revolutionaries, guarded, he knew, by a couple of men in
the passage, whose voices he occasionally heard--in a sort of
dull agony, far more torturing than positive objective fear.

He tried to comfort himself by retelling to himself the story of
the last few days; reminding himself how, after the first
outburst, when the police had been shot down by these new weapons
of which he understood nothing, and the palace had been taken,
and the city reduced to a state of defenceless terror--the
revolutionaries had sternly repressed the second attempted
massacre in a manner not unworthy of real civilization.

A great deal of the whole story was unintelligible to him. He
just knew the outlines. First, it was obvious that the
revolution had been planned in all its details months before.
There had been, soon after the Emperor's conversion, a great
access of other converts, accompanied by a dispersal to other
countries, notably America, of innumerable people of the lower
classes who were known as Socialists. All this was looked upon
by the authorities as natural, and as actually reassuring. There
had been a few protests against the new proposals with regard to
legislation; but not enough to rouse any suspicion that violence
would be attempted. Finally, when the organized emigration was
beginning, and even the most pessimistic politicians were
beginning to regard the situation as saved, without the
slightest warning the blow had been struck, obviously by the
directions of an international council whose very existence had
not been suspected.

As to the details of the revolution itself he was even more
vague, for the understanding of it depended on an acquaintance
with the internal arrangements of Berlin, by which a kind of
interior citadel, not outwardly fortified in any way, yet held in
its compass all those immense "power-stations" by which, in the
present day, every town was defended. (He did not know exactly
what these "power-stations" were, beyond the fact that they were
the lineal successors of the old gun-forts, and controlled an
immense number of mines both within the city and without it, as
well as some kind of "electric ray," which was the modern
substitute for cannon.) Well, it was this "citadel," including
the Emperor's palace, that had been suddenly seized by the
revolutionaries, obviously by the aid of treachery. And the thing
was done. It was impossible for the other Powers, or even for the
German air-navy itself