The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution

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Introduction

Hecker, Struve, Blenker, Zitz und Blum,
Bringt die deutschen Fürsten um!

This refrain [Hecker, Struve, Blenker, Zitz and Blum, slay the German princes!– Ed.] which on every highway and in every tavern from the Palatinate to the Swiss frontier rang out on the lips of the South German "people's militia" to the well-known tune of "Surrounded by the Sea", a mixture of chorale and barrel-organ–this refrain sums up the whole character of the "magnificent uprising for the Imperial Constitution". Here you have in two lines their great men, their ultimate aims, their admirable staunchness, their noble hatred for the "tyrants" and at the same time their entire insight into the social and political situation.

Amidst all the movements and convulsions in Germany which followed in the wake of the February Revolution and its subsequent development, the campaign for the Imperial Constitution stands out owing to its classically German character. Its occasion, its appearance, the way it conducted itself, its whole course, were through and through German. In the same way as the June days of 1848 mark the degree of the social and political development of France, so the campaign for the Imperial Constitution marks the degree of the social and political development of Germany, and especially of South Germany.

The soul of the whole movement was the class of the petty bourgeoisie, usually known as the burghers, and it is precisely in Germany, and especially in South Germany, that this class is in preponderance. It was the petty bourgeoisie which, in the "March Clubs", the democratic constitutional clubs, the patriotic clubs, the multitude of so-called democratic press, swore to the Imperial Constitution its Grutli oaths, as widespread as they were innocuous, and carried on its fight against the "refractory" princes of which the only immediate result was admittedly the elevating consciousness of having fulfilled one's civic duty. It was the petty bourgeoisie, represented by the resolute and so-called extreme Left of the Frankfurt Assembly, i.e. in particular by the Stuttgart Parliament and the "Imperial Regency", which furnished the entire movement with its official leadership; lastly, the petty bourgeoisie was dominant in the local committees of the provincial diets, committees of public safety, provisional governments and constituent assemblies which in Saxony, on the Rhine and in South Germany won greater or lesser credit in the cause of the Imperial Constitution.

It is most unlikely that the petty bourgeoisie, if left to its own devices, would have gone outside the legal framework of lawful, peaceful and virtuous struggle and taken up the musket and the paving-stone in place of the so-called weapons of the spirit. The history of all political movements since 1830 in Germany, as in France and England, shows that this class is invariably full of bluster and loud protestations, at times even extreme as far as talking goes, as long as it perceives no danger; faint-hearted, cautious and calculating as soon as the slightest danger approaches; aghast, alarmed and wavering as soon as the movement it provoked is seized upon and taken up seriously by other classes; treacherous to the whole movement for the sake of its petty-bourgeois existence as soon as there is any question of a struggle with weapons in hand – and in the end, as a result of its indecisiveness, more often than not cheated and ill-treated as soon as the reactionary side has achieved victory.

Standing everywhere behind the petty bourgeoisie, however, are other classes who take up the movement provoked by it and in its interest, give it a more defined and energetic character and wherever possible seek to take it over: the proletariat and a large part of the peasantry, to whom moreover the more advanced section of the petty bourgeoisie usually attaches itself for a while.

These classes, headed by the proletariat of the larger towns, took the loudly protested assurances in favour of the Imperial Constitution more seriously than was to the liking of the petty-bourgeois agitators. If the petty bourgeois were prepared, as they swore at every moment, to stake "property and life" [In the German original a paraphrase of "mit Gut und Blut fur des Reichsgrundgesetz einzustehen" in the proclamation issued by the Bavarian petty-bourgeois deputies in reply to the Bavarian King's refusal to recognise the Imperial Constitution; the proclamation was published in the Kolnische Zeitung No. 109, May 8, 1849.–Ed.] for the Imperial Constitution, the workers, and in many districts the peasants too, were ready to do the same, but under the condition, admittedly unspoken but perfectly understood by all parties, that after victory the petty bourgeoisie would have to defend this same Imperial Constitution against these same workers and peasants. These classes drove the petty bourgeoisie to an open break with the existing state power. If they could not prevent their allies, with their shopkeepers mentality, from betraying them even while the battle was still going on, they at least had the satisfaction of seeing this treachery punished after the victory of the counter-revolution by the counter-revolutionaries themselves.

On the other hand at the beginning of the movement, the more resolute section of the bigger and middle bourgeoisie likewise attached itself to the petty bourgeoisie, just as we find in all earlier petty-bourgeois movements in England and France. The bourgeoisie never rules in its entirety; apart from the feudal castes which have still retained some degree of the political power, even the big bourgeoisie itself splits, as soon as it has vanquished feudalism, into a governing and an opposing party usually represented by the banks on the one hand and the manufacturers on the other. The opposing, progressive section of the big and middle bourgeoisie then has, against the ruling section, common interests with the petty bourgeoisie and unites with it for a joint struggle. In Germany, where the armed counter-revolution has restored the almost exclusive rule of the army, the bureaucracy and the feudal nobility and where the bourgeoisie, in spite of the continued existence of constitutional forms, only plays a very subordinate and modest role, there are many more motives for this alliance. For all that, however, the German bourgeoisie is also infinitely more irresolute than its English and French counterparts and as soon as there is the slightest chance of a return to anarchy, i.e. of the real, decisive struggle, it retreats from the scene in fear and trembling. So also this time.

Incidentally, the moment was not at all unfavourable for battle. In France elections were at hand; whether they gave the majority to the monarchists or the reds, they were bound to oust the centre parties of the Constituent Assembly, strengthen the extreme parties and bring about through a popular movement a speedy resolution of the intensified parliamentary struggle: in a word, they were bound to bring about a "journee". [An "historic day".–Ed] In Italy fighting was going on under the walls of Rome, and the Roman Republic was holding out against the French army of invasion. In Hungary the Magyars were pushing on irresistibly; the imperial troops had been chased over the Waag and the Leitha; in Vienna, where every day people imagined they could hear the roar of cannon, the Hungarian revolutionary army was expected at any moment; in Galicia the arrival of Dembinski with a Polish-Magyar army was imminent and the Russian intervention, far from becoming dangerous to the Magyars, seemed much more likely to transform the Hungarian struggle into a European one. Finally, Germany was in a state of extreme ferment; the advances of the counter-revolution, the growing insolence of the soldiery, the bureaucracy and the nobility, the continually renewed betrayals by the old liberals in the ministries and the rapid succession of broken promises on the part of the princes precipitated into the arms of the active party whole sections of former supporters of order.

In these circumstances the struggle broke out which we are about to describe in the following passages.

The incompleteness and confusion that still prevails in the material, the total unreliability of almost all the oral information that can be collected and the purely personal designs that underlie every piece of writing so far published about this struggle make it impossible to give a critical picture of the whole course of events. In these circumstances we have no choice but to restrict ourselves purely to recounting what we ourselves have seen and heard. Fortunately this is quite enough to allow the character of the whole campaign to emerge; and if, besides the movement in Saxony, we also lack personal observation of Mieroslawski's campaign on the Neckar, perhaps the Neue Rheinische Zeitung will soon find an opportunity of giving us the necessary information at least as regards the latter.

