1
Mariette's communications by wireless were very brief, and on the second
day of the revolution Gisela went by special train to Berlin. It was
the King's own train, and always ready to start. The engineer and
fireman avowed themselves "friends of the revolution," but they
performed their duties with two armed women in the cab and fifty more in
the car behind the engine.
The cities through which Gisela passed, as well as the small towns and
wayside villages, presented a uniform appearance: smoking ruins in the
outlying sections which had been devoted to the war factories, and
streets deserted save for women sentries. One or two of the smaller
towns had burned, owing to lack of fire brigades. The food trains
destined for the front, which had been moved out of danger before the
general destruction, were being systematically unloaded, and a portion
of the contents doled out to thousands of emaciated men, women, and
children. The rest would be as methodically returned to the warehouses.
Gisela arrived in Berlin half an hour before the Kaiser.
The city was as dark as interstellar space and she would have been
forced to spend the night in the Anhalt Bahnhof if Mariette had not met
her. They walked from the station, keeping close to the walls of the
silent houses and entering Unter den Linden from the Friedrichstrasse.
There was not a sound but the high whirr of airplanes keeping guard over
a city that seemed stifled in the embrace of death, its life current
switched off by the proudest achievement of its pestilent laboratories.
Mariette did not take the trouble to lower her hard incisive voice as
she told her sister the brief story of the revolution in Berlin.
"I left not a loophole for failure. Two minutes before the bells rang
every policeman on duty was shot dead from a doorway or window. The
police offices and stations were blown up. There is not a policeman
alive in Berlin. I also ordered the garrisons blown up. Both the police
and the garrisons here were too strong. I dared not risk an encounter.
Criticize me if you will. It is done."
"But the Emperor, the General Staff?" Gisela was in no mood to waste a
thought upon means, nor even upon accomplished ends. "If they left Pless
at once they should have been here before this."
"They did not leave Pless at once. When they began to send out questions
by wireless after they found their telephone and telegraph wires cut,
they were kept quiet for several hours by soothing messages sent by our
women in Breslau and nearer towns. An abortive uprising of a handful of
starving Socialists! Even when their fliers went out they could learn
nothing because they dared not land even at Breslau; high-firing guns
threatened them everywhere. All they could report was that the streets
were full of armed women, which, of course, the General Staff took as an
unseemly joke. But toward night a soldier who had managed to escape from
Breslau came staggering into Great Headquarters with information that
penetrated even that composite Prussian skull: the women of Germany had
risen _en masse_ and effected a revolution. Of course they refused to
believe the worst--that every ounce and inch of war material had been
destroyed; and the entire Staff, escorted by a thousand troops--all they
had on hand--started for Berlin. They did not omit to wireless in both
directions for troops to march on Berlin at once; but, needless to say,
these messages were deflected. As the tracks were torn up they were
obliged to travel by automobile, and as the bridges over the Kloonitz
Canal and the Oder tributaries had been blown up, they were unable to
ameliorate what must have been an apoplectic impatience. No doubt a few
of them are dead. Of course their progress has been watched and reported
every hour, but they have not been molested. We want them here. Only
their small air squadron has been shot down."
They felt their way along Unter den Linden by the trees and entered the
Opernplatz. Two biplanes awaited them before the arsenal. There were
lights in the great pile of the Hohenzollerns across the bridge. Uneasy
spirits prowled there, no doubt, but none of the women of the Imperial
family had made any attempt to escape, accepting the assurances of the
revolutionists that no harm should come to them, and, knowing nothing of
the thorough methods taken to reduce the army to impotence, awaited with
what patience they could muster--and royal women are the most patient in
the world--the invincible troops that must come within a day or two to
their rescue.
The two biplanes flew over to the streets east of the Emperor's palace
and hovered just above the house tops until the eyes of Gisela and
Mariette, now accustomed to a darkness unpierced by moon or stars, made
out a long line of moving blackness in the narrow gloom of the
Königinstrasse. The forward cars entered the palace from the
Schlossplatz, and as lights immediately appeared in the courtyards
Gisela saw eight or ten men alight stiffly and hurriedly enter the inner
portals. The other automobiles ranged themselves in an apparently
unbroken line on all sides of the palace. Gisela had amused herself
imagining the nervous speculations of those war-hardened potentates and
warriors as they crawled through the sinister darkness of the
capital--proud witness of a thousand triumphal marches; of the sharp and
darting gaze above the guns of the armored cars, expecting an ambush at
every corner. How they must hate a situation so utterly without
precedent.
Gisela almost laughed aloud as she saw the purple flag, denoting that
the Emperor was in residence, run up on the north side of the palace.
However, automatic discipline worked both ways.
Once more Berlin was as silent as if at rest for ever under the pall of
darkness that seemed to have descended from the dark and threatening
sky.
But only for a moment.
Berlin suddenly burst into a blinding glare of light. Unter den
Linden from end to end--excepting only the royal palaces--with
its long line of imposing public buildings, hotels, and shops,
the Kaiser-Franz-Joseph-Platz, the Zeugplatz, the Lustgarten--the
Schlossplatz--all the magnificent expanse from the Brandenburg gate to a
quarter of a mile beyond the river Spree--had been strung and looped
with electric lights, and the scene looked as if touched with a royal
fairy's wand. The side streets from the Royal Library and the old Kaiser
Wilhelm palace as far as the Schlossbrücke, were also brilliantly
illuminated.
