 Section 109 of Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Avae in May 2019. The World's Story, Volume 7, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, edited by Eva March-Tappen. Section 109. How Switzerland defends herself. By Clarence Rock. To the Swiss man, soldiering is a second nature, for he is called young, and the tradition gets into his blood. At the age of ten he is roped into the gymnastic class at school, and in most of the cantons is taught the elements of drill in the playground. So insistent became the military spirit a few years ago, that the boys who strutted about in uniform, and pretended to be grown-up soldiers, had to be suppressed by special legislation. But when the boy is seventeen, he is liable to service in defence of his country, and the liability is upon him until he is fifty years of age. Nor even then does it cease, if he be still capable of doing his military duty in any capacity, as baker, veterinary surgeon or otherwise. The federal forces consist of three divisions, corresponding to the divisions of the German army and its reserves. First comes the Auszug or Elite, next the Landwehr or First Reserve, then the Landsturm or Second Reserve. At the age of twenty, every able-bodied Swiss youth becomes a member of the Auszug, having passed through his gymnastic course. There are, of course, exemptions, but the onus Probandy is on the side of the young man who can do nothing in cooperation with the other young defenders of his country. He may prove that he is under five feet, one and one-half inches in height, but he must prove also that he has no special qualifications for particular branches of work. If he has the privilege of being born and bred of able-bodied and proper stature in a free country, it is his duty to render himself capable of fighting in defence of that free country should necessity arise. Therefore the Swiss young man accepts the situation. It is no very onerous task, after all. The young man must serve for forty-five days during his first year of liability, and that, with all allowances for preparation and return, means but a couple of months, the half of the ordinary Oxford undergraduate's long vacation. When we in England talk of the horrors of universal service and drag in the arguments that are drawn from the compulsory system of France and Germany, we forget the possibility of that citizen army which Switzerland has organised at small sacrifice of money and time. For myself, having seen something of the universal service of France and Germany, I discount the horrors of the system, and welcome the discipline it imposes at the turn of the nation's manhood. Switzerland, however, had made it her endeavour to safeguard her security at the smallest possible expenditure of money and time. The young Swiss of twenty must serve his five and forty days in the Auszug. After that he remains, until he is two and thirty years of age in the same category, and it is his duty every other year to put in sixteen days of training. And the young workmen, the student, the teacher, the artisan, the waiter, who has his brief holiday from the foreign hotel, all of them regard that eight days a year as due tribute to the country of their birth. I remember the young Swiss waiter in a London restaurant who had attended me many times and confided to me one evening that he was going for his holiday. I inquired as to how he proposed to spend his holiday. First he said, I do my duty. He meant that his eight days tribute was due. It was to be duly paid. And you would not recognise that young man, as he stands at attention, goes through his drill, which he remembers as a swimmer long out of water remembers how to swim, and lies on his belly behind his native rocks with a rifle in his hands. Have you ever reflected that the Swiss waiter who serves you in a London restaurant is equally capable of serving you with a bullet, if you invade his native land? He is as handy with the rifle as with the napkin. Until he reaches the age of thirty-two, this service is the duty of the young Swiss man. At this stage there are no exemptions but Sanchez are imposed by absolute physical disability or lack of the statutory five feet, one and one half inches in height, and even then the possession of special qualification for special service renders the young man liable for service. It is no excuse that a young man has brothers already in the army, or that he has a widowed mother dependent upon him. The burden spread over a nation becomes light enough, and the few days hard work in camp on the drill ground or upon the hillside are cheerfully born as part of the day's work of the citizen who has a country worth defending. The Swiss are a nation of soldiers in a sense that applies to none of the European nations, with the possible exceptions of the hillmen of Montenegro. But the facing of the prospect of personal share in war has become a tradition, and the preparation for warfare is to the Swiss man as natural as the preparation for the cricket pitch is to the English public schoolboy. The Auszug or the elite of the nation's youth comprises not a whole of the young manhood as one may imagine. There are the Kretars, the undersized, the invalids, but something over 60% of the nation's youth pass master and become members of the Auszug, and the Levy recently produced 117,179 young men capable of national defence. At the same time the second line, the Landwehr, produced 84,046, and a couple of hundred thousand from a population of three millions is no bad result. At the age of 32 the Swiss man is by no means quit of his military duty. It lies lightly upon him in times of peace, but he is at call when the guns begin to shoot. And he must keep his hand in with occasional practice. For at the age of 32 he passes into the Landwehr or First Reserve, and there until he has completed his 44th year he remains, still with his duty to the state, but a duty proportioned to his age and personal interests for a dozen years more. Those who have passed into the Landwehr have to give in every four years nine days of service, and even when he has passed his 44th year the Swiss man does not cease from being a possible soldier. There is the Lunchturm or Second Reserve, and even the man of 50 knows that in time of need his name is on record, his service can be demanded. Every man indeed from 17 to 50 is at call of the state, nor indeed is the man of more than 50 exempt if his services are not elsewhere required or if he is