"Sixty policemen? There aren't that number in all Lichtenberg. Two got shot defending the station, but after they surrendered to a quarter of their number we let them all go home. You can go and see any of them."
It is impossible not to believe these intelligent, even intellectual and eminently honest faces. So the sixty policemen follow the field-guns and the "ring of steel" into the limbo of "White" lies.
We pass a railway goods yard where plundered flour is being carried away in sacks.
"Where is that going?" we ask.
"To the bakers, and afterwards to be distributed gratis to the crowd."
We see later women with red crosses distributing loaves from a cart to women and children. We reach our destination, only to be warned by a woman just in time that it is now occupied by troops—a narrow escape that so shakes the nerve of our guide that he takes refuge in a dressing station improvised in a shop. Here are "neutral" doctors and nurses, very angry at the bombardment of crowded tenement houses and the reckless shooting by the young volunteers. They run great risks, as robbers have so often misused the Red Cross that it is now no protection against the Government troops. Here are many wounded, mostly women and children, and but a few fighters. The latter all indignantly deny having shot prisoners, though they know the other side are doing it. And then at last to the evasive Headquarters, where the leaders tell us of what they hope to achieve by this desperate resistance of a few hundred men armed with rifles and bombs against as many thousands armed with all the machinery of modern war.
"Noske," they say, "is only a puppet in the hands of Majors Gilsa and Hammerstein, and they are agents of the Eden Hotel, the headquarters of the Cavalry Guard and the centre of reaction. The old story again of Bethmann-Hollweg, Ludendorff, and the General Staff, militarism and monarchism is what all this bombardment means, for they want to convince the Entente that they must have a large standing Army. They have just raised the pay and doubled the rations of these young mercenaries. Why don't the Entente abolish them and insist on a Swiss Militia here?
"If this White Guard goes on, we shall organise a Red Guard, and we shall win. But that will mean Bolshevism. We are not Bolsheviks, but Socialists to-day. We have offered to keep order in Berlin and here, with a militia representing all parties, but they go on bombarding. It is the old Prussian terrorism again. They have learnt nothing from the war."
And, so, in the twilight, back the way we came, wondering at the working of moral laws that have now subjected Berlin to a self-inflicted punishment of bombardments and bombings worse than any of those it inflicted on other cities.
Firing heavy artillery at crowded tenement houses, even with reduced charges and plentiful blank, means a butcher's bill of several thousands, mostly women and children, and damage to property of several millions.