VERDUN stands today as a monument to collective madness that breeds war and is bred by it. The eleven-month defence of the ville martyre against the Germans in 1916 cost more than a million lives. Perhaps one day the city will attain equal renown for another, less gruesome reason. It was near Verdun that, in 1920, the first international voluntary workcamp took place. The story of that camp is well worth telling for the project embodied, in embryonic form, many of the successes that would later propel the voluntary service movement forward as well as the problems that were to plague it.
During the First World War, English and American pacifists formed the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a movement of Christian protest against war and belief that a better way than violence could be found for the solution of conflicts among nations. In 1919, less than a year after the war ended, the FOR held its first international conference at Bilthoven, near Utrecht, in Holland. Participants in this meeting, many of whom had been conscientious objectors, refusing to bear arms during the war, sought to implement one of their organization's principal aims: 'To build a social order which will suffer no individual or group to be exploited for the profit or pleasure of another, and which will assure to all the means of realizing the best possibilities of life.(1)
The war had left Europe in an appalling state of cynicism and discouragement, and even these imaginative people had to cast about for some time before leaving the realm of cloudy ideals and good intentions. It was a German delegate who finally said, 'We have been talking for two days, is there no practical work we can do to give expression to what we have been saying?'(2) He said his brother had been a soldier in northern France, and killed at Verdun; now he wanted to help rebuild on the ruins.
This appeal stuck in the mind of the first international secretary of the FOR, a Swiss named Pierre Ceresole. In June 1920 Ceresole wrote to a friend: 'Neither a newspaper nor a manifesto would really be the thing we want [for the Fellowship]; I want to know when shall we send our first man out to serve his fellow men?'(3) That summer he and Hubert Parris, an English Quaker who had done post-war relief work in France, toured the eastern part of the country looking for a practical project. Work was not lacking in the devastated villages, but a spirit of comprehension towards the 'enemy' --- there were to be German and Austrian volunteers --- seemed absent everywhere. Finally the mayor and peasants of a village called Esnes, near Verdun, asked to have a reconstruction project. The town was still churned with shell craters and its fields sown with unexploded mines. The police prefect of Paris took an interest in the idea and obtained the necessary entry visas for the foreign workers. The Fellowship of Reconciliation agreed to defray part of the costs.
In November the team arrived: a dozen hardy young Frenchmen, Swiss, Germans (two of whom had been soldiers), British, Hungarians, an Austrian and a Dutch girl who kept house. The volunteers lived in a primitive hut, which they found without door or windows. They worked through the winter helping the villagers build shacks, and were considerably cheered by the arrival of Pierre Ceresole's jovial brother Ernest. Now the leadership triumvirate was complete: Hubert Parris and Pierre were pacifists, and Ernest ... a colonel in the Swiss army. The peasants found the group intriguing: they worked hard in all kinds of weather, held intense discussions late into the night and seemed a generally curious crew.
Curiosity was not the only feeling abroad about the volunteers. A certain Madame X, who managed a relief organization and had shown herself sympathetic to Pierre and Hubert, was particularly antagonistic towards volunteers who were 'enemies of France'. Unfortunately the Germans spoke no French --- a lesson for future camps in tension areas. In spite of the mayor's continued approval and assistance, the campers soon faced a crisis.
By spring the team had completed their construction of new homes for the peasants, repaired a road, and begun foundations for a new town hall. Wishing to continue the camp, they offered to help de-mine and put under cultivation still dangerous but badly needed fields. But they were given to understand that, highly appreciated though their work was, they could only stay on condition that the Austro-German contingent be sent home. To accede to the wishes of Madame X might allow the project to continue but would breach the principle on which it was based. There was no choice; principle had to triumph, even if the work stopped. After five months the-first international voluntary workcamp disbanded and the volunteers --- saddened but still convinced of their ideal --- went home.
A failure? Partially, The volunteers had left much work undone. The camp had not succeeded in reconciling Madame X, and those villagers who thought like her, to the idea that Germans are not intrinsic 'enemies of France'. Indeed, it had seemed to exacerbate their prejudices. But the project was not a total failure. Some peasants had been re-housed and other work was carried to a successful conclusion. 'Some seeds of international good will were sown in that hard earth,' wrote one volunteer. 'In the hearts of some Meuse peasants remained fond memories of the young idealists who had wanted to help them among the ruins. The idea of a voluntary civilian service was not lost.'(4)
The Esnes camp was a success if for no other reason than that from it sprang first a series of workcamps, then an organization --- the Service Civil International(5) --- and finally a world-wide movement of people who attempt, by working manually for and with those less fortunate than they, to prevent another Verdun from ever happening.
