ON THE GERMAN-SWISS FRONTIER NEAR BASEL (BALE).
ITALIANS RETURNING FROM BELLIGERENT COUNTRIES ON THE DECLARATION OF WAR ARRIVE HUNGRY AND TIRED AT BASEL (BALE).
ON THE GERMAN-SWISS FRONTIER.
INTERNED FRENCH SOLDIERS EMPLOYED IN AGRICULTURAL WORK AT ERIENZ.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/german-agents-in-switzerland-gzcp67nrw?CMP=TNLEmail_118918_1779768
German agents in Switzerland
Mr Grant Duff, the British Minister, has more than once been the object of malicious calumnies, clearly designed to weaken his influence, and therefore that of England
January 24, 1916
On Friday an article was published in The Times on the arrest of two Correspondents of The Times in Switzerland, and on Saturday another, on the subject of the Swiss Etat Major. One of the main objects underlying these articles was to call renewed attention to the way in which the many difficulties which the Swiss Government and people are inevitably called upon to face during the war are increased by the untiring efforts of German agents, high and low, in all parts of the country. Sometimes the ostensible object of the work of these industrious Teutons is to prepare the way for peace - a pax Germanica - as was supposed to be the case with Prince Bulow’s gigantic organization at Lucerne. Sometimes, as in certain Circles in Geneva, it aims at stirring up strife in other countries, such as India, where it is likely to be embarrassing to the cause of the Allies and especially of England. Sometimes, as at Lugano and on the Italian frontier and in one or two of the German Consulates, it moves in more mysterious ways, and the only thing certain about it is that its tendency is inimical and dangerous to England, France, Italy, and Russia, and, incidentally, to everyone who may be presumed to have the interests of those countries at heart.
UNDERGROUND MANOEUVRES.
Naturally, nearly the whole of this work is done below the surface, and, therefore, except in rare instances, it is almost impossible for the Swiss Government to deal with it, however neutrally they may be disposed, and however mischievous and harmful to their own country they may consider it. That they have the wish to suppress it is certain. In January last the then President, M Motta,in the course of a conversation with a special Correspondent of The Times, made use of the following significant phrase: “Whoever violates our neutrality will free us to become the allies of his enemy.” And without doubt the use of Switzerland for much of the propaganda and plotting carried on by these German agents, since it has a tendency to draw the country against its will nearer to the brink of war, is a distinct violation of its neutrality.
Nor is it all underground work. Much of it has been done, especially in the first months of the war, in a certain section of the Swiss Press which is notoriously financed by German money, and even controlled by German editors. One of these newspapers, La Depeche Suisse, published but not written in Geneva, was in October, 1914, suppressed by the Swiss authorities, and the Government at about the same time prohibited the circulation in Switzerland of the notorious Munich weekly, Simplicissimus. It is also significant of the change of feeling which has taken place in the German-speaking cantons that the tone of the German-Swiss newspapers is not nearly so violently pro-German and unfair and hostile to the Allies as it used to be. The proprietors have learnt that their readers are not as much attracted by that particular presentation and distortion of the facts, as they used to be.
BRITISH MINISTER CALUMNIATED
One point which must have been especially troublesome to the Swiss Government is that both in this special section of the German-Swiss Press and in other quarters this German influence has been particularly violent in attacking and inconveniencing the diplomatic representatives of the Allied Powers resident in Berne. Mr Grant Duff, the British Minister, has more than once been the object of malicious calumnies, clearly designed to weaken his influence, and therefore that of England. He was actually publicly accused in a German newspaper of having taken observations of Friedrichshafen from the neutral soil of Romanshorn, and another charge made against him was that he had endeavoured to persuade the President to lease to the British Government for the duration of the war the St Gothard wireless station. In both instances the Swiss Government publicly contradicted these lying absurdities, the German source of which was made perfectly evident. But even in Switzerland itself there have been “incidents,” in which Mr Grant Duff was not the only sufferer, which ought not to have happened to the diplomatic representatives of friendly Powers. On one occasion the motor-cars of the French, Italian, and British Ministers were held up on the public road by a squad of soldiers with fixed bayonets, and on another they were refused admittance to an invitation lecture, which was to have been given in Berne, on the atrocities in Belgium, although they had taken the precaution, before accepting their invitations, to ascertain from the police and from a still higher authority that the delivery of the lecture was officially authorized.
