From “La Place de la Concorde Suisse”, John McPhee

It seems likely that the two most widely circulated remarks ever made about Switzerland's military prowess were made by Napoleon Bonaparte and Orson Wells.

Wells said, " In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.  In Switzerland, they have brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce?  The cuckoo clock."

Napoleon said, "The best troops – those in whom you can have the most confidence - are the Swiss."

Wells spoke his lines in "The Third Man", a motion picture deservedly attracted an extensive worldwide audience.  The screenplay was written by Graham Greene, who later published the preliminary treatment in book form, but Greene was not the author of the lines about the Borgias and Switzerland. They were interpolated by the ingenious Wells, who may have chosen to suppress in his memory the fact that when Italy was enjoying the Borgias, Switzerland was enjoying a reputation as - to quote Douglas Miller's "The Swiss atWar" - "the most powerful and feared military force in Europe". 

Switzerland was about as neutral in those days as had been Mongolia under Genghis Khan.  Not only were the Swiss ready to fight.  They fought.  They had a militia system that could mobilize 54,000 soldiers.  They knew enough about warfare and bloodshed to sicken a Borgia.  They were so chillingly belligerent that even if they were destroyed in battle they had been known in the same moment to win a war. 

One afternoon in mid-Renaissance, a few hundred Swiss who were outnumbered fifteen to one elected not to run away but to wade across a river and break into the center of the opposition, where all of them died, but not before they had slaughtered three thousand of their French enemies.  The French Army was so unnerved that it struck its tents and fled.