Far from being lost, the idea of an international voluntary civilian service had just been born and during the next decade Pierre Ceresole nurtured it towards maturity. But who was this extraordinary man who, according to the Esnes volunteer quoted above, 'always had enough strength and courage for himself and enough left over to carry us along with him'?(6)
Pierre Ceresole was born in 1879 into a large French-speaking Swiss family. As he later took pleasure in pointing out to deflate chauvinists, he had roots or relations in Italy, Germany and England as well as his native Switzerland. His father was a colonel, lawyer, judge, parliamentarian and, during the year 1873, President of Switzerland. According to his wife, Pierre grew up in 'happy surroundings and in an environment particularly suited to developing both heart and intelligence'.(7) Young Pierre lived his formative years in a large Lausanne household frequented by Swiss and foreign men of letters, philosophers and politicians such as Victor Hugo, Ernest Renan and Gambetta.
Pierre was a good student and took his religious training with utmost seriousness. In his teens, after confirmation in the Protestant church, he taught at a Sunday school and devoted many hours to discussing religious and philosophical issues with his schoolmates. For a time nothing seemed to distinguish him from many other slightly grave sons of the intelligentsia of Protestant French-speaking Switzerland.
One day, however, at seventeen, Pierre was walking in the forest above Lausanne that overlooks Lake Leman and from which, in clear weather, Mont Blanc is visible. Suddenly he experienced 'something which seemed to me like a solemn dedication to truth ... in which the first necessity was to recognize one's own faults. In a blinding fashion there came to me the Vision of Truth and nature's mysteries and solitude.'(8) This mystic experience may well have been due, in part at least, to a combination of Pierre's innate intensity and the romantic surroundings in which he was walking. It was more than adolescent agitation, however.
The experience left him profoundly different from other youths of his age. Thereafter he measured his own intentions and actions, and those of others, against the yardstick of total truth. Life, defined in such stark terms, and regulated by such an absolute role, was not easy to live. Throughout his twenties existence often seemed meaningless to Pierre. Reading and re-reading the Bible he found the teachings it contained far removed from the preoccupations of what he considered a dogmatic and conformist church. Although an exceptional student --- he spent several months at the Munich laboratory of Röntgen, discoverer of the X-ray --- Pierre underestimated his academic excellence. He badly missed home and family, and brooded. He had set his sights very high and his expectations were deceived by life, which he termed 'this horrible business'. (9)
At thirty, Pierre Ceresole made a crucial choice that ended this period of unsureness. Though young, he was offered the chair of his gravely ill professor at the highly regarded Swiss Federal Polytechnic Academy. To the dismay of family and friends he refused the professorship that could have marked the beginning of a brilliant and respectable career. Pierre was horrified at the prospect of slipping into an easy existence that might not have allowed him to seek a constructive outlet for his dedication to truth. He may well have feared that the very need to seek truth would be stifled in him by the regularity and narrowness of the academic world.
At an age when most men are settling down, Pierre was moved to leave his homeland. Adventure? Certainly, if a vague desire to broaden and deepen oneself by coming into contact with new and different ideas and peoples is adventurous. In 1910, not quite sure what he was seeking, Pierre left Switzerland with one of his brothers for a trip to the United States. The short tour turned into a five-year round-the-world voyage of self-discovery.
Frank and rough, idealist yet utilitarian, American life refreshed Pierre. He soon discovered the shortcomings of being a pure intellectual and set about completing his education. He decided to work his way across the country and then around the world. Entrusting his money to his brother so as to live on inventiveness alone, he set out from the East Coast. He took well to the rugged life of the oil fields, raised chickens on a ranch and made the acquaintance of pick and shovel --- which were later to be constant and close companions on workcamps --- as a gravedigger. While teaching French literature at a Honolulu school he read Emerson's works for the first time. Imbued with their message of simplicity and justice, Pierre was distressed by the economic and social gulf that divided the Hawaiian and North American inhabitants of the islands.
