cantons was to secure Reichsunmittelbareit, that is to say, to place themselves under the immediate lordship of the Emperor. they preferred the rule of the Emperor to the rule of the Habsburgs for many reasons, of which the most important was that they preferred the remote control of the Emperor to the control of the Habsburgs on the doorstep. the Emperor was a long way off, and far less efficient as a tax collector than the Habsburgs.  to be directly subject to the Emperor was a status as near to actual independence as the Forest Cantons could ever hope to achieve.
the Emperor was all the readier to support the Forest Cantons because the men of Uri, who were under the immediate lordship of the Emperor, controlled the northern entrance to the Gotthard Pass.  the St Gotthard was not 'opened' in the 12th century, as every SW history that I have read implies. the pass was known in Roman times.  but some time between 1180 and 1190

15  the St Gotthard route was shortened by rendering the passage of the Schollenen Gorge practicable, and from that moment the St Gotthard replaced  the Lukmanier  as the best route from germany into Italy.  the new importance of the St Gotthard was reflected in the status of the Forest Cantons .  the Habsburgs were determined to control the approach to the St Gotthard;  the Hohenstaufen emperors were equally convinced that the relative independence of the Forest Cantons was of primary importance to them, since they could not afford to allow the habsburgs to cut them off from the main approach to Italy. the Forest Cantons, as we shall see , won their independence by playing off the Habsburgs against the Emperor.  even when a Habsburg was himself Emperor, the Forest Cantons never allowed the Habsburgs to confuse the rights which they enjoyed qua Emperor with the rights which they enjoyed qua Habsburg.
it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the St Gotthard in the struggle for independence. the increasing traffic across this pass transformed many of the men of Uri from agriculturalists into traders. many of them made a living by providing mules or acting as guides across the pass. moreover, the traffic across the pass exposed the forest Cantons to the new wind of freedom which was blowing from Italy, where  the communes were fighting an unsuccessful war of liberation against the Emperor.  the legend, according to which the men of the Forest Cantons had preserved their passion for liberty thanks to their remoteness from the great world, is the exact reverse of the truth. on the contrary, as the SW historian William Martin points out, it was at the moment that this remoteness ceased that the movement for independence began.

this book is not a history of SW but a study of the Swiss in relation to their mountains, and I am therefore only concerned with the struggle for independence, which i have described as greater length in my book THE CRADLE OF SWITZERLAND, because of the decisive influence of the mountains in general and of the two mountain passes in particular, the St Gotthard and Morgarten, on the events which led to the foundation of the Confederation.
the Tell legend, which would seem to have some basis in fact, bears witness to that growing spirit of independence which finally determined the Habsburgs to organize a punitive expedition

16  against the men of the Forrest Cantons. for a quarter of a century these mountain men had befriended all their enemies, had not concealed their enthusiastic support and approval of the assassins of Albrecht, and the time had come to teach them a lesson.

meanwhile, the Forest Cantons were not passively awaiting the Habsburg onslaught.  they numbered among their warriors many who had served for years in foreign wars, particularly under the Hohenstaufen. there is no basis whatsoever for the legend which represents them as simple mountain peasants,  untutored in the art of war. their preparations had begun as early as 1290, and by the time the punitive expedition left Zug, the land approach through Arth was already sealed off by a fence of palisades which stretched from the Rigi to the Rufiberg. a second line of defence had been constructed near the Enge of Oberarth. the Renggpass and the Brunig had also been fortified. the Habsburgs enjoyed a virtual command of the lake, but the ports of Brunnen and Buochs were fortified, and the Forest Cantons did not confine themselves to passive defence. by a series of spirited sorties on the lake against the Habsburg ports, they maintained an active war of nerves.

in the autumn of 1315, Duke Leopold of austria mobilized his army in Aargau.  'the men of his army,  writes a contemporary chronicler, Joannes Vitoduranus,  'cam together with one purpose - utterly to subdue and humiliate those peasants who were surrounded with mountains as with walls.

on November 15, 1315, the Duke and his knights approached the pass of Morgarten which the men of the Forest Cantons had deliberately left undefended, hoping to lure the Habsburgs into a trap.

they climbed slowly, in single file, towards the pass, their line of battle necessarily broken. near the top of the pass the leaders halted and looked anxiously up towards the steep hillsides, down which a few stray rocks and pebbles had just fallen. suddenly an avalanche of huge boulders and tree-trunks crashed down the slopes. the narrow pass of morgarten was turned into a death-trap - a desperate struggling confusion of men and horses. and then came the human avalanche, an irresistible torrent of peasants swinging their deadly halberds. beneath these rude weapons the chivalry of the Empire fell. some died on the
17  spot, others were driven into the lake, while others were killed by falling boulders. Morgarten was perhaps the first battle of the Middle ages in which an army of mounted knight s was beaten by peasants on foot.
on december 9,1315, the Confederates renewed their first league at the village of Brunnen and three years later the Dukes of Austria decided to make peace with them.
the confederation rapidly expanded. Lucerne was naturally the first to join. Zurich, Glarus, Aug and Berne all followed the example of Lucerne in the course of the following year. the growth in strength of the young Confederation was, of course, viewed with alarm by Austria.

