_Sunday Afternoon._--The Halle flying ground. While one of the few planes left is being patched up the officer is telling me of his difficulties. He daren't leave the men alone for an hour. The plane with the post for Weimar I travel with has to be represented as going to Magdeburg, or the men might stop its starting. He holds on because the planes are indispensable to the Government, but when he came back from the front, and the orders and badges were torn from his coat, "something broke in him." His family has always been military, but now it's over, and he is going to the Argentine. But my pilot is tougher stuff. A man of the middle class, pilot since 1912, fighting scout through the war, a friend of the great fliers and of Fokker, he had had good openings abroad. "But no," says he; "Germany's going down out of control, but if it crashes I crash with it."
So after careful scrutiny to see that nothing has been half sawn through, as it was a few days before, we climb in. The roar of the motor drowns the distant rattle of the machine-guns, and Halle disappears below into the dusk as we drive into the red glare of the setting sun.
Germany at this time was like a seething pot. Outbreaks such as that at Halle were only bubbles breaking out on the surface. At any moment one expected the whole heaving, simmering mass to boil over. But, wherever a centre of ebullition declared itself the Government quenched the upheaval with a douche of Frei-Corps.
Such a centre from the first days of revolution was Brunswick. Indeed, Brunswick had been such a centre of disturbance from the earliest days of German history. The chronicles of Brunswick show the workmen of that town always in the van not only of German but of European movements. They were indeed Bolsheviks as early as 1292; and it was largely owing to the improvement in the workmen's position that they forced on the German towns in the following century that the general risings of the proletariat, that led to civil war in England and France, were in Saxony comparatively bloodless.[A]
And, as soon as the revolution broke out in the North Sea Coast towns, Brunswick gave it its first welcome to the interior. Bodies of sailors, travelling up from the coast as the vanguard of revolution, had established it in Brunswick, the day after the first outbreak at Wilhelmshaven; and thereafter Brunswick threw itself wholeheartedly into a real revolutionary _régime_.