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 role 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.