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Mariette’s communications by wireless were very brief, and on the second day of the revolution Gisela went by special train to Berlin.  It was the King’s own train, and always ready to start.  The engineer and fireman avowed themselves “friends of the revolution,” but they performed their duties with two armed women in the cab and fifty more in the car behind the engine.

The cities through which Gisela passed, as well as the small towns and wayside villages, presented a uniform appearance:  smoking ruins in the outlying sections which had been devoted to the war factories, and streets deserted save for women sentries.  One or two of the smaller towns had burned, owing to lack of fire brigades.  The food trains destined for the front, which had been moved out of danger before the general destruction, were being systematically unloaded, and a portion of the contents doled out to 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