The outbreak of the First World War found Pierre working as an engineer in Japan, the ancient civilization of which, according to one biographer, 'helped him to see more clearly the virtues and follies of European culture'.(10) Deeply troubled by the probability of mass violence, he hurried home.
During his travels Pierre had discovered a whole new world, which he called 'a poem, an immense poem ... which people have no time to read because they are busy in the office'.(11) The only way to know and understand that poem, he felt, was to get away from offices and everyday complications, to use one's hands as well as one's head, to do as well as think. In five years abroad, Pierre read the world poem and came to appreciate the value of simplicity and practicality.
The months of war following his return home were the decisive time in his early life, when the constellation of internationalist ideas whirling in his mind jelled into a pattern of practical action.
At the outbreak of the war, Pierre Ceresole was not a pacifist. Nor had it entered his head that the State might come into conflict with the practice of the theories that were forming in him. Although Switzerland was not a belligerent power, he contributed from Japan part of his earnings to the Swiss Air Force. Later, it was to the State war effort that he transferred the modest fortune left him by his father.
Meditating on the social injustice that had so shocked him in Hawaii he had decided to have no other income than that he could earn himself. His acceptance of war and support of the State's military preparations soon evaporated.
Already in 1914 the war appeared terrifying and absurd to him.
At this very moment as I write --- do you hear, descendant? --- hundreds of thousands of men are devoting all their ingenuity to killing hundreds of thousands of others against whom they have absolutely nothing, except that it is necessary to kill them.... If everyone were obliged to thrust his bomb or shrapnel personally into the body of his enemy, he would realise the horror of what he is doing.(12)
The following year Pierre was shaken by the trial and imprisonment of a religious pacifist who refused to do obligatory service in the Swiss Army. 'Since honest people have locked up Baudraz,' he wrote in his diary, 'it seems to me that official lying has reached an extreme and I must say something.'(13) Having called a protest meeting at Lausanne's Central Hall, Pierre mounted the podium, but was too embarrassed to get beyond the first few words.
He was not long in finding his voice, however, although he chose a strange place to speak out. In church one Sunday not long after the Central Hall fiasco, Pierre rose at the end of the service and asked the minister's permission to speak. The pastor was startled but knew of Pierre's sincerity and consented. The buzzing crowd returned to their pews. Pierre then read out a manifesto to the effect that 'there are in the Church today two lies which we must get rid of at any price ... the lie that a Christian can be a soldier and the lie that a Christian can be rich.'(14) In conclusion he invited the pastor to refuse to sacrifice himself to false gods by serving the State, and to join in prison conscientious objectors to military service.
Pierre also took up the pen against what he called the Church's 'military lie'. In a text written in 1917 he said:
On Easter of this year, we heard a sermon in Lausanne [where sentiment was pro-French] to the effect that Christ resurrected had manifested himself through the United States' intervention in the world war, while at the same hour of the same day, at Grossmünster Church in Zurich [where pro-German feeling ran high] a pastor ... preached that Christ resurrected had manifested himself in pacifist attempts to prevent this same intervention.(14)
Not content with speaking and writing against war, Pierre Ceresole acted, usually alone and symbolically, at the bidding of his conscience. Although more familiar to us today since Gandhian passive resistance and sit-ins have become widespread means of sparking off social change, his method shocked his contemporaries. Pierre's first gesture, which he repeated during the Second World War and for which he served several prison sentences, was to refuse payment of his military tax.
Another act, which endangered Pierre personally and caused much consternation (and perhaps some thought) among the authorities who had to deal with him, was illegal border crossing. Affirming that 'human order comes before State order',(15) and attempting to make personal contact with plain Germans without asking official permission, Pierre made unauthorized trips to Germany at three critical periods: in 1918, in 1933 after Hitler's accession to power, and during the Second World War, in November 1942.
On his last crossing he was imprisoned. He wrote thus of his days in the German jail:
I do not exaggerate by saying they were among the best and most beautiful of my life.... Never have I felt so truly, naturally international --- or, to put it more correctly, a MAN and nothing more or less --- freed from all this ... monstrous folly of national idolatries.(16)
Three years later, after serving a three month term (which the Swiss prison authorities tried to make as pleasant as possible for their incorrigible client) for refusing to pay military defence tax, Pierre died of a heart attack.
