The compact ranks, which had listened unmoved to the roar of dynamite and the detonations of bursting shells, raised their faces at the humming of the machine and broke into harsh abrupt cheering.  Then they leaned their rifles against their powerful bodies and unfurled their flags and waved them in the faces of the half paralyzed people in the windows.  It was a white flag with a curious device sketched in crimson:  a hen in successive stages of evolution.  The final phase was an eagle.  The body was modeled after the Prussian emblem of might, but the face, grim, leering, vengeful, pitiless, was unmistakably that of a woman.  However humor may be lacking in the rest of that grandiose Empire it was grafted into the Bavarians by Satan himself.

Gisela nodded.  “The hens are eagles—­all over Germany,” she announced in her full carrying voice.  “Word has come through from every quarter.”

She flew down the Leopoldstrasse.  It was packed with women from the Feldherrnhalle to the Siegesthor, cheering women, waving their flags, armed to the teeth.  So was the great Park of the Residenz, the Hofgarten, where the guards were either bound or dead.  It took her but a few moments to fly all over Munich.  The narrow streets were deserted, save for the prostrate policemen bound suddenly from ambush; but in all the beautiful squares, with their pompous statues, and in all the wider streets, and out in the wide Theresien Field before the colossal figure of Bavaria, the women were gathered; relapsing into phlegmatic calm as soon as she had given her message and passed.

But it was by no means a scene of unbroken dignity and silence.  Here and there groups of men in uniform lay dead, sword or pistol in hand.  Once Gisela flew low and discharged her revolver into the shoulder of a big officer, half dressed and barely recovered from his wounds, who was keeping off half a dozen women with magnificent sword play.  The women gave one another first aid, then lifted and pitched him into his house.

There was sniping, of course, from the windows, but the women made a concerted rush and disposed of the terrified offender as remorselessly as their own men had punished the desperate civilians of the lands they had invaded.  They had heard their men brag for too many years about their admirable policy of Schrecklichkeit to forget the lesson in this fateful hour.

The most exciting scenes and the only ones in which any of the women were killed were in the vicinity of the garrison.  These interior garrisons of the country had been one of the long debated problems.  As no women entered them and as it was not safe to attempt the corruption of any of the men, there were but two alternatives:  blow them up and sacrifice the men wholesale or meet them with a superior force as they rushed out to ascertain the nature of the explosions, and fight them in open battle.  Gisela had finally decided to give them a chance for their lives, as she had no mind to shed any more blood than was unavoidable; and these men, being no longer in their prime, must be overcome eventually, no matter what their fury.