The steadfast attitude of the soldiers was the more astonishing in view of the great number of deserters in Greater Berlin at this time. Their number has been variously estimated, but it is probable that it reached nearly sixty thousand. With an impudent shamelessness impossible to understand, even when one realizes what they had suffered, these self-confessed cowards and betrayers of honest men now had the effrontery to form a "Council of Deserters, Stragglers and Furloughed Soldiers," and to demand equal representation on all government bodies and in the Soviets. Liebknecht played the chief rôle in organizing these men, but Ledebour, already so radical that he was out of sympathy even with the reddest Independent Socialists, and certain other Independents and Spartacans assisted. This was too much for even the revolutionary and class-conscious soldiers under arms, and nearly a month later at least one Berlin regiment still retained enough martial pride to fire on a procession of these traitors.
In these deserters and stragglers, and in the thousands of criminals of every big city, including those liberated from jails and prisons by the revolution, Liebknecht and his lieutenants found tools admirably adapted to their ends. The Spartacans had already been indirectly recognized as a separate political party in an announcement made by the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council on November 11th, which, referring to the seizure of the Lokal-Anzeiger by the Spartacans and of the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung by the Independents, pointed out that "all the Socialist factions in Berlin now have their daily paper." The Spartacans now organized. Ledebour, an aged fanatic, temperamental, never able to agree with the tenets or members of any existing party, organized an "Association of Revolutionary Foremen," which was recruited from the factories and made up of violent opponents of democratic government. To all intents and purposes this association must be reckoned as a wing of the Spartacus group. It played a large part in the January and March uprisings against the government, and throughout strengthened the hands of the opponents of democracy and the advocates of soviet rule in Germany.
Despite all its initial extravagances, the bona fides of the Ebert-Haase government at this time cannot fairly be questioned. It honestly desired to restore order in Germany and to institute a democratic government. With the exception of Barth, the least able and least consequential member of the cabinet, all were agreed that a constituent assembly must be summoned. Haase and Dittmann, the two other Independent Socialist members, had not yet begun to coquet with the idea of soviet government, although, in the matter of a constituent assembly, they were already trying to hunt with the hounds and run with the hares by favoring its summoning, but demanding that the elections therefor be postponed until the people could be "enlightened in the Social-Democratic sense." This meant, of course, "in the Independent Social-Democratic sense," which, as we shall see, eventually degenerated into open advocacy of the domination of the proletariat.
To this government, facing multifold tasks, inexperienced in ruling, existing only on sufferance and at best a makeshift and compromise, the armistice of November 11th dealt a terrible moral and material blow. A wave of stupefied indignation and resentment followed the publication of its terms, and this feeling was increased by the general realization of Germany's helplessness. Hard terms had, indeed, been expected, but nothing like these. One of the chief factors that made bloodless revolution possible had been the reliance of the great mass of the German people on the declarations of leaders of enemy powers—particularly of the United States—that the war was being waged against the German governmental system, the Hohenzollerns and militarism, and not against the people themselves. There can be no doubt that these promises of fair treatment for a democratic Germany did incalculably much to paralyze opposition to the revolution.
In the conditions of the armistice the whole nation conceived itself to have been betrayed and deceived. Whether this feeling was justified is not the part of the historian to decide. It is enough that it existed. It was confirmed and strengthened by the fact that the almost unanimous opinion of neutral lands, including even those that had been the strongest sympathizers of the Allied cause, condemned the armistice terms unqualifiedly, both on ethical and material grounds. It is ancient human experience that popular disaffection first finds its scapegoat in the government, and history repeated itself here. The unreflecting masses forgot for the moment the government's powerlessness. It saw only the abandonment of rich German lands to the enemy, the continuance of the "hunger-blockade" and, worst of all, the retention by the enemy of the German prisoners. Of all the harsh provisions of the armistice, none other caused so much mental and moral anguish as the realization that, while enemy prisoners were to be sent back to their families, the Germans, many of whom had been in captivity since the first days of the war, must still remain in hostile prison-camps. The authority of the government that accepted these terms was thus seriously shaken at the very outset.
The government was as seriously affected materially as morally by the armistice. During the whole of the last year food and fuel conditions had been gravely affected by limited transportation facilities. Now, with an army of several millions to be brought home in a brief space of time, five thousand locomotives and 150,000 freight cars had to be delivered up to the enemy. This was more than a fifth of the entire rolling stock possessed by Germany at this time. Moreover, nearly half of all available locomotives and cars were badly in need of repairs, and a considerable percentage of these were in such condition that they could not be used at all. Nor was this all. Although nothing had been stipulated in the armistice conditions regarding the size or character of the engines to be surrendered, only the larger and more powerful ones were accepted. One month later it had been found necessary to transport 810 locomotives to the places agreed upon for their surrender, and of these only 206 had been accepted. Of 15,720 cars submitted in the same period, only 9,098 had been accepted. The result was a severe over-burdening of the German railways.
What this meant for Germany's economic life and for the people generally became apparent in many ways during the winter, and in none more striking than in a fuel shortage which brought much suffering to the inhabitants of the larger cities. The coalfields of the Ruhr district required twenty-five thousand cars daily to transport even their diminishing production, but the number available dropped below ten thousand. Only eight hundred cars were available to care for the production in Upper Silesia, and a minimum of three thousand was required. The effect on the transportation of foodstuffs to the cities cannot so definitely be estimated, but that it was serious is plain.
The armistice provided that the blockade should be maintained. In reality it was not only maintained, but extended. Some of the most fertile soil in Germany lies on the left bank of the Rhine, and cities along that river had depended on these districts for much of their food. With enemy occupation, these supplies were cut off. What this meant was terribly apparent in Düsseldorf after the occupation had been completed. Düsseldorf, with a population of nearly 400,000, had depended on the left bank of the Rhine for virtually all its dairy products. These were now cut off, and the city authorities found themselves able to secure a maximum of less than 7,000 quarts of milk daily for the inhabitants.
A further extension of the blockade came when German fishermen were forbidden to fish even in their territorial waters in the North Sea and the Baltic. The available supply of fish in Germany had already dropped, as has been described, to a point where it was possible to secure a ration only once in every three or four weeks. And now even this trifling supply was no longer available. Vast stores of food were abandoned, destroyed or sold to the inhabitants of the occupied districts when the armies began the evacuation of France and Belgium, and millions of soldiers, returning to find empty larders at home, further swelled the ranks of the discontented.
Only the old maxim that all is fair in war can explain or justify the great volume of misleading reports that were sent out regarding food conditions in Germany in the months following the armistice. Men who were able to spend a hundred marks daily for their food, or whose observations were limited to the most fertile agricultural districts of Germany, generalized carelessly and reported that there were no evidences of serious shortage anywhere, except perhaps, in one or two of the country's largest cities. Men who knew conditions thoroughly hesitated to report them because of the supposed exigencies of war and wartime policies, or, reporting them in despite thereof, saw themselves denounced as pro-German propagandists.