Pierre Ceresole's pacifism was strong. His acts protesting against war were clearly conceived and meticulously executed, although not always understood by his contemporaries. And he had the courage to suffer for his convictions. But two aspects of his life must be stressed lest the reader be left with an unbalanced picture of the man's personality, thought and action. In the first place, Pierre was not a professional agitator. Secondly, in spite of the uproar caused by his protests, he devoted more time to building a new, more just society than to assaulting the old.
What drove Pierre Ceresole to the words and acts that aroused a notoriety from which, not being a born rebel, he suffered acutely? Feelings of guilt for his wealthy background and long periods of inaction played some role. After the church scandal, he wrote to a friend: 'From that day(17) on, the shame I still felt at having been a Sunday school teacher disappeared; I am better ready to take another step forward, if I have to.'(18) More important than any guilty feeling, however, was Pierre's unswerving dedication to the truth.
The anguish he felt resulted from a conflict between the dictates of his good breeding and conventional education, on one hand, and the imperatives of truth, as he saw it, on the other. 'I feel unworthy of representing this cause,' he wrote after refusing to pay the military tax, 'I can find a hundred and one reasons for giving in.... But I simply can't.' After each public protest Pierre experienced --- not pride --- thankful humility at having been able to 'go through with it'. 'What a prodigious privilege it is,' he wrote, 'not to betray.' Underlying truth was Christianity, in the basic tenets of which he firmly believed while rejecting many of its outward trappings. After the last border-crossing episode, he described his relief as 'this liberation because God has allowed me to be courageous!'(19)
The aspiration to change society arises from at least a partial rejection of society. The reformer and revolutionary must begin by saying 'no'. Calling himself a radical pacifist, Pierre Ceresole formulated an 'absolute and tranquil NO to all preparations for military violence'.(20)
Pierre's simple and instinctive 'no' to war brought him ultimately to challenge the validity of existing orders that allowed and perpetuated war: the organized church and the nation-state. Not a destructive man by nature or upbringing, Pierre faced the dilemma that pacifists have always grappled with in wartime. As a historian of Service Civil International puts it, they say 'no' and would like to say 'yes'.(21) They wish to build a more fraternal and peaceful world, but often find that their first public acts are essentially anti-social and isolate them from the society they seek to improve. And the gestures of refusal which place them beyond the pale attract greater publicity than their less newsworthy constructive activities. For many years, for example, Pierre was better known in Switzerland for having risen to speak in church and gone to prison as a tax delinquent than as the creator of voluntary workcamps.
Limited in wartime to symbolic gestures of individual rebellion, Pierre Ceresole initiated between the two world conflicts what he called a Peaceful Revolution. In the years since the first workcamp, time has judged Pierre's programme favourably. Millions of young --- and many not so young --- people have volunteered their time and enthusiasm to improving society in international projects. Most of them had never heard of Pierre Ceresole, or of the Esnes workcamp. But today Pierre's qualities still characterize, in varying degrees, the international voluntary service movement, its leaders and the volunteers themselves.
A world without frontiers was Pierre Ceresole's home, sincere simplicity his style, and practical action --- individual or collective, depending on the circumstances --- his method; truth was his vocation and peace his objective. To some he seemed mentally deranged, others took him for a saint. That he was extraordinary no one who knew him would contest; but he was neither crank nor hero.
Overcoming the painful memory of an early, unhappy love affair Pierre Ceresole married, at sixty-two, his distant cousin Lise. 'I am infinitely happy,' he wrote to a friend,
that an ultra-radical pacifist has the opportunity to demonstrate that he is sensitive to the beautiful things of this world. I am happy to dissociate myself from the ascetic category in which many people have believed they must classify me. One is a militant for peace because one loves life.(22)
Returning to Switzerland after French super-patriots had forced the Esnes project to halt, Pierre and his brother, the colonel, must have been discouraged by their apparent failure. During the next four years Pierre occasionally took time off from teaching and other occupations to seek appropriate projects for a second camp. But most of his time was spent attempting to obtain legal recognition of conscientious objection in Switzerland.
Post-war Europe was alive with ideas. The world had emerged transformed from its first prolonged contact with modern warfare. Horrified by the barbarism of the previous years, many European leaders looked with despairing cynicism at anything that smacked of idealism. Others' imagination was stirred by the idealistic euphoria preceding the Treaty of Versailles and fired by the desire to make another war impossible. They sought the policies and institutions that could preserve peace. At this time of ferment that gave birth to the League of Nations, politics seemed to be a channel of successful action for the peace-minded. It is not surprising that Pierre concentrated his energy on political rather than social endeavour.