Nor are these the only instances of similar gaffes. There have been others, and it is unfortunate, as has been remarked more than once in the French-Swiss Press, that the victims of them always happen to belong to the same side - the side, that is to say, of the Allies. Perhaps a firmer support of those official victims by the Governments which they represent would have led to their being less frequent. In Switzerland itself these “unfortunate incidents” are popularly attributed, in a large part of the country, to the German influences and militarist tendencies with which, from the Federal Council downwards, the people as a whole are showing signs of being utterly wearied and disgusted.
“We have good will towards all the nations,” said President Motta in the conversation to which I referred above. That is and must be the motto of a united Switzerland. But it is a motto which cannot be truly and effectively carried out unless these under- ground influences of one of the nations-of Germany-are firmly and sternly repressed whenever and wherever they show their ugly heads.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-two-correspondents-and-the-two-colonels-bqh33d2gd?CMP=TNLEmail_118918_1779768
UNDERGROUND MANOEUVRES.
Naturally, nearly the whole of this work is done below the surface, and, therefore, except in rare instances, it is almost impossible for the Swiss Government to deal with it, however neutrally they may be disposed, and however mischievous and harmful to their own country they may consider it. That they have the wish to suppress it is certain. In January last the then President, M Motta,in the course of a conversation with a special Correspondent of The Times, made use of the following significant phrase: “Whoever violates our neutrality will free us to become the allies of his enemy.” And without doubt the use of Switzerland for much of the propaganda and plotting carried on by these German agents, since it has a tendency to draw the country against its will nearer to the brink of war, is a distinct violation of its neutrality.
Nor is it all underground work. Much of it has been done, especially in the first months of the war, in a certain section of the Swiss Press which is notoriously financed by German money, and even controlled by German editors. One of these newspapers, La Depeche Suisse, published but not written in Geneva, was in October, 1914, suppressed by the Swiss authorities, and the Government at about the same time prohibited the circulation in Switzerland of the notorious Munich weekly, Simplicissimus. It is also significant of the change of feeling which has taken place in the German-speaking cantons that the tone of the German-Swiss newspapers is not nearly so violently pro-German and unfair and hostile to the Allies as it used to be. The proprietors have learnt that their readers are not as much attracted by that particular presentation and distortion of the facts, as they used to be.
BRITISH MINISTER CALUMNIATED
One point which must have been especially troublesome to the Swiss Government is that both in this special section of the German-Swiss Press and in other quarters this German influence has been particularly violent in attacking and inconveniencing the diplomatic representatives of the Allied Powers resident in Berne. Mr Grant Duff, the British Minister, has more than once been the object of malicious calumnies, clearly designed to weaken his influence, and therefore that of England. He was actually publicly accused in a German newspaper of having taken observations of Friedrichshafen from the neutral soil of Romanshorn, and another charge made against him was that he had endeavoured to persuade the President to lease to the British Government for the duration of the war the St Gothard wireless station. In both instances the Swiss Government publicly contradicted these lying absurdities, the German source of which was made perfectly evident. But even in Switzerland itself there have been “incidents,” in which Mr Grant Duff was not the only sufferer, which ought not to have happened to the diplomatic representatives of friendly Powers. On one occasion the motor-cars of the French, Italian, and British Ministers were held up on the public road by a squad of soldiers with fixed bayonets, and on another they were refused admittance to an invitation lecture, which was to have been given in Berne, on the atrocities in Belgium, although they had taken the precaution, before accepting their invitations, to ascertain from the police and from a still higher authority that the delivery of the lecture was officially authorized.
