The army of Chile is a citizen army; its strength, year by year, is under 20,000 men, of whom about half are newly conscripted; but every healthy man over twenty-one years old is due to receive a year’s training, and is as a matter of fact very rapidly made into good fighting material. I have seen extremely smart soldiers turned out in six months’ time in the training camps of Chile.
There is no doubt that in case of need the country could raise and equip a hundred thousand men at least partly trained to arms in a few weeks’ time. Discipline is good, the uniform neat, weapons of modern pattern and well kept. The cavalry is conspicuous for first-class condition in particular; horses and horsemanship are of a remarkably high quality.
The aircraft branch of Chile’s service is being steadily developed; the daring and skill of the Chilean aviator was displayed when Lieutenant Godoy crossed the Andes into the Argentine—the pioneer to perform this hazardous feat.
CHAPTER XIV
IMMIGRATION
The First Immigrants of the South.—Araucanian Lands.
Organised immigration efforts began in Chile just before the middle of the nineteenth century, during the régime of President Bulnes; they ceased within a few years, and recommenced between 1881 and the end of the century: thenceforth the flow has been regulated by a series of laws of strict tendencies. For a number of years the largest contributor of blood to Chile has been Spain, but there are no colonies such as those created by the Brazilian system, newcomers of today usually finding industrial employment in cities, or the coal, nitrate and copper camps. For several years before 1914, when immigration practically ceased, the average entry was less than 2000, of whom at least 75 per cent were Spaniards. Chile’s first batch of regular immigrants arrived in 1850, following the efforts of an energetic agent in Europe. There were 70 German men, 10 women and 5 children in the party, who sailed round the Horn, had a passage of 120 days and were landed at Corral. Both Valdivia and Corral were economically dead at this period; it would perhaps be more exact to say that they had never lived. The sea-port and the riverine city had been maintained as frontier posts against pirates on the ocean and Indians on land during the Spanish colonial days; a small mixed population had grown up as a result of Valdivia’s utilisation as a dumping-ground for convicts from all the West Coast. Evildoers were shipped here as a convenient means of obliteration, and a number never returned north. For thirty years following independence from Spain Valdivia languished, the forts decaying and the soldiers indifferent. There was no connection with the rest of Chile except by sea, for the land of the unsubdued Araucanians lay, a broad belt of forbidden land, below the populous towns of the Central region.
Corral had twenty-eight houses when the Germans landed; Valdivia’s plaza was a rubbish-heap, the streets unmade, the one-story houses of mud had unglazed windows. To add to the troubles of the agent who had brought the settlers, governmental negotiations for land on which to plant the colony had not been completed. Vicente Perez Rosales, the agent, tells in his memoirs that as soon as immigration to the south loomed in view as a fact, tracts of land that had been wild and valueless suddenly acquired owners and a price. Enterprising citizens went forth into the woods, found some ancient Indian who was willing for a consideration to swear that such and such a tract was his inheritance from his fathers, and, for another consideration, to sell it.
Vicente Perez found it an extremely difficult matter to fight this new flood of landowners, and had no time to spend upon litigation; so, philosophically, he adopted similar methods, and presently acquired territory. But meanwhile provision had been made for the first arrivals by the public spirit of Benjamin Viel, a French citizen of Valdivia, who gave for their settlement the pretty Isla de la Teja which lies at the confluence of the Calle-Calle and the Cruces rivers in front of Valdivia City. Today the island is covered with prosperous businesses, most of them carrying German names—breweries, a paper mill, two or three shipbuilding yards.
Valdivia, a Flourishing New Southern City.