the habsburgs made two attempts to revenge Morgarten, only to suffer crushing defeats at Sempach, ten miles from Lucerne, in 1386, and Nafels in the canton of Glarus in 1388.
after various attempts to seduce Zurich from the Confederation, Austria accepted the inevitable and signed a treaty of peace.  from this time forward the young Confederation, though still within the Empire, was no longer of it. the germans began to speak of the citizens of this Confederation as SCHWEIZER,  after SCHWYZ.  the battles of Morgarten, Sempach and Nafels planted the seeds of modern SW.  the Cantons which resisted the Habsburgs began as a league of small states within the Empire and emerged a nation. their success was the more surprising because at that very time the liberties so gallantly defended on the shores of the lake of Lucerne were being trampled underfoot in germany. in germany the monarchial principle was in the ascendant and the Leagues of the Swabian cities and of the Rhine cities were being crushed. in SW,  on the other hand, the principles of a primitive democracy were established on an enduring foundation. why this contrast? surely because the primitive SW democracy was a natural development in mountain valleys too remote from centres of government to be effectively controlled. the structure of the mountains in which communications between valley and valley are seldom easy is favourable to the development of self-government in the mountain communities. life in these mountain valleys was never easy, an unending battle against nature which compelled the mountain dwellers to co-operate closely in the building of paths, in irrigation and in the construction of  barriers to avalanches. it was indeed this inevitable co-operation which created a whole range of communal rights, such as grazing rights on the cattle alps.

in the charter of Aug. 1, 1291, which established the young Confederation, there is no challenge to the rights of the distant Emperor. the Confederates were content to remain members of the Holy Roman Empire but there is a firm repudiation of the rule of the Habsburg Landvogts and a stubborn insistence on the rights of the Confederates to appoint all those responsible for the government of their communities, judges for instance.

Chapter 6  The Genevese

57  De Luc, Bourrit, de Sussure and Rousseau wer Genevese but not swiss, for they died before Geneva joined the Swiss Confederation. the Switzerland of their epoch was a confederation of 13 Cantons - Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, Lucrne, Zug, Zurich, Glarus and Berne (together forming the so-called eight old Cantons), and in addition Appenzell, Fribourg, Solothurn, Basel and Schaffhausen....
59....(speaking of one of the mountain climbers..and Swiss hospitality.) ..he made a second ascent in 1772 by a different route. his party spent the night in the valley of Anterne and had some difficulty in finding the chalet where they planned to sleep. at last they found a hut, and the women gathered round a fire immediately made them welcome and offered them milk and cheese, which was all that they had and also the hospitality of their one and only bedroom, which the men shared with these peasant women without causing or feeling embarrassment. on their return next day they were overtaken by storm and darkness and were rescued by their hostesses, who struggled up the mountain to find them and succeeded in spite or the fact that it was only the largest of their torches which was not extinguished by rain and wind. next morning they refused to accept any payment for their services. however, de Luc eventually persuaded the one 'who seemed to be less in the position of a mistress than the other' to accept a crown. 'the idea of accepting payment for a service!'

'it is thus, writes de Luc, that human nature is corrupted; and there are times when I reproach myself, I should reproach myself without ceasing if there were any chance that Anterne would become a frequented place. and this is not merely a passing reflection. I have made it again and again when I have realized THAT IT IS THUS THAT ONE ALTERS THE NATURE OF THE REWARD WHICH GOOD PEOPLE LOOK FOR'.

82  (speaking of an intriguing religious who is 'described in detail by Professor Pieth of Chur in the monumental biography'...Pater (FATHER) PLACIDUS A SPECHA

Chapter 13 - Mountain Fortress

129  Prime Minister to Foreign Secretary                                                                          3 Dec., 44
'I put this down for the record. of all neutrals SW has the greatest right to distinction. she has been the sole international force linking the hideously sundered nations and ourselves. what does it matter whether she has been able to give us the commercial advantages we desire or has given too many to the germans, to keep herself alive? she has been a democratic State, standing for freedom in self-defence among her mountains, and in thought, in spite of race, largely on our side.
'I was astonished at U. J.'s (Stalin's) savageness against her, and, much though I respect that great and good man, I was entirely uninfluenced by his attitude. he called them 'swine' and he does not use that sort of language without meaning it. I am sure we ought to stand by SW, and we ought to explain to U.J. why it is we do so. the moment for sending such a message should be carefully chosen...'
                                                                                                           'W.S.C.' (note - Winston Churchill)

there was a tense atmosphere in the Olympic stadium just before the ceremonial march past of the teams competing in the 1936 Winter Olympic Games. I had done my best to ensure that the members of our ski team knew the difference between the Olympic salute, arm extended to the side and the nazi salute, arm extended in front. there were rumours that some of the teams would not salute hitler. the competitors who received the most rapturous welcome were those of the Austrians who gave the nazi salute, turning towards hitler to make it clear that it was the nazi and not the olympic salute. my own careful instructions were wanted, for the broadcaster informed the crowd that the 'British greet the Fuhrer with the German salute. the Swiss provided an unpleasant surprise for the crowd. the Swiss competitors in the military race wee in uniform and these saluted. then came the civilian competitors. a momentary hesitation and then suddenly, the Swiss ranks stiffened and the descendants of the men who fought for freedom at Morgarten walked past hitler eyes to the front, arms stiffly to the side.
no cheers from the crowd.
no comments from the broadcaster.
i looked back to the balcony on which hitler was standing. his face was distorted with venomous hatred. 'God help the Swiss, I thought, if ever hitler invades their country'.

