The engineer and
fireman avowed themselves "friends of the revolution," but they
performed their duties with two armed women in the cab and fifty more in
the car behind the engine.
The cities through which Gisela passed, as well as the small towns and
wayside villages, presented a uniform appearance: smoking ruins in the
outlying sections which had been devoted to the war factories, and
streets deserted save for women sentries. One or two of the smaller
towns had burned, owing to lack of fire brigades. The food trains
destined for the front, which had been moved out of danger before the
general destruction, were being systematically unloaded, and a portion
of the contents doled out to thousands of emaciated men, women, and
children. The rest would be as methodically returned to the warehouses.
Gisela arrived in Berlin half an hour before the Kaiser.
The city was as dark as interstellar space and she would have been
forced to spend the night in the Anhalt Bahnhof if Mariette had not met
her. They walked from the station, keeping close to the walls of the
silent houses and entering Unter den Linden from the Friedrichstrasse.
There was not a sound but the high whirr of airplanes keeping guard over
a city that seemed stifled in the embrace of death, its life current
switched off by the proudest achievement of its pestilent laboratories.
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