Our Soldiers in Switzerland

The Times, 23 August 1916. One of St Peter’s First World War documents, from the years when British prisoners of war were interned at Château-d’Œx, 1916–17. Transcribed in full from a cutting made available by The Times Archive.

In this report: the correspondent’s report on what the interned men were given to do — the workshops set up for them, and his argument that discipline should be handed back to their own officers.

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Headline as printed: OUR SOLDIERS IN SWITZERLAND.

Handwritten annotation

The Times - 23 August 1916

THE QUESTION OF EMPLOYMENT.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE.

(FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.)

BERNE.

O, farewell !
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The Royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
And, O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
The immortal Jove’s dread clamours counterfeit,
Farewell ! Othello’s occupation’s gone!

The British prisoners of war interned in Switzerland have many reasons, besides the not inconsiderable fact that they are still alive, for congratulating themselves on their present lot, as far removed in many cases from what went before it as heaven, or, at all events, purgatory, from the other place. But for all that, they can never, I suppose, quite shake off the depressing feeling that they are placed on the shelf at the time of all others in their lives when they would fain be up and doing. Though they may not grumble about it, they can hardly forget that till the end of the war they are a race apart, and that till then, and perhaps for always, their careers as soldiers have come to the place called Stop.

When they first came to this friendly land they were, and to a certain extent still are, in the position of schoolboys restricted by rules and bounds and fixed hours for meals and lock-up, but without the schoolboy’s stand-by of regular games and work, and without his incentive of possible office and promotion and the sense of development and authority which they carry with them. The case of the officers was especially hard. Their office was taken from them and given to others. The N.C.O.’s, though they were given a certain disciplinary responsibility, were almost equally powerless, and all of them, officers and men, were in the position of being cut off (unavoidably, of course) from the work for which they had been trained, and were hard put to it to discover satisfactory substitutes.

For a time, after the strain of all that they had gone through, rest and repose were all that they were fit for or wanted. The men especially were well content to bask in the sun (only there was no sun for the first month) and do nothing, or as little more as need be. But that obviously could not last. It is all very well to beat swords into ploughshares, but even ploughshares must plough, or they will get rusty.

FILLING UP THE TIME.

All play and no work either makes Tommy a very dull boy, or else will make him extra lively and lead to trouble. To avoid these dangers, even from the first, many of the men were provided or provided themselves with various kinds of peaceful occupations. “They cleaned the windows, and they swept the floor, and they polished up the handle of the big front door.” They did their own washing and all the housework (except the cooking) in the hotels and chalets where they were quartered, and they gardened, and worked in sawmills, and did odd jobs about the village. By way of recreation (when they were not being visited by the Swiss doctors) some of them bicycled, some kicked about an aimless football in a goalless field, some went for walks, some embroidered antimacassars for the old folks at home, and the rest of their spare time was chiefly spent in saluting British and Swiss officers and in making friends with the village women and children. And one day, by way of showing gratitude to their Swiss hosts, some of them gave a concert, the first of a series which they hope to be allowed to give elsewhere as a travelling troupe, in order to collect funds with which to build a holiday house and home of rest in the mountains for the sick children of the canton.

All this, however, was only the preliminary stage of the Swiss life of the British soldiers in Château d’Oex, Rougemont, and Rosinières. It was impossible to watch it without feeling that something more was wanted if the life there was to be tolerable, and now this something else is to be provided by the institution of a number of workshops—carpenters’, bootmakers’, tailors’, mechanicians’, bookbinders’, and so on—in which the men will be able to work at their old trades or to learn new ones against the rainy days which they may have to face when the war is over.

For the men it is difficult to see what more could be done at present, though I believe the Swiss Government have under consideration an admirable scheme for providing real work for all interned prisoners, civilian as well as military, in order to check the degeneration which would otherwise be inevitable.

THE OFFICERS.

The problem of the officers is, it seems to me, rather different. They ride, they drive the best imitations of dog-carts that they can lay hands on, they play lawn tennis (with their left arm if the right is gone), they hunt butterflies instead of snipers, they dance (if they are young) even when they can only hobble, they climb the mountains to see the sun rise, they fish for trout and sometimes catch them, and they pursue their studies in French and Russian begun in Germany, and manage to fill up their time with various kinds of serious work. To a certain extent the blank in their lives is now beginning to be filled by the business of supervising the men’s workshops, and organizing mountain marches for them, and by the duty, thanks to the recent institution of orderly officers, of visiting the men’s quarters, examining offenders, and receiving complaints.

But with these exceptions Othello’s occupation, and, what is worse, Othello’s authority, is gone. Moral suasion can do much, but it can never take the place of the discipline under which the British soldier is trained and to which he is accustomed. My personal opinion, which I give for what it is worth, is that the Swiss military authorities would add enormously to all the other wise and gracious measures which they have adopted with regard to the treatment of the interned prisoners of war if they were to place all questions connected with the discipline of the British soldier entirely in the hands of his own officers. The effect, as I see it, would be twofold. In the first place men and officers would work together to uphold the credit of the British Army—for, excellent disciplinarians as the Swiss military officers are who now have the charge of our men, they cannot be expected to understand them in the same way. And the second and most desirable result of the change would be to restore to Othello a very important part of his occupation as an officer. It would give him a practical object in life, and make him feel that he is being of real use to his country and to his kind-hearted Swiss hosts.