And in all these streets and squares women stood in close ranks, silent,
phlegmatic women, with pistols in their belts and rifles with fixed
bayonets on their shoulders, the steel reflecting the terrific downpour
of light with a steady and menacing glitter. These women wore gray
uniforms and there were shining Prussian helmets on their heads.
In every window was a double row of women, armed; and the housetops were
crowded with them. There were also machine guns on the roofs, pointing
downward or toward the roof of the palace.
Mariette laughed. "Theatric enough to please even his taste? Our last
tribute. Let us hope he will enjoy it."
A moment later the expected happened. A window of the palace overlooking
the great Schlossplatz opened and the Emperor stepped out into the
narrow balcony. His uniform was caked with dust and mud and his face was
drawn with a mortal fatigue; but as he stood there scowling haughtily
down upon that upturned sea of woman's faces, the most singular vision
that ever had greeted imperial eyes, he was an imposing figure enough
to those who knew that he was the Kaiser Wilhelm II, King of Prussia and
Alsace-Lorraine, and Emperor in Germany.
It was evident that he had no intention of speaking, but expected this
grotesque mob to be overwhelmed by the imperial presence and dissolve.
Frau Kathie Meyers, with the figure of an Amazon and the voice of a
megaphone, stepped forth from the ranks and lifted her placid red face
to the balcony.
"You will abdicate, William Hohenzollern," she announced in tones that
rolled down toward the Brandenburg gate like the overtones of a Death
Symphony at the Front. "Germany is a Republic. And the palace is mined.
If your soldiers fire one shot from the windows the palace goes up to
meet the ghosts of every arsenal and every ammunition factory in what
two days ago was the Empire of Germany. Your armies are helpless. You
will remain a prisoner within your palace until we have decided whether
to deliver you to Great Britain, incarcerate you in a fortress, or
permit you to live in exile. It will depend upon the behavior of the
army when it returns. If you attempt to leave the palace you will be
shot."
The Emperor stared down upon that mass of calm implacable faces, so
unmistakably German; not brilliant nor beautiful, but persistent as
death, and stamped with the watermark of kultur; stared for a long
moment, his gray face twitching, the familiar gray blaze in his eyes.
But he turned without a word or even a disdainful gesture and reëntered
the palace, the window closing immediately behind him.
The Amazon addressed the men in the armored automobiles that surrounded
the palace.
"Fire upon us if you like. Our ranks are close and you will kill many.
But not one of you will live to eat rat sausage tomorrow morning. Now
disarm and march to the guard house."
The contemptible little army of the Kaiser, hypnotized as much by the
glare as by this solid mass of vindictive females--singly so
negligible--shrugged their shoulders, surrendered their arms, and
marched off under guard. After all, they would have a blessed rest,
however brief, before the great generals sent back a few brigades to
execute summary vengeance upon these presumptuous women, who had used
their incidental superiority in numbers so basely.
2
But nothing came from the front but frantic orders by wireless to the
staunch but impotent pillars of the old régime. The British, French, and
American forces, convinced at last that German women actually had
effected a revolution--God knew how!--attacked every point of the line
from Flanders to Belfort, and their aviators dropped newspapers
containing the extraordinary but verified story, into the German
trenches and back of the lines.
The destruction of the railways leading to the Austria-Hungarian Empire,
as well as all the rolling stock within three miles of the frontier,
balked any attempt to rush supplies in from the east, and in two days
Austria was in the throes of a revolution far more devastating
internally than Germany's, for that excitable and harassed people, long
on the verge of despair, merely caught the revolution-microbe and went
mad.
To supply either the army opposing Italy or that in Roumania and
Gallicia, to say nothing of that in the Northeast, was no longer even
considered. The young Emperor sought only to come to an understanding
with his people.
It was a matter of days before both ammunition and food would be
exhausted on the two fronts, and neither had a superfluous man to send
to Berlin, or even to repair the tracks.
3
By Friday there was no longer any doubt of the complete success of the
Revolution. Britain, France, Russia, Italy, the United States, with a
prompt and canny statesmanship, remarkable in Governments, had formally
acknowledged the German Republic, and offered terms of peace possible
for an ambitious and self-respecting but beaten people to accept. At all
events there would be no commercial boycott, and the young Republic
would be given every assistance in restoring the shattered finances of
Germany, and its economic relations with the rest of the world.
The good German people were flattered in phrases that they rolled on
their tongues. Even those too schooled in lies to believe the statesmen
of their own or any land reflected that, after all, the Enemy Allies had
demonstrated they were sportsmen, that German prisoners had been well
treated, and that before the war there had been no restrictions upon
German commerce save in insidious reiterated words of men determined
upon war at any cost. As a matter of fact, Germany had been absorbing
the commerce of the world, and Britain had been reprehensibly supine.
As the Socialists now did all the talking, and unhindered, it was not
difficult to persuade even the reluctant minority that the military
party had precipitated the war in a sudden panic at the rapidly
developing power of the proletariat.
Night fliers dropped millions of leaflets in the vicinity of the armies
on the Eastern and Western fronts, signed (at the pistol point) by the
most powerful names in the former Government, as well as by the
well-known Social-Democrat leaders, containing the details of the
Revolution and proofs of its success. The Empire had fallen. A Republic,
acknowledged by the great powers of the world, was established. Would
the soldiers stack their arms and return to their homes? If the generals
or under officers attempted to restrain them it was to be remembered
that the soldiers were as a hundred thousand to one.
The women felt no real apprehension of an avenging army. They knew the
average German male. His innate subserviency to power would turn him
automatically about to the party whose power was supreme. And the
soldiers hated their officers.