Wednesday Morning.—A back room in a beerhouse of a back street in Magdeburg. I am being booked through to Brunswick on the underground. The "tickets" are being made out among the slops and my guide is getting his instructions. For all tours on the underground are personally conducted.
Wednesday Evening.—A beerhouse in a back street of Brunswick. We have run the blockade successfully, and are waiting to be sent for by the revolutionary government. We reached Brunswick soon after dark, having travelled hard all day. First, leaving Magdeburg by train and going north, we got out at a wayside station where a carriage and pair was waiting. This drove us at a great pace over the rolling uplands to the outskirts of a village. Whom it belonged to I didn't hear, but it had the best pair of horses I saw in Germany. Next came a sharp run across country to a halt on a local steam tramway, which took us down to a junction where we got a train. The train had to be left unostentatiously en route. Fortunately, German trains don't go very fast nowadays; but standing on the end platform and waiting to jump while my Communist guide turned somersaults on the embankment, I should have preferred even my lop-winged Halle aeroplane to the Brunswick "underground." Another walk to a local station from which a train ran backwards and forwards to Brunswick. As we arrived it came up loaded with refugees who were retiring to country farms to escape the imminent invasion of the Prussian troops.
Wednesday Midnight.—Government House Brunswick.—The town is plunged in darkness but the Government building is all ablaze with lights and a-bustle with figures hurrying to and fro past the lighted windows. Inside there is a curious nightmare feeling of hampered haste and of imminent menace. Round a long table in an upper room sits a sort of council of war distractedly discussing whether Brunswick shall resist the Prussian troops that are due to arrive at dawn. In a sort of drawing-room adjoining, other members of the Independent Government sit about listlessly in fauteuils brought over from the palace, or pace restlessly about the room. A Communist is trying to spur the Council on to fight, assuring them that the soldiers and sailors are ready to face the tanks and trench mortars—which is true, and that the workmen will support them—which is not. A sailor suddenly appears in the Council room excitedly waving an object in his hand which it seems is a bomb that has just been found hidden in the cellars—but whether intended to blow up the revolutionaries or to be subsequently found by the reactionaries and exploited as an "atrocity" is not clear. Anyway, no one pays any attention to him, and annoyed at this he proceeds to take it to pieces to prove it's a real bomb. I persuade him to go away and drown it.
Soon after the Council decide not to fight. This definite decision wakes us all up from the nightmare. Telephone orders are at once sent out to the outposts, everyone hurries off on some mission, and as we go home the dark alleys are full of dim hastening groups hauling heavy objects—machine-guns and rifles to be thrown into the river or buried.
Thursday Morning.—A hotel window looking on the main square. I am taking down the history of revolutionary Brunswick from the dictation of one of the leading revolutionaries, while below the Prussian troops are marching in. The organisation of the Independent Government has made good in its last crisis and not a shot has been fired, to the openly expressed disappointment of the invaders. The hotel, awkwardly enough, has been commandeered as an auxiliary headquarters, and I have to escort my informant out past groups of officers and see him safely away into the "underground railway." He is one of the few wanted men who get clean away. Merges and others escaping in aeroplanes and in cars are with few exceptions caught. Merges himself, subsequently, is released by friendly jailers.
The burghers in the streets exult at their deliverance and some of the girls throw flowers to the troops. A young volunteer in an armoured car catches a bunch gracefully and I recognise him as a scion of the princely house of Reuss. At the back of the crowd stalwart men in ill-fitting civilian clothes glower gloomily. A girl at an attic window in a side street cries shrill abuse at the "steel helmets" and one boy in joke points his rifle at her. It goes off, the bullet stars the plaster and the boy looks as terrified as the girl. It is the only shot fired at the fall of the Free Republic of Brunswick.