i  remembered that moment 4 years later, on a day when a german invasion of SW seemed imminent. I had been lecturing for the British Council in Florence and crossed the Swiss frontier some days after germany invaded Holland. on may 14, 1940, I watched the smoke of burning papers rising from the garden of the French Embassy in Berne. that afternoon the French military attache remarked to his british colleague:
'we have lost the war'.
meanwhile the Swiss were expecting to be invaded. the germans had been massing troops along their frontier for some days and circulating rumours to the effect that they were about to invade SW. their intention may have been to deflect French troops, badly needed elsewhere, to the Franco-Swiss frontier or to invade SW if they had failed to break through the extension of the Maginot Line near Sedan. but whatever may have been their intentions, the evidences of plans for an invasion were sufficiently impressive to crowd the roads  fro Basel and other frontier towns with the cars of civilians escaping into the interior.
on the night of may 14th, I dined in Berne with the British Minister, Sir David Kelly. his confidence in our ultimate victory, which never wavered during the darkest months of the war, helped, as I later learned, to maintain not only the morale

during the few days which I spent in SW before returning to London, I was greatly encouraged by the sturdy tone of the proclamations in which General Guisan, the Commander-in-Chief of the Swiss Army, warned the population to disregard, in the event of an invasion, any statements alleged to emanate from Swiss broadcasting stations which announced a cease-fire. there would be no surrender.

there are few professional soldiers in the Swiss Army and Henri Guisan, a Vaudois (note, a descendant of the Waldensians) was not one of them. in 1940, Marcel Pilet-Golaz who, like Guisan, was a Vaudois, was the President of the Swiss Confederation. in the fateful year of 1940 he was the head of the Departement politique, and as such responsible for foreign policy. every member of the Bundesrat (the Swiss Cabinet) is responsible for a particular department and becomes President in rotation for one year only.
after the French collapse, Guisan (G) began quietly to work against Pilet-Golaz's policy of appeasement. the tension between these men was aggravated by the fact that they had always disliked each other. both men had their ardent supporters, some of whom were still engaged in re-fighting their old battles. the controversy flared up again in SW after the publication of Spying for Peace in England and its serialization in the Weltwoche (Zurich). the author, Jon Kimche, is a brilliant journalist who left SW at the age of 12, and still retains a Swiss passport, though he has spent almost all his adult life in England. during the war he was the military correspondent of the Evening standard and is now the editor of the Jewish Observer.
132 G's first problem was the control of the thousands of germans living who were, as he knew, organized for subversive activities and who were working in active co-operation with a small group of Swiss Nazis,of whom 15 were executed and many more sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. even more serious than the problem of german espionage was the possibility that Swiss moral might crack after France fell.
in the First World War SW was never in any serious danger of invasion and if the germans had invaded, French and Italian armies would have immediately linked up with the Swiss; but in the Second World War Italy was not an enemy, but an ally of germany for vital supplies.

whereas the sympathies of the german-Swiss were divided in the First World War, in the Second World War, apart from a lunatic fringe of Swiss Nazis, german Switzerland was passionately anti-Nazi.  in french SW there was a small but influential minority who were certainly not pro-nazi but who were strong supporters of Petain.
133  Pilet-Golaz(P-G), like Petain, was a defeatist who believed in the inevitability of a Nazi victory. Petain handed back to the germans pilots who had been shot down, many of them by our own Air Force, and P-G allowed german pilots, who had been forced to land in SW, to return to germany, a clear breach of neutrality but less open to censure than Petain's action, for P-G was a neutral whereas France had entered the war as an ally of Great Britain.
P-G's supporters in SW maintain that he was a great patriot who made no more concessions than were necessary to prevent the germans invading SW and to persuade the germans to provide SW with coal and other vital imports. certainly the position of SW, wholly surrounded by Axis Powers, was critical and those who negotiated with the germans on behalf of SW had to concede much that a good Swiss would hate conceding.
P-G's critics contend that unpublished evidence of his relations with the German Ambassador in Berne, evidence which came into the possession of the British when the archives of the german Foreign Office were made available to the victors, prove that he went to extreme lengths in his efforts to appease the germans. it was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that on the very day (June 25,1940) when Petain broadcast from Bordeaux his message of surrender to the French nation, P-G should also have broadcast to the Swiss a message of appeasement, in which certain phrases bore an ominous resemblance to the ideology of Petain as, for instance: 'the time for an inner renewal has come. we must look forward, determined to use our modest but useful strength in the reconstruction of the world in its state of upheaval'.
G was determined that appeasement had to be defeated and the Swiss inspired with a determination never to surrender,  however apparently hopeless the immediate situation. he therefore summoned all commanders, down to battalion commanders, to meet him on the historic meadow of the Rutli, by the lake of Lucerne, were the founding fathers of the Swiss Confederation had met on August 1. 1291.

the theme of the General's address was that the existence of

134  SW was at stake and that it was their duty to counteract the propaganda of defeatists and weaklings in their own ranks, and to preach to their troops the duty of uncompromising resistance.