Nor are these the only instances of similar gaffes. There have been others, and it is unfortunate, as has been remarked more than once in the French-Swiss Press, that the victims of them always happen to belong to the same side - the side, that is to say, of the Allies. Perhaps a firmer support of those official victims by the Governments which they represent would have led to their being less frequent. In Switzerland itself these “unfortunate incidents” are popularly attributed, in a large part of the country, to the German influences and militarist tendencies with which, from the Federal Council downwards, the people as a whole are showing signs of being utterly wearied and disgusted.
“We have good will towards all the nations,” said President Motta in the conversation to which I referred above. That is and must be the motto of a united Switzerland. But it is a motto which cannot be truly and effectively carried out unless these under- ground influences of one of the nations-of Germany-are firmly and sternly repressed whenever and wherever they show their ugly heads.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-two-correspondents-and-the-two-colonels-bqh33d2gd?CMP=TNLEmail_118918_1779768
The Two Correspondents and the Two Colonels
All the world, except, apparently, the Swiss Etat Major, knows the character of the men whom The Times sends as Special Correspondents to foreign countries. One and all they are as unlikely to be mixed up in affairs of espionage as the Ambassadors and Ministers of the British Diplomatic Service
January 26, 1916
In the combined interests of England, of Switzerland, and of the rights of British journalism, we wish to supplement with a few words of serious comment the articles from our Special Correspondent in Switzerland which we have published in the course of the last few days. The subjects of his articles were the arrest and imprisonment of himself and another of our Correspondents by the Swiss Military Police on a charge of espionage; the extent to which the Swiss Etat Major, the body responsible for their arrest, has been swayed by German influence; the constant pin-pricks to which the diplomatic representatives of the Allied Nations in Berne have been subjected during the war; and, lastly, the consequent embarrassment caused to the Federal Council and all the honestly neutral Swiss (by far the greater proportion of the population) by the activity of the German agents. who infest their country.
The facts of the arrest are simple and admit of no dispute. Our Correspondent, writing with studious moderation on what, to say the least of it, was a very anxious and disagreeable experience, takes the line that the Swiss Military Police in the first place were within their rights in ordering his arrest; they apparently had reason to believe that another English journalist, the description of whose personal appearance tallied to a certain extent with his own, was a suspicious character. What he complains of, and, what we object to in the strongest possible terms, is their subsequent action. After the charge against him based on this case of mistaken identity had completely broken down - after, that is to say, his innocence was established - he and his French colleague (against whom no charge at all was made) were still treated as spies and detained in custody for over forty-eight hours, one in a hospital, the other in a criminal cell. Meanwhile, even after they had been released on parole - thanks to the decided action taken on their behalf by the Federal Council and the British Minister and the French Ambassador at Berne, and to the outspoken and unanimous protest of the whole of the French-Swiss Press - a minute search was made amongst their papers, with the object of trying to make out a secondary case against them on some other pretext.
It is not necessary for us to say that, like the first charge, this second attempt of the Military Police to discredit our representatives was a dismal failure. All the world, except, apparently, the Swiss Etat Major, knows the character of the men whom The Times sends as Special Correspondents to foreign countries. One and all they are as unlikely to be mixed up in affairs of espionage as the Ambassadors and Ministers of the British Diplomatic Service. It is true that in certain quarters this highest of all possible recommendations has, through no fault of the representatives of British diplomacy in Switzerland, lost some of its force during the period of the war. Incredible as it must seem, Mr Evelyn Grant Duff, the British Minister in Berne, has himself, thanks to these same German influences, been subjected, amongst other gratuitous annoyances, to the absurd indignity of being publicly accused of acts of espionage. The fact that this should have been possible in spite of the loyal support and categoric denials of the Swiss Government, and the ability and honour. able uprightness with which he has carried out his difficult duties during the war, is a matter that calls for the most serious attention. It is the strongest possible evidence of the unscrupulous hostility with which the agents of Germany pursue every one who represents in any public capacity the interests of the Allied Nations in Switzerland. If the open display of that hostility were allowed to continue, not only British journalism, but British diplomacy would suffer in a way that would certainly be against both the traditions and the wishes of the Swiss people.