Many of the participants in the campaign for the Imperial Constitution are still in prison. Some have managed to return home, others, still abroad, are daily awaiting such an opportunity – and among them are by no means the worst. The reader will understand the consideration we owe our comrades-in-arms and find it natural if we remain silent about certain things; and many a one who is now safely back home will not take it amiss if we also do not wish to compromise him by narrating events in which he displayed truly magnificent courage.

I. Rhenish Prussia

It will he remembered how the armed uprising for the Imperial Constitution first broke out in Dresden at the beginning of May. It is well known how the Dresden barricade-fighters, supported by the rural population and betrayed by the Leipzig philistines, were defeated by superior forces after six days' fighting. They at no time had more than 2,500 combatants with a motley collection of weapons and for their whole artillery two or three small mortars. The royal troops consisted, apart from the Saxon battalions, of two regiments of Prussians. They had cavalry, artillery, riflemen and a battalion equipped with needle-guns [Dreyse Needle-gun, first breach loading bolt-action rifle, introduced 1848]. The royal troops appear to have conducted themselves in an even more cowardly way in Dresden than elsewhere; at the same time, however, it is clear that the men of Dresden fought more courageously against these superior forces than was probably the case elsewhere in the campaign for the Imperial Constitution. It must be added, however, that street-fighting is something quite different from an engagement in the field.

Berlin, disarmed and in a state of siege, remained quiet. Not once was the railway torn up to hold up the Prussian reinforcements at Berlin. Breslau [The Polish name is Wroclaw.–Ed.] attempted a feeble barricade-fight for which the government had long been prepared, and as a result the city only ended up the more certainly under the dictatorship of the sabre. The rest of North Germany, having no revolutionary centres, was paralysed. Only Rhenish Prussia and South Germany could still be reckoned on, and in South Germany the Palatinate already started to move just at that moment.

Since 1815 Rhenish Prussia has been considered one of the most progressive provinces in Germany, and rightly so. It combines two advantages which are not to be found in combination in any other part of Germany.

Rhenish Prussia shares with Luxembourg, Rhenish Hesse and the Palatinate the advantage of having experienced since 1795 the French Revolution and the social, administrative and legislative consolidation of its results under Napoleon. When the revolutionary party in Paris succumbed, the armies carried the revolution across the frontiers. Before these so recently liberated sons of peasants not only the armies of the Holy Roman Empire but also the feudal rule of the nobility and the priests fell to pieces. For two generations the left bank of the Rhine has no longer known feudalism; the nobleman has been deprived of his privileges and the landed property has passed from his hands and those of the church into the hands of the peasants; the land has been divided up and the peasant is a free landed proprietor as in France. In the towns, the guilds and the patriarchal rule of the patricians disappeared ten years earlier than anywhere else in Germany in the face of free competition, and the Napoleonic Code finally sanctioned the whole changed situation by summing up all the revolutionary institutions.

Secondly, however, Rhenish Prussia possesses – and herein lies its main advantage over the rest of the states on the left bank of the Rhine – the most developed and diversified industry in the whole of Germany. In the three administrative districts of Aachen, Cologne and Dusseldorf, almost all branches of industry are represented: cotton, wool and silk industries of all kinds, together with those branches dependent upon them such as bleaching, textile printing and dyeing, iron-founding and engineering, are to be found concentrated here, alongside mining, armaments manufacture and other metal industries, within an area of a few square miles and employ a population of a density unheard of in Germany. Directly adjoining the Rhine Province is the iron and coal district of the Mark which provides it with a part of its raw materials and from the industrial point of view belongs to it. The best waterway in Germany, the proximity of the sea and the mineral wealth of the region favour industry, which has also built numerous railways and is even now daily further integrating its railway network. There is a mutual interaction between this industry and an import and export trade, for Germany very extensive, with all parts of the world, a considerable direct traffic with all the great trading centres of the world market and a commensurate degree of speculation in raw materials and railway shares. To sum up, the level of industrial and commercial development in the Rhine Province is for Germany unique, even if in world terms it is fairly insignificant.

The consequence of this industry – which also burgeoned under the revolutionary rule of the French – and the trade connected with it is the creation in Rhenish Prussia of a mighty industrial and commercial big bourgeoisie and, in opposition to it, of a large industrial proletariat, two classes which in the rest of Germany only exist in isolated areas and in embryonic form but which almost exclusively dominate the distinct political development of the Rhine Province.

Over the rest of the German states revolutionised by the French Rhenish Prussia has the advantage of industry and over the rest of the German industrial areas (Saxony and Silesia) the advantage of the French Revolution. It is the only part of Germany whose social development has almost reached the level of modern bourgeois society: developed industry, extensive trade, accumulation of capital and free ownership of land; the predominance in the towns of a strong bourgeoisie and a numerous proletariat and in the countryside of a multitude of debt-ridden allotment peasants; rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat by means of the wages system, over the peasantry by means of the mortgage and over the petty bourgeoisie by means of competition, and finally the sanctioning of bourgeois rule through the courts of trade, the factory courts, the bourgeois jury and the entire body of material legislation.

Is it easier now to understand the Rhinelander's hatred for everything that is Prussian? Along with the Rhine Province Prussia incorporated the French Revolution into its states and treated the Rhinelanders not only as a subjugated and alien people but even as vanquished rebels. Far from developing the Rhenish legislation in the spirit of the ever growing modern bourgeois society, Prussia intended saddling the Rhinelanders with the pedantic, feudal, philistine hotchpotch of Prussian Law, which was barely suitable any longer even for Farther Pomerania.

The revolutionary change after February 1848 clearly showed the exceptional position of the Rhine Province. It provided not only the Prussian but the whole of the German bourgeoisie with its classical representatives, Camphausen and Hansemann, and provided the German proletariat with the sole organ in which it was championed not only in terms of fine words or good will, but according to its true interests: the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. How is it, then, that Rhenish Prussia for all that took so little part in Germany's revolutionary movements?

It must not be forgotten that the 1830 movement in favour of a hollow pettifogger's constitutionalism could not hope to interest Germany's Rhenish bourgeoisie, who were busily engaged in much more real, industrial enterprises; that, whereas people in the petty German states were still dreaming of a German Empire, in Rhenish Prussia the proletariat was already beginning to come out openly against the bourgeoisie; that from 1840 to 1847, at the time of the bourgeois, truly constitutional movement, the Rhenish bourgeoisie stood in the forefront and decisively tipped the balance in Berlin in March 1848. The reason, however, why Rhenish Prussia could never achieve anything in an open insurrection or even bring about a general insurrection of the whole province is best explained by a straightforward account of the campaign for the Imperial Constitution in the Rhineland.

The struggle had just broken out in Dresden; it might break out at any moment in the Palatinate. In Baden, in Wurttemberg and in Franconia mass rallies were launched and people barely concealed their determination to settle the question by force of arms. In the whole of South Germany the troops were wavering. Prussia was no less roused. The proletariat was only waiting for an opportunity of revenging itself for having been tricked of the gains it believed it had won for itself in March 1848. Everywhere the petty bourgeois were busy welding together all the discontented elements into a great Imperial Constitution party whose leadership they hoped to secure for themselves. Their sworn promises to stand or fall with the Frankfurt Assembly and stake property and life for the Imperial Constitution filled all the newspapers and rang out in every club-room and every beer-house.

