The Government has begun to think seriously about the food supply question. Supposing Italy should go to war--which, it is realised, may quite well happen any day--what would happen to Switzerland, surrounded by Germany, Austria, France, and Italy? Where could she get the foodstuffs she is bound to import? Large depôts and stores of all kinds have been arranged, and severe measures have been taken against contraband runners, who up to October last were carrying on extensive operations. The Government has monopolised the mills and the whole of the wheat reserves, as well as all imports, which are taken up by the Government and sold at standard prices and in no larger quantities than is absolutely indispensable. All the Swiss people I came across seemed to be occupied more by their commercial interests, badly hit as they are by the war, than by anything else. They only wish for the war to cease, the sooner the better. There are hardly any foreigners in Switzerland, though some Swiss hotel-keepers have been advertising both in England and Germany: in England that the German managers and waiters had been removed; in Germany that no English guests would be received in their hotels. However, business was very slack, and everybody seemed very pessimistic about the coming summer season. Though the sentence, "Politically we have nothing to get and nothing to lose," is often repeated, I met somebody who showed me that the great crisis has awakened hopes of national development even in this quiet, business-like little country. At the Bubenberg, a large Berne café of world-wide fame, I met a Swiss ex-officer whose white hair saved him from the danger of the Landsturm service. In front of him, on the marble table, a large map of East Switzerland was wide open, and he was tracing a few mysterious lines on it with a blue pencil. When I asked him about it, he told me that the north frontier of Switzerland could never be safe unless it was a "natural" one. "Our canton of Shaffausen," said he, "is completely isolated among German land. We want this little piece of territory between Ludnigshafen, on the Boden-see, and Bargen. We want also the Wutach frontier, from the spot where this river marks our frontier with Germany down to the Rhine." "And what about your neutrality?" I asked him. "Oh, the neutrality, _mon ami_, could not mean much in a general modification of the European map; and beside that, _vous savez l'apetit vient en mangeant_; and if everybody has a piece of Germany, why should we keep out of the feast?" It will be just a hundred years next September since the Prussian Principality of Neuchatel became a Swiss canton. Well, after all, the old Swiss captain's idea would be a rather smart way of celebrating a centenary. CHAPTER VIII ITALY