CHAPTER VII SWITZERLAND
We have become so used to regarding Switzerland as an all-the-year-round playground, and the Swiss as a race of hotel-keepers, waiters, and guides, that many people were quite surprised to learn, when Switzerland mobilised, that she could put an army of 250,000 in the field.
Switzerland, which has been for centuries the battlefield of European nations, has understood that even her perpetual neutrality, guaranteed by the Powers, could not save her from the danger of an invasion if she did not boast a fairly strong army, and in 1874 she organised a proper military service.
A regular army as known in other countries Switzerland does not possess, but she has an admirably organised militia, an army of citizen soldiers. The German Emperor, during his last visit to Switzerland, in September, 1912 (during the first one, nineteen years before, he had a much more enthusiastic reception), assisted at the manœuvres of the Swiss army, and his dream of a German Switzerland as a "Germanic Dependence" must have had a very severe shock.
His reception was nothing more than polite, and all the shouting and flag-waving part had to be done by a large portion of the 300,000 German subjects living in Switzerland, who took the trouble to go to Berne specially to see their Kaiser in his carefully chosen uniform. William II., being now aware that the Swiss nation does not mean to preserve her neutrality by sending troops only to the Franco-Italian frontier, will realise that the fact that the Swiss President carefully avoided showing him, or any of his officers, the fortifications of the German frontier was not a mere coincidence.
It was just a few days after this famous visit that a Franco-Swiss newspaper printed this wonderful little paragraph about the German Emperor:—"People have so often talked about the cult of peace without believing in it that one may finally be permitted to believe in it without talking about it."
In any case, the Kaiser, as soon as he was back in Berlin, sent to the Swiss Government 2,000 yards of grey-blue cloth to dress a group of the Swiss infantry troops, which at that time were still wearing very dark uniforms. The Kaiser observed that those uniforms would be very conspicuous in wartime, and his present of cloth was most appreciated, and lately, with a slight modification in the shade, adopted.
Troops dressed in this way are now watching the German frontier.