...throughout the years which followed, Guisan had the country with him. there were, of course, a few nazis. 'tow men in my company', an artillery major remarked to me, 'were known to be Nazis. they would have been shot the moment the germans invaded'.  there was also a group which was not in the least pro- nazi but which would have liked to muzzle the more aggressively anti-Nazi press. 200 citizens, in fact, signed a petition to the Government on Nov. 15, 1940, urging the dismissal of the more courageous and outspoken editors. to describe, as mr.Kimche does, these signatories as 'prominent Swiss citizens' is an exaggeration. I have the names of the signatories and their occupations in front of me as I write, for the Government released to the press the names of the '200' and these were published in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung of january 22, 1946. there were very few prominent people among the signatories. most of them were small innkeepers, obscure journalists, small farmers, etc.
in the Swiss Army the leading appeaser was Colonel Wille, the son of General Wille who commanded the Swiss Army during the First World War. General Wille had married a Bismarck, and his son was therefore half german. on Nov. 7, 1934, the Social Democrats demanded in the nationalrat that Colonel Wille should be retired because of his close relations with the Nazis...Colonel Wille never enjoyed the confidence of General Guisan. he was never given an active service command, but was relegated to the command of infantry training.

at the end of the war the British Foreign Office brought to the atttention of the Bundesrat certain german documents which had come into their possession, among them a report b y the german minister in Berne, Dr Kocher, on a conversation which he had had with Colonel Wille on Oct. 1, 1940. during their invasion of France the german Army obtained possession of

135 documents relating to conversations between French and Swiss officers for co-operation in the event of a german invasion of SW. Wille, according to Dr Kocher, suggested that he with the Bundesrat and insist on Guisan's dismissal. these documents came to the attention of the Bundesrat in 1952.  they consulted the Chef des Justiz und Polizeidepartements, who replied that no action could be taken in view of the Swiss equivalent of the statute of limitations. they sent for Colonel Wille, who flatly denied that he had made any such suggestions and who insisted that Kocher was concerned to emphasize his importance to the germans and thus to prevent his recall. in 1959 Wille died and when the german documents were published early in 1961 the Bundesrat distributed a memorandum in which they maintained that it was impossible to arrive at any certain conclusions, but it was improbable that Kocher had invented the conversation though he may have had a tendency to write in such a way as to improve his own position. what was certainly true was that there existed great differences of opinion between Guisan and Wille, and that Wille was the advocate of demobilization. Wille's relations with the Minister must be condemned even if he believed himself to be acting in the interests of his country. had these facts been disclosed in time, it would have been necessary to open an investigation...
from all I hear, Wille and his small clique had not the slightest influence in the army or in the country.
the creation of the Reduit, the mountain redoubt into which the Swiss Army would have retreated in the event of an invasion, was not completed for at least 18 months after the Rutli speech, but even in 1940 preparations for the 'scorched earth' policy were far advanced, and many of the factories which were producing munitions and precision tools tor the germans would have been destroyed even at that comparatively early stage of the war. even more important was the fact that both the Gotthard and the Simplon tunnels, so essential for the communications between germany and Italy, would have been put out of action the moment the german invasion started. finally, the germans did not underestimate the stubborn courage of the Swiss soldier defending his homeland.

136  a Swiss friend of mine, Herr Werner Grob, who had served under General Guiswan and who was old enough to remember the First World War in which the Swiss Army was commanded by General Wille,drew an interesting comparison between the two generals. "Wille, he said, had married a Bismarck, and his military outlook was influenced by his admiration for the german army. he wasn't popular with the rank and file of our Army. Guisan, on the other hand, though he understood the supreme importance of discipline, was  a real father to his men. he inspired not only great respect but great affection. when France fell we were surrounded by germany and Italy and there were not a few who felt that it would be useless to resist an invasion. in that critical hour Guisan was to SW what Churchill was to your country. he mad us all feel that it was far, far better to go down fighting than to surrender'.
Guisan died 15 years later and was buried in Lausanne on April 12, 1960.  'the world outside, writes Mr Kimche, if it had ever heard of General Guisan, had long forgotten him. but in the Swiss homes, without orders or instructions, without designation, over 200,000 former soldiers of the General donned their full dress uniforms, put on their black bands of mourning, and travelled to Lausanne at their own expense to pay a last tribute such as was given to no other war commander anywhere. for these 200,000 Swiss knew what they - and the world - owed to Henri Guisan, their General'.

no attempt to estimate the nature and extent of the influence of the mountains on the Swiss would be complete which omitted all reference to the Second World War, and to the effect of the mountain Reduit on Swiss morale. 'THE FACT THAT WE COULD RETIRE INTO THE REDUIT, a Swiss remarked to me, AND HOLD OUT PERHAPS FOR YEARS, WAS ALL IMPORTANT FOR OUR MORAL'. (note - what a picture in this world of the FACT that God is our constant ROCK, REFUGE, FORTRESS, STRONGHOLD!, truly a SHELTER in the time of storm, a Rock in a weary land!

