the gateway, and Dr Kapp vanished from the stage. That was the end of the Junkers' coup-d'état, but it was by no means the end of the trouble they had stirred up. The troops which had supported the militarist rising were still in possession of Berlin, though Lüttwitz had ordered them to withdraw under the direction of General von Seeckt, Mackensen's former Chief of Staff, who had stood aside from the misguided enterprise that had ensnared so many of his colleagues, and was now appointed Commander-in-Chief by Sohiffer behalf of the regular Government. on Would the Junker troops go quietly? That was the question that agitated Berlin for the next twenty-four hours. And what agitated the Junker troops themselves was the question, "Will the Spartacists let us go quietly?" its counterpart, the Red bogey of Bolshevism. The General Strike, called in self-defence by the very Government which the German Bolshevists regarded as thoroughly bourgeois, had provided the Spartaoists with ideal conditions for direct action. In the industrial quarters of Berlin the Communist party had accordingly begun at once to organise its followers into "Red Guards,' which they equipped either with weapons seized from overpowered patrols of police and soldiers, or from the secret stores of arms they had been colleeting ever since the revolution of November 1918 for just such an occasion. And now that their sworn enemies the Baltic troops were so evidently on the losing side, the most bloodthirsty threats were issued by the Reds of Berlin as to the fate of any of them who should fall into their hands. In isolated instances these threats were terribly For the evil spirit of reactionary militarism had evoked fulfilled. X. On the afternoon of the day the capital. Once again the following the flight of Kapp Adlon played a part in the and Lüttwitz, the Baltic troops disturbance. and the Marine Brigade I watched the assembly marched out again through of part of the column of the same Brandenburg Gate Baltio troops in the garden by which they had entered Berlin in triumph five days before. They were defiant and aggressive to the last, and their exit was marked by one of the characteristic bursts of shooting which had already cost human life in other parts of behind what was formerly the palace of Prince Friedrich Leopold in the Wilhelmstrasse, which now serves as part of the German Foreign Office— a sullen-looking collection of young men, their faces looming sinister in the shadow of their deep-brimmed steel hel- Adlon Hotel. Who she was mets. The officers, who moved did not transpire; but she with an indefinable freebooter- was foolishly carrying on a like swagger, were gathered to counter-demonstration of her gether in a group, talking vig- own by waving her handkererously, and from their manner chief to the Baltic troops as it was easy to guess that they they passed. With one of were exchanging indignant ori- those wild impulses that seize ticism of the order of with- upon excited mobs, a rush was drawal which they had received. made for the entrance of the Before the column moved off, hotel, which was closed, as it the senior officer made a short had been all the week, by a speech. The Baltio troops and light iron grille. This went the Marine Brigade, he told down with a crash. The two his men, had been ordered stalwart hall-porters behind it to return to Döberitz. There were swept on one side, and had been some talk of their already thirty or forty pantbeing disarmed when they ing dishevelled people had got there, but they and their forced their way, or been comrades would know how pushed by the pressure beto defend themselves against hind them, through the swingany such attempt if it were ing doors into the hall of the made. hotel. What would have happened next remains problematioal; but at that moment the last company of Baltie treeps that had passed suddenly turned and fired splutter of rifle-shots into the orowd. They probably thought the riot going on behind them was preliminary to an attack upon themselves. The result in any case was to clear the Linden in marvellously few seconds. People fell flat on their faces in the mud, or flung themselves against the looked doors of the shops with such terror-stricken violence as to break them open. Here and there lay motionless figures among the scrambling orowd. The bolder and cooler of the onlookers went to their help, waving handkerchiefs in sign of truce, though the Baltio troops had now passed on through the Gate, and the Then, with the black-andwhite Kaiser flag flying at their head, and their band playing a Prussian march, the Junker soldiers marched out into the Wilhelmstrasse, and wheeled through the barbedwire barrier on to Unter den Linden. Here a orowd, thousands strong, was waiting to see them go, and as the head of the column appeared a constantly swelling chorus of jeers and groans broke loose. The Junker troops replied with threatening gestures. The greater part of them had passed the Brandenburg Gate, however, without the demonstration becoming more serious than this, when the temper of the crowd was suddenly roused to action by the gesture of a woman standing en one of the balconies of the a Occasional splutter of their rifle-shots which was still to be heard came from the Tiergarten beyond. A first-aid station was hurriedly improvised at the back entrance of the Adlon. With German thoroughness the hotel-porter chalked up a notice, "Red Cross Bandaging Post-here!" and hung it on the door. Four dead bodies of the twelve that were found were carried in from the roadway and laid down in the Adlon hall, between the newspaper-stand and the reception-desk,-shapeless huddled forms, men all of them, one with his whole face one olot of blood. The cosmopolitans living in the hotel peered at them in horrorstricken ouriosity, but the idea of death by violence has become commonplace enough during the last five years, and almost as soon as the bodies had been taken away in an ambulance-waggon the tragedy of their fate was forgotten, and the General-Strikestarved hotel guests turned to the ever-recurring speculation as to whether there was small restaurant open anywhere that would serve them with a hot meal. For during that week of General Strike, dwellers in hotels were rapidly reduced to most primitive conditions. With beds unmade, floors unswept, boots unoleaned, they lived on oheerless meals of petted meat and biscuit, most of them never venturing out of doors. From