She had watched her little brother and her old grandmother die
of malnutrition. Her sister was "officially pregnant" and under
surveillance lest she kill herself. No more perfect machine was at the
disposal of Gisela Doering. Whether Germany were delivered or razed to
the earth was all one to her, but she was more than willing, as a
Bavarian with a traditional hatred of Prussia, to play her part in the
downfall of a race that presumed to call itself German.
2
Gisela stepped into the machine and it glided downward and skimmed
lightly over the great length of the Maximilianstrasse.
The compact ranks, which had listened unmoved to the roar of dynamite
and the detonations of bursting shells, raised their faces at the
humming of the machine and broke into harsh abrupt cheering. Then they
leaned their rifles against their powerful bodies and unfurled their
flags and waved them in the faces of the half paralyzed people in the
windows. It was a white flag with a curious device sketched in crimson:
a hen in successive stages of evolution. The final phase was an eagle.
The body was modeled after the Prussian emblem of might, but the face,
grim, leering, vengeful, pitiless, was unmistakably that of a woman.
However humor may be lacking in the rest of that grandiose Empire it was
grafted into the Bavarians by Satan himself.
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