The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  In a previous chapter I tried to give you an idea of the origin of ail such complicated masses of mountain-ridges as are represented by the Alps and the Pyrenees. I told you to take half a dozen clean handkerchiefs, unfold them and put them on top of each other and push them together and then watch the wrinkles and the creases and double-jointed circles and crumples that are the result of such a forcible concentration. The table on which you performed this geological experiment was the original base or core of granite (countless millions of years old) across which the younger layers folded themselves during subsequent millions of years, to become those queerly-shaped pinnacles which were given their present form and aspect by still other millions of years of wind and rain and snow and ice.

  These enormous folds, from ten to twelve thousand feet above the plains, have gradually crumpled into a series of parallel ranges. But in the centre of the country (the village of Andermatt on the Gotthard Pass is the geographical centre of the country) they meet in the huge mountains (the so-called St Gotthard range) which send the Rhine on its course towards the North Sea, the Rhône on its way to the Mediterranean, and which also give birth to those mountain-rivers which feed the lakes of Thun, of Lucerne, and Zurich in the north, and the famous Italian lakes in the south. And it is precisely in this neighbourhood of glaciers, and precipices, and valleys, so deep that they hardly ever see the rays of the sun, in this region of avalanches and impassable mountain streams, green with the chilly waters of a dozen melting glaciers, that the Swiss Republic took its origin.

  SWITZERLAND

  It was, as not infrequently happens, a combination of practical politics with certain geographical peculiarities of the land which gave the Swiss a chance to make a bid for independence. For almost a thousand years the half-savage peasants of these inaccessible valleys had been left alone by all their more powerful neighbours. What was the use of hoisting the proud standard of empire when there was no plunder? At best one could deprive these wild men of a couple of cow-hides. But they were dangerous barbarians, with their aptitude for guerrilla warfare and their command of those uncomfortable boulders that came crashing down from the hillsides and would squash a suit of armour as if it were a piece-of parchment; and so the Swiss were treated as the Indians that lived behind the Alleghenies were treated by the original settlers of the Atlantic coast—they were ignored.

  But with the rising importance of the Papacy and the tremendous upward sweep of Italian commerce during and immediately after the Crusades, northern Europe felt a very real need of a more direct and convenient route from Germany to Italy than those provided by the St Bernard Pass (which necessitated a long detour by way of Lyons and the entire Rhône valley, via the lake of Geneva) or the Brenner Pass, which meant that one had to cross the Habsburg domains with their almost unbearable tariff rates.

  THE MOUNTAIN PASS

  It was then that the peasants of the Cantons (the name for the independent little Swiss republics or districts) of Unterwalden, Uri, and Schwyz decided to combine and each spend a little money (Heaven knows, they did not have much) upon the road that led from the valley of the Rhine to the valley of the Ticino River. They cut down certain parts of the rock. Whenever she rocks were too hard to be removed by means of pick-axes (try to make a mountain road without dynamite!) they made narrow wooden contraptions which they hung from the side of the mountain walls to negotiate difficult corners; and they built some primitive stone bridges across the Rhine, hitherto impassable except by pedestrians during the height of the summer. Part of the way they followed the road that had been traced by the engineers of Charlemagne, four centuries before, but had never been completed; and by the end of the thirteenth century a merchant with a caravan of pack-mules could travel from Basle to Milan by way of the St Gotthard Pass with a fair assurance that he would not lose more than two or three of his animals on account of broken legs and falling stones.

  As early as the year 1331 we hear of the existence of a hospice on top of the Pass, and although it was not opened to carriages until 1820 it was soon one of the most popular routes for commerce between the south and the north.

  Of course the good people of Unterwalden, Uri, and Schwyz allowed themselves to be paid a slight remuneration, for all the trouble they had taken. This steady revenue, together with the impetus this international traffic gave to such cities as Lucerne and Zurich, gave these small peasant communities a new feeling of independence which no doubt had a great deal to do with their open defiance of the Habsburg family. The latter, curiously enough, were also originally of Swiss peasant stock, although they did not mention this in any of the genealogies which were preserved in their home castle of Habichtsburg (or Hawk’s Nest) that stood near the spot where the river Aar flows into the Rhine.