Several countries --- Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Holland --- had adopted legislation enabling young men who for reasons of conscience refused military service to do alternative civilian service rather than be sent to prison as common criminals. Why, asked Pierre and many others, pacifist or not, should not Switzerland do likewise? Pierre presided over a committee that sought recognition of conscientious objection. Although this committee obtained 40,000 signatures --- twice the required minimum --- for a petition demanding the creation of alternative service the Swiss Parliament overwhelmingly defeated the proposal in 1924.
Just as political action showed itself a less effective means of implementing his ideas than Pierre had hoped, a pressing need appeared for a second workcamp. This proved a golden opportunity to demonstrate the value of civilian service. In December 1923 an avalanche of snow hurtled down the Alpine valley of Ormonts in the Vaud district of Switzerland, uprooting trees, and destroying houses and a bridge that blocked its path in the village of Vers-l'Eglise. The following spring Pierre visited Vers and convinced the wary mountain folk to accept, and help defray the expenses of, a workcamp. First of a series of camps to be organized in Switzerland during the twenties, the Vers project set the pattern for later workcamps sponsored by Service Civil International and other organizations in Europe and North America. According to Hélène Monastier, a volunteer at Vers and long-time 'civilist', it also 'created a living community on which Pierre could count until the end of his life'.(23)
During three weeks of August 1924 some forty volunteers rebuilt one of the destroyed houses, built a bridge and cleared a stream-bed. Two customs that came into being quite by chance during the Vers project have become standard features of workcamps organized since by SCI and many other organizations.
One day, at mealtime, John Baudraz scolded the other volunteers, 'We throw ourselves at our food like animals; it's not becoming.' Pierre agreed: 'Quite true, but some of us would have serious objections to saying grace before meals. Perhaps we could observe a minute of silence.' It was agreed that this should be the practice for the rest of the camp. Another day, in the evening, John Baudraz sang a song no one had heard before, 'l'Amitié'---'Friendship'. The volunteers liked its easy melody and simple words and decided to sing it each day in order to learn it by heart. The English version is stilted, but the song runs smoothly in the original French, which most people learn.
Toi qui fais de nos misères
Disparaître la moitié
Viens nous faire vivre en frères,
Charme pur de l'Amitié.
Throughout the project the villagers kept a close watch on the volunteers. Little by little, as they saw the tasks advance in all sorts of weather, their original. suspicion disappeared. The campers went home 'enriched by a magnificent and unforgettable experience: the discovery of a new instrument for joining men together. We had lived this experience on a scale that was small but sufficient to make us realize its potential.'(24),
Hardly had the volunteers returned home, when this potential was tested by a new and greater need. At the end of September 1924 a landslide ravaged the village of Someo, in the Maggia valley of Italian-speaking Switzerland. Colonel Ceresole made a rapid prospecting trip and reported that if a camp was not quickly organized at Someo the peasants would probably abandon their ruined village. But the holidays were over and the prospects for recruiting enough volunteers looked dim. Undaunted, Pierre called on his friends to 'come even if it is impossible'(25) and daily newspapers throughout the country published appeals for volunteers. The response to Pierre's invitation was encouraging.
'A wave of good will seemed to spread out over the country,' wrote Hélène Monastier. 'The YMCAs lent material, the Army tools and bedding, and the railways granted reduced fares to the volunteers.'(26) Still-active retired people signed up, together with the core group of pacifists who had worked at Vers-l'Eglise and --- a new challenge --- unemployed men who knew nothing of the idealism motivating most volunteers.