Chapter 15 - The Mountain Way of Life

SW is today an independent country mainly because the Habsburgs found it far more difficult to bring pressure on their subjects in the Alpine valleys than on their subjects in the plains. the mountains foster among mountain dwellers a spirit of independence. the fathers of the Swiss Confederation  were men of the mountains who instinctively resisted the attempt to govern them from the plains. they did not willingly accept any authority other than the authority of those whom they themselves had chosen to administer their own affairs. the story of William Tell enshrines the race memories of a collective rather than of an individual attitude. The Landvogt Gessler, who Tell slew, was hated not because he was an Austrian, for the founders of SW were not nationalists as that term is now understood, but because he had been appointed by the Habsburgs to impose Habsburg government on the stubborn men of the mountains. the spirit which created SW independence still survives in the mountains of SW. in the fourth year of the II World War a local paper in the Grisons reported the indignant protest of a mountain peasant against the necessary controls which the Government could not avoid imposing. 'How can one speak, he exclaimed, of freedom when one can't even fatten a calf with a special permit or sell a little bit of land without permission from the State? what is the use of such regulations. the Landvogt Gessler said, 'I won't allow peasants to build houses without my permission'.
the word 'democracy', which is perverted by the Communists, their so-called 'popular democracies' being neither democracies nor popular, is far from being a precise term even in the free world. a more exact classification of democracies is indeed long overdue. even in a small country such as SW there are not only differences in the democratic governments of the different

150 Cantons which are recognized officially in the words employed to differentiate, for instance, the landes gemeinde from other forms of democratic government, but also differences of attitude as yet undefined in actual terms, the difference, for instance, between what i suggest might be described as personal and impersonal democracies.
the Landesgemeinde, which still function in the mountain Cantons of Glarus, Appenzell and Unterwalden, are assemblies in which every adult citizen meets and approves or rejects laws submitted to the entire adult citizenship of the Canton. this is indeed government of the people by the people for the people, and not government of the people by a political party mainly for the supporters of that party. 'where the entire people' writes Dr Richard Weiss in his fascinating book, Volkskunde der Schweiz,  'stands shoulder to shoulder and almost every man knows every other member of the community, wher the administration is from man to man rather than from office to office, from mouth to mouth and not from paper to paper, as it still is in the Landesgemeinde Cantons of Glarus, appenzell and Unterwalden, there is still a close contact between Home and state.  there one still says 'Land' when one means State and Home'.
this mountain democracy of the Berglers, as the mountain men describe themselves, is not a manufactured constitution imposed from above, like the democratic constitutions imposed on India and Nigeria in imitation of the west. it is an organic democracy which has evolved naturally and has its popular roots in local government in the various Gemeinde which are responsible for local affairs, such as the Kirchgemeinde and Schulgemeinde. patriotism begins, as Burke somewhere says, with our feeling for the little platoon' of which we are a member. the contrast between what I have called personal as opposed to impersonal democracy is reflected in the Berglers' attitude to the State. whereas the urban proletariat seek to change the State and transform it from a bourgeois-capitalistic into a Socialist of Marxist State, the peasant dislikes the State as such. the very word State did not exist in the old folk language, to the Bergler the word suggests taxes, , innumerable forms to fill up and the modern successors of the old Bailiffs, the Habsburg Vogte. as a

151  result, there has always been a cleavage between the laws imposed by the State and the customs and ethical codes which have evolved organically in the community. hence the popular saying that Orstbrauch is superior to Landrecht.
Newman's contrast between 'real assent' and 'notional assent' could be illustrated by the contrast between the notional assent which the Bergler gives to what the law enjoins and his real assent to the code of the community. a Bergler gives to what the law enjoins and his real assent to the code of the community. a Bergler who lived in one of the valleys of the Bundner Oberland, whose southern mountains divide SW from Italy, was convicted of smuggling. his righteous indignation was passionate in its sincerity. he explained that he had no other profession and that he had been a smuggler since the age of 16 and had a wife and children to support. he might have committed an offence against Landrecht but he had acted in accordance with Ortsbrouch.

