Letters from Switzerland

by Samuel Irenæus Prime

The steamer from Lucerne, on its daily trip from that city, touches at Weggis, where we awaited its coming, and were soon in the midst of the most romantic scenery in Europe. From the water’s edge the mountains rise perpendicularly. Broken into ridges, clothed with green forests or smooth pastures, and now and then sheltering a hamlet in the openings, the mountains stand around this lake with a majesty too impressive for words. We have come into the heart of a land of heroes. The waters of this lake are like the life-blood of martyrs. This little village of Gersau, on a sloping hillside, shut out from the rest of the world by these mountain ramparts, was an independent democracy of four hundred years, though its domains were only three miles by two! Here, at Brunnen, are painted, on the outer walls of a building on the waterside, the effigies of the three great men who, with William Tell, achieved the independence of Switzerland in 1815. Across the lake, away up among the ledges of the rocks, there lies a little plain, an oasis in the wilderness, where, in the dead of night, the three confederates met and laid their plans for the deliverance of their country from the yoke of a foreign oppressor. That spot is Grutli. It is a holy place, for liberty was there conceived, and every patriot, from whatever land he comes, is thrilled when his eye looks on it. Yet not so sacred is Grutli as the land upon the opposite side of the lake, where the steamer slackens its speed as we are passing a little chapel that is built upon the margin of the lake. This chapel marks the spot where William Tell escaped from the boat in which he was a prisoner on his way to Gessler’s prison at Kussnacht. It does savage violence to one’s better feelings to be told that no such man as Tell was ever living in this land we are now exploring. He has been our ideal of a patriot chieftain from childhood, and we are not to be cheated out of him without a struggle. Skeptical critics may tell us, as they do, that Tell is a myth; but we have history for our faith to lean upon, and tradition tells us that this chapel was built in 1388, thirty-one years after the hero’s death, and in presence of one hundred and fourteen persons who had known him when he was living. Such is our faith, and as we are passing by the chapel, to which, even unto this day, the Swiss make an annual pilgrimage and have a solemn mass performed within its narrow walls, and a sermon preached, we will tell the story of Tell.

When the year 1300 was coming in, Albert of Austria was ruling with a rod of iron over the dwellers in these mountains. He sent magistrates among them who exacted heavy taxes which they were unable to pay, and imposed arbitrary and cruel punishments upon them on slight occasions. Arnold, a peasant of Uterwalden, was condemned for some insignificant offence to give up a yoke of fine oxen, and the servant of the bailiff seized them while Arnold was plowing with them, and said, as he drove them off, “Peasants may draw the plow themselves.” Arnold smote the servant, breaking two of his fingers, and fled. The tyrant seized the father of Arnold and put out both his eyes! Such cruelties became too many and too grievous to be borne. Even the women—brave souls!—refused to submit, and the wife of Werner Stauffacher said to her husband: “Shall foreigners be masters of this soil and of our property? What are the men of the mountain good for? Must we mothers nurse beggars at our breasts, and bring up our daughters to be maid-servants to foreign lords? We must put an end to this!” Her husband was roused, and went to Arnold, whose father’s eyes had been put out, and Walter Furst. These three held their meetings for counsel at Grutli. Afterward each of them brought ten men there, who bound themselves by a great oath to deliver their land from the oppressor. This oath was taken in the night of November 17, 1307. Not long afterward the bailiff, Herman Gessler, when he saw the people more restless and bold, resolved to humble them. He placed the ducal hat of Austria upon a pole, and ordered every one who passed by to bow down in reverence before it. William Tell, one of the men who had taken the oath at Grutli, held his head proudly erect as he passed, and when warned of the danger of such disobedience stoutly refused to bow. He was seized and carried before the bailiff, who was told that Tell, the most skillful archer of Uri, had refused to pay homage to the emblem of Austrian power. Enraged at Tell’s audacity, Gessler exclaimed,

“Presumptuous archer, I will humble thee by the display of thine own skill. I will put an apple on the top of the head of thy little son; shoot it off, and you shall be pardoned!”

In vain did the wretched father plead against such cruelty. He could pierce the eagle on the wing, and bring down the fleet chamois from the lofty rocks, but his arm would tremble and his eyesight fail him when he took aim at the head of his noble boy. But his remonstrances were all in vain. The boy was bound to a tree, and the apple set upon his head. The strong-hearted father took leave of his son, scarce hoping that he could spare him, and rather believing that his arrow would in another moment be rushing through his brain. With a prayer for help from Him who holds the stars in his hand, and without whose providence not a sparrow falls, the wretched father drew his bow. The unerring arrow pierced the apple, and the child was saved. Another arrow fell from underneath the garment of the archer as the shout of the people proclaimed the father’s triumph.

