La Place de la Concorde Suisse

First Edition.
VALAIS/OCTOBER. In admirable disregard for the orthodoxy of public relations, the Swiss Army has chosen Luc Massy to be the soldier-companion of the American observer John McPhee during various exercises of a “re-fresher” course among the high Alps of the Canton de Valais. The easygoing, irreverent Massy can take the army or leave it alone, and his irrepressible clowning has even been known to invoke discipline, including ten days and nights in a guardhouse known as le trou.
“Switzerland does not have an army, Switzerland is an army,” an officer remarks at one point to McPhee; and, indeed, the Swiss Army is a militia composed of 650,000 people who can be fully mobilized in less than forty-eight hours but generally pursue civilian occupations while their assault rifles repose under beds and in closets at home. For Massy, home is a lovely seventeenth-century country house high above Lake Geneva, in the middle of a vineyard called Clos du Boux. Age thirty, he is a master winemaker if not a master soldier, but he puts in his time ungrudgingly, walking the Valais terrain in the vicinity of Brig, climbing from river gorges to alpine meadows on patrol with the Section de Renseignements of the Eighth Battalion of the Fifth Regiment of the Tenth Mountain Division. The assignment of the Section de Renseignements is to gather information about landscapes, infrastructure, native people, and lurking enemies, who, for the purpose of the exercises, are designated “red.” As the author gathers his own renseignements, this book full of wit and deft portraiture be-comes, in a larger sense, a portrait of Switzerland as seen through its ubiquitous army.
The Swiss Army knits the varied skeins of Switzerland’s society. Swiss militiamen serve until they are in their fifties. Depending on rank, they are on active duty for as little as three weeks or as much as two months in a given year. For businessmen and bankers, high position in the army can lead to high position in businesses and banks. As a seedbed for business contacts the army is regarded as more fertile than any gentlemen’s club and for
managementtraining an equivalent to the Harvard Business School. When not walking with Massy’s patrols, McPhee travels from alp to alp and unit to unit in the company of people with more formal military enthusiasms. such as Captain François Rumpf, of the Schweizerischer Bankverein, who is an adjutant to Divisionnaire Adrien Tschumy, and Major Jean-Philippe Jaussi, general manager of the Hotel zum Storchen in Zurich and command. ing officer of the Seventh Battalion. “When we sit together in private life, we often talk about the army.” one colonel says. “Your conscience can accept it more thoroughly when you know you will attack no one.” The Swiss have not fought a war for nearly five hundred years.
This beautiful country is nonetheless prepared to defend itself to the last valley, in accord with its time-honored Porcupine Principle (“You roll up into a ball and brandish your quills”). Swiss rock is honeycombed with hidden military installations. “Thorn and rose, there is scarcely a scene in Switzerland that would not sell a calendar,” writes John McPhee, and, there is scarcely a scene inSwitzerland that is not ready to erupt in fire to repel an invasive war.”