ng 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