But fortunately there are distinct signs that decided efforts will be made to put an end to the reign of this poisonous influence with its menace to Swiss neutrality and Swiss interests. Simultaneously with the arrest of our Correspondents, public opinion was roused to protest against one of its most baneful results. Two former members of the body which caused them to be imprisoned were put on their trial by the Federal Council and their late military colleagues on a charge of having supplied to a diplomatic representative of one of the belligerent Powers important military information. By all the principles of international law these confidential reports should never have gone outside the walls of the Swiss War Office. The Swiss people are now demanding that this shall be the beginning of a process by which the Government will take back into their own hands some of the extraordinary, and, as it has proved the excessive, powers which they delegated to the Etat Major at the beginning of the war.
As far as, we are concerned the position is that our Correspondents were unconditionally released and are free to carry out their duties in any part of Switzerland, except that they are requested not to take up their residence near the few miles of the frontier between Delemont and Delle. The position has also so far been regularized that they can, if they so wish, join the German journalists who have lived at Chiasso, on the Italian frontier, since the beginning of the war (though this permission was at first refused). At the same time the Prussian engineer-photographer, who since August has been officially attached to the Fourth Division of the Swiss Army at Delemont, has been removed from his post.
For the rest, although our Correspondents were publicly arrested, and released without public apology, we are content, for two reasons, to leave the matter where it stands. We recognize the perfectly correct way in which the Federal Council behaved in what for them was a very awkward position, and we wish to say nothing that might hamper them, as a friendly though neutral State, in the delicate task which they now have in hand. The journalistic aspect of the case we may safely and gratefully leave in the hands of our confreres of the Swiss Press, who did at once publicly and generously apologize to our Correspondents for the unjust and high-handed way in which they were treated.
But we do claim that the other Englishmen now imprisoned in Berne on this same charge of espionage shall be allowed the advice of counsel and brought at once to trial. For where two mistakes have been made it is at least possible that there may be others. And at present, like our two Correspondents, these men are being punished as though they had already been found guilty.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/our-wounded-in-switzerland-wvd8gqzmb?CMP=TNLEmail_118918_1779768
The facts of the arrest are simple and admit of no dispute. Our Correspondent, writing with studious moderation on what, to say the least of it, was a very anxious and disagreeable experience, takes the line that the Swiss Military Police in the first place were within their rights in ordering his arrest; they apparently had reason to believe that another English journalist, the description of whose personal appearance tallied to a certain extent with his own, was a suspicious character. What he complains of, and, what we object to in the strongest possible terms, is their subsequent action. After the charge against him based on this case of mistaken identity had completely broken down - after, that is to say, his innocence was established - he and his French colleague (against whom no charge at all was made) were still treated as spies and detained in custody for over forty-eight hours, one in a hospital, the other in a criminal cell. Meanwhile, even after they had been released on parole - thanks to the decided action taken on their behalf by the Federal Council and the British Minister and the French Ambassador at Berne, and to the outspoken and unanimous protest of the whole of the French-Swiss Press - a minute search was made amongst their papers, with the object of trying to make out a secondary case against them on some other pretext.
It is not necessary for us to say that, like the first charge, this second attempt of the Military Police to discredit our representatives was a dismal failure. All the world, except, apparently, the Swiss Etat Major, knows the character of the men whom The Times sends as Special Correspondents to foreign countries. One and all they are as unlikely to be mixed up in affairs of espionage as the Ambassadors and Ministers of the British Diplomatic Service. It is true that in certain quarters this highest of all possible recommendations has, through no fault of the representatives of British diplomacy in Switzerland, lost some of its force during the period of the war. Incredible as it must seem, Mr Evelyn Grant Duff, the British Minister in Berne, has himself, thanks to these same German influences, been subjected, amongst other gratuitous annoyances, to the absurd indignity of being publicly accused of acts of espionage. The fact that this should have been possible in spite of the loyal support and categoric denials of the Swiss Government, and the ability and honour. able uprightness with which he has carried out his difficult duties during the war, is a matter that calls for the most serious attention. It is the strongest possible evidence of the unscrupulous hostility with which the agents of Germany pursue every one who represents in any public capacity the interests of the Allied Nations in Switzerland. If the open display of that hostility were allowed to continue, not only British journalism, but British diplomacy would suffer in a way that would certainly be against both the traditions and the wishes of the Swiss people.