It was at this point that the Prussian Government opened hostilities by calling up a large part of the army reserve, particularly in Westphalia and on the Rhine. To order a call-up during a period of peace was illegal and not only the petty bourgeoisie but also the bigger bourgeoisie rose up against it.

The Cologne municipal council proclaimed a congress of deputies of the Rhenish municipal councils. The government banned it; conventions were disregarded and the congress held in spite of the ban. The municipal councils, representing the big and middle bourgeoisie, declared their recognition of the Imperial Constitution, demanded its acceptance by the Prussian Government and the dismissal of the ministry as well as the repeal of the order calling up the army reserve, and threatened unambiguously enough that the Rhine Provinces would secede from Prussia if these demands were not met.

"Since the Prussian Government has dissolved the Second Chamber following on the latter's pronouncement in favour of unconditional acceptance of the German Constitution of March 28 of this year and has thereby deprived the people of its representation and voice in the present critical moment, the undersigned delegates of the towns and municipalities of the Rhine Province have assembled to discuss the need of the fatherland.

"The meeting, chaired by Councillors Zell of Trier and Werner of Coblenz and assisted by the clerks of the minutes, Councillors Boecker of Cologne and Bloem II of Dusseldorf,

has resolved as follows:

"1. This meeting declares that it recognises the Constitution of the German Empire, as promulgated by the Reich Assembly on March 28 of this year, as a definitive law and that in the conflict brought about by the Prussian Government it stands on the side of the German Reich Assembly.

"2. The meeting calls upon the entire people of the Rhineland, and in particular all men capable of bearing arms, to make collective declarations in smaller or larger gatherings of its commitment and steadfast intent to uphold the German Imperial Constitution and comply with the ordinances of the Imperial Constitution.

"3. The meeting calls on the German Reich Assembly henceforth and with the utmost dispatch to make greater efforts to give to the resistance of the people in the separate German states and in particular in the Rhine Province that unity and strength which alone is capable of thwarting the well-organised counter-revolution.

"4. It calls on the imperial authorities to take steps as soon as possible to tender to the imperial troops an oath of loyalty to the Constitution and to decree a concentration of these troops.

"5. The undersigned pledge themselves to secure recognition of the Imperial Constitution by all means at their disposal in the area of their municipalities.

"6. The meeting considers the dismissal of the Brandenburg-Manteuffel Ministry and the summoning of the Chambers, without change in the existing system of voting, to be absolutely necessary.

"7. In particular it considers the recent partial call-up of the army reserve to be an unnecessary measure which highly endangers the internal peace, and experts its immediate repeal.

"8. Lastly the undersigned express their conviction that if the content of this declaration is disregarded the fatherland is threatened by the greatest dangers which could even jeopardise the continued existence of Prussia as at present constituted. "Resolved on May 8, 1849, at Cologne."

(Signatures follow.)[Published in the Kolnische Zeitung No. 110, May 9, 1849, second edition.– Ed]

We would only add that the same Herr Zell who presided over this meeting went a few weeks later as imperial commissioner of the Frankfurt imperial ministry to Baden, not only for the purpose of appeasement, but also to plot with the local reactionaries those counter-revolultionary coups which later broke out in Mannheim and Karlsruhe. It is at least probable that at the same time he served imperial General Peucker as a military spy.

We insist on firmly establishing this fact. The big bourgeoisie, the flower of the pre-March liberalism of the Rhineland, sought from the very beginning to place themselves at the head of the movement for the Imperial Constitution in Rhenish Prussia. Their speeches, their resolutions, their whole demeanour demonstrated their solidarity for the subsequent events. There were plenty of people who took the words of the municipal councillors seriously, especially the threat that the Rhine Province would secede. If the big bourgeoisie went along with the movement, then the cause was as good as won from the beginning; it would mean that every class of the population was taking part, and that one could afford to take a risk. The petty bourgeois calculated along these lines and hastened to strike a heroic pose, It goes without saying that his supposed associe the big bourgeois, did not let this in any way deter him from betraying the petty bourgeois at the first opportunity and afterwards, when the whole affair had come to a truly miserable end, from ridiculing him for his stupidity to boot.

In the meantime the excitement continually mounted; the news from all areas of Germany sounded extremely warlike. At last steps were to be taken to fit out the army reserve. The battalions met and declared categorically that they would not let themselves be fitted out. The majors, in the absence of sufficient military support, could do nothing and were happy if they escaped without threats or actual attacks. They dismissed their men and set a new date for fitting-out.

The government, which could easily have given the officers of the army reserve the necessary backing, was purposely allowing things to go so far. It now immediately used force.

The refractory army reserve units came in particular from the industrial region of Berg and the Mark. Elberfeld and Iserlohn, Solingen and the Ennepe valley were the centres of resistance. Troops were ordered at once to the first two towns.

A battalion of the 16th Regiment, a squadron of lancers and two pieces of artillery moved to Elberfeld. The town was in a state of great confusion. The army reserve had found on mature reflection that they were after all playing a risky game. Many peasants and workers were politically apathetic and had merely been unwilling to absent themselves from their homes for an indefinite period to comply with some chance whim of the government. The consequences of insubordination weighed heavily upon them: species facti, martial law, confinement in irons and perhaps even the firing-squad! Suffice it to say, the number of army reserve men up in arms (they had their weapons) dwindled and dwindled, and in the end there were only about forty left. They had set up their headquarters in an inn outside the town and were awaiting the Prussians there. Around the town hall stood the civic militia and two citizens' rifle corps, vacillating and negotiating with the army reserve but at all events determined to protect their property. The people were thronging the streets: petty bourgeois who had sworn loyalty to the Imperial Constitution in the political club and proletarians of all levels, from the resolute, revolutionary worker to the gin-swilling drayman. Nobody knew what to do or what would happen.

The town council wanted to negotiate with the troops. The commander rejected all overtures and marched into the town. The troops paraded through the streets and drew up in front of the town hall, opposite the civic militia. There were negotiations. Stones were thrown at the troops from the crowd. The army reserve, about forty strong as earlier indicated, after lengthy discussions also marched over from the other side of the town towards the troops.

Suddenly a cry was raised among the people for the freeing of the prisoners. In the prison close to the town hall, sixty-nine Solingen workers had been in custody for a year for demolishing the cast-steel works near the castle. They were to be tried in a few days' time. Intent on freeing these men, the people made a rush for the prison. The doors gave way, the people broke in and the prisoners were free. At the same time, however, the troops advanced, a volley rang out and the last prisoner, hurrying through the door, dropped to the ground with a shattered skull.

The people fell back, but with the cry: "To the barricades!" In a trice the approaches to the inner city were secured. Unarmed workers were there in plenty, but there were at most only fifty men with arms behind the barricades.

The artillery advanced. Like the infantry before it, it fired too high, probably on purpose. Both bodies of troops were made up of Rhinelanders or Westphalians, and were good. Eventually Captain von Uttenhoven advanced at the head of the 8th Company of the 16th Regiment.

Three armed men were behind the first barricade. "Don't shoot at us," they cried, "we only shoot at officers!" The captain ordered halt. "Just order ready and there you'll lie," one of the riflemen behind the barricade shouted at him. "Ready! Present! Fire!" A salvo rang out, but at the very same moment the captain slumped to the ground. The bullet had hit him through the heart.