  I am sorry to be so prosaic, but it was the tangible revenue derived from a busily patronized Alpine trade-route rather than the bravery of a mythical William Tell which was responsible for the foundation of what afterwards developed into the modern Swiss Republic. That modern Swiss Republic is a highly interesting political experiment built firmly upon one of the most efficient elementary education systems of the world. The governmental machine runs so smoothly and so effectively that even Swiss citizens have to think for a moment when you ask them suddenly who happens to be their President. For their country is run by a Bundesrat—a sort of Board of Managers—composed of seven members, and every year they appoint a new President (usually the Vice-President of the previous year) and custom, though not law, provides that one year he shall belong to the German-speaking part of the country, the next year to the French-speaking part, and the third year to the Italian-speaking sub-division.

  This President, however, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the President of the United States of America. He is merely the temporary chairman of a Federal Executive which expresses its will through the mouths of seven individual members. The President, apart from presiding over the meetings of the federal council, is Minister of Foreign Affairs, but his position is so inconspicuous that he has no official residence. When distinguished strangers have to be entertained, the party is given in the rooms of the Foreign Office, and even those parties bear more resemblance to a simple Bierfest in a little mountain village than to the semi-royal receptions of the French or American presidents.

  The main details of the administration are too complicated to be mentioned here, but the visitor to Switzerland is constantly being reminded that somewhere or other an intelligent and honest person is constantly on the watch to see that things are being done and are being done both honestly and intelligently.

  Take the matter of railway transport, to which, of course, are attached innumerable difficulties. The two main arteries that connect Italy with northern Europe run straight through the heart of the Swiss Alps. The Mont Cenis tunnel connects Paris with Turin (the ancient capital of the kingdom of Savoy) by way of Dijon and Lyons. And the Brenner line provides a direct communication between southern Germany and Vienna, but although it crosses the Alps it does not pass through any long tunnel. The Simplon line and the St Gotthard lines, however, are not only tunnel-borers but veritable mountain-climbers. The St Gotthard is the older of the two. It was begun in 1872 and finished ten years later. It took eight years to dig the tunnel, which, is nine and a half miles long and reaches a height of almost 4000 feet. Even more interesting than the tunnel itself are the spiral tunnels between Wassen and Goeschenen. Since the valleys were so narrow that they offered no room for even a single track, the railway had to’ do its climbing through the heart of the mountains themselves. Besides these special tunnels there are fifty-nine other tunnels (several of them almost a mile long), nine large viaducts, and forty-eight bridges.

  THE CONQUEST OF THE BARRIERS

  The second most important transalpine railway, that of the Simplon, offers us a direct route between Paris and Milan by way of Dijon, Lausanne, and the valley of the Rhône as far as Brieg. It was opened for traffic in 1906, exactly a century after Napoleon
had finished his famous Simplon Pass road with its 250 big and 350 small bridges and its ten long tunnels, the greatest piece of road-building the world had ever seen. The Simplon railway, which was much easier to construct than that of the St Gotthard, follows the slowly ascending valley of the Rhône until it reaches a spot about 2000 feet high where the tunnel begins. This tunnel is twelve and a half miles long and provided with double tracks. So is the Lötschberg tunnel (nine miles long) which connects northern Switzerland with the Simplon railway and western Italy.

  Although one of the narrowest of mountain-ranges, the so-called Pennine Alps, through which the Simplon railway runs, have a climate all their own. There are no fewer than twenty-one peaks of 12,000 feet or more within this small quadrangle, and 140 glaciers feed the turbulent streams, which have a most annoying habit of washing away railway bridges just a few minutes before the arrival of one of the big international express trains. That there never have been any wrecks on account of these aquatic surprise parties speaks highly for the efficiency of the Swiss railway men. But as I have said before, in this somewhat stiff and rather bureaucratic republic, nothing much is left to chance. Life is too difficult and too dangerous to encourage the amiable philosophy of ‘muddling through.’ Somewhere, somehow, some one is for ever watching, observing, paying attention.

