Algernon Blackwood

“ In every train and tram is khaki or the poilus blue, in the village café, at the Kursaal concert, halfway up some dizzy height, or in the shady nook of some hotel or villa garden, is seen at every hour of the day that symbol of a fighting world⁠—the military salute. ”

“ A chilly winter is a probability all have to face. The easygoing, happy Switzerland of former days exists no more. Even a homecoming traveller as he leaves Geneva by the single daily train⁠—he must book his seat days, and his sleeper even weeks, in advance⁠—is searched to see that he carries no foodstuffs out of the country with him. ”

“ This morning, for instance, an overworked woman, seeking a few days’ change and rest, but a woman still sensitive enough to dream of happier days in the careless Long Ago, mentioned her yearning for the peace of a beflowered valley of the Alps, where the glacier streams gush downwards from eternal snows, where the wind sighs softly through great pine woods, some quiet valley brimmed with crystal sunlight and lying beneath a dome of stainless blue. ”

“ Strange and various are the people from every country in the world who seek the salubrious climate of Switzerland today. They, with their retinues, doubtless bring money in. Judging, however, by the outspoken comments of the native Press, their absence, even in these hard times, would be preferable to their gold. ”

“ There is another aspect of life in Switzerland today that is less accessible to the public, as well as less free for the journalist to write about. Though the resorts are somewhat deserted, and the villages handed over to interned soldiers chiefly, the towns are crowded, and some of them are booming. Geneva, Bern, Zurich and Lausanne are packed with strange humanity, and rooms not easily to be had. ”

“ Elderly, bronzed officers, beribboned and beclasped, chasing swallowtails with homemade nets and killing-bottles, and with the zest of eager boyhood! A first-lieutenant, one sleeve empty, casting a rod over a mountain stream for trout, a flying man behind him, limping badly, picking flowers as though he saw them for the first time in his life! ”

“ Every nationality is represented, every shade of colour. Germans are ubiquitous, of course, making themselves at home even in French Switzerland, which does not welcome them, and whose newspapers can hardly be pleasant reading for them just now. ”

“ The question of State help is broached plaintively in the daily Press, and more than one popular hotel that filled its great salle à manger easily in 1913 now employs two or three waitresses at most for the handful of guests who occupy one corner only. The men⁠—guides, waiters, porters, sometimes the hotelier himself⁠—are mobilised and doing their service militaire on plain or frontier far away. Labour is as scarce as guests. In every department of her normal life Switzerland has suffered a violent, even a ruinous dislocation ”

“ Maurice platform and help the kindly Swiss in their distribution of welcome material comforts among this daily consignment of sorely afflicted humanity.
Switzerland, indeed, today is changed beyond recognition. Prices are high and food is scarce. Rationing runs its difficult course, as elsewhere in our dislocated world. Trains are reduced, and railway, as also amusement, tickets heavily taxed. Instead of cheese and butter, the rule, strictly enforced, is cheese or butter, while one lump of sugar and one speck of saccharine is the sweetening allowance with thé or café complet. ”

“ A Tommy, or a Jock in kilts, struggling with his dictionary in a grocery, a teashop or a railway booking office; while down the sun-drenched street outside a New Zealander and two Australians stump to the bathing-house, hang up their crutches (on the hotel billiard table later in the evening to be used as cue rests) and prove to all and sundry that a man with only one leg can swim as well as a man with two! ”

“ Minds satiated with revolutions and disasters on a colossal scale are blunted and unresponsive. The morning newspaper once read, the latest Prussian treachery discussed, the length of the Casualty List appreciated, the villagers then go about their duties until the following morning (there is no evening paper) provides the daily excitement, now become as habitual as breakfast. The war is not forgotten; it has grown into the routine of life ”

“ The interiors of clinique and convalescent home, of doctors’ consulting rooms and private nursing quarters, are not, of course, so easily seen, but it needs no imagination to divine that they, too, are full. ”

“ Owing to the irregular supply, if not sometimes the actual lack, of fuel⁠—the country’s coal is derived from Germany⁠—more than one industry has been in peril and more than one factory, deprived of the necessary raw material, been shut down. ”

“ There are villages, even within the radius of the London searchlights, where the remark is not uncommonly heard: “One almost forgets the war down here; it’s difficult to believe there is a war!”⁠—the speaker usually some tired worker snatching a few days’ rest, but prevented by limits of time and money from a longer journey. ”

“ The village has grown accustomed to the lesser evidences of change: the woman driving a milk-cart, girls in breeches working on the fields, scarcity of matches, butter, sugar and so forth in the local shop, even to the boom of antiaircraft guns and the shifting of mysterious lights across the night skies ”

“ Thursday in every week is an unhappy day for people with sweet tastes, since no sweetened article, not even a cup of chocolate, may be bought at all. And the hotels, to add to their other troubles, are anxious for their supply of fuel. ”

“ The majority of these have not seen England for three years at least. Their evacuation will make room for others to come in from Germany, and no one can be more grateful for this than those whose places in Switzerland will thus be filled. ”

“ At Montreux, for instance, they frequent certain hotels, spend money freely, and make themselves at home. The little country has distinguished visitors, some of them undesirably notorious these troubled days. ”