The platoon retreated in all haste, not even taking back the captain's body. A few more shots rang out, a few soldiers were wounded and the commanding officer, who did not relish staying overnight in the rebellious town, pulled out again and bivouacked with his troops an hour's march outside the town. As the soldiers withdrew, barricades were at once raised on all sides.

The same evening the news of the retreat of the Prussians reached Dusseldorf. Numerous groups formed in the streets; the petty bourgeois and the workers were in a state of extreme excitement. Then the rumour that fresh troops were to be sent to Elberfeld gave the signal for action. Without giving a thought to the lack of weapons (the civic militia had been disarmed since November 1848), the relatively strong garrison and the disadvantage posed by the broad, straight streets of the little ex-capital, some workers raised a call to the barricades. In Neustrasse and Bolkerstrasse a few fortifications were thrown up; the other parts of the town were kept free partly by the troops who had already been consigned there beforehand and partly by the fear of the big and petty bourgeoisie.

Towards evening the fighting began. Here, as elsewhere, there were only a few fighters on the barricades. And where were they to get weapons and ammunition! Suffice it to say that they fought back bravely for a long time against superior odds and only after extensive use of artillery, towards morning, were the half-dozen barricades that could be defended in the hands of the Prussians. As we know, on the following day these cautious heroes took their bloody revenge on servant girls, old folk and other peaceful people.

On the same day that the Prussians were beaten back from Elberfeld, another battalion, from the 13th Regiment if I am not mistaken, was to enter Iserlohn and bring the army reserve there to reason. But here too the plan was frustrated; as soon as the news of the advance of the troops became known, the army reserve and the people fortified all the approaches to the town and awaited the enemy with rifles at the ready. The battalion did not dare to make an attack and withdrew again.

The fighting in Elberfeld and Dusseldorf and the barricading of Iserlohn gave the signal for the uprising of the greater part of the industrial region of Berg and the Mark. The people of Solingen stormed the Grafrath arsenal and armed themselves with the rifles and cartridges they took from it; the people of Hagen joined the movement en masse, armed themselves, occupied the approaches to the Ruhr and sent out reconnaissance patrols; Solingen, Ronsdorf, Remscheid, Barmen, etc., sent their contingents to Elberfeld. In the other localities of the region the army reserve declared itself for the movement and placed itself at the disposal of the Frankfurt Assembly. Elberfeld, Solingen, Hagen and Iserlohn replaced the district and the local authorities, who had been driven out, with committees of public safety.

Needless to say the news of these events was monstrously exaggerated. The whole of the Wupper and Ruhr area was pictured as one huge, organised camp of insurrection. There were said to be 15,000 armed men in Elberfeld and as many in Iserlohn and Hagen. The panic which suddenly seized the government and at one blow paralysed all its measures to deal with this uprising in the most loyal districts played no small part in making these exaggerations credible.

After making all reasonable allowances for probable exaggerations, the undeniable fact remained that the main centres of the industrial region of Berg and the Mark were engaged in an open and so far victorious uprising. That was a fact. There was further the news that Dresden was still holding out, that Silesia was in a state of ferment, that the movement in the Palatinate was consolidating, that in Baden a victorious military revolt had broken out and the Grand Duke [Leopold–Ed.] had fled and that the Magyars stood on the banks of the Jablunka and the Leitha. To sum up, of all the revolutionary opportunities that had presented themselves to the democratic and workers' party since March 1848 this was by far the most favourable, and of course it had to be seized. The left bank of the Rhine could not leave the right bank in the lurch.

What should be done now?

All the larger towns of the Rhine Province are either fortress towns like Cologne and Coblenz, dominated by strong citadels and forts, or they have numerous garrisons like Aachen, Dusseldorf and Trier. In addition to this the province is further kept in check by the Wesel, Julich, Luxembourg, Saarlouis and even the Mainz and Minden fortresses. In these fortresses and garrisons there were altogether at least 30,000 men. Finally, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Aachen and Trier had been disarmed for some time. So the revolutionary centres of the province were paralysed. Here every attempt at an uprising, as had already been demonstrated in Dusseldorf, would inevitably end in a victory for the military; another such victory, e.g. in Cologne, would mean the moral crushing of the uprising in Berg and the Mark, in spite of the otherwise favourable news. On the left bank of the Rhine a movement was possible on the Moselle, in the Eifel and the Krefeld industrial district; but this region was encircled by six fortresses and three garrison towns. On the other hand, those districts on the right bank of the Rhine which were already in insurrection offered a densely populated, extensive terrain which with its woods an mountains seemed to be made for an insurrectionary war.

If the intention was to support the insurgent districts, then there was only one course open:

above all things avoid unnecessary disorders in the fortresses and garrison towns;

make a diversion on the left bank of the Rhine in the smaller towns, in the factory areas and in the countryside in order to hold the Rhine garrisons in check;

finally, throw all available forces into the insurgent district on the right bank of the Rhine, spread the insurrection further and attempt to organise here the nucleus of a revolutionary army around the army reserve.

Prussia's new heroes, who specialise in revelations, should not rejoice too soon over the treasonable conspiracy here revealed. Unfortunately no conspiracy existed. The above three measures are no conspiratorial plan but a simple suggestion put forward by the writer of these lines when he himself left for Elberfeld to see to the execution of the third point. Thanks to the dilapidated organisation of the democratic and workers' party, thanks to the indecision and shrewd cautiousness of most of the local leaders who had come from the petty bourgeoisie, and finally thanks to the lack of time, it never came to a conspiracy. Therefore if the beginnings of a diversion did indeed materialise on the left bank of the Rhine and if in Kempen, Neuss and the surrounding country disorders did break out and the arsenal in Prum was stormed, these incidents were by no means the outcome of a common plan but were merely a manifestation of the revolutionary instinct of the people.

In the insurgent districts in the meantime things looked completely different from what the rest of the province would lead one to suppose. It must be admitted that Elberfeld with its barricades (which were, however, extremely unplanned and thrown together in a hurry), with its many sentinels, patrols and other armed men, with its whole population in the streets, only the big bourgeoisie apparently missing, and with its red flags and tricolours did not look at all bad, but otherwise the greatest confusion reigned in the town. Through the Committee of Public Safety formed in the first moments, the petty bourgeoisie had taken the direction of affairs into its hands. It had scarcely got thus far when it took fright at its power, limited as it was. The first thing it did was to get legitimation from the town council, i.e. from the big bourgeoisie, and out of gratitude for the town council's kindness to take five of its members into the Committee of Public Safety. Reinforced in this way, the Committee forthwith washed its hands of all dangerous activity by transferring the responsibility for external security to a military commission, over which, however, it reserved for itself a moderating and restraining control. Secured in this fashion from all contact with the uprising and transplanted by the fathers of the town onto the ground of legality, the trembling petty bourgeois on the Committee of Public Safety were able to confine themselves to calming tempers, looking after day-to-day business, clearing up "misunderstandings", quietening people down, procrastinating and paralysing every form of energetic activity under the pretext that it was first necessary to await the answers given to the deputations sent to Berlin and Frankfurt. The rest of the petty bourgeoisie naturally went hand in hand with the Committee of Public Safety, quietened things down everywhere, did all they could to hinder the continuation of defence measures and distribution of arms and constantly wavered as to how far they would go with the uprising. Only a small part of this class was determined to defend itself weapons in hand in the event of an attack on the town. The great majority sought to persuade themselves that their threats alone and aversion to the almost inevitable bombardment of Elberfeld would move the government to make concessions; nevertheless they covered themselves against all eventualities.