  That such a general tendency towards a rather schoolmasterisb punctuality and efficiency does not make for artistic success is a well-known fact. In literature and the arts—painting, sculpture, or music—the Swiss have never produced anything that has travelled far beyond their own narrow confines. But then, the world is full of ‘artistic’ nations, while only a few can boast of centuries of uninterrupted political and economic growth and development. And the system suits the average Swiss and his wife. What more should we ask?

  Chapter XV

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  GERMANY, THE NATION THAT WAS FOUNDED TOO LATE

  Merely for the sake of convenience I have divided the different countries of Europe into racial or cultural groups, and I have started my general discussion, with those nations which still showed unmistakable evidences of having been Roman colonies ere they began an independent political existence.

  It is true that Rome had also conquered the Balkans and that in one country at least (Rumania) the Latin language has survived as the national tongue. But the great Mongolian, Slavic, and Turkish invasions of the Middle Ages have so completely destroyed all evidence of Roman civilization in that part of the world that it would be decidedly erroneous to include the Balkan monarchies in the present discussion, wherefore I shall now bid farewell to the Mediterranean range-of-influence and proceed to that other form of civilization which was of Germanic origin and which came to be centred around the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

  There is (I have already told you that when I spoke of France) a vast semicircular plain which stretches all the way from the eastern Russian hills, where the Dnieper and the Dvina and the Neva and the Volga take their origin, to the Pyrenees, The southern part of that semicircle was brought under Roman control a very short time after the Germanic tribes began their mysterious migrations towards the west. The eastern part, even then, seems to have been occupied by those nomadic Slavic masses which replenished themselves just as rapidly as they were killed off, and which therefore, like the rabbits of Australia, were invincible. Thus the only part that was still available when the hungry Teutonic invaders appeared upon the scene was that big square which stretched from the Vistula on the east to the Rhine delta on the west. The Baltic was its northern limit and in the south a long line of Roman block-houses reminded all newcomers that they were entering upon a forbidden territory.

  The western part of this southern region was mountainous. First there were the Ardennes, the Rhine Highlands, and the Vosges, on the western bank of the river Rhine. Then, going from west to east, came the Black Forest, the Jura Mountains of Germany, the Erz (or Iron Ore) Mountains (present-day Bohemia), the Riesengebirge, and finally the Carpathians, which stretched almost as far as the Black Sea.

  The rivers in this territory were forced to flow northward. In order of their appearance from west to east there was first the Rhine, the subject of innumerable songs and legends, the river over which people have fought and wept more copiously than over any other mountain stream. For the Rhine is really a very modest little river. The Amazon is over five times as long. The Mississippi and Missouri are six times its length, and even the Ohio, which Americans do not consider much of a river as rivers go, is five hundred miles longer. Then comes the Weser River, with the modern city of Bremen near its mouth. Then the Elbe, which has made Hamburg what it is to-day. Then the Oder, which gave rise to the city of Stettin, the export harbour for the products of the town of Berlin and its industrial hinterland. Finally there is the Weichsel or Vistula, with the city of Danzig, which is now a free state ruled by a commissioner appointed by the League of Nations.

  Millions of years ago this northern territory was covered with glaciers. When they retreated they left behind them a large, stony waste, which towards the North Sea and the Baltic degenerated into a trackless morass. Gradually these northern marshes developed a fringe of sand dunes, and these dunes reach almost all the way from the Flemish coast to Königsberg, the old Prussian capital near the Russian frontier. As soon as these dunes had developed, the marshes began to enjoy a certain protection from the tides of the ocean. That meant the beginning of vegetation, and as soon as the soil had been prepared for timber the forests appeared, those same forests which, converted into peat fields, provided our ancestors with an unlimited supply of fairly good fuel.