'those who, to quote Burke once again, are so preoccupied with the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature' tend to equate democracy with egalitarianism. democracy is only egalitarian in so far as elections are decided by the egalitarian principle of one man one vote, but man is a hierarchical animal and snobbery is the key to evolution, for if our ape-like ancestors had been less anxious to climb the social ladder, we should still be climbing trees.

in SW, as elsewhere, the egalitarianism of the sinner which is inspired by resentment of superiority,'I'm as good as you are, is more common than the egalitarianism of the saint which is based on humility, 'You're as good as I am',  and the Berglers have always been quick to condemn any pretentions acquired by those who had iced with the great world. in the 17th century the Grisons held the key to the Valtelline, the strategically important valley coveted both by the French and the Austrians. ambassadors from the Grisons were treated with great honour at the French Court and some of them were painted in their ambassadorial robes, but in the family portraits which were displayed in their homes they were indistinguishable so far as clothes were concerned from their fellow citizens.
there was nothing egalitarian about the republican simplicity which would have made it impossible
for one of the leading citizens of the Grisons, which was then an independent State, to hang on the walls of his own home a portrait of himself in the

152  court dress which he wore at the Court of the French King. nor was the official who posted the results of a ski race in which the Spanish Prince, H.R.H. Prince Alonso de Orleans-Bourbon, had apostle of egalitarianism. a mild comment of mine on 'Bourbon, had competed and who described him as Bourbon, Alf, a doctrinaire apostle of egalitarianism. a mild comment of mine on 'Bourbon, Alf' elicited from another Swiss the retort, 'we Swiss are not interested in titles.  'Why then, I asked, is one of the competitors described on the result list as 'Dr Roth'?..'He earned the title of 'Doctor',  but the Prince's title came out of the bed'.  'so did the doctor's title, I retorted. 'Brains are just as much an accident of birth as the title of Prince.' but my friend was unconvinced.

it would, however, be wrong to assume that achievement is all that counts with Berglers and that the Bergler hierarchy ignores all 'aus dem Bett' qualifications. in Grindelwald, those who can trace theri descent from the first settlers who migrated from the Lotschental in the 13th century, feel themselves very much the superiors of those whose forebears emigrated from the shores of lake Brienz and settled in the valley in the 18th century and both groups refer with disdain to recent arrivals as Zuehagaschlingget, which may be rendered, 'those who have slunk in'. in Murren the old Murren families will often foregather and inveigh against the fact that most of the money in Murren goes into the pockets of the Fetzel, a pejorative term applied to those who are not Murrenites by birth but who have acquired hotels or shops in Murren.
in many mountain valleys the Burgers constitute an oligarchy based on birth. every Bergler has the right to vote in elections for the Gemeinde which is responsible for the affairs of the community, but you do not acquire merely by residence any right to join the Burgerschaft, which is often a considerable property owner. in Zermatt, for instance, the Burgerschaft not only owns the grazing rights of the cattle alps but also two hotels, the hotel on the Riffelberg and the Zermatterhof in Zermatt.
Zermatt was created as a tourist centre by Alexander Seiler, who was a Burger of the little village of Blitzingen in the Upper Rhone Valley. his application to become a Burger of Zermatt was refused. though a Valaisian, and though the Burger of a village less than 100 miles from Zermatt, he was still

153  regarded as a quasi-foreigner. he appealed to the Canton of Valais, who fixed a sum which he would be required to pay to become a Burger and insisted that he be admitted. the Burgers appealed to the Nationalrat in Berne (one of the two houses of Parliament) and when they supported the Canton, the Burgerschaft appealed to the Bundesrat (the Cabinet), the Bundesversammlung (both houses of Parliament) and finally to the Federal Court of Appeal in Lausanne, which confirmed the findings of the Bundesrat, Nationalrat and Cantonal government. but it was not until the Swiss Government sent a platoon of soldiers to Zermatt that the Burgers gave in. that was on april 7, 1889,  but the main fight did not end with the admission of the Seilers. when the Gornergrat railway was built, the Burgers were delighted that the railway passed conveniently close to the Riffelberg Hotel, which they owned, but was separated from the Riffelalp Hotel, owned by the Seilers, by land which the Burgers owned. the Seilers opened negotiations to buy the necessary land to build a little road from the Riffelalp station to their hotel, but the Burgers refused to sell. the Seilers thereupon asked the Federal Government for a concession to build a RAILWAY  from the Riffelalp station to their hotel. this concession was granted. the necessary land for the railway was expropriated by the Federal Government and the little electric tram which transports luggage from the station to the hotel is,in theory, the railway for which the Seilers obtained the concession.

now, as I have said, Alexander Seiler belonged to the same Canton as the Zermatter Burgers, but he might as well have been a foreigner. I remember once reminding the organizer of a race in a famous Oberland centre that according to one of the international rules, for which I was in fact responsible, the referee had to be a foreigner. 'but we did appoint a foreigner', exclaimed my friend. in this case the 'foreigner' came from Berne.
some of the fiercest mountain feuds are not between valley and valley but between parties in the same mountain village. nothing could be more misleading than the widely held conception of the Swiss as rather dull, worthy, law-abiding democrats, the conception which finds expression in the remark of one of the characters in graham Greene's The Third Man,  'the Swiss have had 5 centuries of peace and democracy and what have the produced? the cuckoo clock.' during these 5 centuries

154  of alleged peace, SW has been the scene of 3 civil wars and 7 wars against foreign powers. prior to the 19th century SW  was not a democracy but a federation of quasi-sovereign cantons, some of which were democratic, some of which were governed by oligarchies and some of which were subject cantons, Vaud, for instance, which was governed by Berne. finally, though cuckoo clocks are now made in SW, they originated in the Black Forest and the Swiss who are rightly proud of their watch industry much resent being credited with the paternity of the cuckoo clock.