The big bourgeoisie, in the first moments after the battle, was as if thunderstruck. In its terror it saw fantastic visions of arson, murder, looting and God knows what abominations rising up out of the ground. Therefore the setting up of the Committee of Public Safety whose majority (town councillors, lawyers, public prosecutors, sober people) suddenly offered it a guarantee for life and property, filled it with more than fanatical delight. The selfsame big merchants, dyers and manufacturers who up to now had decried Messrs. Karl Hecker, Riotte, Hochster, etc.,as bloodthirsty terrorists, now hurried en masse to the town hall, embraced the same alleged butchers with the most feverish passion and deposited thousands of talers on the table of the Committee of Public Safety. It goes without saying that when the movement was ended these same enthusiastic admirers and supporters of the Committee of Public Safety spread abroad the most extravagant and basest lies not only about the movement itself but also about the Committee of Public Safety and its members, and thanked the Prussians with a similar intensity of feeling for liberation from a terror which had never existed. Innocent constitutional bourgeois, like Messrs. Hecker, Hochster and Public Prosecutor Heintzmann, were once more depicted as bugbears and man-eaters whose affinity to Robespierre and Danton stood written all over their faces. For our part we consider it our duty completely to exonerate these honourable gentlemen from any such accusation. For the rest, the greater portion of the big bourgeoisie placed themselves, their wives and their children with the utmost dispatch under the protection of the Dusseldorf state of siege and only the smaller, more courageous portion stayed behind to protect their property against any eventuality. The Chief Burgomaster [Johann Adolph Carnap.–Ed.] stayed hidden in an overturned, manure-covered cab for the duration of the uprising. The proletariat, united in the heat of the struggle, split as soon as the Committee of Public Safety and the petty bourgeoisie began to waver. The artisans, the actual factory workers and a section of the silk-weavers backed the movement up to the hilt; but they, who formed the core of the proletariat, were almost entirely without weapons. The dye-workers, a robust, well-paid working class, coarse and consequently reactionary like all sections of workers whose occupation demands more physical strength than skill, had lost all interest even during the first days. They alone of all the industrial workers stayed at work while the barricades were up and did not allow themselves to be disturbed. Finally the lumpenproletariat was here as elsewhere corruptible from the second day of the movement onwards, demanding weapons and pay from the Committee of Public Safety in the morning and selling itself to the big bourgeois in the afternoon to protect their buildings or rip down the barricades when evening fell. On the whole it stood on the side of the bourgeoisie, which paid it most and with whose money it led a gay life as long as the movement lasted.

The negligence and cowardice of the Committee of Public Safety and the discord in the military commission, in which the party of inaction initially had the majority, prevented any decisive action from the very beginning. From the second day onwards reaction set in. From the outset it became evident that in Elberfeld the only chance of success was under the banner of the Imperial Constitution and in agreement with the petty bourgeoisie. On the one hand, the proletariat had, here in particular, only too recently freed itself from the slough of gin and pietism for even the slightest notion of the conditions of its liberation to penetrate the masses, and on the other hand it had a too instinctive hatred for the bourgeoisie and was much too indifferent towards the bourgeois question of the Imperial Constitution to work up any enthusiasm for such tricolour interests. This put the resolute party, the only one to consider the question of defence seriously, in a false position. It declared itself for the Imperial Constitution. The petty bourgeoisie, however, did not trust it, maligned it in every way to the people and impeded all the measures it took to distribute arms and erect fortifications. Every order that could really serve to put the town in a state of defence was immediately countermanded by the first member of the Committee of Public Safety to come along. Every philistine in front of whose house a barricade was set up at once hurried to the town hall and procured a reversal of the order. The funds for the payment of the barricade-workers (and they asked for the very minimum to avoid starvation) could only be squeezed out of the Committee of Public Safety with great effort and in paltry amounts. Wages and rations for those bearing arms were provided irregularly and were often insufficient. For five to six days there was neither roll-call nor muster of armed men, with the result that nobody knew how many fighters could be reckoned on if an emergency arose. Not until the fifth day was an attempt made to detail the armed men, but the attempt was never carried into effect and was based on a total ignorance of the number of the fighting forces. Every member of the Committee of Public Safety acted on his own. There was a clash of the most contradictory orders and the only thing most of them had in common was to add to the easy-going confusion and prevent any energetic steps being taken. As a result of this the proletariat became heartily sick of the whole movement and after a few days the big bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie succeeded in their aim of making the workers as apathetic as possible.

When I reached Elberfeld on May 11, the armed men numbered at least 2,500 to 3,000. Of these, however, only the reinforcements from outside and the handful of armed Elberfeld workers were reliable. The army reserve was vacillating; most of them had a mighty dread of imprisonment in chains. At first there were not many of them, but they were reinforced by the admission of all the shilly-shallying and faint-hearted elements from the other detachments. Finally the civic militia, reactionary here from the very first and set up specifically to suppress the workers, declared itself neutral and wanted nothing but merely to protect its property. All this only came to light in the course of the next few days; in the meantime, however, a section of the reinforcements from outside and the workers dispersed and the number of actual fighting forces dwindled as a result of the stagnation of the movement, while the civic militia held together more and more and with every day more openly expressed its reactionary desires. During the last few nights it was already tearing down a number of the barricades. The armed reinforcements, who certainly numbered at first more than a thousand men, were already reduced to half on the 12th or 13th, and when at length there was a general roll-call it became evident that the entire armed force upon which one could reckon by now numbered at the most 700 to 800 men. The army reserve and the civic militia refused to appear at this roll-call.

That is not all. Insurgent Elberfeld was surrounded by places all of which were alleged to be "neutral". Barmen, Kronenberg, Lennep, Luttringhausen, etc., had not joined the movement. The revolutionary workers of these places, insofar as they had weapons, had marched to Elberfeld. The civic militia, which in all these places was purely an instrument in the hands of the manufacturers for holding down the workers, and was composed of the manufacturers, their factory overseers and the shopkeepers wholly dependent on the manufacturers, ruled here in the interests of "order" and the manufacturers. The workers themselves, who because of their dispersion in the more rural areas were rather out of touch with the political movement, had been partially brought over to the side of the manufacturers by the familiar means of coercion and by slanders about the character of the Elberfeld movement; among the peasants these slanders always worked unfailingly. In addition, the movement had come at a time when the manufacturers, after a business crisis of fifteen months, at last had full order books again; and it is common knowledge that no revolution can be made with regularly employed workers – a circumstance which also had a very significant effect in Elberfeld. It is obvious that under all these conditions the "neutral" neighbours were only so many covert enemies.

And there was still more to it than that. No links were established with the other insurgent districts. From time to time odd individuals came over from Hagen; as good as nothing was known of Iserlohn. Some individuals offered their services as commissaries, but none of them was to be trusted. Several couriers between Elberfeld and Hagen were said to have been arrested by the civic militia in Barmen and the surrounding area. The only place with which there was regular communication was Solingen, and the situation there looked no different from that in Elberfeld. That it looked no worse there was due only to the good organisation and determination of the Solingen workers, who had sent 400 to 500 armed men to Elberfeld and yet were still strong enough to keep their own bourgeoisie and civic militia in check. If the Elberfeld workers had been as developed and as organised as the Solingen workers, the chances would have been completely different.