not physically incapable of military service. At the various stages of life the proper exemptions are allowed, for the civil and religious business of the state must go on, even amid the clash of arms. Thus those in the employment of the state, such as railway and steamboat men, hospital officials and so forth, reach their exemption early. Pastors, doctors, prison, postal, telegraphic officials must obviously carry on their functions undisturbed, and in time of war they would be doing their duty equally with the men in the field. Members of the Federal Council are exempt, but not all the members of the Federal Tribunal. The principle of the Swiss Confederation is that every man shall do his duty towards the defence of the state, and there is one little touch of universality which is a stroke of genius. The man who cannot, for physical reasons, shoulder a rifle or take his part in the field, must pay his scot according to his means. And those who, for physical or other reasons, are not admitted into the Auszug and Landwehr, must pay, from twenty to thirty-two years of age, a special tax of six francs a hit. And if the physically incapable has a private income, he must pay anything up to three thousand francs yearly towards the defence of his country. It is a cheap army that the Swiss have organised, for it costs much less than two million sterling a year to keep up a fighting force of more than half a million. Rich and poor serve in the army side by side, and the Swiss system is against any sharp division between the crack regiment and another. The placing of the labourer and the professional man side by side makes for the welding of the nation together and prevents those class distinctions which in Switzerland are always avoided. There is no picking and choosing in the service, as, for instance, selecting this or that arm as the more fashionable. Each man is placed where he will tell to the best advantage. The system too is territorial. There are eight territorial divisions. Thus the man who is called out for his temporary service finds himself shoulder to shoulder with an old school fellow, with a man who may be far wealthier or far poorer than himself, but a man who has to face the same drill sergeant, the same possibilities. There is the making of the citizen army. Nothing that quite corresponds to Woolwich or Sandhurst or West Point exists in Switzerland, nor is there any such thing as an army set. Yet there are centres for military instructions, which everyone who wishes to become an officer must attend for a definite period of study and practice. Thus at Toon there is a central military college for the instruction of officers of the general grade and another for regimental officers. At various points there are these schools for departmental work, such as ambulance, artillery, rifle shooting, but they have this difference from the military colleges of the larger nations that they are not open continuously but only at certain periods of the year. In the time of war or during manoeuvres every citizen is expected to provide food and lodging for such a number of soldiers as his dwelling and means allow. Should he prefer not to have soldiers billeted at his house he is obliged to pay into the army chest the sum sufficient to provide lodging for them elsewhere. Every householder in Switzerland is informed of the number of men and horses he is expected to receive, and when the annual manoeuvres are held in his district he makes preparation accordingly. By this system the army train is made comparatively light and the mobility of a force greatly increased as the result, for it is only on rare occasions that the troops go under canvas being billeted whenever possible on the inhabitants of nearby towns. So we have a citizen army entrenched behind its native rocks, an army which contains every element of the nation, the man of wealth and the peasant standing shoulder to shoulder. In the world there is no such nation in arms, for even in the countries such as Montenegro where every man is a soldier by birth, not every man has another profession as well. In Switzerland there are scarcely such a being as a soldier by profession, but all men are soldiers, whether with muscle and brain, or with the contribution that the unfit must provide. In his work, La Confedération Helvetique, M. Marsosz says that the Swiss in effect possess the strongest and perhaps the best-drilled army among nations of the second rank. At any rate the Swiss army is a cheap investment in which every Swiss man has his little risk. No man is compelled to spend the crucial years of his life in garrison with the futile intervals that turned a British soldier when he becomes a reservist into an unskilled labourer and all that disimplies in dirt, discomfort and dishonour. The Swiss army is absolutely democratic, national, and of all the armies in the world it is surely not only the most efficient of the second rank, but it is the cheapest in the cost it entails in money or in grain upon national life. Section 110 of Germany the Netherlands and Switzerland This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sonja. The World's Story Volume 7 Germany the Netherlands and Switzerland Edited by Evermarch Tappen Section 110 How the Swiss built the greatest tunnel in the world by Francis Fox There was no question that a tunnel through the Simplon would be a great advantage, but could it be made? It would have to go through the heart of a mountain from five to seven thousand feet in height, and this would involve difficult questions of ventilation to say nothing of the heat in which the men would have to work. Some of the rocks were hard and some were soft, and this tunnel must be twelve and one half miles in length. The Swiss are a careful people. They wanted the tunnel, but they did not want to undertake a plan that could not be carried out. Therefore they consulted three tunnel experts from Italy, Austria and England respectively. It was decided that the thing could be done, though with many difficulties to be surmounted. The following account of the making of this tunnel was written by Francis Fox, the tunnel expert named by England. The Editor The work went on steadily from both entrances and consisted of one single line tunnel, with a parallel gallery for the second tunnel running alongside at a distance of about fifty-five feet. Cross passages every two hundred and seventeen yards were provided both for purposes of ventilation and for taking in and out the