o 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
dir