Under these circumstances there was only one possibility left: to take swift, energetic measures to inject new life into the movement, provide it with new fighting forces, cripple its internal enemies and organise it as strongly as possible throughout the whole industrial area of Berg and the Mark. The first step was to disarm the Elberfeld civic militia, distribute its weapons among the workers and impose a compulsory tax for the maintenance of the workers thus armed. This step would have broken decisively with all the slackness which had hitherto characterised the Committee of Public Safety, given the proletariat new life and crippled the "neutral" districts' capacity for resistance. How then to go about getting weapons from these districts too, spreading the insurrection and regularly organising the defence of the whole region depended on the success of this first step With an order from the Committee of Public Safety and with no more than the 400 Solingen workers the Elberfeld civic militia would have been disarmed in no time. Courage was not their strong point.

For the safety of those Elberfelders charged in May and still in prison, I owe the declaration that I alone was responsible for all these proposals. I began to call for the disarming of the civic militia immediately when the Committee of Public Safety's funds began to run out.

But the commendable Committee of Public Safety did not at all consider that it was necessary to take such "terroristic measures" The only thing I managed to get carried out, or rather, directed on my own initiative together with a few corps leaders – who all got away safely and some of whom are already in America, was to fetch some eighty rifles belonging to the Kronenberg civic militia which were kept in the town hall there. And these rifles, distributed with extreme carelessness, ended up for the most part in the hands of gin-happy lumpenproletarians, who sold them that very evening to the bourgeoisie. These same bourgeois gentlemen were sending agents among the people to buy up as many rifles as possible and they paid quite a high price for them. In this way the Elberfeld lumpenproletarians delivered up to the bourgeoisie several hundred rifles, which had got into their hands through the negligence and lack of order of the improvised authorities. With these rifles the factory overseers, the most reliable dye-workers, etc., etc., were armed and the ranks of the "well-disposed" civic militia strengthened from day to day.

The gentlemen of the Committee of Public Safety answered every proposal for improving the town's defences by saying that there was no point, the Prussians would take care not to come there, they would never venture into the mountains, and so on. They themselves were fully aware that in saying this they were spreading the most barefaced lies, that the town could be bombarded from all the heights even with field-guns, that no arrangements at all had been made for any at all serious defence and that, the insurrection having come to a halt and the Prussians possessing a colossal superiority, only really extraordinary events could now save the Elberfeld uprising.

The Prussian generals, however, did not seem to be particularly anxious to venture into a terrain which was as good as totally unknown to them, at least not until they had assembled a truly overwhelming force. The four unfortified towns of Elberfeld, Hagen, Iserlohn and Solingen made such an impression on these cautious military heroes that they had an entire army of twenty thousand men and large numbers of cavalry and artillery brought up, partly by rail, from Wesel, Westphalia and the eastern provinces. Not daring to attack, they had a regular strategic formation drawn up the other side of the Ruhr. High command and general staff, right flank, centre. everything was in the most beautiful order, just as if they were facing a colossal enemy army, as if it were a question of giving battle to a Bem or a Dembiriski and not of an unequal fight against a few hundred unorganised workers, badly armed, virtually leaderless and betrayed behind their backs by those who had put the weapons into their hands.

We know how the insurrection ended. We know how the workers, disgusted with the petty bourgeoisie's constant procrastination, its faint-hearted shilly-shallying and its treacherous lulling into a false sense of security, finally moved out of Elberfeld to fight their way through to the first state they came to where the Imperial Constitution offered them the slightest refuge. We know how they were hunted by Prussian lancers and by incited peasants. We know how immediately after their departure the big bourgeoisie crawled out into the open again, had the barricades carried off and built triumphal arches for the approaching Prussian heroes. We know how Haben and Solingen were played into the hands of the Prussians through direct betrayal by the bourgeoisie and how only Iserlohn put up a fight, unequal and lasting two hours, against the 24th Regiment, the conquerors of Dresden, who were already laden with booty.

Some of the Elberfeld, Solingen and Mulheim workers got safely through to the Palatinate. Here they met with their fellow-countrymen, the fugitives from the storming of the Prum arsenal. Together with these they formed a company consisting almost exclusively of Rhinelanders in Willich's volunteer corps. All their comrades will surely testify that whenever they came under fire, and especially in the last decisive battle on the Murg, they fought very bravely.

The Elberfeld insurrection deserved this more detailed description because it was here that the position of the different classes in the Imperial Constitution movement was most sharply pronounced and furthest developed. In the other towns in Berg and the Mark the movement resembled that in Elberfeld in every way, except that there the participation or non-participation in the movement by the various classes was less clearly defined, the classes themselves not being so sharply differentiated as in the industrial centre of the area. In the Palatinate and in Baden, where concentrated large-scale industry and along with it a developed big bourgeoisie are almost non-existent, where the class relationships merge into each other in a much more easy-going and patriarchal way, the mixture of the classes that were the mainstay of the movement was even more confused. We shall see this later, but we shall also see at the same time how all these admixtures to the uprising likewise end up by grouping themselves around the petty bourgeoisie as the core for the crystallisation of the whole splendour of the Imperial Constitution.

It is abundantly clear from the attempted uprisings in Rhenish Prussia in May of last year what position this part of Germany is capable of occupying in a revolutionary movement. Surrounded by seven fortresses, three of them first-class for Germany, constantly manned by almost a third of the entire Prussian army, intersected in all directions by railways and with an entire fleet of transport steamers at the disposal of the military authorities, a Rhineland uprising has no prospect of succeeding except under quite exceptional circumstances. Only when the citadels are in the hands of the people can the Rhinelanders hope to achieve anything by force of arms. And such an eventuality can only arise either if the military authorities are terrorised by tremendous external events and lose their heads, or if the military declare themselves wholly or partly for the movement. In every other case an uprising in the Rhine Province is doomed in advance. A swift march on Frankfurt by the Badeners and on Trier by the Palatines would probably have led to the uprising immediately breaking out on the Moselle and in the Eifel, in Nassau and in both parts of Hesse, and the troops of the central Rhenish states, who at that time were still favourably disposed, joining the movement. There is no doubt that all the Rhenish troops, and especially the entire 7th and 8th artillery brigades, would have followed their example, that they would at least have given loud enough vent to their feelings to cause the Prussian generals to lose their heads. Probably several fortresses would have fallen into the hands of the people, and even if not Elberfeld, at least most of the left bank of the Rhine would have been saved. All that, and perhaps much more, was forfeited as a result of the shabby, cowardly and philistine policies of the wiseacres on the Baden Provincial Committee.

With the defeat of the Rhenish workers died the only newspaper in which they saw their interests openly and resolutely championed: the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The editor-in-chief,[Karl Marx–ed.] though a native of Rhenish Prussia, was expelled from Prussia and the other editors had either direct arrest or immediate expulsion hanging over their heads. The Cologne police explained this with extreme naivete and went to great lengths to prove that they had enough against each one of them to take proceedings along one or the other of these lines. In this way the newspaper was forced to cease publication at the very moment when the unprecedentedly rapid increase in its circulation more than secured its existence. The editors scattered across the various German provinces where uprisings had taken place or were still to take place; several went to Paris, where yet again a critical moment was impending. There is not one of them who during or as a result of the movements of this summer was not arrested or expelled, so experiencing the fate which the Cologne police were kind enough to prepare for him. A number of the compositors went to the Palatinate and joined the army.