Later, in the 1930s, work with the jobless was to become a main task of voluntary service. Although not conceived as a palliative for unemployment, the Someo camp did successfully influence the heterogeneous troop of work-seekers who volunteered. Some, of course, were undisciplined and had to be sent away. 'Quite simple,' explained Pierre, ' "You're not happy with us " or "We're not happy with you?" and it's "Farewell!" . . . I confess I am happy to have the support of my brother's military habits. Another good side of the soldier: one does not fool about with order. There is an order that belongs to the nature of things ... that order must be respected.'(27)
The experience of working disinterestedly to help the discouraged villagers wrought a few remarkable transformations. Paul Schenker, for example, was a jobless Swiss German and something of a drifter when he read a newspaper appeal for Someo. Capable and energetic, he soon caught the spirit of service that predominated in the camp and became a faithful standby of the Ceresoles. Ten years later, working with SCI in India as one of the first long-term volunteers, he contracted a fever and died. In a letter home, Pierre suggested a memorial service that would have pleased Paul: 'It will be a service with pick-axe and shovel, eight good hours of good work with a whistle to mark the start and finish---for Peace, Discipline and the Service.'(28)
By the mid twenties Pierre Ceresole's movement of optimism and hope had attained momentum.
At Vers-l'Eglise, work, talk and camaraderie forged a living community of practical pacifists ready to follow him in his quest for truth and peace. The Someo project proved that a nucleus of like-minded friends could exert sufficient influence over a larger and heterogeneous group, not all of whose members shared their pacifist ideals, to marshal the diffuse energies in a common constructive effort. By broadening its scope and using quantities of volunteers not necessarily committed to all its aims, the movement became known and its influence enhanced. After the Someo camp Pierre found to his great pleasure that the hesitations he encountered when seeking projects disappeared more quickly than previously. People who had heard of Someo now came to ask for the aid of volunteers. The spark struck at Esnes had ignited a low but steady flame.
Yet, in retrospect, one senses a futility about workcamping in this period. How effectively could a few, sporadic projects of a few volunteers each, organized in one country during an era of relative opulence and good conscience, radically transform the ideas and actions of men everywhere? It did not seem that the flame of workcamping in the mid twenties could set the world on fire. Something spectacular was needed.
'Civilists', as Pierre Ceresole and other advocates of a civilian alternative to military service called themselves, were not praying for a catastrophe. But when in October 1927 the Rhine overflowed its banks in Liechtenstein, they were faced with an extraordinary task tailored to the needs of the movement. Fully one third of the little principality, fertile bottomland bordering the river, had been flooded and was covered by a layer of silt, stones and gravel. Liechtensteiner farmers began to speak of leaving their country.
On assembling at Neuchâtel, Pierre and his friends hastily sized up the situation. Even if they could mobilize all the able-bodied pacifists in Europe there would not be nearly enough volunteers for the job in hand. Furthermore, the Government or Army would have to be approached for sizeable material aid. Some of those present considered it would be opportunistic to play down the pacifist aim of the project in order to obtain wide public support and governmental assistance. They did not, as they put it, want to 'hide our colours'. Pierre and Ernest, on the other hand, were prepared to make concessions and in the end they convinced the purists. This was a timely victory; and one wonders what the fate of workcamping would have been had the opportunity in Liechtenstein been by-passed. Avoiding a hermetic approach to their action the civilists were able to undertake the spectacular Liechtenstein project that accelerated momentum attained by the movement in the early and mid twenties.
The first concession was made in the choice of a title for the undertaking. They decided to call the project 'Voluntary Assistance Service for the Flooded Regions of Liechtenstein'. Avoiding the term 'civilian service', which smacked of conscientious objection and irritated some sectors of Swiss opinion, Pierre opened the doors to broad co-operation. With Ernest, he drafted an appeal to help in the same spirit:
By bringing men of different nationalities to work together for their unfortunate neighbours, the undersigned wish to accomplish a human duty of assistance. Without haggling over divergences of opinion concerning present methods of national defence, they want also to contribute to creating among peoples relationships of mutual assistance which, as they develop, would make it morally impossible for a people to attack their neighbours, both having become sincere friends.(29)
Many non-pacifist personalities, including the President of Switzerland, signed the appeal and, as the flood-waters receded, a vast recruitment campaign filled the winter and spring of 1927-8.
