Just consider for a moment what the German women have suffered during this war—­a war that they were told was forced upon their country by the aggressive military acts of Russia and France, but which, owing to Germany’s might, would hardly last three months.  For nearly three years they have never known the sensation of appeased hunger, and, having always been immense eaters, have suffered the tortures of dyspepsia in addition to hunger.  But, far worse, they have listened almost continuously to the wails of their children for satisfying food, children who are forever hungry and who often succumb.  Karl Ackerman, whose accuracy no one has questioned, states in his book, Germany, The Next Republic?, that in 1916 sixty thousand children died of malnutrition in Berlin alone.

These women have lost their fathers, husbands, sons—­well, that is the fortune of any war; but they are beginning to understand that they have lost them, not in a war of self-defense, but to gratify the insane ambitions and greed of a dynasty and a military caste that are out of date in the twentieth century.  Their parents, when over sixty, have died from the same cause as the children.  Their daughters, both unmarried and newly widowed, are “officially pregnant,” or the mothers of brats the name of whose fathers they do not know.  The young girls of Lille hardly have suffered more.  The German victims are sent for, then sent home to bear another child for Germany.

Now, we know what the German men are.  These women are the mothers and wives and sisters of the German men; in other words, they are Germans, body, and bone and brain-cells, capable of precisely the same ruthless tactics when pushed too hard—­if they have a leader.  That, to my mind, is the whole point.  Given that leader, they would effect a revolution precisely as I have described in my story.  Nor would they run the risk of failure.  The German race is not eight-tenths illiterates and two-tenths intellectuals, emotional firebrands, anarchists and sellers-out like the Russians.  They are uniformly educated, uniformly disciplined.  They will do nothing futile, nothing without the most secret and methodical preparation of which even the German mind is capable.  It will be like turning over in bed in camp:  they will all turn over together.  They are damnably efficient.

It may be said:  “But you may have spoiled their chances with your book.  You not only have revealed them in their true character to their men, but all the details of their probable methods in working up and precipitating a revolution.  You have, in other words, put the German authorities on their guard.”

The answer to this is that no German of the dominant sex could be made to believe in anything so unprecedented as German women taking the law into their own hands, uniting, and overthrowing a dynasty.  Nothing can penetrate a German official skull but what has been trained into it from birth.  Unlike the women, the system has made the men of the ruling class into the sort of machine which is perfect in its way but admits of no modern improvements.  That has been the secret of their strength and of their weakness, and will be the chief assistance to the Allies in bringing about their final defeat.  I am positive they go to sleep every night murmuring:  “Two and two make four.  Two and two make four.”