VI

1

The eyes of the four women traveled to the lofty towers of the

Frauenkirche. Its bells rang out a wild authoritative summons.

Coincidentally the streets filled with women dressed uniformly in

gray--big powerfully built women, sturdy products of the strong soil of

Germany. They did not march, nor form in ranks, but stood silent, alert,

shouldering rifles with fixed bayonets.

Involuntarily Gisela and her three lieutenants braced themselves against

the pillars of the tower. An instant later the walls of the

Maximilianeum rocked under the terrific impact of what sounded like a

thousand explosions. The roar of parting walls, the shriek of shells and

bombs bursting high in the air, the sharp short cry of shattered metal,

the deep _approaching_ voice of dynamite prolonging itself in echoes

that seemed to reverberate among the distant Alps, shook the souls of

even those inured to the murderous uproar of the battlefield.

Grotesquely combined with this terrific but majestic confusion of sound

were the screams of innocent citizens hanging out of the windows, waving

their arms, staring distraught at the sky, convinced, in so far as they

could think at all, that a great enemy air fleet was bombarding Germany

at last.

Masses of flame and smoke shot upward. The pale morning sky turned

black, rent with darting crimson tongues and lit with prismatic stars.

Other explosions followed in rapid succession, some coming down the

light morning wind from a long distance. Blasts of heat swept audibly

through the long galleries of the Maximilianeum.

"It is an inferno!" Marie von Erkel for the moment was almost

hysterical. "Will Munich be destroyed? Oh, not that!"

"The fire brigades know their business." Gisela glanced up at the

Marconi station. Even through the din she could hear the faint crackling

of the wireless. "If all Germany--"

But her eyes were wild.... If the revolutionists in the rest of the

empire had been as prompt and fearless as those of Bavaria, every

munition and ammunition factory, every aerodrome and public hangar, save

those taken possession of by powerfully armed squads of women, every

arsenal, every warehouse for what gasoline and lubricating oils were

left, every telegraph and telephone wire, every railway station near

either frontier, with thousands of cars and miles of track had been

destroyed simultaneously. The armies would be isolated, without arms or

ammunition but what they had on hand or could manufacture in the invaded

countries; no food but what they had in storage. They could not fight

the enemy seven days longer; if the Enemy Allies heard immediately of

the revolution through neutral channels and believed in it after so

many false alarms, the finish of the German forces would come in two

days.

But had the women of the other states been as prompt and ruthless as the

women of Bavaria? Spandau, Essen, all the centers in the Rhine Valley

for the manufacture of munitions on a grand scale ... the great Krupp

factories ... unless they were in ruins the revolution was a failure....

She could not be everywhere at once. War and misery and starving

children, the loss of the men and boys they loved, and a profound

distrust of their rulers, had filled them with a cold and bitter hatred

of an autocracy convicted of lying and aggressive purpose out of its own

mouth; but would the iron in their souls carry them triumphantly past

the final test? Women were women and Germans were not Russians. They had

little fatalism in their make-up, and their brain cells were packed with

the tradition of centuries of submission to man. True, their quiet

revolt had begun long before the war, and this last year had wrought

extraordinary changes, quickening their mental processes, forcing them

to think and act for themselves; but their hearts might have turned to

water during those last dispiriting hours before the dawn.

And how could it be possible that all traitors had been detected,

exterminated, with millions in the secret? Troops might even now be in

Prussia. Great Headquarters (Grosse Hauptquartier) were in Pless, and

although the women of that city were not in the confidence of the

revolutionaries, and it was to remain in ignorance as long as possible,

the abrupt cessation of telephone and telegraph communication would

advise that group of alert brains that something was wrong. Moreover,

even with interrupted communications they would soon learn of the

blowing up of factories in other Silesian towns; no doubt hear them. It

was true the railways and bridges between Pless and Berlin were--if they

were!--destroyed, but there were always automobiles; enough for a small

force.... And the police, the police of Berlin! They were still

formidable in spite of the drain on men for the front. Mariette had

written her grimly that she would "take care of 'the rats in the

granary,'" meaning the police; but although Mariette was the most

thorough and merciless person she knew, she doubted even her in this

awful moment.

How could she have dreamed of accomplishing a universal revolution in

a country possessing the most perfect secret service system in the

world?... a country with eyes in the back of its head? True, the

Socialists in her confidence had been noisy and bumptious of late in

order to concentrate attention upon their sex, and at the same time

careful to refrain from definite statements or overt acts.... It would

never enter the stupid official head that German women could conceive,

much less precipitate, a revolution; but there _must_ be traitors,

women who fundamentally were the slaves of men, weak spirits, spirits

rotten with imperialism, militarism, but cunning in the art of

dissimulation.... What an accursed fool and criminal she had been ...

egotistical dreamer! ... led on by the extraordinary power she had

acquired over the women of her race....

