on the Western front.  Well, it cannot be done.  Even I could not obtain a pass into Great Headquarters.  You might as well expect a British soldier to be permitted to saunter over from his lines and make sketches of the German trenches.  Those men guard themselves—­day and night, at every point—­as if haunted with the fear of assassination.  Perhaps they are.  And remember that the downfall of Caesarism means the downfall not only of junkerism but of all the other kings and Grand Dukes—­who are powerful and wealthy in their own domains.  They have no doubt cursed Prussia daily since September, 1914, but now they all sink or swim together.  They will force Germany to die a thousand deaths in the hope of a miracle that will save a class to which the rest of poor Germany is a breeding-ground for their mighty armies.  I belong to that class.  One of my brothers is on the staff of the Crown Prince of Prussia.  Take my word for it:  the solution of Germany’s deliverance is not to be found in the simple antidote of political assassination, for only men bound up in the success of the German arms, or their terrorized creatures of our own sex, are near enough to throw the bomb.”

“It was rather a commonplace idea,” said Kate, gracefully, “but what can you do?”

“Quite aside from the women of the industrial and lower classes generally, who have given the municipalities serious trouble with their food riots—­far more than you know about—­the German women altogether are restless and dissatisfied.  They were promised a short and triumphant war.  They are daily more skeptical of promises.  They have suffered death in life.  All that early exaltation—­exhilaration—­has gone long since.  They shut their teeth and endure because they still believe the cunning official lies—­that Britain must be starved by the submersibles, that France’s man power is nearly exhausted, that the United States cannot prepare an army in less than two years and needs all her trained men at home to quell the riots of the masses who disapprove of the war.  They are taught to believe that ultimate victory for Germany is inevitable—­that it is merely a question of months.

“But—­convince them that Germany cannot win, that their own conquest is inevitable after three or four more years of horror and torment and personal despair, turn their blind hatred of England and America upon their own conscienceless rulers—­”

“Jimminy!” cried Mimi.  “That’s the dope.  Pound it into them that the Enemy Allies will give them a square deal as a Republic and put them under the steam-roller with the Hohenzollerns if they stand pat, and you’ll get them.  No more hungry and tubercular babies, no more babies born with a cuticle short in theirs.  They’d rise as one man—­I mean—­damn the men!—­as one woman.”

Heloise left her seat like a whirlwind and flung herself at Gisela’s feet.  Her face was flaming white.  She looked like a sibyl.  “I knew it would be you!” she cried in her sweet bell-like tones.  “I have had visions of you leading us out of this awful war.  You have only to talk to the women—­your word was gospel to them before the war—­they too will have the vision and they will make it fact.”