The Swiss Republic

by Boyd Winchester

If men have but some share of comfort and property in the country, they will abide there, for that is really the place provided for them. “Towns, the haunt of pride, luxury, and inequality, foster the spirit of revolt: the country begets calm and concord, the spirit of order and tradition.” Under the old Roman system the city was the important unit; under the Teutonic element the land was brought into prominence and the possessor of it into power. The dominant member of society was the landowner and not the citizen. In ancient society the “citizen” need own no land; in the modern society of the feudal age the “gentleman” could not be such without owning land.

CHAPTER XII.
MILITARY SERVICE AND ORGANIZATION.

Attached alike to liberty and to arms, the Swiss are no less famous for their undaunted intrepidity than their simple and pure democracy. From early times the hardy mountaineers of the Alps were eminently and splendidly martial. History is full of their steadiness and bravery on the field of battle. When Rome was in its highest military glory, its armies under the Consul Lucius Cassius were routed by the Helvetians on the shores of Lake Leman, 111 B.C. The two armies are supposed to have met about where the Rhone falls into the lake, and the conquerors of all Italy, the masters of Greece and Macedonia, who had carried their victorious armies over Asia and Africa, were overcome by a people hitherto unknown. Julius Cæsar speaks of their “military virtue and constant warfare with the Germans.” Livy and Tacitus refer to them as a people originally of the Gallic nation, “renowned for their valor and their exploits in war.” About the middle of the fourteenth century attention began to be attracted towards these mountaineers, and great was the wonder that cavalry, which made the only effective part of the federal armies of those ages, should be routed by men on foot; that warriors sheathed in complete steel should be overpowered by naked peasants who wore no defensive armor, and were irregularly provided with pikes, halberds, and clubs, for the purposes of attack; above all, it seemed a species of miracle that knights and nobles of the highest birth should be defeated by mountaineers and shepherds. The repeated victories of the Swiss over troops having on their side numbers and discipline, and the advantage of the most perfect military equipment then known and confided in, plainly intimated that a new principle of civil organization as well as of military movements had arisen amid the stormy regions of Helvetia. The signal victory over Charles the Bold of Burgundy, in which they routed the celebrated Burgundian ordonnance, constituting the finest body of chivalry of Europe, demonstrated their capacity as infantry. This, no doubt, contributed to the formation of that invincible Spanish infantry which, under the Great Captain and his successors, may be said to have decided the fate of Europe for more than half a century. The “Swiss whiskered Infantry” became distinguished in all the continental wars by pre-eminent valor and discipline. Their principal weapon was a pike about eighteen feet long; and, forming in solid battalions, which, bristling with spears all around, received the technical appellation of the hedgehog, they presented an invulnerable front on every quarter, and received unshaken the most desperate charges of the steel-clad cavalry on their terrible array of pikes. In the Granadine war (1484), among the volunteers that flocked to the Spanish camp was a corps of Swiss infantry, who are thus simply described by Pulgar: “There joined the royal standard a body of men from Switzerland, a country in upper Germany; these men were bold of heart and fought on foot. As they were resolved never to turn their backs upon the enemy, they wore no defensive armor except in front, by which means they were less encumbered in fight.” The astonishing success of the French in the Italian wars (1494) was largely imputable to the free use and admirable organization of their infantry, whose strength lay in the Swiss soldiers they had. Machiavelli ascribes the misfortunes of his nation chiefly to its exclusive reliance on cavalry; this service, during the whole of the Middle Ages, being considered among the European nations so important that the horse was styled by way of eminence “the battle.” The arms and discipline of the Swiss were necessarily different from those of other European nations. The hill-sides and the mountain-tops and the deep valleys of Switzerland have felt as frequently as any part of Europe the mailed footstep of the warrior, and run as red with his blood. Zschokke, in his history, remarks that, in its wars of the last five hundred years, but particularly those growing out of the great French revolution, “battle-field touched battle-field.” During the long struggle for their liberties, they found that their poverty, with at that time a barren and ill-cultivated country, put it out of their power to bring into the field any body of horse capable of facing the enemy. Necessity compelled them to place all their confidence in infantry. With breastplates and helmets as defensive armor, together with long spears, halberds, and heavy swords as weapons of offence, they formed into large battalions, ranged in deep and close array, presenting on every side a formidable front to the enemy. They repulsed the Austrians, they broke the Burgundian Gendarmerie, and, when called to Italy, bore down with irresistible force every enemy that attempted to oppose them. Bacon, in his “History of King Henry VII.,” says: “To make good infantry, it required men bred not in a servile fashion but in some free manner. Therefore, if a state run most to noblemen and gentlemen, and that the husbandmen and ploughmen be but as their workfolks or laborers, you may have a good cavalry, but never good, stable bands of foot, in so much as they are enforced to employ bands of Swiss for their battalions of foot.” It was a trusty sword these brave and hardy peasants offered. Some thought that nature certainly only meant the Swiss for two classes, soldiers and shepherds. It is easy to convert husbandmen into good soldiers. According to the institutions of the Lacedæmonians, the employments of husbandmen and soldiers were united, as alike the highest training-schools for the qualities that make the best citizen and the best soldier. The plough was readily exchanged for the sword by those engaged in peaceful occupations that seemed to place them at an immeasurable distance from the profession of a soldier. Happy had it been for Switzerland had she gained nothing beyond simple liberty in her contest with her ancient masters, and had continued to cherish pure and healthful feelings. When peace had crowned their heroic struggles, their warlike spirit sought in foreign states the excitement and military glory which were denied them at home. The cravings of avarice and the thirst of plunder are inseparable from the pride of victory. While the hardy mountaineers exulted in the defeat and humiliation of Austrian chivalry, they purchased their triumph, for a time at least, at the expense of the simplicity of their nature. They accepted the dangers and privations of soldiers fighting battles in which their own country bore no part. They became the ready agents of the highest paymaster. These military capitulations dated from the period of the Burgundian war. Treaties were often concluded between foreign governments and one or more Cantons.[66] They made a trade of war, letting themselves out as mercenaries. The Holy Father himself entered the list of bargainers, and in 1503 Pope Julius III. engaged the first of those Swiss life-guards whose name became famous in Europe. From Louis XI. to Louis XV. the Swiss are said to have furnished for the French service over half a million men. In the wars between the French king and the Emperor Maximilian, in 1516, the Swiss fought on both sides. In its last extremity, it was neither in its titled nobility nor its native armies that the French throne found fidelity, but in the free-born peasant soldiers of Luzern. Of the undaunted ranks of the Swiss guard, defending the French royal family at the Tuileries on the 10th of August, 1792, seven hundred and eighty-six officers and soldiers fell in the place where they stood, unconquered even in death; and for two days their bodies lay in the gardens of the palace and the streets near by, exposed to the derision and insults of the frantic populace.

