Lake Leman fascinated me. All the scenery round looked fairy-like to
me, a dream land, in which mighty mountains cast their blue-black
shadows down on the turquoise water, beneath a brilliant, sparkling
sunshine that saturated the air with its colouring. My impressions of
Lausanne, Chillon, Vevey, Montreux, were recorded in the first of my
lectures at the University the following year. The instruments of
torture at Chillon, barbaric and fearsome as they were, made me think
of the still worse murderous instruments being used in the war between
France and Germany. It seemed to me that if one could see war at close
quarters, one would come to regard the earth as peopled by dangerous
lunatics. Political indifference to human life and human suffering had
taken the place of the premeditated cruelty of the Middle Ages. Still,
if no previous war had ever been so frightful, neither had there ever
been so much done to mitigate suffering. While fanatic Frenchwomen on
the battlefields cut the noses off wounded Germans, and mutilated them
when they could, and while the Germans were burning villages and
killing their peaceful inhabitants, if one of them had so much as fired
a shot, in all quietness the great societies for the care of the
wounded were doing their work. And in this Switzerland especially bore
the palm. There were two currents then, one inhuman and one humane, and
of the two, the latter will one day prove itself the stronger. Under
Louis XIV. war was still synonymous with unlimited plundering, murder,
rape, thievery and robbery. Under Napoleon I. there were still no such
things as ambulances. The wounded were carted away now and again in
waggons, piled one on the top of each other, if any waggons were to be
had; if not, they were left as they lay, or were flung into a ditch,
there to die in peace. Things were certainly a little better.