Shadows on the Alps

Atop the white-capped Swiss Alps, giant fires blazed skyward. While church bells tolled and golden-tailed rockets sped through the night, gaily lighted boats, like graceful waltzers on a vast mirror, drifted across the Lake of Zurich. This Aug. 1, 655 years had passed into history since the day in 1291 when peasants of the old cantons first learned from signal fires on the peaks that Habsburg rule had ended. This year as always, nearly all the day's eloquent oratory, in big cities or small hamlets, ended with the sentence from Schiller's William Tell: "Wir wollen frei sein wie die Voter waren" ("We swear we will be free as were our fathers").

In the little mountain land, there was no feeling of greatness and only a little pride, but there was plenty of thankfulness and happiness. Fields were heavy with ripening grain. Throughout the smiling countryside, barelegged children, plump and rosy, waved to sleek, swift trains running on Swiss-clocklike schedule. In the cities, there was industrial peace, assured by the no-strike agreement which the big unions had pledged after winning substantial gains in pay and working conditions.

In foreign trade, exports to the U.S. in the first six months of 1946 were more than six times the prewar average. Though Germany, Switzerland's best customer, was lost, there was consolation in the 50% share in German assets taken over by the Swiss Government. The Swiss consumer could buy an abundance of things, scarce or nonexistent in the rest of Europe: milk and radios, tires and refrigerators, bananas and tennis balls.

Yet the Swiss knew that even the white Alps throw dark shadows. Swiss engineers were pouring more concrete into the mountain strongholds built during World War II. The Government voted 18,000,000 francs ($4,500,000) for atomic research.

Deeper, more disturbing than any military danger, was a new idea in the sensitive Swiss conscience: a realization of their national loneliness. Isolation in war had seemed necessary and honorable. But, however bountiful materially, isolation now seemed spiritually bleak. The Swiss were quietly but unmistakably heavy-hearted about their prosperity. On their 655th independence day they felt as Voltaire did, when from his Swiss refuse at Les Delices he viewed the Europe of the 1750s:

"I behold Germany dyed in blood, France utterly ruined. . . . While I contemplate the storm, I am almost ashamed of my own tranquillity."

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