Part 14 (1/2)
”This declaration was approved and signed by His Majesty, and was telephoned by Excellency von Hintze to the Chancellery. At 8:10 o'clock in the evening His Majesty received from the office of the Imperial Chancellor a report of the announcement made public through the Wolff Bureau, in which the Imperial Chancellor, without waiting for the Kaiser's answer, had reported the Kaiser's abdication as Kaiser and King. His Majesty received the news with the deepest seriousness and with royal dignity. He asked my views on the situation. I answered:
”'It is a coup d'etat, an abuse of power to which your Majesty must not submit. Your Majesty is King of Prussia, and there is now more than ever a pressing necessity for Your Majesty to remain with the army as supreme commander. I guarantee that it will be true to Your Majesty.'
”His Majesty replied that he was and would remain King of Prussia, and that he would not abandon the army. Thereupon he commissioned Generals von Pless and Marschall and Excellency von Hintze to report to the Field Marshal what had happened. He then took leave of the Crown Prince and of me. After I had left, he called me back, thanked me once more and said:
”'I remain King of Prussia and I remain with the troops.'
”I answered:
”'Come to the front troops in my section. Your Majesty will be in absolute safety there. Promise me to remain with the army in all events.'
”His Majesty took leave of me with the words:
”'I remain with the army.'
”I took leave of him and have not seen him again.”
In the general condemnation of the Kaiser, his flight to Holland has been construed as due to cowardice. His motives are unimportant, but this construction appears to be unjust. He was convinced that he had nothing to fear from his people, nor is there any reason to suppose that he would for a moment have been in danger if he had remained. It is also probable that he entertained hopes of leading a successful counter-revolutionary movement. But his protests were overruled by men in whom he had great confidence. Hindenburg and Groener, following an unfavorable report from nearly all the army chiefs regarding the feeling in their commands, told the Kaiser that they could not guarantee his safety for a single night. They declared even that the picked storm-battalion guarding his headquarters at Spa was not to be depended on.
Others added their entreaties, and finally, unwillingly and protestingly, the Kaiser consented to go.
With him went the Crown Prince. There was no one left in Germany to whom adherents of a counter-revolution could rally. Scheming politicians for months afterward painted on every wall the spectre of counter-revolution, and it proved a powerful weapon of agitation against the more conservative and democratic men in charge of the country's affairs, but counter-revolution from above--and that was what these leaders falsely or ignorantly pretended to fear--was never possible from the time the armistice was signed until the peace was made at Versailles. Counter-revolution ever threatened the stability of the government, but it was the gory counter-revolution of Bolshevism.
The Kaiser's flight had the double effect of encouraging the Socialists and discouraging the Conservatives, the right wing of the National Liberals and the few prominent men of other _bourgeois_ parties from whom at least a pa.s.sive resistance might otherwise have been expected.
The Junkers disappeared from view, and, disappearing, took with them the ablest administrative capacities of Germany, men whose ability was unquestioned, but who were now so severely compromised that any partic.i.p.ation by them in a democratic government was impossible. ”The German People's Republic” as it had been termed for a brief two days, became the ”German Socialistic Republic.” Numerically the strongest party in the land, the Socialists of all wings insisted upon putting the red stamp upon the remains of Imperial Germany.
In their rejoicing at the revolution and the end of the war, the great ma.s.s of the people forgot for the moment that they were living in a conquered land. Those that did remember it were lulled into a feeling of over-optimistic security by the recollection of President Wilson's repeated declarations that the war was being waged against the German governmental system and not against the German people, and by the declaration in Secretary Lansing's note of the previous week that the Allies had accepted the President's peace points with the exception of the second.
The Soldiers' and Workmen's Councils held plenary sessions on Monday and ratified the proceedings of Sunday. The spirit of the proceedings, especially in the Soldiers' Council, was markedly moderate. Ledebour, one of the most radical of the Independent Socialists, was all but howled down when he tried to address the soldiers' meeting in the Reichstag. Colin Ross, appealing for harmonious action by all factions of Social-Democracy, was received with applause. The _Vollzugsrat_, which was now in theory the supreme governing body of Germany, also took charge of the affairs of Prussia and Berlin. Two Majority and two Independent Socialists were appointed ”people's commissioners” in Berlin. It is worthy of note that all four of these men were Jews.
