“For heathen heart that puts his trust
In reeking tube and iron shard”?
Is not a merry smile a thing of great gravity in the world’s economy, and may not a hearty laugh be as potent as a bloody battle? Why, at a time when kings and their peoples slept booted and spurred, jesters were paid to break the horrid spell with laughter. True, the world called, and still calls, these merrymakers “fools”, but the sooner a foolish world recasts its mode of thinking in these matters, the sooner will it realize how low and odious is its recognized god of war. Lucerne holds excellent and moving proof of this in the Museggstrasse, where stands the International Museum of War and Peace, founded by the Russian, Johann von Bloch. In this Museum there are things which, although they represent what have long been looked upon as among the noblest elements in serious history, come as a dreadful and a useful shock to such as pin their faith to the vaunted advance in intellectuality, humanity, and civilization of this present age.
In Lucerne there is much excuse for pensiveness upon this subject. I know no town where the problem of Peace and War presents itself more suggestively. Not that Lucerne is a hotbed of that militarism which is apt to think of Peace as “sweet poison for the age’s tooth”; for excepting a subdued rattle of arms from the barracks near the Spreuer-Brücke, and an occasional drilling of recruits in the recesses of the Gütsch woods, little or nothing is seen here of the actual cult of warfare. Peace pervades Lucerne, and War is evident upon all hands as an irresistibly suggestive reminiscence. There could be no more appropriate home for the Bloch Museum. Fritschi is the town’s hero, not for the part he played in the Burgundian Wars, but for his drolleries; a sham castle-fortress stands picturesquely by the steamboat quay; the Glacier Garden, witness of neolithic man’s grim struggles as far back, possibly, as 700,000 years, is now a sylvan resort of pleasure-seeking tourists; and the soft-blue distant Alps of Uri and Unterwalden send to the town subdued echoes of past tyranny and revolt. On every hand is all that could be wished for from peace; and warfare, in the form of battlements and towers, sits crumbling upon the Musegg slopes—swords turned into ploughshares, the past’s frowning exigencies left to serve the present’s decorative sense and purpose. Truly the Bloch Museum has found a fitting home, and for long years may this fitness endure, spreading wide its virtues to the four corners of the globe and inspiring men to live up to that high level which, in their quiet moments, they so persistently claim for modern civilization.
And yet, because something finer is expected of the present than of the past there is no right rhyme or reason for heaping wholesale abuse upon the latter’s crudely drastic ways. We may quite well admit how much of actual beauty arises from previous horrors. As, surely, few can visit Lucerne’s unique Glacier Garden without being impressed with the fact of how much the loveliness and grandeur of the town’s surrounding scenery is indebted to that dismal and terrific epoch, of which these giants’ cauldrons, mills and mill-stones are the witnesses, so, surely, few can stroll up to the Drei Linden, or through the cathedral-like pine woods of the Gütsch to Sonnenberg, and survey
THE BÜRGENSTOCK FROM VITZNAU
the lovely reaches of the Lake and the blue borderline of the Alps beyond without feeling the enormous and quiet benefits which to-day are enjoyed because of the sanguinary struggles of a bygone age. Nor, surely, can many stand by the shady water pool and gaze at the rock-cliff wherein is sculptured Thorwaldsen’s famous masterpiece and not be sensible of how large a debt is laid upon to-day’s tranquillity by such past incidents which in a sense were so ugly and so vicious. “Honour to you, brave men”, says Carlyle with stirring eloquence, referring to this same monument in honour of the 800 officers and men of the Swiss Guard, slain at the Tuileries in defending Louis XVI, very many of whom were natives of Lucerne and district (which was noted for its so-called mercenaries)—
“Honour to you, brave men; honourable pity, through long times! Not martyrs were ye; and yet almost more. He was no King of yours, this Louis; and he forsook you like a King of shreds and patches; ye were but sold to him for some poor sixpence a-day; yet would ye work for your wages, keep your plighted word. The work now was to die; and ye did it. Honour to you, O Kinsmen; and may the old Deutsch Biederkeit and Tapferkeit, and valour which is Worth and Truth, be they Swiss, be they Saxon, fail in no age! Not bastards; true-born were these men: sons of the men of Sempach, of Murten, who knelt, but not to thee, O Burgundy! Let the traveller, as he passes through Lucerne, turn aside to look at their monumental Lion; not for Thorwaldsen’s sake alone. Hewn out of living rock, the Figure rests there, by the still Lake-waters, in lullaby of distant-tinkling rance-des-vaches, the granite Mountains dumbly keeping watch all round; and, though inanimate, speaks.”