Part 12 (1/2)

Some of the palace guard had given up their rifles and left their posts.

Others had joined the revolutionaries. The looting of the palace began.

It did not a.s.sume great proportions on this first day, but many valuable Articles had disappeared when night came. Government property of all kinds was sold openly in the streets by soldiers and civilians. Rifles could be had for a few marks, and even army automobiles were sold for from three to five hundred marks. Processions kept moving about the city, made up in part of soldiers and in part of armed civilians.

Persons without red badges were often molested or mishandled. c.o.c.kades in the imperial or some state's colors were torn from soldiers' caps, their shoulder insignia were ripped off and their belts taken away by the embryo and self-const.i.tuted ”red guard.” The patriotic c.o.c.kades inflamed their revolutionary hearts; the belts, being of good leather--a rare article--could be used for repairing the shoes of the faithful.

Officers were hunted down, their shoulder-straps torn off and their swords and revolvers taken from them. Many officers were roughly handled. Hundreds escaped a like fate by a quick change into civilian clothing. The _mobile vulgus_ had forgotten that forty per cent of Germany's active officer corps had been killed in fighting for their country, and that a great part of those left were crippled by wounds. It saw in these men only the representatives of an iron discipline and of authority--and authority is hated by all truly cla.s.s-conscious _Genossen_. It was this same feeling that led, on the following day, to the disarming of the police--a measure which so quickly avenged itself in an increase of crime from which even the proletariat suffered that their sabers and revolvers were restored to the police within a month.

Thus far the revolution had been all but bloodless. The brave officer of the _Maikafer_ and the four revolutionaries who fell before him were the only victims. But about 6:00 P.M., as an automobile ambulance turned into the palace courtyard, a single shot was heard. Observers thought they saw the smoke of the shot in the central entrance to the royal stables, which are situated across the street just south of the palace.

While the source of the shot was being investigated a second shot was fired. Almost immediately machine guns began firing from the cellar windows and the first and second stories of the stables.[32] The crowd filling the square melted away. Members of the Soldiers' Council returned the fire. The shooting continued until late into the night, when members of the Soldiers' Council entered the stables. They found n.o.body there.

[32] This story of the origin of Sat.u.r.day evening's shooting comes from the Soldiers' Council, and is undoubtedly exaggerated. No other report of the incident is, however, available.

By whom or with what intention the first shots were fired is not known. The most radical of the revolutionaries, and especially the Liebknecht followers, saw in them the beginning of the dreaded ”counter-revolution.” The stables were at the time occupied by some of the marines who had been brought to Berlin two days earlier. These men, who were later to cause the new government so much trouble,[33] were in large part what is so aptly expressed by the slang term ”roughnecks.”

Their leader was a degraded officer named Heinrich Dorrenbach.[34]

Viewed in the light of their subsequent conduct it is impossible that they could have been won for any counter-revolutionary movement. The revolutionaries, however, who knew that they had been summoned by Prince Max's government, concluded that the shots had been fired by them. There were few casualties from the encounter.

[33] It was these men who surrounded the imperial chancellery on December 24th, held the cabinet members there _incommunicado_ by severing the telephone wires, and compelled the government to grant their wage demands and to permit them to retain the royal stables as barracks. They also helped loot the palace.

The government had to disarm them during the second ”Bolshevik week” in Berlin early in March, when twenty-four of them were summarily executed.

[34] Dorrenbach was afterward indicted in Brunswick for bribery and looting.

The Majority Socialists' three delegates conferred again with Dittmann, Vogtherr and Ledebour, the Independents' representatives. They were unable to come to an agreement, and the Independents withdrew to confer with their party's executive committee. This committee debated the question for some hours with the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council.[35]

Liebknecht, still nominally an Independent, for the _Spartacus Bund_ had not yet been formally organized as a separate party; Ledebour, Dittmann, and Barth, who was chairman of the council, took a leading part in the debate that ensued. It was finally decided to make the Independents'

partic.i.p.ation in the government conditional upon the granting of certain demands. First of all, the new government must be only a _provisorium_ for the conclusion of the armistice, and its existence was to be limited to three days. Before the expiration of that term the Soviet was to decide what course should then be taken. The republic must be a socialistic republic,[36] and all legislative, executive and judicial power must rest in the hands of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils, who were to be elected by ”the laboring population _under the exclusion of all bourgeois elements_.”[37]

[35] That the radical wing of the German Socialists conferred in a party matter with this council, which was supposed to represent Socialists of both parties, is significant. As a matter of fact, the real power in the council was from the beginning in the hands of the Independent and Spartacan members, and their ascendancy grew steadily.

[36] Here, as the demands show, ”socialistic” in the most rigid and ”cla.s.s-conscious” partisan sense.

[37] The italics are those of the Independents themselves, as used in publis.h.i.+ng their demands in their party organ.

These demands were communicated to the Majority Socialist delegates, who, after a conference with their party's executive committee, rejected them. They especially opposed the exclusion of all _bourgeois_ statesmen from the government, declaring that this would make the provisioning of the people impossible. They demanded cooperation of the two parties until the convening of a const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, and rejected the three-day limitation upon the existence of the government to be formed.

Further negotiations between the two sets of delegates were agreed on for Sunday morning.

The German Socialists have always had a keen appreciation of the influence of the press. No other country has such an extensive, well-edited and influential array of Socialist newspapers and periodicals as Germany, and in no other country are the Socialists so carefully disciplined into taking their political views from their party organs. As the parent party, the Majority Socialists already had their press. The Independents had no organ of any importance in Berlin, and Liebknecht's Spartacans had none at all. This, for persons who, if not in abstract theory, nevertheless in actual practice refuse to admit that the _bourgeoisie_ has any rights whatever, was a matter easily remedied.

Liebknecht, at the head of a group of armed soldiers, went in the evening to the plant of the Conservative _Lokal-Anzeiger_, turned out the whole staff and took possession. The paper appeared Sunday morning as _Die rote Fahne_ (The Red Flag). Independent Socialists and members of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council at the same time took violent possession of the venerable _Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung_, which they published Sunday morning as _Die Internationale_.

The Wolff Bureau had already been occupied by members of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council. It was compelled to send out any articles coming from that council, and its other news dispatches were subjected to a censors.h.i.+p quite as rigid and _tendencieuse_ and even less intelligent than that prevailing under the old regime. The committee put in charge of the Wolff Bureau was nominally composed of an equal number of Majority and Independent Socialists, but the latter, by dint of their rabid energy and resolution, were able for a long time to put their imprint on all news issuing from the bureau.

_Die rote Fahne_ of Sunday morning published on the first page a leading Article which undoubtedly was written by Liebknecht himself. It began:

”Proudly the red flag floats over the imperial capital. Berlin has tardily followed the glorious example of the Kiel sailors, the Hamburg s.h.i.+pyard laborers and the soldiers and workingmen of various other states.”

The article glorified the revolution and declared that it must sweep away ”the remains and ruins of feudalism.” There must be not merely a republic, but a socialistic republic, and its flag must not be ”the black, red and gold flag of the _bourgeois_ Republic of 1848, but the red flag of the international socialistic proletariat, the red flag of the Commune of 1871 and of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1912.

**** The revolutionary, triumphant proletariat must erect a new order out of the ruins of the World War. **** The first tasks in this direction are speedy peace, genuine proletarian domination, reshaping of economic life from the pseudo-socialism of the war to the real socialism of peace.”

The article closed with an appeal to workingmen and soldiers to retain their weapons and go forward ”under the victorious emblem of the red flag.”