A similar address was made at a meeting of the revolutionaries in Hanover, where the speaker told his hearers that the salvation of Germany depended upon their loyal support of the revolution, which had placed all power in the hands of the people and fulfilled the conditions precedent entitling them to such a peace as the President had promised them.
At the request of the government Noske assumed the post of Governor of Kiel. Order was restored. The relations between the mutineers and their former officers were strikingly good. The spirit of the Majority Socialists prevailed. Not until the Berlin revolution had put the seal upon their work did the mutineers of Kiel realize that it was they who had started the revolution.
CHAPTER X.
The Revolution Reaches Berlin.
The first news of the Kiel revolt reached Berlin on November 5th, when the morning papers published a half-column article giving a fairly accurate story of the happenings of Sunday, November 3d. The report ended:
"By eight o'clock the street" (Karlstrasse, where the firing occurred) "was clear. Only a few pools of blood and numerous shattered windows in the nearby buildings gave evidence that there had been sad happenings here. The late evening and the night were quiet. Excited groups stood about the street corners until midnight, but they remained passive. Reinforced patrols passed through the city, which otherwise appeared as usual. All public places are open and the performances in the theaters were not interrupted."
The papers of the following day announced that "official reports concerning the further course of events in Kiel and other cities in North Germany had not been made public here up to noon. We are thus for the moment unable to give a report concerning them."
This was but half the truth. The capital was already filled with reports, and the government was by this time fully informed of what was going on. Rumors and travelers' tales passed from mouth to mouth, but even yet the movement was not considered directly revolutionary, nor, indeed, was it revolutionary, although it became so within the next twenty-four hours. The executive committee of the German Federation of Labor published a declaration regarding "the recent spreading of anonymous handbills summoning laborers to strikes and disorders for political ends." It was also reported by the press that Kurt Eisner, who had been released from prison by the October amnesty, had made a violent revolutionary speech at a meeting of the Independent Socialists in Munich. A further significant newspaper item complained of the distribution in Germany of vast quantities of revolutionary literature printed in Sweden and Denmark and smuggled across the Danish border.