Almost exactly one per cent of the total population of Germany was made up of Jews, but here, as in Russia, they played a part out of all proportion to their numbers. In all the revolutionary governmental bodies formed under the German Socialistic Republic it would be difficult to find a single one in which they did not occupy from a quarter to a half of all the seats, and they preponderated in many places.
The _Vollzugsrat_ made a fairly clean sweep among the Prussian ministers, filling the majority of posts with _Genossen_. Many of the old ministers, however, were retained in the national government, including Dr. Solf as Foreign Minister and General Scheuch as Minister of War, but each of the _bourgeois_ ministers retained was placed under the supervision of two Socialists, one from each party, and he could issue no valid decrees without their counter-signature. The same plan was followed by the revolutionary governments of the various federal states. Some of the controllers selected were men of considerable ability, but even these were largely impractical theorists without any experience in administration. For the greater part, however, they were men who had no qualifications for their important posts except members.h.i.+p in one of the Socialist parties and a deep distrust of all _bourgeois_ officials. The Majority Socialist controllers, even when they inclined to agree with their _bourgeois_ department chiefs on matters of policy, rarely dared do so because of the s.h.i.+bboleth of solidarity still uniting to some degree both branches of the party.
Later, when the responsibilities of power had sobered them and rendered them more conservative, and when they found themselves more bitterly attacked than the _bourgeoisie_ by their former _Genossen_, they shook off in some degree the thralldom of old ideas, but meanwhile great and perhaps irreparable damage had been done.
The revolutionary government faced at the very outset a more difficult task than had ever confronted a similar government at any time in the world's history. The people, starving, their physical, mental and moral powers of resistance gone, were ready to follow the demagogue who made the most glowing promises. The ablest men of the Empire were sulking in their tents, or had been driven into an enforced seclusion, and the men in charge of the government were without any practical experience in governing or any knowledge of constructive statecraft. Every one knew that the war was practically ended, but thousands of men were nevertheless being slaughtered daily to no end.
In all the Empire's greater cities the revolutionaries, putting into disastrous effect their muddled theories of the ”brotherhood of man,”
had opened the jails and prisons and flooded the country with criminals.
What this meant is dimly indicated by the occurrences in Berlin ten days later, when Spartacans raided Police Headquarters and liberated the prisoners confined there. Among the forty-nine persons thus set free were twenty-eight thieves and burglars and five blackmailers and deserters; most of the others were old offenders with long criminal records. This was but the grist from one jail in a sporadic raid and the first ten days of November had resulted in wholesale prison-releases of the same kind. The situation thus created would have been threatening enough in any event, but the new masters of the German cities, many of whom had good personal reasons for hating all guardians of law and order, disarmed the police and further crippled their efficiency by placing them under the control of ”cla.s.s-conscious” soldiers who, at a time when every able-bodied fighting man was needed on the west front, filled the streets of the greater cities and especially of Berlin.
The result was what might have been expected. Many of the new guardians of law and order were themselves members of the criminal cla.s.ses, and those who were not had neither any acquaintance with criminals and their ways nor with methods of preventing or detecting crime. The police, deprived of their weapons and--more fatal still--of their authority, were helpless. And this occurred in the face of a steadily increasing epidemic of criminality, and especially juvenile criminality, which had been observed in all belligerent countries as one of the concomitants of war and attained greater proportions in Germany than anywhere else.
Nor was this the only encouragement of crime officially offered. In ante-bellum days, when German cities were orderly and efficient police and _gendarmerie_ carefully watched the comings and goings of every inhabitant or visitor in the land, every person coming into Germany or changing his residence was compelled to register at the police-station in his district. But now, when the retention and enforcement of this requirement would have been of inestimable value to the government, it was generally abolished. The writer, reaching Berlin a week after the revolution, went directly to the nearest police-station to report his arrival.
”You are no longer required to report to the police,” said the _Beamter_ in charge.
And thus the bars were thrown down for criminals and--what was worse--for the propagandists and agents of the Russian Soviet Republic.
_Die neue Freiheit_ (the new freedom) was interpreted in a manner justifying Goethe's famous dictum of a hundred years earlier that ”equality and freedom can be enjoyed only in the delirium of insanity”
(_Gleichheit und Freiheit konnen nur im Taumel des Wahnsinns genossen werden_).