various materials. Most praiseworthy arrangements were made for the care of the men with the view to their suffering for harm from the exposure to alpine air after working in the heat of the galleries. A large building was fitted up near each entrance provided with cubicles for dressing and with hot and cold douche-bath. At the top of the building steam-pipes were fixed, and each man was entitled to his own private rope and padlock. This rope passes over a pulley in the roof and has a hook at the end to which he can attach his stay-clothes with his watch, purse and pipe, and pulling them up by the cord and padlocking it, he secures the safety of his belongings. On returning from his work he at once enters this warmed building, has his bath, lowers his clothes, and, hanging his wet mining-dress on the hook, raises it to the roof. Here it hangs until he again returns to work, when he finds his clothes dry and warm. The adoption of the brand-hydraulic drill not only enables the gallery to be driven at least three times the usual speed, but it avoids the creation of dust, which in mining is so productive of minor stasis. Not a single instance of this fell disease has occurred during the work, and although a well-appointed hospital was provided at each end of the tunnel, the beds were generally empty. At a distance of two and one half miles from Izel, a great subterranean river was met with in September 1901, which caused serious delay, and for a period of six months the total advance was only 46 meters. Footnote. A meter is equivalent to 39.37 inches. And a footnote. The difficulties at this point were such as in the hands of men of less determination might have resulted in the abandonment of the undertaking. Not only was it necessary to close timber the gallery on both sides, and also at the top and floor, with the heaviest box of square pitch pine 20 inches thick, but when these were crushed into splinters and the gallery completely blocked with their wreckage, steel girders were adopted, only in their turn to be distorted and bent out of shape. It seemed as if no available material could be found which would stand the enormous pressure of the rocks, until steel girders, forming a square placed side by side, the interstices being filled with cement concrete, resisted the load. Fortunately the bad ground only extended for a distance of about 50 yards, but it cost nearly a thousand pounds per yard to overcome this difficulty, and required the encasement of the tunnel at this point on sides, floor and arch with granite masonry, 8 feet 6 inches in thickness. Meanwhile the progress at the brig side was good, and the miners reached a half-way boundary and then began to encounter great heat from both rock and springs. It was a curious experience to insert one's arm into a borehole in the rock, and to find it so hot as to be unbearable. The maximum heat then encountered was 131 degrees Fahrenheit, but now a fresh difficulty presented itself, as in order to save time it was desirable to commence driving downhill to meet the miners coming uphill from Italy, and thus the very problem which the ascending gradients had been provided to avoid had to be faced. As the gallery descended the hot springs followed, and the boring machines and the miners were sending in a sea of hot water. This for a time was pumped out by centrifugal pumps over the apex of the tunnel, but at last, and while there yet remained some three or four hundred yards to be penetrated, it was found impossible to continue going downhill. Nevertheless time had to be saved, and as the height of the heading was only some seven feet while that of the finished tunnel was twenty-one feet, it was decided to continue to drive the gallery forward on a slightly rising gradient until it reached the top of the future tunnel. After seven hundred and two feet had thus been driven, the hot springs proved so copious that work had to cease, and an iron door which had been fixed in the heading some two or three hundred yards back was finally closed, and the gallery filled with hot water. Advance now could only be made from the Italian face, but even there the difficulties from hot water were very great. So much so that for a time one of the galleries had to be abandoned and excess obtained to it by driving the parallel gallery ahead, and then returning and taking the hot springs in the rear. The only way in which these hot springs, sometimes as high as one hundred and twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit, could be grappled with was by throwing jets of cold water under high pressure into the fissures, and thus diluting them down to a temperature which the miners could stand. At the right moment, at 7 a.m. on February 24, 1905, a heavy charge was exploded in the roof of the Italian heading, which blew a hole into the floor of the Swiss gallery, and released the impounded hot water. It was here that a truly sad incident occurred. Two visitors to the tunnel, who it appears had entered the gallery with a desire to witness the actual junction, were overcome by the heat and probably the carbonic acid gas from the pent-up hot water, and died. By means of jets and spray of high-pressure cold water, the air of the tunnel is reduced many degrees in temperature, and it is very noticeable how rapidly the heat of the rocks cools off when the gallery has been driven past them. On April 2, 1905, the visitors and officials from the Italian side, travelling in a minor strain, arrived within 250 yards of the Porte de Ferre, in the middle of the mountain, six miles or more from either entrance, and completed their journey on foot up to that point. Meanwhile the officials and visitors from the Swiss entrance had travelled up to the other side of the door. At the right moment this was opened by Colonel Laura Freuler, and the two parties met and fraternised, embracing one another. A religious dedication service conducted by the bishop of Sion was then held on the spot, and the divine blessing was invoked on the tunnel, the officials, the workmen and the trains, and touching reference was made to those who had lost their lives in the execution of this great work, some 40 or 50 in number. Thus was the fête de persimmon of the greatest tunnel in the world celebrated. End of Section 110 This recording is in the public domain. End of The World's Story, a history of the world in story, song and art. Volume 7, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, edited by Eva Marge-Tappen.