sunset onwards candles were the only light they had, and with the stoppage of the water-supply ordinary cleanliness and elementary sanitation became unpleasantly difficult to maintain. The hardy ones made reconnaissances to look for food outside. Occasionally humble little eating - houses were to be found, run by their proprietor and his family personally, where meals were still served in defiance of the strike. To these places people would make their way stealthily, with as much precaution as if seoret lunching were a vice. At night, though, it was really unpleasant to be obliged to go out of doors. The streets were pitch dark, for there was no moon, and all the lighting was out off by the strike. Constantly one would stumble up against some unexpected barrier of barbed wire, set up after dark by the troops, who then moved out to picket the main streets. "Wer da?" a startled voice would suddenly call out of the black shadows, and a half-excited, half-soared young "Baltikum" would come threateningly forward with levelled rifle, to examine one's papers by the light of an electric pocket - lamp. Their officers had filled their minds with the belief that they were in constant danger of unexpected attack from a Red Army of German Bolshevists, and they were ready to let fly on the least suspicion. From the east and north quarters of the eity, where trouble had already occurred with the crowds of workpeople, Very flares were continually being fired into the air to light up dark corners, and searchlights quivered from every radiating street junction, flooding each dark avenue in turn with a blinding stream of brilliant glare. Occasionally Occasionally two or three distant rifle-shots would rap out in the silence of the stagnant city, or a splutter of shooting told of some new "incident" that would add its little toll of dead and wounded to the week's list of futile casualties. But reckless as the Junker mercenaries were in thus firing on the crowd, one instance of the revenge the latter took was more ghastly still. It occurred in the good-class residential suburb of Schoeneberg, on the night of Friday, the 19th, as the last of the troops supporting the revolution were being withdrawn. During the week twenty-five officers of the Junker garrison had had their quarters in the old Schoeneberg Town Hall, and on Friday evening three motor - lorries were sent to take them, their servants, and their kit away. Word had got round among the people of Schoeneberg that the officers were leaving, and a dense crowd gathered in front of the Town Hall to give them a hostile demonstration as they drove away. Seared by the threatening appearance of the mob, the officers inside the building telephoned for police protection, and a small squad of Green Police, who had now resumed their duty in the service of the constitutional Government, appeared to act as escort. Against such numbers as were waiting for the officers, however, the police lieutenant was powerless, and he could only make a speech to part of the crowd and obtain a promise that the twenty-five men inside should be allowed safe passage on condition they left their arms behind. The first motor - lorry, containing ten officers, then appeared through the gates of the Town Hall and slowly made its way through the dense-packed jeering mob. But before it had gone very far the crowd stopped its farther progress. No sooner was the lorry at a standstill than two or three men clambered up its sides, seized one of the officers, and thrust him over the edge into the hands of the excited people. Then a rush was made for the waggon from every side, and all the ten men, struggling desperately but hopelessly, were flung down on to the pavement. The mob set on them like a pack of hounds breaking up a fox. With feet, fists, sticks, the officers were pounded and battered, till horror at their own savagery made the crowd recoil. Four of their victims had been trampled to death, four more were badly injured. is not permanently discredited. It had precisely the opposite effect to what its organisers aimed at, and though it was baulked of its own malign ends, it left the state of Germany far worse than it had been before. name associated with it that less hear of Junkerism as a disturbing element in Germany again. As a political party the militarists have been badly defeated but not orushed. The same Baltic troops that supported them still lie at Döberitz Camp, and have openly defied the Government to disarm them. The leaders of the last attempt have found refuge beyond the German frontiers, and are planning another coup. It is not likely that they will ever be so ambitious as to try afresh to seize the capital, but they may make a bid for power in some more favourable locality, like the Junker province of East Prussia, or perhaps in conjunction with the Separatist tendencies of the Catholic South. The Junkers are directly responsible for the harm done to their country by the Spartacist risings that followed upon it; for though the Spartacist movement would very probably have broken out in any case later on, Germany would then have been stronger from an internal point of view to grapple with it if the Junkers had not ripped open the healing soars of civil disorder. One manifest result of the Junker failure has been to cripple the [forces of reaction in Germany to such an extent that, though still in the field, they may be regarded for the time being as impotent. For their luckless venture had the effect of uniting the two antagonistic wings of the Socialist party, the moderates and the extremists, in common cause against a restoration of militarist tyranny, and it gave an opportunity for demonstrating the orushing power of the General Strike when all grades of workers unite in it whole-heartedly, and it is used for national and not class aims. None the less, we shall doubt- all hope of resurrection. German officers are intensely ignorant of everything outside their own profession, but they are determined, they are selfconfident, and they are fighting to keep their own livelihood and their own prestige. With modern weapons, a small military force can dominate a large district easily; so that, while this present generation of out-of-work officers remains unsettled, Germany will always be liable to local freebooting outbreaks of Junker anarchy. One thing, however, the Hundred Hours has provedthat in the national sense, militarism and Junkerdom in Germany are causes lost beyond |