The Rhenish uprising too had to end tragically. After three-quarters of the Rhine Province had been placed in a state of siege, after hundreds had been thrown into prison, it closed with the shooting on the eve of Frederick William IV of Hohenzollern's birthday of three of the men who had stormed the Prum arsenal." Vae victis![Woe to the vanquished!–Ed.]

II. Karlsruhe

The uprising in Baden took place under the most favourable circumstances that an insurrection could possibly hope for. The entire people were united in their hatred for a government that broke its word, engaged in duplicity and cruelly persecuted its political adversaries. The reactionary classes, the nobility, the bureaucracy and the big bourgeoisie, were few in numbers. Anyhow a big bourgeoisie exists only embryonically in Baden. With the exception of this handful of nobles, civil servants and bourgeois, with the exception of the Karlsruhe and Baden-Baden shopkeepers who made their living from the Court and from rich foreigners, with the exception of a few Heidelberg professors and a half-dozen peasant villages around Karlsruhe, the whole state was unanimously for the movement. In other uprisings the army had first to be defeated. Here, however, it had been harassed more than anywhere else by its aristocratic officers, worked on for a year by the democratic party and recently permeated even more with rebellious elements by the introduction of a kind of compulsory military service, with the result that it placed itself at the head of the movement and even drove the movement further than the bourgeois leaders of the Offenburg Assembly cared for. It was precisely the army which in Rastatt and Karlsruhe transformed the "movement" into an insurrection.

The insurrectionary government therefore found on acceding to office a ready army, abundantly supplied arsenals, a fully organised state machine, a full exchequer and a virtually unanimous population. What is more, on the left bank of the Rhine, in the Palatinate, it found an insurrection already effectuated covering its left flank; in Rhenish Prussia an insurrection which was admittedly seriously threatened but not yet defeated; and in Wurttemberg, in Franconia, in both parts of Hesse and in Nassau a general mood of unrest, even among the army, which only needed a spark to repeat the Baden uprising in the whole of South and Central Germany and put at least 50,000 to 60,000 regular troops at the disposal of the revolt.

It is so simple and so obvious what should have been done under these circumstances that everybody knows it now, after the suppression of the uprising, and everybody claims to have been saying it from the very start. It was a question of immediately and without a moment's hesitation spreading the uprising to Hesse, Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Nassau and Wurttemberg, immediately mustering 8,000 to 10,000 of the available regular troops – by rail that could have been done in two days – and sending them to Frankfurt "for the defence of the National Assembly". The alarmed Hessian government was as if rooted to the spot by the rapid succession of advances made by the uprising; its troops were notoriously well disposed to the people of Baden; it was no more capable than the Frankfurt Senate of offering the slightest resistance. The troops of the electorate of Hesse, Wurttemberg and Darmstadt stationed in Frankfurt were for the movement; the Prussians there (mostly Rhinelanders) were wavering; the Austrians were numerically few. The arrival of the Badeners, whether or not any attempt was made to stop them, would inevitably have carried the insurrection into the heart of both parts of Hesse and Nassau, compelled the Prussians and Austrians to retreat to Mainz, and placed the trembling German so-called National Assembly under the terrorising influence of an insurgent people and an insurgent army. If the insurrection had not then immediately broken out on the Moselle, in the Eifel, in Wurttemberg and in Franconia then there would have been means enough at hand to carry it into these provinces too.

Further, the power of the insurrection should have been centralised, the necessary funds placed at its disposal and through the immediate abolition of all feudal burdens that great majority of the population which tills the soil should have been given a stake in the insurrection. The establishment of a common central authority for war and finance with full powers to issue paper money,[The Baden Chambers had earlier already approved the issue of two million in bank-notes, of which not a penny had been issued.– Note by Engels.] to begin with for Baden and the Palatinate, and the abolition of all feudal burdens in Baden and every area occupied by the insurgent army would for the moment have sufficed to give the uprising quite a different energetic character.

All that had, however, to happen in the first moment if it were to he carried out with the swiftness which alone could guarantee success. A week after the appointment of the provincial committee it was already too late. The Rhenish insurrection was suppressed, Wurttemberg and Hesse did not stir, and those military units which at the beginning had been favourably disposed became unreliable and ended up by once more completely obeying their reactionary officers. The uprising had lost its all-German character and had become a purely local uprising restricted to Baden or to Baden and the Palatinate.

As I learnt after the fighting, the former Baden Second Lieutenant F. Sigel, who during the uprising won more or less equivocal dwarf-laurels as "colonel" and later as "general-in-chief", had at the very outset laid before the provincial committee a plan according to which the offensive was to be assumed. This plan has the merit of containing the correct notion that under all circumstances it is necessary to go over to the attack; in other respects, it is the most adventurist plan that could possibly have been proposed. Sigel wanted first to advance on Hohenzollern with a Baden corps and proclaim the Hohenzollern Republic, then take Stuttgart and from there, after having incited Wurttemberg to revolt, march on Nuremberg and set up a large camp in the heart of a likewise insurgent Franconia. It is easy to see that this plan completely left out of account the moral importance of Frankfurt, without which the insurrection could have no all-German character, and the strategic importance of the Main line. It is also easy to see that it presupposed completely different military forces than were actually available and that in the end, after a completely Quixotic or Schill-like raid, it fizzled out and immediately set the strongest of all the South German armies and the only definitely hostile one, the Bavarian army, in hot pursuit of the insurgents, even before they could procure reinforcements through the defection of the troops of Hesse and Nassau.

The new government undertook no offensive under the pretext that the soldiers had almost all dispersed and gone home. Apart from the fact that this was true only in respect of a few isolated units, in particular the Prince's own regiment, even the soldiers who had dispersed were almost all back with their colours within three days.

Furthermore, the government had quite different reasons for opposing any offensive.

At the head of the agitation for the Imperial Constitution throughout Baden stood Herr Brentano a lawyer, who with the invariably rather mesquin ambition of a man of the people from some petty German state and the seeming political staunchness which in South Germany is the very first condition of all popularity, combined a dash of diplomatic cunning which sufficed to give him full mastery of all around him, with the possible exception of a single person. Herr Brentano (this sounds trivial now, but it is true), Herr Brentano and his party, the strongest in the province, demanded nothing more at the Offenburg Assembly than changes in the policies of the Grand Duke, which were only possible with a Brentano Ministry. The Grand Duke's reply and the general agitation gave rise to the Rastatt military revolt – against the will and the intentions of Brentano. At the very moment that Herr Brentano was placed at the head of the provincial committee he had already been overtaken by the movement and was forced to try and hold it back. Then came the riot in Karlsruhe; the Grand Duke fled, and the same circumstance that had summoned Herr Brentano to the head of the administration, that had furnished him with dictatorial powers as it were, now thwarted all his designs and induced him to use this power against the very movement that had procured it for him. While the people were celebrating the departure of the Grand Duke, Herr Brentano and his faithful provincial committee were sitting upon thorns.