Pierre was exhilarated by the response. 'My unshakeable opinion,' he wrote to Hélène Monastier,
is that in our resolve to go to the extreme in making all possible concessions --- without negating any of our principles---we were only doing an essential duty, and that the action we are about to undertake could not be what it should be had that duty not been done.(30)
In mid March 1928, two weeks from the opening of the camps, when preparations were far from complete, Pierre caught a cold. Ernest had to replace him at a public rally in Lausanne, leading him to draw the moral of their broad-minded approach to the project in light-hearted terms. 'Isn't it amusing,' he asked Mademoiselle Monastier, 'that just when they expected to see "Lawbreaker Ceresole" appear on the platform it was "Colonel Ceresole " who popped out of the box? To me it seems -excellent that the public and we are all forced to mix our ideas, to re-examine everything, calmly and cordially.'(31)
From April to October of 1928, 710 volunteers from seventeen countries, representing fifty trades and professions, worked in four workcamps spread out along Liechtenstein's valley. Liechtenstein's farmland was reclaimed. To one camper the principality looked 'once again lush-green, fertile, peaceful'.(32)
In many ways the project's success was due to luck. Liechtenstein was conveniently located near Switzerland, the home of the civilists, and centrally situated for volunteers coming from all corners of Europe; yet while there one was abroad. It was small enough for the work of 700 men and women to have a real impact, yet it was a country, and the project had national significance. The work at hand called for masses of volunteers, but these needed only minimal skill and direction. The basic requirements after good will, were sturdy arms and stout shoes.
But even with luck, the 'Liechtenstein Campaign', as it became known, could not have succeeded without the civilists' conviction and energy. A young American's description of a typical morning meeting of the campers affords a lyrical glimpse of the atmosphere. First came the distribution of the day's assignments. 'Then there were the introductions of the newly arrived friends and the last farewell to those leaving on the train. Ah, that scene, that singing!' (l'Amitié', no doubt.)(33)
What he and the others later learnt, the process of transformation of volunteers' outlooks and characters, is described in an Icelander's letter.
My first day, at lunch, when almost everyone was seated, I saw a man come in who greeted us gaily, speaking in French and German to several volunteers, laughing, joking and chattering as though he were paid to amuse us at mealtime. 'Who is he?' I ask my neighbour at table. 'What? Why that's the Colonel!' he answers, astonished by my ignorance. Colonel Ceresole, . . . I don't think he is like so many leaders who keep their distance from the battlefield. No, the others reassure me that the Colonel is always here ...
Then I see another man come in, a volunteer like the others, tall, serious, a little hard-looking. He clambers over the benches to get to an empty seat. My neighbour tells me 'That's the Colonel's brother, the one who had the idea of a civilian service and started it.' I remain sceptical. Could this slow and taciturn man really be the inventor of the idea? Would he come and work as an ordinary volunteer? There must be some misunderstanding.
Yes, there was a misunderstanding, but it was on my part, as I found out the next Wednesday during the first group discussion I attended. Pierre Ceresole clearly explained his extremist ideas, which I found absurd at first but to which I have since reconciled myself admirably. Afterwards, the Colonel explained his point of view ...
I have never seen anything more interesting and fine than this discussion, and those that took place later, with the two brothers in the foreground, helping one another to translate and having such a courteous and cordial duel that I could not help but marvel at them.
Pierre was more than a source of inspiration, courteous, cordial and somehow distant. His persistent good humour showed in the criteria by which he judged his volunteers.
As we had to expect, the recruitment of a large number of foreign friends with a still embryonic organization did not bring us only 'robust archangels'. Certain English students have been weighed and found rather light! I must admit that they were a useful decorative motif for the press.... But we shouldn't have too much of that sort of decoration! ... One of the Indians is eminently decorative too, used to working under a dazzling sun, and with a slowness and passivity even more dazzling. As far as the Polar Circle is concerned, one of its inhabitants is a quite remarkable chap. He arrived at the camp wearing a fine town suit and carrying a swagger-stick. We said to ourselves that this was a strange 'farmer' --- that's what we'd been told his profession was. At the work site, he turned out to be a veritable Hercules.(34)
During its first decade, workcamping was not a one-man-show, to be sure, as Pierre could always count on the Colonel, Paul Schenker, Hélène Monastier, and many other stand-bys. Some of them --- Professor Jean Inebnit of Leeds University in England, for one --- are still active in the movement today. But Pierre was the pivot around which the workcamping revolved in the twenties, at one and the same time spiritual guide, initiator of new ideas, project leader, exemplary volunteer and --- what he liked least --- travelling secretariat.
