If we pause before a public building, a soldier or sailor immediately approaches and asks if we desire to enter. In suchwise we get glimpse of a number of the important public institutions, including the modern and rather magnificent Royal Library. In the Royal Opera House, despite the revolution, performances are announced for to-night of Verdi’s “Otello,” for to-morrow (Sunday) night of “Rigoletto.”
Some of the streets running off Unter den Linden bear marks of yesterday’s fighting; some of them are still big with agitation; groups and queues of gesticulating soldiers and civilians. We pass the Legations and through the Brandenburger Tor into the Tiergarten, and take leisurely view of the Reichstag, looking deserted and dejected, and as if all the glory of debate had departed from it for ever. Here is the Siegessäule and the Denkmal to Bismarck, Moltke, and the long lineage of German warriors. Here also is the Hindenburg statue, looking decidedly forlorn and rather foolish. Tim and I decide that it would hardly be expedient for us to drive in a couple of nails!
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg
Now approaches a great procession of men and women, silent, sad, slow-moving, sombre-hued save for the red banners which here and there droop into the ranks and show through the trees like gouts of blood. It is the Spartacusbundes Party, with Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at their head. They are doubtless come to mourn their dead of yesterday and to demand redress and revenge. The procession winds its way through the paths, and ultimately the speakers take up position beside the statue of one of the Margraves, where Liebknecht’s father agitated before him in less agitated times than these.
Liebknecht speaks now, fiercely and with arms outflung and disturbed as the leafless branches of the trees which form a background. There is a wild scream and the crowd commences to stampede. The motor-waggons of the Security Service of the Social Democratic Party are coming up, grim and grinning with machine-guns. A terrified crowd is a very terrible thing.
My last experience of its blind whirl and bewilderment was when the Germans shelled Béthune with big guns at long range on a market Monday of August, 1916. We looked like having trouble now. “Through force of habit they will doubtless take their sighting shots on us,” I said to Tim.
The soldiers have had orders, however, not to shoot unless they were attacked, and the crowd gradually regains reassurance. Standing on the outskirts of the throng, I bought an album of views of Berlin from a poor little girl, and immediately after a similar collection from an old woman equally poor and equally insistent.
My last recollection of Liebknecht is of a gesticulating volcanic figure, and of a livid face, with the wild eyes and the distorted mouth of a Greek tragic mask. He was killed a few weeks later, within a few hundred yards of where we heard him speak.
We have during the day made incursions to various cafés, the “Victoria,” and the one-time very cosmopolitan “Bauer.” In this last, at just an hour before train time we are seated, at question whether, our adventure having proved so successful so far, it be not financially possible to carry it into another day. We decide that if we go fasting during the morrow—a proceeding familiarity with which has rendered not too fearful—-we shall have purses sufficient to pay for a bed in the hotel, and our return fares to Beeskow.