Thursday Evening.—The General has deposed the Government of Independents and set up another of Majoritarians, has arrested all the leaders he can find and has proclaimed the severest form of martial law. Many burghers are already regretting the revolutionary régime. The streets are almost deserted for it is already dusk and no one may be out of doors after sundown. In the shadows under the overhanging gables of the mediæval market-place gleams the steel helm of a Prussian picket. Other cloaked and helmed figures gather round a fire down a side street. Brunswick is back in the Middle Ages and these might be Tilly's men. A fat burgher creeps cautiously past the hotel. Every evening for years he has trotted to the cosy beer cellar round the corner. Shall these bedamned Prussians keep a free Brunswicker from his beer. After several false starts he marches boldly out across the market. Bang goes a blank cartridge from the Prussian sentry and the burgher bolts back into obscurity. The liberty of Brunswick is no more.
The establishment of a Räte Republik at Munich got more attention than the Brunswick attempt but was really less interesting because less indigenous. The relative importance of the two was more accurately assessed at Berlin. Berlin has always had a difficulty in taking Munich politics seriously. It has had to recognise its superiority in Art and Literature, but compensates itself in matters political by an amused arrogance not unlike the attitude of London to Dublin. But Munich is not Bavaria. If it were, the Prussians and Wurtembergers would never have ventured to interfere; for the Bavarian is far too fierce a fighter and too jealous of his freedom for all the rest of Germany to coerce him as a nation. However, it soon became evident that Munich Communism represented only a section of the Munich workmen and was resented by Bavaria as a whole, with the exception of the proletariat in the large industrial towns. Even so, the Berlin Government acted cautiously. It was indeed in a difficult position; for the policy that Scheidemann's socialism stood for was one of compromise with political clericalism and provincial particularism. His minister, Preuss, then framing the constitution, had been reluctantly compelled to reject the conception of the more radical reformers who had hoped to found a wholly uniform and wholly united centralised German Socialist State. The Government had been forced to use the political jealousies of the German States and the clerical prejudices of the Centrum as weapons against the social revolution. It would not be too much to say of this period of German politics that only the revolutionary adherents of the Council movement were Germans; while the upper and middle classes had again become Prussians, Saxons or Bavarians. And now it had become necessary to coerce the capital of Bavaria, the centre of Roman Catholicism and the most sensitive and important of the minor kingdoms. And this, too, at the very time when everything was being done to induce German-Austria, Bavaria's neighbour, to accept the same sort of position in the Realm as that held by Bavaria. It was a most awkward predicament and the German Government showed less than its usual tactlessness in dealing with it. It arranged with the Bavarian bourgeois Government, when matters came to a crisis at Munich, that it should take refuge at Bamberg, where it could be protected by the Government's troops centred at Weimar. Then it arranged with Würtemberg and Baden to supply troops to restore this Bamberg ancien régime, supporting them with Saxons and, at first, keeping the Prussian corps in the background. Operations were then begun, first against the Franconian towns of North Bavaria, where Bavarian sentiment was weak. Any attempt against Munich was delayed until a raging Press propaganda against the rule of the Munich Bolshevists in the Wittelsbach Palais, and the crushing of the movement everywhere else, had excited the class feeling of the propertied farmers and burghers and had exorcised temporarily Bavarian jealousy of Prussia. All this, however, would not have ensured Berlin success, but for the inherent weakness of the Munich revolutionaries. The movement for Council Government and general Communism had lost all chance of success when it was forced either by the policy of its enemies or by the jealousies of its supporters into the hands of men like the Russian extremists, Leviné and Levien.
I saw a good deal of both men during my stay in Munich a few days before their fall, and both were very frank as to the hopelessness of their position. They were very different. Leviné was a black Jew of a common and rather criminal type, with a bad record, but great ability of a sort. Levien was a cosmopolitan and a Bohemian—in appearance and abilities a dissolute and demoralised version—a Bohemian and Bolshevist caricature—of the Treasury official who now represents us and rules Germany on the Reparation Commission.
A curious picture it was this Communist dictatorship in the Wittelsbach palace. Outside—crowds of workmen waiting for the posting of the bulletins in which decrees were proclaimed. Inside—a great coming and going of seedy-looking revolutionaries—a frantic clattering of typewriters pounded by unkempt girls—hurried conclaves in corners—remains of meals on marble tables—the dubious atmosphere of a Quartier Latin garret—the high pressure of a Bolshevist headquarters and the melancholy madness of a Wittelsbach pavilion.