But fortunately there are distinct signs that decided efforts will be made to put an end to the reign of this poisonous influence with its menace to Swiss neutrality and Swiss interests. Simultaneously with the arrest of our Correspondents, public opinion was roused to protest against one of its most baneful results. Two former members of the body which caused them to be imprisoned were put on their trial by the Federal Council and their late military colleagues on a charge of having supplied to a diplomatic representative of one of the belligerent Powers important military information. By all the principles of international law these confidential reports should never have gone outside the walls of the Swiss War Office. The Swiss people are now demanding that this shall be the beginning of a process by which the Government will take back into their own hands some of the extraordinary, and, as it has proved the excessive, powers which they delegated to the Etat Major at the beginning of the war.
As far as, we are concerned the position is that our Correspondents were unconditionally released and are free to carry out their duties in any part of Switzerland, except that they are requested not to take up their residence near the few miles of the frontier between Delemont and Delle. The position has also so far been regularized that they can, if they so wish, join the German journalists who have lived at Chiasso, on the Italian frontier, since the beginning of the war (though this permission was at first refused). At the same time the Prussian engineer-photographer, who since August has been officially attached to the Fourth Division of the Swiss Army at Delemont, has been removed from his post.
For the rest, although our Correspondents were publicly arrested, and released without public apology, we are content, for two reasons, to leave the matter where it stands. We recognize the perfectly correct way in which the Federal Council behaved in what for them was a very awkward position, and we wish to say nothing that might hamper them, as a friendly though neutral State, in the delicate task which they now have in hand. The journalistic aspect of the case we may safely and gratefully leave in the hands of our confreres of the Swiss Press, who did at once publicly and generously apologize to our Correspondents for the unjust and high-handed way in which they were treated.
But we do claim that the other Englishmen now imprisoned in Berne on this same charge of espionage shall be allowed the advice of counsel and brought at once to trial. For where two mistakes have been made it is at least possible that there may be others. And at present, like our two Correspondents, these men are being punished as though they had already been found guilty.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/our-wounded-in-switzerland-wvd8gqzmb?CMP=TNLEmail_118918_1779768
Our wounded in Switzerland
By the unanimous testimony of all the officers and men I spoke to on the subject things would have gone very badly with them without the weekly parcel from Berne
June 13, 1916
The second convoy of wounded British soldiers reached the end of their long journey 24 hours after the first, still hardly able to believe that the time of their durance vile in the enemy’s country was actually over for good and all. Like them they were worn out by all they had gone through, and happy and bewildered by their own good fortune, and like them they were all full of compassion for the bitter disappointment of their fellow-soldiers who, after being originally selected by the German medical officers as fit subjects for the Grand Swiss Cure, had at the eleventh hour been turned back at Constance.
Although they had travelled so close on the heels of the first arrivals they had been greeted everywhere all along the route - “from the moment we were five yards this side of the frontier” - with the same generous hospitality and the same extraordinary displays of sympathy and admiration. For, after all, it is extraordinary that on two nights in succession, from end to end of the country, tens of thousands of people should be readv to sit up half the night, or to leave their beds in the small hours, in order to extend the right hand of brotherly fellow-feeling to a few hundred war-worn fighting men with whom they have no sort of connexion either of blood or alliance.
It is difficult to express in moderate terms what these two nights and days have meant to all the British who have lived through the triumph of them. For the men themselves they have changed everything. The open-handed and large-hearted Swiss have restored to them their belief in human nature.
CHEERING THEIR HOSTS.
