The Gothard and St. Maurice guards use ski, and ski-ing detachments are about to be attached to the brigades of mountain infantry located all along the range of the Alps.
Many junior Swiss officers have made themselves proficient in the new mountaineering by joining military ski courses. Military patrol competitions meet with much favour at the large ski gatherings.
For all that, the adaptability of ski to military purposes is not very great in the High Alps. Still they are called upon to become quite a consideration in border defence or attack. Small troops of skiers could pass easily from one side to another of the Alps, occupying flying posts of observation, and even raiding places where the defence would have preferred to put its own outposts, had it not allowed itself to be forestalled. The Alpine Club huts afford sufficient shelter for summarily equipped detachments numbering from twenty to forty men.
Bodies of troops crossing the Alps in winter by the passes available for considerable military transport would enjoy a distinct advantage if the outlet of the passes had been previously occupied by half or quarter companies of bold ski-ing infantry pouncing, as it were, from the skies upon small snow-bound places with summer hotels ready for occupation and better stocked with means of subsistence than one would at first be led to expect. In some Swiss Alpine villages particularly, large supplies are often accumulated for the next summer season, and in others much merchandise is stored up to accommodate the Italian smugglers whose “exports” from Switzerland are all the year round a source of profit to their purveyors.
AT THE FOOT OF COL D’HÉRENS.
To face p. 279.
Swiss ski-runners, by expeditions like my own, have proved that the glaciers may be used, within strict limits, as highways for rapid and unexpected military movements. Till now it was assumed that crevasses, iced rocks, and piles upon piles of corniced snow would offer insuperable obstacles to any military action. But the crevasses—as the reader now knows—are most hermetically sealed. To the expert and wary runner the snow opposes no greater barrier than to the pedestrian in summer. Does not history teach how foot-soldiers have en masse, with artillery and baggage, been moved to and fro across the Alps? Henceforth, military runners may be trusted to scour the ranges, undetected, cutting communications one day at the St. Bernard hospice and opening fire three days later upon the Simplon hospice, hanging alternately on the only two military roads joining Switzerland and Italy between the St. Gothard forts and French Savoy.
Those raiding parties could be followed by considerable parties of transport men, carrying fresh ammunition and supplies.
Such places as Bourg St. Pierre, Fionnay, Arolla, Zinal, Zermatt, Saas, would be, from the Italian point of view, worth seizing and manning at the outset of a winter campaign. From the point of view of a Swiss advance aiming at laying hold of the southern outlets of the military roads before the enemy could move up its advanced columns, those places would be valuable bases for the auxiliary services waiting upon the raiding detachments.