Meanwhile the Revolutionary Committee, to the number of fifty or thereabouts, were sitting in the Rua da Esperanca, discussing the question, “To be or not to be.”  The military members counseled delay, for the Government had ordered all officers to be at their quarters in the various barracks which are scattered over the city.  The intention had been to choose a time when most of the officers were off duty and the men could mutiny at their ease; but this plan had for the moment been frustrated.  The military view might have carried the day, but for the determination shown by Candido dos Reis, who pointed out that it would be madness to give the Government time to order the ships out of the Tagus.  Finally, he turned to the military group, saying, “If you will not go out, I will go out alone with the sailors.  I shall have the honor of getting myself shot by my comrades of the army.”  His insistence carried all before it, and it was decided that the signal should be given, as previously arranged, at one o’clock in the morning.

That evening, at the Palace of Belem, some two miles down the Tagus from the Necessidades Palace, Marshal Hermes da Fonseca, President-elect of Brazil, was entertaining King Manuel at a State dinner.  There was an electrical sense of disquiet in the air.  Several official guests were absent, and every few minutes there came telephone-calls for this or that minister or general, some of whom reappeared, while some did not.  At last the tension got so much on the nerves of the young King that he scribbled on his menu-card a request that the banquet might be shortened; and, in fact, one or two courses were omitted.  Then followed the dreary ritual of toasts; and at last, at half-past eleven, Dom Manuel parted from his host and set off in his automobile, escorted by a troop of cavalry.  Two bands played the royal anthem.  Had he known, poor youth, that he was never to hear it again, there might have been a crumb of consolation in the thought.

It would be impossible without a map to make clear the various phases of the Battle of Lisbon.  Nor would there be any great interest in so doing.  There was no particular strategy in the revolutionary plans, and what strategy there was fell to pieces at an early point.  It is not clear that the signal was ever formally given, but about the appointed hour mutinies broke out in several barracks.  In some cases the Royalist officers were put under arrest, in one case a colonel and two other officers were shot.  A mixed company of soldiers and civilians, with ten or twelve guns, marched, as had been arranged, upon the Necessidades Palace, to demand the abdication of the King; but they were met on the heights behind the palace by a body of the “guardia municipal,” and, after a sharp skirmish, were forced to retire, leaving three of their guns disabled behind them.  They retreated to the general rallying-point of the Republican forces, the Rotunda, at the upper end of the mile-long Avenida da Liberdade.  This avenue stands to the Rocio very much in the relation of Charing Cross Road to Trafalgar Square:  there is a curve at their junction which prevents you from seeing—­or shooting—­from the one into the other.  On reaching the Rotunda, the insurgents learned that the Rocio had been occupied by Royalist troops, from the Citadel of St. George and another barrack, with one or two machine guns, but no cannon.