“What means this?” demanded the tyrant.

“To pierce thy heart,” replied Tell, “if the other had slain my son!”

Gessler ordered the man to be seized and bound, and hurried off to the dungeon he had built at Kussnacht. Fearing to trust the guards with their prisoner—for he knew not how far the spirit of rebellion might have spread—Gessler embarked in the boat with them, and hastened off lest the people should rise to the rescue of their countryman. The lake was subject then, as it is now, to sudden and fearful tempests. The wind rose and swept the waves over the boat, defying the skill of the boatmen, and threatening their speedy destruction. Tell was known for his skill with a boat as well as with a bow. Tyrants are always cowards, and when the tyrant saw that his own men were not able to manage the craft, he ordered Tell’s bonds to be removed that he might take the helm in his hand. Steering the boat as near to the projecting rock of Axenberg as she could run, he suddenly leaped from it to the ledge, and the force of his leap sent the boat backward upon the lake. The prisoner was free. Pursuit was hopeless. He was at home among the mountains. Every path was familiar to him. But vengeance would be taken on those dearer than his own life. He resolved to preserve them by the death of the monster who had sought to make him slay his own son. With the speed of the chamois he sped his way across the mountains to the very place where he was to have been carried in chains, and there awaited the coming of Gessler. The tyrant came but to die. The arrow of the patriot drank his heart’s blood. Then the inhabitants of the mountain fastnesses flew to arms. The minions of Austria were seized, and with a wonderful forbearance were not slain, but sent out of the country under an oath never to return. The King Albert came to subdue the rebels. On his way he was murdered by his nephew and a band of conspirators, whom he had thought his friends. He expired at the wayside, his head being supported by a peasant woman who found him lying in his blood. The children of the murdered man and his widow, and Agnes the Queen of Hungary, took terrible vengeance on the murderers, and, confounding the innocent with the guilty, shed blood like water. Agnes was a woman-fiend. As the blood of sixty-three guiltless knights was flowing at her feet, she said: “See, now I am bathing in May-dew!” One of the most distinguished of the enemies of the King, the Knight Rudolf, was, at her orders, broken on the rack, and while yet living was exposed to the birds of prey. While dying, he consoled his faithful wife, who alone knelt near him, and had in vain prostrated herself in the dust at the feet of Agnes, imploring her husband’s pardon. But the war of oppression went on. An army marched into Switzerland, and to the many thousands of their invaders the men of Grutli could oppose only thirteen thousand. But they were all true men, and at Morgarten, on a rosy morning in 1315, they met the enemy and routed them utterly, after such deeds of valor as history scarcely elsewhere has recorded. This gave freedom to Switzerland. Of that struggle the first blow was struck by William Tell when he smote Gessler to the earth.

At the head of the Lake of Lucerne, and a few miles above the chapel of Tell, is the village of Fluelen, at which we rest only long enough to get away, for the low grounds, where the River Reuss comes down into the lake, breeds pestilence, and the inhabitants give proofs of the unhealthiness of the place by the number of cretins and goitred cases that are found among them. Two miles beyond is the old town of Altorf. Lapped in the midst of rugged mountains, which shut down closely on every side, it is secluded from the world that is familiar with its name. Here, on this village green, in front of the old tower, a fountain, surmounted by a statue, marks the spot where William Tell shot the apple from the head of his son. The tree on which the ducal hat was hung by Gessler, and the same to which the boy was bound, is said to have remained there three hundred years after the event. The tower dates back of that time, as records still in existence prove it to be more than five hundred and fifty years old. To this day the hunters of Uri come down to Altorf to try their skill with the rifle, which has now taken the place of the bow and arrow.

A few miles further on we came to the River Reuss, in which William Tell was drowned while attempting to save the life of a boy. There was something sublime in the thought that a man whose name is now identified with the patriots and heroes of the world should finally lose his life in the performance of a deed that requires more of the self-sacrificing spirit than to scale the walls of a fortress and perish in the midst of a nation’s praise.

The men of this region are spoken of as the finest race in Switzerland. We had no reason to think them remarkable; but the women, who were making hay in the meadows while the men were off hunting, were certainly very good-looking for women who work in the fields in all weathers, braving the storms of rain and snow, tending the sheep and cattle on the hillsides, and carrying the hay on their backs to the barns.