When the second 150 arrived the weather was so threatening that the official reception had to be given under cover, and only a limited number of the populace were able to crowd in on tip-toe behind the brass-helmeted row of pompiers to watch the British lions being fed. But both at the station and, later in the day, when those who could not walk had been taken to their quarters in the carriages lent by the local cab-proprietor, every one joined in the welcome and every one who could gave a helping hand. While the men were having their tea Mr Grant Duff three times asked them to give three cheers-for Switzerland, for the boy scouts (than whom nothing could have looked more English), and for the children of Chateau d’Oex (who had been hard at work for weeks practising songs for the soldats anglais), and it was with something very like tears in their eyes that the soldats anglais hurrahed away the lumps in their throats. Since then Chateau d’Oex has become a little bit of England, in a land flowing with milk and honey and other good things, fragrant with flowers, and not fenced in with barbed wire. In the village street the men are as thick as bees in a herbaceous border. They are not busy bees - not yet - but they are wonderfully contented.
At the station in Berne, as one of our men was painfully climbing back into his railway carriage, a Swiss soldier gave him a helping push in the small of his back. He turned round quickly, with a snarl on his lips, and then seeing that the hand which had touched him was the hand of a friend, limped up the last step and turned to the Swiss Red Cross nurse beside him, his face red with confusion. “Please miss,” he said, “will you tell him I’m sorry? I thought it was a bayonet.”
Among the 450 odd now lodged (and most comfortably lodged) in the various hotels and pensions of the village, all within five minutes’ walk of each other, there are only a few Irish, a few sailors, a few Canadians - one of them a volunteer of over 60 - and one or two soldiers of our Indian Army. The great mass are the men of Great Britain; there is hardly a Highland, Lowland, Border, or county regiment which has not one or more representatives.
HELPING THE PRISONERS.
I suppose at present, next to the beauty and dignity of their surroundings, the two things the men chiefly talk about are food and clothes. The food question is chiefly of interest for its contrast with the past. It is of practical value that people at home should realize that their great standby in the prison camps was the weekly supply of bread that came to them from Mrs Grant Duff’s depot at Berne. The cost per head is only 1s a week, and there is no better or simpler way of helping our prisoners in Germany (of whom over 19,000 are now being regularly supplied) than by sending that amount of money either direct to the depot at Berne or to one of the many regimental agencies in England which work through it. By the unanimous testimony of all the officers and men I spoke to on the subject things would have gone very badly with them without the weekly parcel from Berne.
As for clothes, the men are at present dressed either in faded khaki or in the ugly black-blue tunic and trousers which (for verv excellent and obvious reasons) are the regulation kit served out by the War Office to the men in prison camps. I believe that the business of replacing or supplementing.these is being undertaken by the military authorities at home, and a large supply of underclothing has been provided by Mrs Grant Duff’s Swiss branch of the Red Cross Society.
Thus as far as the men are concerned everything necessary in the way of clothing is already well in hand. I should imagine that a particularly welcome kind of present, both for officers and men, would be a supply of literature of all kinds, especially books about the war.
IN THE ENGLISH CHURCH
A thanksgiving service has been held in the English church, at which, besides the British Minister and Mrs Grant Duff and Colonel and Mrs Picot, all the officers and a large number of the men now interned in Chateau d’Oex were present. The most moving part of a very moving ceremony was the singing, after a thoughtful sermon by the British chaplain, the Rev E Lampen, of “God save the King.” To the Swiss population outside the church it must have been a strange experience to hear it sung by some hundreds of English to the tune of their own national anthem. To the English inside it was something more than that. It was at once a song of thanksgiving and triumph, and a solemn prayer that “their” politics may be confounded, and that God may save us all, King and people. And it was sung mainly by men who had fought in some of the most deadly battles of the war, and had been saved almost as if by a miracle. For nearly all of them belonged to the original Expeditionary Force.
Although they had travelled so close on the heels of the first arrivals they had been greeted everywhere all along the route - “from the moment we were five yards this side of the frontier” - with the same generous hospitality and the same extraordinary displays of sympathy and admiration. For, after all, it is extraordinary that on two nights in succession, from end to end of the country, tens of thousands of people should be readv to sit up half the night, or to leave their beds in the small hours, in order to extend the right hand of brotherly fellow-feeling to a few hundred war-worn fighting men with whom they have no sort of connexion either of blood or alliance.
