A growl was running through the twilight.... _Es lebe das Rate Republik!_ A fierce whisper of voices. Workingmen looking to their guns, massing about the government buildings. A new war minister in the uniform of a marine, speaking from a balcony. Workingmen with guns, listening. Women drifting back to the hovels and stinking bundles of houses. In the cafés, satraps and burghers eating amid a suppressed clamor of whispers, plans. The foolishness was almost over. The armies of General Hoffmann were coming ... Twenty kilometers out.... Arrive at night. The corps students themselves would saber the swine out of the city.... Night. Darkened streets. Tattered patrols hurrying through mysteriously emptied highways, shouting, "Indoors! Inside, everybody!" Suddenly from a distance the bay of artillery. Workingmen with guns were storming the cannon of the artillery regiment outside the city. A haphazard cross-fire of rifles began to spit from darkened windows ... an upper world showing its teeth behind parlor barricades. In the shadows of the massive government buildings an army was forming. No ranks, no officers. Easy to drift through the sunny streets singing the _Marseillaise_ and the International ... to mooch along through the forbidden avenues dreaming in the daylight of a new world ... with red flags proclaiming the new masters of earth. Hundred thousands, then. But now, how many? Too dark to see, to count. An army, perhaps. Perhaps a handful.... Feverish salutes in the shadows.... "_Gruss Gott, genosse!_" Was it alive? Did the revolution live? What was happening in the empty streets? Who was shooting? And the armies of Hoffmann? _Gruss Gott, genosse._ Under Rupprecht the armies had lain four years in the trenches. Great armies, swinging along like a single man, that had once battered their way almost into Paris against the English, against the French. "_Gruss Gott, genosse._ _Hoffmann kommt_ ... _Ja wohl, Gruss Gott!_" Now twenty kilometers away and coming down the highroad against Munich--against the drifting little clusters of lonely men whispering in the shadows--the great armies of the Kaiser, an iron monster clicking down the road toward Munich. Would there be artillery to meet them? _Gruss Gott, genosse, wer shusst dort?_ No, they had only guns, old guns that might not shoot. Old knives at their belts.... Darkness and rifle-spattered silences. Where was the revolution? The shadows whispered, "_Gruss Gott...._" The shadows began to stir. A voice was talking in the night. High up from a window. Egelhofer, the communist. No, Levine. Who? A light in the window.... Egelhofer, thin-faced, tall, black-haired. Egelhofer, the new war minister. 'Shh! what was he saying?... "_Vorwaerts, der Banhoff...._"