a great charm of SW is its cultural variety. there are, of course, many Swiss who conform to the popular conception of worthy law-abiding democrats, but this particular type was not over-represented among those citizens of Saxon who supply the Swiss market with fruit, and who resented the climatic injustice which enables Italian fruit to ripen earlier and reach the Swiss market before the fruit grown in SW. their protest took the form of burning a freight train full of Italian fruit on its way through Saxon.
there are mountain valleys in which local politics evoke passions and violence reminiscent of city feuds in Renaissance Italy. there is a certain village, which I do not propose to name, in a canton which I prefer not to indicate, the report of whose elections in a local paper circulating through that region ended with the words, 'we are glad to report that nobody was killed during the elections', but this reassuring statement was followed in the Stop Press news column with the statement , 'We regret to report that there was one fatal casualty of which we were unaware when we wrote our report, but only one, which is an improvement on last year'.
the elections are important because of the spoils system. the party in power have a certain amount of patronage to dispose of. there are mountain villages where 40 %  of the population belong to one family clan and another 40% to another family clan. each clan has its own candidates for every post and it's own local Wirtschaft. even the cows are sometimes made to feel the results of the collective vendetta.
mountain valleys are, of course, feeling the effects of the wind of change which sweeps up from the towns and plains. in the Inner Oberland, many of the Berglers, including most of those

155  who work on railways, were captured for the socialist Party by two brilliant schoolmasters, but the Bergler socialist is very different from the urban Socialist. the Bergler is never a marxist.

moreover, even in those mountain valleys where the two-clan system still prevais, the multiple-party system is gradually being adopted, even though it is often the target for mockery by those who feel that the traditional two-party feud is ideal. Dr. Weiss quotes in this connection the uninhibited comment on the multi-party system in an open discussion by a pratigauer peasant (note- quote in german? Swiss?) I am no expert on Swiss dialects, but the sense of the above seems to me clear:  'formerly there were only 2 parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives and for that reason it worked well.  now there is a whole lot of parties, but Mother Helvetia has not more than 2 breasts. I have finished'.
THE INFLUENCE OF MOUNTAINS IN PRESERVING LOCAL CULTURES.
 the Far West Kandahar had just been successfully completed in the Yosemite, and the cup itself, presented by the Kandahar ski Club, had been won by a Swiss, Martin Fopp of Davos. he had spent only a few weeks in America and he was  suffering from an acute attack of homesickness.
'In SW, he said, you travel a few hours and the language changes and the customs change....(that has a charm.  but here you travel 6000 kilometres from New York to San Francisco and you find the same newspaper and the same good and the same people as when you started'.

if he had know America better he would have appreciated the great difference between New York and San Francisco, but it  is undeniable that cultural differences are tending to disappear. in the 19th century the Boston Brahmin, the Kentucky Colonel, the southern aristocrat and the Far West Pioneer were sharply differentiated types, but today radio and television and other means of mass communication are eroding regional differences. the same process is at work in SW, but it meets with more resistance. the great mission of the mountains is to

156  keep people apart, and it is the fierce sense of independence, native to mountain valleys, which preserves cultural differences. every true Swiss can make his own the prayer,...(May God preserve our variety in unity).
there is indeed, as Martin Foop truly said, a great Reiz in all the sharp contrast of this mountain land. you can travel in few hours from Zurich which is industrial, progressive and increasingly secular in its dominant ethos, to mountain valleys in Catholic SW, such as the Maderanertal, in which the middle ages still linger.
we are assured by St Paul that 'evil communications corrupt good manners'. maybe, but good communications corrupt them even more rapidly, every improvement in communication, particularly in the dissemination of ideas, has an erosive effect on regional cultures. compare, for instance, the statues and altars and stained glass prior to the period when the mass distribution of religious prints began, with the pictures and statues of Our Lord and the saints which date from the second half of the 19th century. the older artists were familiar with the work of their predecessors in their native valley or perhaps in some neighbouring town; they were not copyists. even their least accomplished work was not wholly derivative. it had the rude vigour of genuine creative work. but in the 19th and still more in the 20th century, the market was flooded by mass-produced religious pictures, prints and statures, with the deplorable results we all know.

THE FACTUAL ELEMENT IN THE HALLER-ROUSSEAU IDEALIZATION OF THE BERGLER
Haller's idealization, which Rousseau adopted, of the Alpine peasant, uncorrupted by ambition and uninfected by avarice, was not wholly devoid of factual basis. it is, of course, absurd to maintain that the peasant is uninfected by avarice, but of all forms of avarice land hunger is the least ignoble, the land hunger so eloquently described by De Tocqueville.
'the French peasant before the Revolution was, so De Tocqueville declares,...''he is so passionately in love with the earth that he devotes all his savings to buying it and buys it whatever the cost. he buries his heart with the seed. this little corner of the earth which belongs to him in all the vast universe fills him with pride and independence'. L'ancien Regime, Liv. II, Ch, I.

