The Amazon addressed the men in the armored automobiles that surrounded the palace.

“Fire upon us if you like.  Our ranks are close and you will kill many.  But not one of you will live to eat rat sausage tomorrow morning.  Now disarm and march to the guard house.”

The contemptible little army of the Kaiser, hypnotized as much by the glare as by this solid mass of vindictive females—­singly so negligible—­shrugged their shoulders, surrendered their arms, and marched off under guard.  After all, they would have a blessed rest, however brief, before the great generals sent back a few brigades to execute summary vengeance upon these presumptuous women, who had used their incidental superiority in numbers so basely.

2

But nothing came from the front but frantic orders by wireless to the staunch but impotent pillars of the old regime.  The British, French, and American forces, convinced at last that German women actually had effected a revolution—­God knew how!—­attacked every point of the line from Flanders to Belfort, and their aviators dropped newspapers containing the extraordinary but verified story, into the German trenches and back of the lines.

The destruction of the railways leading to the Austria-Hungarian Empire, as well as all the rolling stock within three miles of the frontier, balked any attempt to rush supplies in from the east, and in two days Austria was in the throes of a revolution far more devastating internally than Germany’s, for that excitable and harassed people, long on the verge of despair, merely caught the revolution-microbe and went mad.

To supply either the army opposing Italy or that in Roumania and Gallicia, to say nothing of that in the Northeast, was no longer even considered.  The young Emperor sought only to come to an understanding with his people.

It was a matter of days before both ammunition and food would be exhausted on the two fronts, and neither had a superfluous man to send to Berlin, or even to repair the tracks.

3

By Friday there was no longer any doubt of the complete success of the Revolution.  Britain, France, Russia, Italy, the United States, with a prompt and canny statesmanship, remarkable in Governments, had formally acknowledged the German Republic, and offered terms of peace possible for an ambitious and self-respecting but beaten people to accept.  At all events there would be no commercial boycott, and the young Republic would be given every assistance in restoring the shattered finances of Germany, and its economic relations with the rest of the world.

The good German people were flattered in phrases that they rolled on their tongues.  Even those too schooled in lies to believe the statesmen of their own or any land reflected that, after all, the Enemy Allies had demonstrated they were sportsmen, that German prisoners had been well treated, and that before the war there had been no restrictions upon German commerce save in insidious reiterated words of men determined upon war at any cost.  As a matter of fact, Germany had been absorbing the commerce of the world, and Britain had been reprehensibly supine.