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compromised merely in a negative sense. A man who had not been sentenced by a court during the war, or at least arrested, was considered compromised. Honest trade unionists and party officers were shoved aside with the mere word 'compromised leaders.'

Although they had committed no offense to compromise them the very fact that they had committed no offense was proof that they were compromised. The other class of enemies, which Thomas attacked, were what he called the educated fellows. He proclaimed a sort of metaphysical faith in the proletariat. No educated leader was needed to proclaim this faith. A man who was not thrust aside as compromised was cast out as educated. In this way the Munich working people were deprived in a few weeks of all their well-known leaders, and the political stage was left empty for unknown men whose only qualification was an eager desire to get into the spotlight. Otto Thomas himself did not rise to eminence on this revolutionary wave, although he undoubtedly was the most popular speaker in Munich. On the other hand, a man literally crazy, but politically uncompromised and certainly uneducated, got the position of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and continued to send telegrams in every direction until his mental disease could no longer be concealed.

The meeting lasted late into the night and passed without incident. In the closing hours a very thin school mistress, with spectacles, mounted the speakers' stand and called for a vote of the comrades present, on the ground that in this critical situation only the instincts of the proletariat would be able to decide what was right. In order that this divine, saving instinct might find free and unpolluted expression, the vote must not be preceded

by any formal address or explanation concerning the facts involved in establishing a Soviet republic. The mere untaught, unalloyed instinct of the people was to decide. Behold it did decide three days later, and we might have assumed with almost absolute certainty before the decision was made that some 3,300 comrades would vote in favor of the Soviet republic and some 3,300 comrades would vote against it. The instinct of the proletariat merely refused to settle the question. What will the poor school mistress do now? I am unable to imagine to what instinct her credulous nature will now appeal.

A few days later I attended a deciding meeting of the Munich Workers and Industrial Councils. It was held at the Hofbräu. Throughout the most revolutionary debates the waitresses forced their way through the crowd with twenty steins of beer in each hand. None of the Social Democratic leaders were visible. Had they not been invited? Did they not come? On the other hand the Independents and the Communists sent their best speakers. The principal speech was delivered by a young man in the gray tunic of a former officer. His name was Mr. Klingelhöfer. He was not a compromised person, but a new man and a passionate enthusiast. He spoke with the warmth inspired by the previous debate, employing short sentences of seven or eight words. Every sentence was a hammer blow. (The revolution has undoubtedly improved the oratorical talents of the Germans. At many of their mass meetings new speakers have appeared, speakers who have suddenly comprehended the great art of using simple language.) None of his sentences had a kite-tail of subordinate sentences. Each thought was set off by itself. This speaker tried to unite Majority Socialists, Independents, and

Communists. He had been eagerly advocating this for several days. The Workers' Council listened to him with a fixed attention that indicated profound approval. Only occasionally was he interrupted by some whispered discourse between one of his auditors and a waitress. If you believe in this instinct so often mentioned, you must confess that by thus rising superior to party difference the people has given superior power and comprehension. This convincing speaker found prudent, but plain, words to characterize the Communist leaders, who persisted in their dogmatic isolation. Mr. Klingelhöfer was given an ovation. Following him a Mr. Levine spoke. He had been exported from Russia a few days previously. He had the head of a scholar. He was a thin man with a great pointed nose, who monotonously gestured with the index finger. This Russian proved himself to be a long-winded instructor upon the Soviet system. He delivered his dry, and one may say scientific, lecture with ruthless monotony, until the Workers' Council was obviously restless. The Russian was interrupted by invitations to stop, and I began to have some faith in this people's instinct. But thereupon a great riot started in the gallery and the back part of the hall and the Communists insisted violently that the Russian be permitted to finish. So the listeners resigned themselves and Mr. Levine continued his instructions for half an hour more. But he had learned something from the incident and became more enthused with his subject, so that when he concluded he, too, received applause.