It is difficult to express in moderate terms what these two nights and days have meant to all the British who have lived through the triumph of them. For the men themselves they have changed everything. The open-handed and large-hearted Swiss have restored to them their belief in human nature.
CHEERING THEIR HOSTS.
When the second 150 arrived the weather was so threatening that the official reception had to be given under cover, and only a limited number of the populace were able to crowd in on tip-toe behind the brass-helmeted row of pompiers to watch the British lions being fed. But both at the station and, later in the day, when those who could not walk had been taken to their quarters in the carriages lent by the local cab-proprietor, every one joined in the welcome and every one who could gave a helping hand. While the men were having their tea Mr Grant Duff three times asked them to give three cheers-for Switzerland, for the boy scouts (than whom nothing could have looked more English), and for the children of Chateau d’Oex (who had been hard at work for weeks practising songs for the soldats anglais), and it was with something very like tears in their eyes that the soldats anglais hurrahed away the lumps in their throats. Since then Chateau d’Oex has become a little bit of England, in a land flowing with milk and honey and other good things, fragrant with flowers, and not fenced in with barbed wire. In the village street the men are as thick as bees in a herbaceous border. They are not busy bees - not yet - but they are wonderfully contented.
At the station in Berne, as one of our men was painfully climbing back into his railway carriage, a Swiss soldier gave him a helping push in the small of his back. He turned round quickly, with a snarl on his lips, and then seeing that the hand which had touched him was the hand of a friend, limped up the last step and turned to the Swiss Red Cross nurse beside him, his face red with confusion. “Please miss,” he said, “will you tell him I’m sorry? I thought it was a bayonet.”
Among the 450 odd now lodged (and most comfortably lodged) in the various hotels and pensions of the village, all within five minutes’ walk of each other, there are only a few Irish, a few sailors, a few Canadians - one of them a volunteer of over 60 - and one or two soldiers of our Indian Army. The great mass are the men of Great Britain; there is hardly a Highland, Lowland, Border, or county regiment which has not one or more representatives.
HELPING THE PRISONERS.
I suppose at present, next to the beauty and dignity of their surroundings, the two things the men chiefly talk about are food and clothes. The food question is chiefly of interest for its contrast with the past. It is of practical value that people at home should realize that their great standby in the prison camps was the weekly supply of bread that came to them from Mrs Grant Duff’s depot at Berne. The cost per head is only 1s a week, and there is no better or simpler way of helping our prisoners in Germany (of whom over 19,000 are now being regularly supplied) than by sending that amount of money either direct to the depot at Berne or to one of the many regimental agencies in England which work through it. By the unanimous testimony of all the officers and men I spoke to on the subject things would have gone very badly with them without the weekly parcel from Berne.
As for clothes, the men are at present dressed either in faded khaki or in the ugly black-blue tunic and trousers which (for verv excellent and obvious reasons) are the regulation kit served out by the War Office to the men in prison camps. I believe that the business of replacing or supplementing.these is being undertaken by the military authorities at home, and a large supply of underclothing has been provided by Mrs Grant Duff’s Swiss branch of the Red Cross Society.
Thus as far as the men are concerned everything necessary in the way of clothing is already well in hand. I should imagine that a particularly welcome kind of present, both for officers and men, would be a supply of literature of all kinds, especially books about the war.
IN THE ENGLISH CHURCH
A thanksgiving service has been held in the English church, at which, besides the British Minister and Mrs Grant Duff and Colonel and Mrs Picot, all the officers and a large number of the men now interned in Chateau d’Oex were present. The most moving part of a very moving ceremony was the singing, after a thoughtful sermon by the British chaplain, the Rev E Lampen, of “God save the King.” To the Swiss population outside the church it must have been a strange experience to hear it sung by some hundreds of English to the tune of their own national anthem. To the English inside it was something more than that. It was at once a song of thanksgiving and triumph, and a solemn prayer that “their” politics may be confounded, and that God may save us all, King and people. And it was sung mainly by men who had fought in some of the most deadly battles of the war, and had been saved almost as if by a miracle. For nearly all of them belonged to the original Expeditionary Force.
No comments:
Post a Comment