ning the governor at his station and the Socialist party executive at the trade union hall decided at the same moment, and without any communication with each other, to ask that a government Socialist be sent from Berlin.

On Monday, November 4, ten thousand to twenty thousand men received rifles, part of which had been secretly collected beforehand, while others came from the armories. At the same time everyone knows that the guns of the ships, where the fires have not yet gone down, are in the hands of people who would choose to destroy the railway station and the officers' quarters before they would permit outside troops to come. Sailors from the trade school appear. They prevail upon the men in the mechanical engineering school to join them. The regiment of marines goes over. Guards are disarmed. Torpedo and shipyard divisions join the uprising. Sentries refuse to shoot. By afternoon the authorities recalled all orders to offer resistance. Souchon still hopes to save the situation by negotiation. At a quarter of three he makes it known to all the naval forces in the city through handbills that he wishes to learn the reason for the revolt. The sailors are to bring their complaints to him in order to avoid bloodshed. He takes this proper and decisive step on his own responsibility without orders from Berlin. Five sailors come to the headquarters and interview their commandant, who awaits them with his staff. 'Does Your Excellency recognize our delegation?'

'Yes, indeed. What do you wish?' Their attitude is not that of a soldiers' council. Their conversation is carried on in the usual form. The sailors speak in the third person. The governor's attitude is cordial. There is a long table. On one side sit the mutineers, on the other the staff. It

is the first formal negotiation between officers and crew on equal terms in the history of Prussia. Do the men know what they want?

In a most unpolitical, naïve, confused way they express their wishes. 'The same rations for officers and men.'

'Granted.'

'We wish to hold meetings.'
'No one prevents you.'
'No naval battle.'

'It was never intended.'
'No more saluting, except on duty.'
'Accepted.'

"The Hohenzollerns, yes, the Kaiser, must abdicate.'

Souchon smiles. 'I surely can't promise you that.'

'In any case the Imperial diet must be abolished.'

'I can only transmit your wishes to Berlin in this matter.'

"The Markgraf people must be liberated.'

'Granted.'

'Are we going to be able to keep the lid on after this?' ponders the staff as the men salute and retire.

Not at all; for during the interval the two Socialist parties have held a session at their building. They have organized everything. They have written out a political programme in accordance with Wilson's Fourteen Points, in which they do not jumble up the Hohenzollerns and the rations and in which they concentrate their political demands on the single requirement, the approval of the soldiers' council for all future measures.

Meantime, they wait for news from Berlin. The Independent Socialists, who were at that time a majority in Kiel, wanted Haase. Berlin wants to arrange things moderately. It sends Haussmann, one of the secretaries, and Noske, a moderate Socialist and a representative in the Reichstag from

Chemnitz, who is personally unknown in Kiel. When these public men arrive at the railway station in the evening and appear before the sailors, they are immediately surrounded by their party colleagues and led off to a public meeting.

The revolutionary leader, Noske, came to Kiel to calm things down rather than to agitate. Even three days later, when the movement had assumed gigantic proportions throughout the country and the care-worn specialist in propaganda was forced to convert himself into a resolute pioneer in revolution, his mission continued to be to make peace. When the man on this November evening from the top of an automobile found himself addressing a throng of ten thousand men, to whom he was a stranger and who wanted to know what they should do, it seemed to him that his first duty was to say 'Wait, maintain order.' What was behind them? They were mutineers from a German squadron and a few flotillas and strikers from a few shipyards and factories, but they represented only Kiel, a little corner on the northern edge of a still untroubled Germany. This was evident in the session that followed, when Noske in company with the workers' and soldiers' council at that time the only one in Germany -negotiated with the government.

That afternoon the Berlin authorities had made it known to all the troops by a wireless: "The following wishes of the deputation will be considered by the government. Liberation, investigation, cancellation of an alleged sally by the fleet.' Now in the evening systematic negotiations began. The governor felt himself strengthened by the assistance of the State secretary. The soldiers' council felt itself strengthened by the arrival of a leader of their party. Four members of the Kiel Socialist party participated in the confer

ence. The soldiers said less than they had before. Their party leaders became their spokesmen. Of a sudden the proceedings came to resemble those of a strike settlement, where workingmen and employers negotiate their dif ferences. A settlement of their immediate grievances was the main purpose in view with both parties as late as Monday evening, and when the conference closed at 1 o'clock A.M. Noske wired Scheidemann: 'Situation serious; send another man.' He was allotted quarters in the headquarters building.