Thereupon, the chairman of the Independent Socialist party took the floor. He was a young man, a Mr. Ernest Toller, thin, pale, black hair, another enthusiast. He was a young chap twenty-five years old, who was a stu

VOL. 15-NO. 739

dent in Marburg when the war broke out. He was a Social Democrat and the foolish regulations of the university authorities converted him into an ultra-radical. He is a man of poetic temperament, and I have seen plays which he has written that give evidence of talent, though it may be only the talent of a twenty-five-year-old youth. He served in the war, saw with his own eyes its brutalities, then returned to Munich, participated in a peace demonstration and was imprisoned. Consequently, he has not had much time for studying political science and economics. As chairman of the Independents he has, since the wounding of Auer deprived the city of its last Social Democratic leader, been called upon to play a responsible political part. We can say that he has performed the task with moral courage. Whether he is intellectually mature enough I cannot yet decide. In any case his passionate enthusiasm has been a drawback. All these young, ardent fellows, who are promoting the revolution in Germany to-day, are endowed with a minimum of practical knowledge. They are men of ardent faith, something for which they may be praised as well as criticized. Mr. Toller likewise spoke only in short, hammer blow, revolutionary style. Such a tone is necessary at these great meetings. He, too, pointed his index finger at Mr. Levine, the leader of the Communists, whom he charged with being the enemy of unity. Mr. Toller likewise was applauded.

Thereupon, Dr. Eugen Levien ascended the speaker's platform. He is no lean enthusiast, but a well-nourished comfortable man. His smooth shaven countenance suggested an actor. Everyone of his gestures was well calculated and would have delighted a moving picture operator. When he raised his arm in a pathetic

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appeal he used his little finger to lift up his white cuff, conscious of the fact that a pathetically raised arm looks better and is more effective when you see the little white rim of the cuff between the arm and the sleeve. In periods of profound emotion a black curl falls over his forehead. He knows it, and tosses back his head with a masterful motion, as though he would order his locks to return to their old position. Then he speaks, and the amiable, disobedient curl falls down almost into his eyes. Then suddenly he draws his well-manicured right hand through his artistic hair, and compels the disobedient curl to take its proper position. I have associated these romantic gestures with eminent opera tenors. I get the same association from his pathos. When he ascended the speakers' stand two or three hundred people applauded. Liebknecht was never received in such a theatrical manner in Berlin. Levien began his speech with the bold question, 'Why are your eyes not aglow, comrades?' There was a lyrical undertone in these words, but beneath the deep pathos was concealed extraordinary shrewdness. Levien, who comes from Moscow, had joined the Munich Soviet movement greatly against his own desire. He felt that the whole revolution was ninety-nine per cent foreign to the Munich temperament. But that this ninety-nine per cent was leaderless, unadvised, phlegmatic, or confused, and that consequently the remaining one per cent had taken things into their own hands. Levien's speeches, trumpet-like as they might sound, always betrayed a fatal concern and tormenting sentiment of uncertainty. He defended himself against the attacks of the Independents with lurid sentences. The Soviet republic was a gift of Providence to the proletariat of Munich. It had not

been won by bloody battles. Eight days later he said in the same assembly: 'Now that the pavements of Munich are red with the blood of the bourgeoisie and with the blood of the working people, I begin to have faith in the Munich revolution.' This rude, poster style of oratory produced a great effect, and Mr. Levien also was cheered.

Every speaker was cheered. The Workers' Councils remained in practically continuous session for several evenings and nights. The waitresses, who had carried steins of beer from morning till midnight, were already cursing the revolution. The last orator was always the man of the moment, provided he was eloquent. 'Our mass meetings are concerts.'

I attended several wild street meetings during the revolution. I had seen similar spontaneous assemblies with their improvised speakers in Berlin, but the Berlin corner orators were much more fanatical, and, I must add, men of a much higher grade. In Munich these street gatherings soon degenerated into a contest of witticisms or anti-Semite abuse, where Socialists and Communists, who just a few hours before had been applauding Levien and Levine, joined again in the applause.

On one of the last days of the revolution, I was a spectator of thrilling events at a brewery in Stachus, which is arranged for accommodating large gatherings. A dance of the Munich citizens with their brides and sweethearts was going on. I stood at the entrance when we heard the first rifle shot. Several people went to the windows. A man came to the door and shouted, "There is shooting outside.' But people kept on dancing. They did not turn a hair. They were not even curious. I ran down the steps and saw the first wounded writhing in their blood. But I was the only one at the

dance who thought it worth while to go out on the street. When I returned I heard a dancer, who was waltzing by me, say in an irritated way, 'A lot of rascals among 'em!' The music had not ceased playing for a moment. Of

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course, there was dancing also in Berlin, but so far as I know only during the intervals in the fighting. Berlin people would have stopped dancing if only from curiosity. The Munich dancers were not even curious.

FIVE TO ONE

BY H. J. JONES

THE peninsula of Gallipoli was once a beautiful country - a land of scattered farms and tended vineyards, of fig trees and date palms, of cypresses and tamarinds, of gorge and down, of careless husbandry and cheerful indolence. And, as it was, so will it become, in the reconciling lapse of the coming years; when that which now pollutes the soil shall have melted into nourishment, and that which now defiles shall have become ancient and subdued.