157  an important test of a healthy society is the proper distribution of power between town and country. Stalin's attempt to liquidate the Kulak would have been impossible had not all power in the State been transferred to the urban Marxists. in SW the Bergler has till great influence politically,  for the Swiss still agree, in the main, with the author of that mediaeval book, A Christian Admonition, who wrote: 'THE FARMER MUST IN ALL THINGS BE PROTECTED AND ENCOURAGED, FOR ALL DEPEND ON HIS LABOUR from the Emperor to the humblest of mankind, and his handiwork is particularly honourable and well pleasing to God'.

every great culture is born within the economy of the small town, village and farm...

it was because Virgil 'knew the country gods' and because Wordsworth's 'daily teachers had been woods and hills' that Virgil and Wordsworth are of the company of immortals. it was no accident that the greatest poet of classical antiquity should have written the Georgics which is not only noble poetry but also a practical guide to farming.
few would deny that an urban civilization is greater danger to religion than life on the land. Jefferson, perhaps the greatest of the Founding Fathers of America, said that the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts...I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man'.

Dr Alex Carrel, one of the world's greatest biologists and Nobel prizewinner, in his famous book, Man the Unknown, analyses the evil influence of an industrial civilization on mankind. he was particularly preoccupied  with the flight from beauty. here are some quotations from man the Unknown:
'the descendants of the men who conceived and erected the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel no longer understand its splendour. they cheerfully accept the indescribable ugliness of the

158  modern houses in Normandy and Brittany, and especially in the Paris suburbs'.

'during the history of a civilization, the sense of beauty, the moral sense, grows, reaches its optimum, declines and disappears'.
'despite the marvels of scientific civilization, human personality tends to dissolve'.
'the peasant owning his land, the fisherman owning his boat, although obliged to work hard, are nevertheless masters of themselves and their time.' (these above quotes on pp. 130-1;293-4)

the Bergler is a democrat but he is a Tory democrat. he believes in progress but he does not despise tradition. he would agree with Burke that 'a people will not look forward to posterity who never looked back to their ancestors. a disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman'.  now Burke alone among his contemporaries diagnosed the true motive of the Jacobins, which was to transfer the balance of power from the country to the towns, and to use the country as a 'mere sustenance for the towns', a process completed in soviet Russia but firmly checked in SW where the interests of the peasants are still treated with great respect.
the Bergler in touch with nature is realistic in his political outlook, for Virgil's justissima tellus encourages no utopian illusions. the 'most just earth' gives nothing for nothing. the peasnt knows that man must sow before he can reap and that a man must not only vote but also work for 'the more abundant life'.
there was, as I have tried to show in the preceding pages, some factual basis for Haller's idealization of the Bergler religion and the natural virtues have less to contend with in the mountains than in the cities. even today divorce is not fashionable in mountain valleys and marriages tend, in the main, to be stable. I know, of course, that the Bergler is in a state of transition, and that some of my observations are ceasing to be true of the modern Bergler. I remember feeling depressed by the evidence of change in the Lotschental. on the January day in 1909, when we climbed slowly from Kippel to the Lotschenjucke, the Lotschental was a lovely remote valley unconnected either by rail or motor road with the outer world. today the railway
159  station of Goppenstein on the Lotschberg line is at the entrance to the Lotschental, and a motor road penetrates as far as Blatten. in my youth there was not a house in the valley which one could not look at but with pleasure, but today the valley is desecrated by some very ugly modern buildings.

'you ask me, a Swiss friend of mine said,  'whether the influence of the tourist on the Bergler has in the main been good. well, you know the Lotschental. 100 years ago, life was hard but the men and women who lived in this remote valley were in the main happy. they had few wants. there was the Church and the great Feast Days which gave colour to life and still do and the peasants would meet together and drink wine and sing in chorus, but now they have become CONSCIOUS OF A LARGER LIFE WITH MORE PLEASURES AND THEY ARE BECOMING DISSATISFIED. there is now a plan to develop winter sports in the Lotschental and they will run up ski lifts and there will be cocktail bars and perhaps a winter sports variant of La Dolce Vita and where will it end?

yes, the winds of change are blowing through these mountain valleys, bringing with them the seeds of scepticism in ultimate values, the scepticism from which great civilizations have perished in the past, for as Dr. Monk Gibbon in his delightful autobiography, Mount Ida, rightly says, 'THE TRUTH IS THAT A CIVILIZATION COLLAPSES WHEN THE ESSENTIAL REVERENCE FOR ABSOLUTE VALUES WHICH RELIGION GIVES DISAPPEARS.  Rome discovered that in the days of her decadence. men live on the accumulated  Faith  of the past as well as on its accumulated self-discipline. overthrow these and nothing seems missing at first, a few sexual taboos, a little of the prejudices of a Cato, these have gone by the board. but SOMETHING ELSE HAS GONE AS WELL, THE MORTAR WHICH HELD SOCIETY TOGETHER, THE I-N-T-E-G-R-I-T-Y (def. Latin integer (whole) and -ity state of...state of wholeness) - OF THE INDIVIDUAL SOUL; then the rats come out of their holes and begin burrowing under the foundations and there is nothing to withstand them.'

the rats are burrowing under the foundations of the Bergler life, but though these foundations need to be reinforced, they have not yet been irreparably undermined.