le Huns
will end the war."

Countess Niebuhr, whose love of intrigue had not diminished with the
years, and who had known more of the Pan-Germanic mind than her naive
husband had guessed--who, moreover, had had a long and enlightening
interview with one of her sons but a month before--undertook to win over
many women of her own class who had suffered death and disillusion.

Elsa's transfer to a hospital in Saxony was skilfully managed; and Lili
went on a concert tour for the Red Cross. It was not worth while to
campaign in Austria; the moment Germany was helpless she would collapse
automatically.

In the course of a month the secret propaganda was moving with the
invisible, sinister, irresistible suction of an undertow. The immense
army of women who did Gisela's work proved themselves true Germans,
logical products of generations of discipline, concentration,
secretiveness, and a thoroughness, even in trifling details, as
implacable as it was automatic. They made few mistakes. When they
discovered--and their spy service was also Teutonic--that they had
confided in some girl or woman whose inherent weakness or venality
threatened betrayal, she disappeared immediately and for ever.

Gisela, obtaining a commission to inspect the leading hospitals "back of
the front," visited each of the states in turn and addressed thousands
of women in groups of two or three hundred, gathered under the eyes of
the police in the name of one of the many war charities in which all
women were engaged. The lieutenants prepared these women, and Gisela
inspired, crystallized, cohered. The timid she shamed with the example
of the Russian women (and German women despise all other women); the
desperate she had little difficulty in convincing that there was but one
egress from their insupportable agony. Victory under her leadership if
they stood firm, was inevitable.

She had the gift of a fiery torrent of speech, a clear steady eye, even
when it flashed and blazed, and a warm and irresistible magnetism that
convinced the individual as well as the mass that she had but one
object, the liberation of the miserable women of her country, their
deliverance from further sorrow; and that she was wholly lacking in
personal ambition.

These women had known the gnawing sensation of unappeased appetite for
two years. They had seen old men and women, sometimes their own, fall in
the streets dead or dying, because they no longer had the reserves of
men a