The ships lay out in the harbor. Finally on Tuesday, Admiral Krafft decided to leave, but it was too late for two reasons. Hundreds of men had not returned from shore leave, and when the vessels approached Lübeck, Swinemünde, and Flensburg it proved impossible to prevent the men on board from communicating with those on land and the agitation was thus scattered all along the coast. Meantime, the mutineers in Kiel Harbor came alongside the war vessels that remained, in little fishing boats, and with arms in their hands demanded that the vessels raise the red flag. They quickly attained their object. None of the officers made armed resistance. Since of all the thousands who for two hundred years have been enjoying special privileges throughout all Germany as members of families loyal to the king, there have not twelve men died for the monarchical idea, we may mention with respect three officers who really tried to prevent raising the red flag upon the König. Commander Weniger, Captain Heinemann, and Lieutenant Zenker were shot because they defended the Imperial battle flag. The city commandant of Kiel, who was hated as a superior officer and feared, was shot about the same time by a couple of sailors in the hall of his resi

dence, as he was opening the door to throw a chair at the latter when they came to arrest him.

On Tuesday red automobiles and red flags multiplied rapidly at Kiel. Noske succeeded in having the troops that were ordered to march against the city recalled. In spite of that the sailors seized the station chief in order to force him in case of necessity to order any arriving troops to be carried on to another destination. But all this happened with a courtesy that is unusual among revolutionary soldiers and unexampled in case of hostages. He was merely requested to remain in one of the offices at the station, until the trains arrived without the troops on board.

The Kiel sailors were worried particularly by the flight of Prince Henry, whose escape from Kiel in an automobile destroyed the slight remnant of authority which his government still enjoyed. A sailor who tried to ride on the running board was shot. The suspicion of the sailors has not been confirmed, since an examination of the victim showed the shot had come from behind. A rumor was current in the city, as it was later in Berlin, that officers shot out of windows. Souchon issued an order forbidding officers to use violence: 'Only general recognition of the demands of the moment can lead to the restoration of order.'

That was his last command. To be sure they had to get over Wednesday

and that 6th of November was the hardest day of the revolution. It was the fourth since its outbreak and as yet nothing was happening in the Empire. 'Are we to be isolated? Then our heads are mighty insecure,' and indeed Noske even on Wednesday evening urged cautiously at a meeting of the delegates: 'Begin to hedge. Get an understanding with the government while it is willing. We are all alone.'

Even the sailors were depressed and intimidated. They thought of their wives and children, and in spite of all Popp's encouragement they went about in a most dejected mood. The next morning things looked better. It was the 7th of November. Reports began to come in of a general uprising in Hamburg, Bremen, Stuttgart, and Munich.

Noske now went to the governor's office and stated that the Imperial Chancery had directed him by telephone to take over the government of the city. He then went to a new mass meeting held in the open air, had himself proclaimed governor of Kiel and returned to headquarters. He reported: 'I have just been chosen governor by the masses. I courteously request the gentlemen of the staff to continue to perform their duties under my direction in the interests of eighty thousand people.'

He was a journalist from Chemnitz. He had been born in the Marches. He was a great, bony, loose-jointed man in a woolen shirt with a soft collar and with a slouch hat in his hand. He was face to face with a naval officer, a little bright-eyed, high strung admiral, who had grown gray in the service and received the decoration Pour le Merite. The former was an entire stranger to naval matters, knowing nothing of the world upon the water, with which the other man, honored by his subordinates yet new in this position, was thoroughly familiar.

There was a short pause. German history stood in the balance.

Then the admiral replied: "Yes, I'll make place for you, but I will also use my influence to have the gentlemen continue their services.' He selected a few papers from his desk, took his leave and departed. His staff followed him. The editor from Chemnitz remained alone. Two minutes later a

flood of absolutely unfamiliar business poured upon him. He had to decide how much oil the U-boats must have, what. furloughs were to be granted, what munitions were to be distributed to-morrow morning for the 10.5 guns.

