In the course of a month the secret propaganda was moving with the invisible, sinister, irresistible suction of an undertow.  The immense army of women who did Gisela’s work proved themselves true Germans, logical products of generations of discipline, concentration, secretiveness, and a thoroughness, even in trifling details, as implacable as it was automatic.  They made few mistakes.  When they discovered—­and their spy service was also Teutonic—­that they had confided in some girl or woman whose inherent weakness or venality threatened betrayal, she disappeared immediately and for ever.

Gisela, obtaining a commission to inspect the leading hospitals “back of the front,” visited each of the states in turn and addressed thousands of women in groups of two or three hundred, gathered under the eyes of the police in the name of one of the many war charities in which all women were engaged.  The lieutenants prepared these women, and Gisela inspired, crystallized, cohered.  The timid she shamed with the example of the Russian women (and German women despise all other women); the desperate she had little difficulty in convincing that there was but one egress from their insupportable agony.  Victory under her leadership if they stood firm, was inevitable.

She had the gift of a fiery torrent of speech, a clear steady eye, even when it flashed and blazed, and a warm and irresistible magnetism that convinced the individual as well as the mass that she had but one object, the liberation of the miserable women of her country, their deliverance from further sorrow; and that she was wholly lacking in personal ambition.

These women had known the gnawing sensation of unappeased appetite for two years.  They had seen old men and women, sometimes their own, fall in the streets dead or dying, because they no longer had the reserves of men and women in their youth or prime.  They had seen men blow out their brains in front of municipal buildings, cursing the Emperor, the military autocracy, and even the Government, always at odds with the war lords.  They knew of suicides and child murder by despairing mothers that they hardly whispered to one another.  And all the children were emaciated and wailed continually for food, sleeping little, playing less, stunted in their growth and threatened with disease; if the war went on another year they would join the little Polish victims on their shadowy playground....  They feared for their daughters at home even as they feared for their young sons in the trenches....  Barring a revolution, the war might last for years ... years....  “Peace Proposals” irritated what little humor they had left to ghastly obscene joking....  “Victories” left them as cold as the mid-winter bed....  The Hohenzollerns, the other kings and princes, the cast-iron junkers, would cling fast to their own until the Enemy Allies’ day of judgment, for surrender meant their quicker extermination; now, at least, they were still in the saddle, able to cheer their haunted egos with the Wine of Lies.