“Go, stranger! and at Lacedæmon tell

That here, obedient to her laws, we fell.”

To their memory a colossal lion, twenty-eight feet long by eighteen feet high, carved by Thorwaldsen out of the face of a solid sandstone rock, in high relief, was dedicated in 1821 at Luzern. The lion is holding the fleur-de-lis in his paws, which he is endeavoring to protect, though mortally wounded by a spear which still remains in his side. Above the figure is the inscription: “Helvetiorum fidei ac virtuti.” When the afternoon sun falls upon this effigy, it is reflected beautifully in the dark pool close below; the gray rock rises perpendicularly some little height above and ends in a crown of acacias and drooping bushes and creepers.

The fame of the Swiss, in every war which desolated Europe from the fifteenth century down, rose to an extraordinary pitch; but this influence, which, as the hired soldiers of belligerent powers, they exercised in the affairs of Europe, was neither conducive to the weal of the state nor worthy of the Swiss people. Addison wrote in 1709 of them: “The inhabitants of the country are as great curiosities as the country itself; they generally hire themselves out in their youth, and if they are musket-proof till about fifty, they bring home the money they have got, and the limbs they have left, to pass the rest of their time among their native mountains.” He also relates that “one of the gentlemen of the place told me, by way of boast, that there were now seven wooden legs in his family; and that for these four generations there had not been one in his line that carried a whole body with him to the grave.”

From their being so frequently in the personal service of foreign potentates, the name of Switzer with some writers became synonymous with guards or attendants on a king. The king in “Hamlet” says: “Where are my Switzers? Let them guard the door.” In 1594, Nashe, in his “Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem,” states that “Law, Logicke, and the Switzers may be hired to fight for anybody.” Even the French were so ungrateful as to chide the Swiss by saying, “We fight for honor, but you fight for money;” to which the Switzer rejoined, “It is only natural that each of us, like the rest of the world, should fight for what he has not got.” These Swiss soldiers were in great demand and liberally paid. They were not only hardy and patient of fatigue, but bold in action and obedient in discipline. The very sight of them alarmed the enemy, suggesting a passage in Tacitus of which every soldier will probably feel the truth, “The eye is the first to be vanquished in battle.”[67] Then these troops were as noted for their fidelity to the service they engaged in as for their courage; and in all their history there is scarce to be found any example of treachery.

From the dawn of the Reformation there was produced a material change, and its effects were chiefly visible in the improvement of moral feeling and the growing aversion to this mercenary service. The Constitution of 1848 altogether swept away this system of military capitulations. At the time of the adoption of the constitution there was only one such convention in force, being that of the King of Naples and several of the Cantons; but public sentiment was so greatly aroused by their participation in the defeat of the revolution, that the Cantons were compelled to recall them, and thus the last of these capitulations came to an end. There were certain bodies of troops who, bearing the Swiss name or composed for the most part of Swiss soldiers, still continued to fight for foreign governments; and to prevent this, as far as possible, a federal law in 1859 prohibited every Swiss citizen from entering, without the consent of the Federal Council, those bodies of foreign troops which were not regarded as national troops of the respective states. This did not hinder individual citizens from enrolling themselves in the national troops of a foreign state. To further avoid any complication of foreign relations through such military connection, the cantonal constitutions first forbade the reception of pensions and titles from foreign states; and a similar provision was embodied in the federal Constitution of 1874, whereby “members of the federal government, civil and military officials of the Confederation, and federal representatives or commissioners, shall not accept from foreign governments any pension, salary, title, present, or decoration. Decorations shall not be worn in the Swiss army, nor shall titles conferred by foreign governments be borne. Every officer, under-officer, and soldier shall be forbidden to accept any such distinction.”

The first approach towards the establishment of a federal army was after Swiss independence had been recognized at the peace of Westphalia, when the Confederation in 1648 adopted an arrangement called the “Defensional,” by which, in case of urgent danger, the Federal Diet could call upon the several Cantons to supply troops for the general defence, in such numbers as were stipulated. In 1848 it was proposed that the Confederation should be charged with the entire military administration. This was rejected. In 1874 the effort was renewed, and this most important power was substantially vested in the Confederation by the constitution adopted that year, which contains the following provisions: