ellars, 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
Reichstaggebaeude, 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
regime 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 th