Facsimile of the original cutting: Our Soldiers in Switzerland, The Times, 23 August 1916 — **Facsimile** — *The Times*, 23 August 1916, page 5. Scanned by the News UK Archive & Record Office and supplied to St Peter's in April 2016. Reproduced with acknowledgement to Times Newspapers Limited. Open the full-size scan.

End of the transcribed document

Notes by St Peter's — not part of the document above

St Peter’s and the 1916 internment

The Château-d’Œx chaplaincy was placed on the Colonial and Continental Church Society’s list in 1866, and for the thirty-three years before St Peter’s was built the English congregation had no building of its own. Served by seasonal chaplains, it met in the village’s Protestant church — the Temple, up on the hill — and, when the climb or the snow made that impractical, in the lounge of the Hôtel Berthod, the Pension Morier and the Salle des Catéchumènes. The season was a summer one — June to September, before winter sports drew visitors to the valley. The church was built in 1899, on land given by the Berthod brothers and with a loan from the Society; it was consecrated on 27 May 1902 by Thomas Edward Wilkinson, Anglican Bishop of North Europe, and enlarged in 1911, by which time the chaplain could no longer seat everyone who came.

From 1916 neutral Switzerland took in wounded and invalid prisoners of war from both sides — French, Belgian, German and British — released from enemy camps under agreements between their governments. Château-d’Œx received the British. The first train reached Montreux on 30 May 1916 carrying 304 men, including 32 officers. The chaplain, the Revd E. Dudley Lampen — the parish’s first permanent chaplain, in post since 1908, and assisted during the war by the Revd Isaac Hutchinson — later described the whole episode as “the sojourn of 750 British soldiers in this valley”.

St Peter’s was their parish church. They filled it for services, and one of the internees, a professional organist in England before the war, played the church’s American harmonium. In August 1916 Lampen wrote to The Times asking readers to fund a proper organ — “a permanent memorial of the historic sojourn of our British officers and men in this valley”. The fund’s treasurer was Colonel E. Vansittart of the Royal West Kent Regiment, himself one of the officers who had arrived on that first train. The organ was dedicated on 8 March 1917: a Goll of 1916, opus 462, and the organ still played in the church today.

These First World War reports were traced for the centenary of the internment, which Château-d’Œx marked on Sunday 29 and Monday 30 May 2016 — a hundred years to the day after the first train. The complete archive → · The fuller account of 1916 →

About this transcription

Source: The Times, 23 August 1916
Archive item: our-soldiers-work-discipline (4 images)
Transcription: Machine-transcribed in two independent passes, with a further check on disputed readings.
Status: Verified before publication — two independent transcriptions were compared, and any reading still in doubt is left unresolved and noted below rather than settled.

Transcribed verbatim, preserving the spelling, punctuation and capitalisation of the original. Square brackets mark a reading that is uncertain or a passage cut off by the edge of the scan. Where the text of a figure or a name could not be established, it is shown as unresolved rather than guessed.

Editorial notes

Uncertain readings

“twofold” — the only reading left open. It is printed across a line break (“two-” at the column edge, “fold” beginning the next line), so the scan cannot show whether the paper set it as one word or hyphenated. Rejoined here as one word; the alternative is “two-fold”.
“Rosinières” (place name, third in the list with Château d’Oex and Rougemont) — the printed text reads “Rosinières”, with a single s and a grave accent, checked at magnification. The village’s modern spelling is “Rossinière”; the 1916 form is transcribed as printed rather than corrected.
No count of interned soldiers is given anywhere in this article — indeed no figure of any kind appears in it. The piece describes life, occupations, workshops and discipline for the British soldiers interned at Château d’Oex, Rougemont and Rosinières, and refers in passing to “all interned prisoners, civilian as well as military” under Swiss Government consideration, but states no number. Mürren and Leysin are not mentioned at all.

Editorial method

Two independent machine transcriptions were made from the page scan without sight of each other. They disagreed in seven places, and each disagreement was settled by examining the scan at magnification rather than by taking the majority reading:

“in the hotels and chalets” — not “hovels”. The t is clear; the h is inked and reads at a glance as a b.
“mechanicians’” — not “mechanics’“, in the list of workshop trades.
“Rosinières” — the grave accent is present.
“The men especially were well content” — not “were especially”.
“thanks to the recent institution of orderly officers, of visiting the men’s quarters” — the phrase is present; one pass dropped it.
“N.C.O.’s” — the apostrophe is present.
“But with these exceptions Othello’s occupation…” begins a new paragraph; one pass ran it on.

The verse is Othello’s farewell, from Othello, Act III scene iii. It is set in italic, and the spacing before its exclamation marks is reproduced as printed — “O, farewell !” and “Farewell !” carry a space, “glorious war!” and “occupation’s gone!” do not.