“For what is Nature? Ring her changes round.
Her three flat notes are water, plants, and ground.
Prolong the strain and, spite of all your chatter,
The tiresome theme is still ground, plants, and water.”
Be this as it may—and both opinions are at least debatable—the scenery here, around the Rigi, is so bound up with remarkable events and remarkable men that, willy-nilly, some sort of acquaintance has to be made with them.
Among the twenty-two lakes which go to the making of this wondrous panorama are at least two that we shall hear of when we come into closer contact with William Tell and his momentous age. Away to the left of the Rossberg, and beyond and above the Lake of Zug, is the little Aegeri-See, upon whose shores the epoch-marking battle of Morgarten was fought in 1315, some seven years after the secret banding together of the men of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden to throw off the tyrannic yoke of Austria. The trouble, which had been brewing through many years of oppression, came to a head when the men of Schwyz attacked and pillaged the Abbey of Einsiedeln (to the east of the Lake of Aegeri, and still a famous place of pilgrimage), taking the monks prisoners, because the Abbot, under a deed of gift from the Austrian Emperor, claimed the mountain pastures of Schwyz for his cattle. Austria determined to crush this revolt, and on November 15, 1315, the Duke Leopold I raised an army 20,000 strong and marched upon Schwyz.
“The Austrians”, says Alexandre Daguet, in his little primer used in Swiss schools, “were so sure of victory that they had with them carts full of rope with which to bind their prisoners. A noble of the neighbourhood, Henri de Hünenberg, warned the Confederates of the danger which menaced them, and 1300 armed peasants at once posted themselves upon the heights dominating the Lake of Aegeri. The Austrian army climbed laboriously the mountain path, when suddenly blocks of rock were hurled upon
MOUNT PILATUS FROM STANSSTAD
them from the heights, causing frightful disorder in their ranks. Others of the Confederates then attacked the Austrians with clubs and halebards, slaughtering such as were not drowned in the lake. A crowd of nobles bit the dust, and the Duke himself only narrowly escaped death, arriving pâle et effaré the same evening at Winterthour.”
This battle was the young Confederation’s baptism of blood, and on the following 19th of December the secret pact made on the Rütli in 1307 was publicly confirmed at Brunnen.