After two hours he issued his first orders of the day. There were eight points upon public safety, health, and furloughs. All followed the precedents established with some few modifications, which seemed extremely revolutionary. These were: "The same food is to be served to all ranks of the service' and 'Address in the third person shall cease.'

Was there ever a case where the first order issued in a revolution followed so courteously the last order of the old régime? Naturally it was. endorsed: 'Approved; the Superior Soldiers' Council.'

A proclamation to Schleswig-Holstein appealed for the erection of other workers' and soldiers' councils. But it was a most remarkable fact that both parties still referred to each other so respectfully. The leaders of the revolution and the sailors at Kiel praised the ability and the tact of the governors they had deposed. The latter continued to be called into counsel and to praise the order and the moderation of their usurping successors. The staff

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continued its labors. Many officers stayed at their posts. Only a few are forced to leave. The men express their approval of the great majority.

It was not until the Berlin revolution legalized the revolution in Kiel, and until the fear of isolation disappeared, and the Kaiser abdicated, and twenty-two princes followed his example within five days, that Kiel began to put on the airs of an originator, and a revolution that started no differently from the one of the year before appeared now as a model and a prologue, although at the time none of the participants had any conception of its vast results.

Neither were there actually such vast results. What was started by the sailors and continued by the organized Socialists - the seed that had been sown among the sailors by the Independents-all these things became portentous in history only because the ideas and feelings which they represented were widely entertained in other places and by other people. If the leaders at Kiel almost despaired on Wednesday because they thought they stood alone, they need not have been so concerned; for the passiveness of their former commanders and rulers showed sufficiently that their political instinct whispered, 'All is lost.'

WHEN, early on the 3d of January, the last patrols, surrounded by plundering mobs, forced a path for themselves toward Riga to the Düna Bridge, a curtain descended between us and the old Hansa city. The civilized world will not know until later what is occurring now, and even then will learn but fragments of the truth. The bloody battles of the German rear guards with plundering mobs gathered in front of the provision warehouses, and the conflagrations that illumined the heavens during the winter night, left us a shuddering impression of what the fate of the ancient city must have been.

It is hardly worth while to tarry over the evacuation of a city at the end of a period which has witnessed so much brutality. But the fall of Riga is more than a bloody incident. It is a sign of warning, and the flames that rose from its destruction may cast a ray of enlightenment into the hearts of distant beholders.

From the middle of November the pressure of the Soviet troops upon the German border guards along the eastern boundary of the Baltic Provinces began to increase. Inasmuch as the withdrawal of the 8th German army was already under way, and the weary old Ländsturn troops were eager to get home, it was neither possible nor advisable to attempt serious resistance. Our troops withdrew slowly, and as soon as they had relinquished a district, a band of Soviet troops occupied it. As this went on, we lost large quantities of military supplies, and

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gradually the advance of the Soviet troops acquired such momentum as to endanger our retreat. The Russians forced their way from the vicinity of Pskof through Werro to Walk. All detachments of the 8th army north of that point saw their line of retreat threatened. Consequently, soldiers' councils began to negotiate with the Soviet troops. At their request I took over the negotiations and sent two commissions to particularly threatening points. We got into touch with the enemy and reached an agreement with them. The Soviet troops were not to make further attacks, but were to follow our withdrawing forces at such a distance as to leave constantly between the two armies a neutral zone of ten kilometres. The Russian officers never tired of expressing their loyalty and good-will. The Germans must not think that they had any hostile intentions. They would send on the military property that fell into their possession, with their own baggage trains. They would take care of our sick and wounded, and when they were better would send them home. The German authorities in Riga need feel no concern. They could wind up their affairs at their convenience under the protection of the Russians. To be sure, all these arrangements had to be approved by the Central Soviet government. But inasmuch as the Chicherin was at this time sending one conciliatory telegram after another to Germany, we had no reason to doubt the sincerity of these promises. In order to clinch our bargain, the Soviet government even

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