And felt as though himself were he
On whose sole arm hung victory.”
Thus a seemingly unimportant event in the remote Alps became the key-note of European thought, literature, art, and language; for it inspired not only statesmen, historians, orators, and poets, but painters, sculptors, and composers. It influenced and exercised pen, pencil, and chisel, and expanded the vocabulary; for who has not seen, heard, read Wilhelm Tell in his own or some other language?
The legend of Tell has a companion piece doubtless as mythical to the sceptical, being of the same historic period, and occurring at the battle of Sempach. This was one of the great battles which terminated the long and obstinate struggle begun at Rütli, and, like all other famous achievements, is remembered in connection with a special example of personal self-sacrifice; still it passes historical scrutiny unchallenged, though no better authenticated, and in many respects more contentious than the heroism of Tell. On the 9th of August, 1386, Duke Leopold was marching against Zurich to fight the last battle which Austria presumed to try against the Forest Cantons. He had the flower of the Austrian nobility, 4000 knights and barons, each with his own vassals, forming an army of veterans in columns 20,000 strong. A handful of brave Swiss, numbering 1400 stout and fearless mountaineers, went out on foot to meet them; they came up with the enemy at Sempach. The mail-clad warriors, dismounting from their steeds, presented a solid and impregnable barrier of lances; the Swiss were rudely armed with halberds and morgensterne.[105] According to their ancient custom, they knelt in silent prayer; arising, they placed themselves in column, presenting an angle, and charged. Again and again they dashed against these protruding lances that stood as firm as a wall of stone. Out of their little number sixty had died in vain; hearts seemed ready to fail; the Austrians were beginning to open in order to surround them. At this crisis Arnold Winkelried, “a trusty man amongst the confederates,” dropped his weapon, and, rushing forward, cried out, “I will open a way to freedom; protect my wife and children!”[106] Being of great size and strength, he clutched as many of the enemy’s lances as his arms could embrace, gathered their points and buried them in his bosom, and as he fell drew his enemies with him. Before the Austrians could extract them his companions took advantage of the gap, rushed over his expiring body into the ranks of the enemy; a breach being made in the wall of mailed warriors, what seemed an inevitable defeat was turned into glorious victory. “Heed not the corpse,” says Byron’s Saul to his warriors and chiefs, admonishing them as to what they are to do should the lance and the sword strike them down in the front. Sempach is a story of thrilling heroism, and in little over half a century was followed by the battle of St. Jacob in 1444, when 1600 Swiss met a predatory invasion of the French, a corps of 8000 horse and a large detachment of infantry, in all numbering over 20,000, called Armagnacs, the disbanded mercenaries of the English war, led by the Dauphin, afterwards Louis XI. Though they might have retreated without loss, the Swiss determined rather to perish on the spot, and fought with heroic fury, tearing the enemy’s arrows from their wounds to send them back dripping with blood. Their valor and terrible sacrifice never were surpassed. The Dauphin lost 6000 men; and of the 1600 Swiss, only ten lived to tell the tale, and they were immediately proscribed throughout Switzerland for having deserted their comrades. A monument is erected near the Birs, on the battle-field, consisting of a figure of Helvetia at the top with four dying soldiers on the pedestal, with the inscription: “Our souls to God, our bodies to the enemy.” At Morgarten, in 1315, 1300 Swiss routed Leopold’s army of over 20,000, killing 9000, when
“There were songs and festal fires
On the soaring Alps that night,
When children sprung to greet their sires
From the wild Morgarten fight.”
Then there is the battle fought near Wessen, in the Canton of Glarus, where 350 Swiss attacked 8000 Austrians and gained the field. Eleven pillars are erected on the field of battle to mark the places where the Swiss rallied, for history says they were repulsed ten times, but, rallying the eleventh, broke the enemies’ line and put them to flight with great slaughter. This victory is celebrated every year; the people, in procession, fall upon their knees at each pillar, sing a Kyrie and thank God for so signal a victory. When they come to the last pillar, one of their orators makes a eulogy of the three hundred and fifty, and, when he has finished, reads over a list of their names,—just as the Spartans caused the names of their three hundred to be cut in brass, to transmit their memories to posterity. There are, in addition, such duels of individual valor recorded as men fighting when mortally wounded, like Fontana, of Grisons, who cried out, “Do not stop for my fall, it is but one man the less;” or like John Walla, of Glarus, who met alone and put to flight thirty horsemen. These events, and many others well authenticated and unhesitatingly accepted in Swiss history, sound infinitely more of knight-errantry than the story of Tell.
Macaulay holds that intense patriotism and high courage are peculiar to people congregated in small spaces. Acts of unflinching bravery and of a noble self-immolation in the cause of conscience, duty, and freedom have been conspicuous in Swiss history. As habits of courage are formed by continual exposure to danger, the hazardous state, the perils and hardships which they hourly encountered, braced their nerves to enterprises of hardihood and daring. Turbulent times created a necessity for great sacrifices and daring exploits, and on the same principle, that the supply of a commodity in transactions of commercial life is generally found to be commensurate with the demand, the frequent call for heroic achievements raised up the patriots who were to perform them. There may be something in the deeply religious character of the Swiss favorable to this virtue. Cicero maintained that a belief in the immortality of the soul and a future state of rewards and punishments was indispensable to the steady sacrifice of private interests and passions to the public good. Some, perhaps, in their brighter visions of fancy, would aspire to those blessed abodes amidst the laurel groves of Paradise, which the poet of Mantua has assigned to the self-devoted victims of patriotic enthusiasm: