The handsomest and most intelligent man I've met in Germany was a Spartacist, a film actor by profession. The last time I saw him--with a rifle slung over his shoulder and stick bombs in his belt--he explained what he was fighting for. German militarism, he said, had revived, encouraged by the Entente attitude; the present Government was as much in the hands of reactionary officers as any during the war. The war had crippled militarism, but only real revolution, the council system, could kill it. He was glad he had escaped the war, so as to have a life to offer to the right side. The next day he was taken and shot. Now, I do not intend to convey that the Germany of to-day is a fighting country. It is quite the reverse. But a section of idealists at each extreme has decided that they are bound to die for their ideals as Spartans or Spartacists. That they will die in vain is inevitable. If only because there is no Sparta and no Spartacus. There is no German land where such an ideal as that of the reactionary "Spartans" can now be realised, not even in rural Prussia; and there is no Spartacus to command and control the "Spartakists" of Germany. But there is another reason also--that there are too few young Germans left. On a Sunday morning I went to the Academy of Singing to hear old German music. One number on the programme, "A Scottish Ballad of a Lost Battle," proved to be a translation of Lady Lindsay's "Lament After Flodden." Sung to a plaintive eighteenth century air, with the thin far-away accompaniment of lute and spinet, it was like an echo from the lost battles and lost beauty of all time. With bowed heads and tear-filled eyes, men and women sat silent long after the last heartrending refrain had died away. In the afternoon I went out to the "Greenwood" of Berlin, a district of pine woods, hills, and lakes, where the young people of Berlin used to flock for picnics and water-parties. The Berliners are noisy in their enjoyments, and on Sunday afternoons before the war the woods of the Havelland would ring with shouting and singing and laughter, with feasting and flirting, as though Pan himself held festival. To-day a few girls were there wandering sadly through the silent woods, pale ghosts of dead delights, and there was no sound but the sighing of the pines-- "Sair moaning in ilka green loaning, The flowers o' the forest are a' wede awa'." CHAPTER III THE COUNCIL REPUBLICS The first result of the failure of German Liberalism and of the Weimar Assembly was that revolution and reaction came into active collision with each other in the provincial capitals.