For a moment she clung to the embrasure, so overwhelming was her impulse

to hurl herself down into oblivion. In that dark and shrieking uproar

she had the illusion that she was in hell, in hell with her miserable

victims.

But although Gisela's long slumbering nerves had had their revenge last

night, they had given up the fight when she had destroyed their only

ally, and these last protesting vibrations were very brief. Her eyes

fell on the ranks of women standing in the wide Maximilianstrasse,--a

street a mile long and seventy-five feet across--undisturbed by the

turmoil they had anticipated, calmly awaiting her orders. The obsession

passed, and after a brief tribute of hatred to her imagination, which

was, after all, one root of her power, she turned and glanced

critically at her three companions. Marie, looking like a little gray

gnome, was dancing about and waving her arms in ecstasy. Heloise, her

long blonde hair hanging about her fine French face, was gazing out with

rapt eyes and lips apart, as if every sense were drinking in the vision

of a Germany delivered. Mimi was standing with her arms akimbo, nodding

her head emphatically.

"Great work," she said as she met Gisela's stern eyes. "Better go up to

the wireless."

They ran rapidly up to the roof and looked into the little room. The

girl who sat there nodded but did not speak. Her face was gray and

tense, but there was no evidence of despair. Gisela and Mimi stood

motionless for what seemed to them a stifling hour, but at last the

operator laid down the receiver.

"All," she said. "Every one."

"The Rhine Valley?"

The girl nodded, then rolled her jacket into a pillow, lay down before

the door and immediately fell asleep. It had been a night of ghastly

suspense. Another operator was already running up the stair to her

relief.

"Fate!" cried Mimi. "The same fate that sank the Armada and drove

Napoleon to Moscow. You had the vision--"

"I was the chosen instrument--" Gisela walked rapidly over to the

biplane. A girl sat at the joy-stick looking as if carved out of wood.

There was no more expression on her face than if she were sitting in the

gallery at a rather dull play. Her lover and six brothers were dead in

France. She had watched her little brother and her old grandmother die

of malnutrition. Her sister was "officially pregnant" and under

surveillance lest she kill herself. No more perfect machine was at the

disposal of Gisela Döring. Whether Germany were delivered or razed to

the earth was all one to her, but she was more than willing, as a

Bavarian with a traditional hatred of Prussia, to play her part in the

downfall of a race that presumed to call itself German.

2

Gisela stepped into the machine and it glided downward and skimmed

lightly over the great length of the Maximilianstrasse.

The compact ranks, which had listened unmoved to the roar of dynamite

and the detonations of bursting shells, raised their faces at the

humming of the machine and broke into harsh abrupt cheering. Then they

leaned their rifles against their powerful bodies and unfurled their

flags and waved them in the faces of the half paralyzed people in the

windows. It was a white flag with a curious device sketched in crimson:

a hen in successive stages of evolution. The final phase was an eagle.

The body was modeled after the Prussian emblem of might, but the face,

grim, leering, vengeful, pitiless, was unmistakably that of a woman.

However humor may be lacking in the rest of that grandiose Empire it was

grafted into the Bavarians by Satan himself.

Gisela nodded. "The hens are eagles--all over Germany," she announced

in her full carrying voice. "Word has come through from every quarter."

She flew down the Leopoldstrasse. It was packed with women from the

Feldherrnhalle to the Siegesthor, cheering women, waving their flags,

armed to the teeth. So was the great Park of the Residenz, the

Hofgarten, where the guards were either bound or dead. It took her but a

few moments to fly all over Munich. The narrow streets were deserted,

save for the prostrate policemen bound suddenly from ambush; but in all

the beautiful squares, with their pompous statues, and in all the wider

streets, and out in the wide Theresien Field before the colossal figure

of Bavaria, the women were gathered; relapsing into phlegmatic calm as

soon as she had given her message and passed.

But it was by no means a scene of unbroken dignity and silence. Here and

there groups of men in uniform lay dead, sword or pistol in hand. Once

Gisela flew low and discharged her revolver into the shoulder of a big

officer, half dressed and barely recovered from his wounds, who was

keeping off half a dozen women with magnificent sword play. The women

gave one another first aid, then lifted and pitched him into his house.

There was sniping, of course, from the windows, but the women made a

concerted rush and disposed of the terrified offender as remorselessly

as their own men had punished the desperate civilians of the lands they

had invaded. They had heard their men brag for too many years about

their admirable policy of Schrecklichkeit to forget the lesson in this

fateful hour.

The most exciting scenes and the only ones in which any of the women

were killed were in the vicinity of the garrison. These interior

garrisons of the country had been one of the long debated problems. As

no women entered them and as it was not safe to attempt the corruption

of any of the men, there were but two alternatives: blow them up and

sacrifice the men wholesale or meet them with a superior force as they

rushed out to ascertain the nature of the explosions, and fight them in

open battle. Gisela had finally decided to give them a chance for their

lives, as she had no mind to shed any more blood than was unavoidable;

and these men, being no longer in their prime, must be overcome

eventually, no matter what their fury.