Pierre was a theoretician and practitioner, but the link between theory and practice escaped him. He was at home with ideas and shovels, not with staples and stamps. Try as he might he could not get the hang of administration. 'You must wonder what is happening,' he asked Hélène Monastier in the spring of 1931. 'Well, so do I. I was supposed to send you the report on Lagarde(35) on the 28th of February and today, the 10th of March, it's still not ready. No real explanation ... I wander about ... I read ... I think, I get on with it a bit but can't finish.'(36)
The immense advantages of an officially recognized civilian service that would place the organizational responsibility on the shoulders of competent administrators appeared undeniable to him. He went so far as to suggest to the Swiss Association for the League of Nations that the world organization take a role in the organization of the service. 'Visible sympathy for the idea,' he reported, 'but we have to use kid gloves with the timorous and retarded.... It's an uphill battle.'(37)(38)
For the present, it was clear, voluntary service would remain the responsibility of the civilists and as the movement grew it became impossible for one part-time person to keep pace with developments. The depression was making itself felt in Europe and new challenges faced the increasing number of Pierre's supporters in Switzerland and abroad. A turning point had been reached: the creation of a permanent staff was indispensable to the evolution of workcamping.
In the spring of 1930 Pierre and his friends decided to found a national organization. Previously the movement only existed as an informal Committee of Civilian Service, composed of Pierre's hard-core supporters. Now, he said, perhaps reasoning on the basis of the successful Liechtenstein Campaign, the time had come to offer the possibility of joining a formal organization to all the friends of the Committee, pacifists and partisans of the army, active volunteers and those who were unable to take part in workcamps. Some of the hard-core civilists wanted the new organization --- and its constitution --- to be strictly pacifist. Pierre disagreed.
In my opinion we must delete everything that expresses radical pacifism.... Service Civil should include (and win over, one day, I hope) people who support neither disarmament nor conscientious objection.... We shall remain as frankly radical as always. But the Association of Service Civil must be broader. I consider that to be most important.(39)
In the end Pierre had his way. The strength of the new structure was tested almost immediately. At Brynmawr, a mining town in South Wales, the pits were exhausted. Added to the effects of the depression, scarcity of coal deposits had created a critical situation. The miners were unemployed, and their families discouraged; the town seemed to have no alternative to disintegration.
With Quaker aid the miners had begun to transform a vacant lot into a park. Soon, for want of continued encouragement and tangible proof that the outside world took an interest in them, they relapsed into listlessness. The civilists had some experience with jobless men at Someo and in Liechtenstein, but during those camps the unemployed had been a minority. Nevertheless, Service Civil accepted the Quakers' call to rouse Brynmawr from its inertia and scepticism. A disaster is a disaster, reasoned the civilists, whether natural or social.
On the eve of the Swiss contingent's departure for Wales, news came to Pierre that a storm had ravaged the canton of Aargan in northern Switzerland. Volunteers were needed urgently. To cancel the Brynmawr service was unthinkable; but could an unforeseen camp be organized immediately in Switzerland? Service Civil was strained to the limit but succeeded in holding simultaneously two widely separated projects, one of which had to do without Pierre. While the volunteers in Aargan wrestled with rocks and tree-stumps, Pierre's team of thirty-seven continentals, joined by seventy-seven British campers, set to work with more delicate raw material: human beings.
At first the miners of Brynmawr looked with suspicion on the volunteers. Wasn't it ridiculous to bring volunteers to a town where the local men could find no work? Perhaps, but the objective of the camp was less to complete the house-washing, park and children's paddling pool begun earlier than to infuse the apathetic people with renewed self-confidence. Little by little, the town took an interest in the young people and, through them, in itself. Miners were pleased to show the more clumsy volunteers how to handle tools; their wives offered to do the camp's laundry; doctors gave free medical care. The campers' zeal and optimism seemed to seep through the grimy house walls they were scrubbing.
Then the camp's money ran out. The project would have to be closed, to the volunteers' consternation and miners' regret. Then a cheque for £153 arrived from Lagarde, a small village in France volunteers had cleared of flood debris the previous summer. Now, the Lagardois, having heard of the difficulties encountered by the Brynmawr project, felt it was their turn to help.
The volunteers were able to achieve their objective, and Brynmawr faced its problems with new hope. But the problems---uppermost of which was unemployment --- subsisted, as did the question asked by the miners when the camp began. Volunteers can have a positive psychological effect on the unemployed. But is it wise to give jobless men hope when there is no real possibility of their finding employment? As the miners had queried: what truly valuable tasks can be done by volunteers where there is not enough work for local people?