On this mid-May morning, however, it still presented features of a gracious and abundant beauty. Southward from the crest of Achi Baba the bluegreen Egean lay shimmering in the sun. The pellucid airs, faintly stirring, were pregnant with the promise of brooding sultry heat; and the sky, tinted with a blue milkiness, bent above the world as delicate as transparent porcelain.

Although but an hour after dawn, Achi Baba hummed with the insistent clamor of a bazaar. Men prayed and cursed, and gave blessing, in incongruous alternation; having adjured Allah Most High in a loud voice, a man, more often than not, would proceed to hurl obscene and picturesque abuse at his neighbor.

Beyond Achi Baba and about two miles along the road that winds away to cypress-hidden Alexi, stood a gray house, set apart, by a patch of meadow land, from interminable rows of pointed brown tents that rose in serene tranquillity from a maze of taut white cordage. Beyond the house a plantation of firs and beeches still held depths of sombre night gloom, touched here and there by the level sunbeams to glints of frosted silver; and beyond, a disused burial ground showed its square unlovely tombs all a-scatter beneath a cluster of cypresses and tamarinds. The door of the house was wide open, and two soldiers mounted an attentive guard, their eyes fixed toward the crest of the rising ground, beyond which the hillside lay torn and tortured as if a host of giant rodents had settled in the ground.

The little stone house, standing apart under the red flag of Turkey and the drapery of a vine in flower, appeared to be empty, for no sound of stir came from its open door, through which could be seen a passage running from back to front, and doors leading to single rooms on either side. Yet, despite the stillness, many strange things were happening or in suspense.

In the narrow room to the right, as you entered the door, a man sat at a long narrow table covered with a white sheet on which five little heaps of pens and pencils and paper were set out with geometrical precision. In the oom to the left four men stood and waited in silence.

The man who sat by himself at the long white table was dressed in a uniform with a texture soft and gray, like the wing of a dove. It lay crumpled across his huge chest in three wide folds. He wore the badges of a German General Officer and two classes of the Iron Cross. He was von Eistel, Chief of Staff. His head looked incredibly round with its covering of stiff gray hair, cut en brosse. His forehead was deeply furrowed, and his cheeks red-veined and flushed. His jaws were heavy and folded like a hound's; his lips were bulbous, his neck swelling. Ponderous lids covered ruminating bloodshot eyes, and a curious growth of white hair made his ears seem much larger than they really were. He looked massive and truculent a bull. One could well believe that, in anger, he roared; that he was greedy at his food ostentatiously greedy in all his swaggering enjoyments.

Two of the four silent men in the room to the left were typical European Turks- impassive, indolent, and taciturn. They were dressed in neat and serviceable uniforms, and wore queershaped hats of brown lambs' wool. They had brightly colored watered silk ribbons on their breasts, and leering malicious anxiety on their faces. Khalek Pasha and Kamel Pasha, they had seen much service, and ranked as Divisional Commanders. Their pale, well-cut features were entirely disagreeable to look upon a complexion with tints reminiscent of an apricot was not improved by eyes with a sug

gestion of a squint. Their eyebrows were thin and black and curved upward, and looked as if they had been badly painted by hand, and their pendulous noses bore eloquent testimony to the Semitic strain that tainted their Osmanli blood.

The two younger men were of a distinctly different type. One, who seemed about thirty-five or so, had a short squat figure, and, like von Eistel, was dressed in gray. He had a pink babyish face, with slightly bulging eyes, that as they peered through his round spectacles did not look like eyes at all. His hair was the color of straw and cropped close to his skull-a Prussian undoubtedly. He stood apart from the others, and clasped with obtrusive nervousness a swollen case of documents.

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The other man who had youth to his credit was of the type that all men who have lived east of Suez sense as carrying black blood the tint of purple in the finger nails, the duskiness of the skin, the sharp, stabbing, restless glance, the cruel, remorseless face. Hussan Bey, an upstart Anatolian, a protégé of Djemal — subtle as a tiger.

And these five men were gathered together on this mid-May morning to judge one of their own kind and quality. Five to one unfair odds! They waited until a tin German clock, not worth fifty piastres in a Stamboul bazaar, should ring a strident seven o'clock; waited on the pleasure of a train of little brass wheels that a pin could derange and a child smash with his fist.

At the end of a row of pointed brown tents, and set apart a space from its fellows, was one before which the flag of a Brigadier hung limply on a pole. And at ten minutes to seven o'clock Ahteen Bey, the one for whom the five judges waited in the gray house below,

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