When she hovered over the Marztplatz in front of the garrison a few

moments after the last of the explosions, and while fire was still

raging in this military quarter of magazines, arsenals and laboratories,

men and women were mixed in a hideous confusion, shooting and slashing

indiscriminately. But there were thousands of women and only a few

hundred men, all of whom at one time or another had been wounded.

Finally the captain of this regiment of women ordered a swift retreat,

and simultaneously three machine guns opened fire from innocent looking

windows, but on the garrison building, not on the square. They ceased

after one round, and the captain of the women gave such men as were

alive and unwounded their choice between death and surrender. They chose

the sensible alternative, were driven within, and placed under a heavy

guard.

It was not safe to venture too close to the still exploding and blazing

structures, but it was quite apparent that the work had been done

thoroughly. The fire brigades were busy, and there was little danger of

Munich, one of the most beautiful and romantic cities in the world,

falling a victim to the revolution. Many lives had been sacrificed, no

doubt. The women night-workers in the factories, fifteen minutes before

the signal from the Frauenkirche, had pretended to strike, seized all

the hand arms available and shot down the men who attempted to control

them. The men in the secret had gone with them and were already about

their business.

The officers in charge of the Class of 1920 were too few in number to

make any resistance, too dazed to grasp a situation for which there was

no precedent; they had surrendered to the Amazons grimly awaiting their

decision. The poor boys in the Kadettenkorps had run home to their

mothers, and, finding them in the streets, had either taken refuge in

the cellars, or joined those formidable warriors in gray, promising

obedience and yielding their arms.

Other aeroplanes were darting about the city. The greater number were

driven by women, directing the fire brigades, but now and again a man,

whose monoplane had been in his private shed, flew upward primed for

battle. After a few parleys he retired to await events, one only

shooting a woman, and crashing to earth riddled with avenging bullets.

Such air men as were in Munich were too callous to danger of all sorts,

too accustomed to the horrors of the battlefield, to take this

outpouring of women and mere civilians seriously; even in spite of the

explosions, which, to be sure, denoted an appalling amount of

destruction. Any attempt to sally forth on foot and ascertain the extent

of the damage was met by bayonets and pistols in the hands of brigades

of women whose like they had never seen in Germany. They inferred they

were Russians, who had managed to cross the frontier with the infernal

subtlety of their race. At all events they would be exterminated with no

effort of men lacking authority to act.

3

Several of the women flew out into the country, but except where people

were gathered about smoking ruins the land was at peace; there was no

sign of a rally to the blue and white flag of Bavaria, no sign of an

avenging army. In the course of the morning there were hundreds of these

aviators darting about Bavaria, descending to tell the peasants or

shop-keepers of the small towns that Germany was in revolution, the

armies deprived of all support, and that the Republic had been

proclaimed in Berlin. The Social Democrats had possession of the

Reichstaggebäude, and every official head still affixed to its

shoulders was as helpless--a fuming prisoner in its own house--as if

those arrogant brains had turned to porridge. Every royal and official

residence throughout the Empire was surrounded by an army of women with

fixed bayonets, and before noon every unsubmissive member of the old

régime would be in either a fortress or the common prison.

This news Gisela heard at ten o'clock when she returned to the wireless

station on the Maximilianeum. The Berlin news came from Mariette.

In Munich the old King had been returned to the Red Palace which he had

occupied during the long years of his father's regency, and it too was

surrounded by an alert but silent army. The other royal palaces were

guarded in a similar manner, but the women had no intention of killing

these kindly Wittelsbachs if it could be avoided. All they asked of them

was to keep quiet, and keep quiet they did. After all, they had reigned

a thousand years. Perhaps they were tired. Certainly they always looked

bored to the verge of dissolution.

The Munich Socialists had taken possession of the Residenz in which to

proclaim their victory and the new Republic, and by this time were

crowding the Hofgarten and adjoining streets. They were unarmed and many

of the women moved constantly among them, ready at a second's notice to

dispose summarily of any man who even scowled his antagonism to the

downfall of monarchy.

Six hundred women, according to the prearranged program, and under

Gisela's direct supervision, were turning such outlying buildings as

commanded the highways leading toward the frontiers into fortifications.

They had little apprehension that their sons and fathers, their husbands

and lovers, would fire on the women to whom they had brought home food

from their rations these two years past, or that the General Staff would

risk the demolition of the cities of Germany. But they took no chances,

knowing that an attempt might be made to rush them. In that case they

were determined to remember only that their husbands and sons, fathers

and lovers, were bent upon their final subjection. Moreover, the term

"brain storm" had long since found its way from the United States to

Germany, and the women thought it singularly applicable to their former

masters when in a state of baffled rage.