  Both the North Sea and the Baltic, which are the northern and western frontiers of this plain, bear the name ‘sea’ as a courtesy title. They are really shallow ponds. The average depth of the North Sea is only sixty fathoms (a fathom is six feet) and its greatest depth is not more than 400 fathoms. The depth of the Baltic is seldom more than 100 fathoms. The average depth of the Atlantic, on the other hand, is 2170 fathoms, while that of the Pacific is 2240 fathoms. These figures show you that you had better think of the North Sea and the Baltic as submerged valleys. A slight elevation of the surface of the earth would once more turn them into dry land.

  And now let us look at a map of the dry land of Germany. I mean the map as it is to-day and as it must have been more or less when human beings followed the retreating glaciers and settled down permanently in this part of the old continent.

  These early immigrants were savages. They lived by catching wild animals and by growing a little grain. But they were savages with a very decided sense of beauty, and as their own territory was poor in those metals which could be used for ornaments, they had to send abroad for their gold and silver.

  The following statement may come as a mild shock to many of my readers, but original trade-routes were luxury routes. Many early contests between the races that inhabited different parts of the world were luxury contests. The Romans learned the main outline of the geography of northern Europe from traders who had penetrated as far as the mysterious Baltic in search of amber, used for personal adornment by Romans, Celts, and Teutons of both sexes. The desire for that small, lustrous concretion, which is sometimes found inside the shell of an oyster, and with which women delight to attract attention to the pretty curves of their ears or the slenderness of their fingers, has been responsible for more voyages of discovery in the Pacific and in the Indian Ocean than any other cause, including the desire of many honest people to carry the Gospel unto the heathen.

  The quest for ambergris, a substance found in the intestinal canals of sperm whales, and the result of what in plain English we would call a bilious attack on the part of the unfortunate whale, has driven more ships to the coasts of Brazil and Madagascar and the Moluccas than the search for herring or sardines or other forms of useful food. For ambergris could be used as a base for many perfumes that smelled deliciously of flowers and distant lands, whereas food was merely food and
not half as interesting.

  A change in fashions which made the women of the seventeenth century wear their corsets underneath their gowns and out of sight (twelve-course dinners were bad for the figure) was directly responsible for much of our knowledge of the Arctic. As soon as Paris had decided that hats should be adorned with aigrets, those hunters who went after the white herons to deprive them of their head plumes (regardless of the fact that this meant the extinction of one of the loveliest and noblest birds of all creation) penetrated further into southern lagoons than when they were merely in quest of their daily bread and butter.

  I might continue the list for almost a dozen more pages. Whatever was rare and therefore expensive has always been an object of desire to those who, by a wasteful demonstration of their riches, hoped to impress their less fortunate neighbours. Ever since the beginning of history, luxury rather than necessity has been the real pioneer of progress along the lines of exploration. And when we study the map of prehistoric Germany carefully we can still trace the old luxury routes, for in the main they are the same as those of medieval and modern times.

  Take the conditions some three thousand years ago. The mountain-ridges of the south, the Harz, the Erz Mountains, and the Riesengebirge, were situated hundreds of miles away from the sea. The plain that stretched northward towards the North Sea and the Baltic had long since changed from marshland into dry land and was now thickly covered with forests. And Man, following in the wake of the glaciers, which had now retreated in the general direction of Scandinavia and Finland, had claimed this entire wilderness as his own. Among the hills of the south, the tribes which inhabited the valleys had found that it paid them to cut down their trees and sell them to the Romans who had occupied strategic positions along the Rhine and the Danube. For the rest, few of these early Teuton nomads and tanners had ever seen a Roman. One Roman expedition had tried to penetrate to the heart of their country, had been ambushed in a dark and waterlogged valley and slaughtered to a man, so that the experiment was not tried again. That did not mean however that northern Germany was completely cut off from all contact with the rest of the world.