The said committee, consisting almost exclusively of Baden worthies with the staunchest of convictions and the most muddled of heads, of "pure republicans" who trembled with fear at the idea of proclaiming the republic or crossed themselves at the slightest energetic measure, this unadulterated philistine committee was needless to say wholly dependent on Brentano. The role which the lawyer Hochster assumed in Elberfeld was here assumed on a somewhat larger terrain by the lawyer Brentano. Of the three outside elements, Blind, Fickler and Struve, who joined the provincial committee straight from prison, Blind was so ensnared by Brentano's intrigues that he had no other choice, isolated as he was, but to go into exile in Paris as a representative of Baden; Fickler had to undertake a dangerous mission to Stuttgart; and Struve seemed to Herr Brentano to be so harmless that he tolerated him in the provincial committee, kept an eye on him and did his best to make him unpopular, in which he was completely successful. It is well known how Struve with several others founded a "Club of Resolute (or rather, cautious) Progress", which was disbanded after an unsuccessful demonstration. A few days later Struve was in the Palatinate, more or less a "fugitive", and there attempted yet again to publish his Deutscher Zuschauer. The specimen number was scarcely off the press when the Prussians marched in.

The provincial committee, from the very first nothing more than a tool of Brentano, elected an executive committee once again headed by Brentano. This executive committee very soon almost completely replaced the provincial committee, using it at the most to confirm credits and measures taken and getting rid of any of the larger committee's members who looked at all unreliable by sending them on all kinds of minor missions to the districts or the army. Finally it abolished the provincial committee altogether, replacing it with a "constituent assembly", elected completely under Brentano's influence, and transformed itself into a "provisional government", whose leader was needless to say once again Herr Brentano. It was he who appointed the ministers. And what ministers – Florian Mordes and Mayerhofer!

Herr Brentano was the most consummate representative of the Baden petty bourgeoisie. He distinguished himself from the mass of the petty bourgeois and their other representatives only by being too discerning to share all their illusions. Herr Brentano betrayed the insurrection in Baden from the very first. He did so precisely because from the very first he grasped the state of affairs more correctly than any other official person in Baden and because he took the only measures which would uphold the hegemony of the petty bourgeoisie and yet for that very reason meant the inevitable destruction of the insurrection. This is the key to Brentano's unbounded popularity at that time but also the key to the curses which have been heaped on him since July by his former admirers. The petty bourgeoisie of Baden were as a body just as much traitors as Brentano; but at the same time they were duped, which he was not. They betrayed out of cowardice and they allowed themselves to be duped out of stupidity.

In Baden, as in the whole of South Germany, there is hardly any big bourgeoisie at all. The province's industry and trade are of no significance. It follows that the proletariat is not at all numerous, very fragmented and scarcely developed. The mass of the population is divided into peasants (the majority), petty bourgeois and journeymen. These last, the urban workers, scattered in little towns without any big centre where an independent workers' party could develop, are or at least were until now under the dominant social and political influence of the petty bourgeoisie. The peasants, even more scattered over the province and lacking the means of instruction, have interests which partly coincide with and partly run parallel, so to speak, to those of the petty bourgeoisie and for that reason were likewise under the petty bourgeoisie's political tutelage. The petty bourgeoisie, represented by lawyers, doctors, schoolmasters, individual merchants and book-sellers, thus held sway over the entire political movement in Baden, since March 1848, partly directly, partly through its representatives.

It is owing to the absence of an antithesis of bourgeoisie and proletariat and the consequent political domination of the petty bourgeoisie that there has never really been in Baden a movement agitating for socialism. The elements of socialism which came in from outside, either through workers who had been to more developed countries or through the influence of French or German socialist and communist literature, never managed to make any headway in Baden. The red riband and the red flag meant nothing more in Baden than the bourgeois republic, compounded at the most with a little terrorism, and the "six scourges of humanity" discovered by Herr Struve were, for all their bourgeois inoffensiveness, the limit to which one could go without losing the sympathy of the masses. The highest ideal of the Baden petty bourgeois and peasant always remained the little republic of burghers and peasants as it has existed in Switzerland since 1830. A small field of activity for small, modest people, where the state is a somewhat enlarged parish, a "canton"; a small, stable industry, based on handicrafts, which gives rise to an equally stable and sleepy social condition; no great wealth, no great poverty, nothing but middle class and mediocrity; no prince, no civil list, no standing army, next to no taxes; no active participation in history, no foreign policy, nothing but Petty domestic gossip and petty squabbling en famille; no big industry, no railways, no world trade, no social collisions between millionaires and proletarians, but a quiet, cosy life in all godliness and respectability,in the humble unobtrusiveness without a history, of satisfied souls–this is the gentle Arcadia which exists in the greater part of Switzerland and which the Baden petty bourgeois and peasants have been longing for years to see established. And if in moments of more ardent enthusiasm the thoughts of the Baden and, let us say it, of the South German petty bourgeois in general are stretched as far as the notion of the whole of Germany, then the ideal of Germany's future which flickers before their eyes takes the shape of an enlarged Switzerland, a federal republic. Thus Herr Struve has already published a pamphlet" which divides Germany up into twenty-four cantons, each with its own landamman[The highest official in some Swiss cantons.–Ed] and its big and little councils. He even goes so far as to append a map which shows the ready-made boundary lines. If Germany were ever in a position to transform itself into such an Arcadia, then it would thereby have descended to a depth of degradation of which it hitherto had no inkling, even in the times of its greatest humiliations.

The South German petty bourgeoisie had in the meantime more than once experienced that a revolution, even one under their own bourgeois republican banner, can quite easily carry away their beloved and peaceful Arcadia in the vortex of far more colossal conflicts, of real class struggles. Hence the petty-bourgeois fear not only of any sort of revolutionary convulsion but also of their own ideal of a federal tobacco-and-beer republic. Hence their enthusiasm for the Imperial Constitution, which at least satisfied their immediate interests and held out to them the hope, considering the purely suspensive nature of the Kaiser's veto, of ushering in the republic at some opportune moment by means within the bounds of the law. Hence their surprise when the Baden military without being asked handed over to them on a salver a ready-made insurrection, and hence their fear of spreading the insurrection over the frontiers of the future canton of Baden. The conflagration might well have taken hold of regions in which there was a big bourgeoisie and a numerous proletariat, regions in which it would have given power to the proletariat, and then woe to their property!

What did Herr Brentano do in these circumstances?

What the petty bourgeoisie in Rhenish Prussia had done consciously, he did for the petty bourgeoisie in Baden: he betrayed the insurrection, but he saved the petty bourgeoisie.

Brentano did not betray the insurrection by his last actions, by his flight after the defeat on the Murg, as the finally disillusioned petty bourgeoisie of Baden imagined; he had betrayed it from the very first. It was precisely those measures that the Baden philistines, and with them sections of the peasants and even the artisans, cheered most loudly, which betrayed the movement to Prussia. It was precisely by his betrayal that Brentano became so popular and shackled the fanatical enthusiasm of the philistines to his heels. The petty burgher was too taken up with the swift restoration of order and public safety and the immediate suppression of the movement itself to notice the betrayal of the movement; and when it was too late, when, compromised in the movement, he saw that the movement was lost, and himself with it, he cried treason and with all the indignation of cheated respectability fell upon his most faithful servant.

Herr Brentano was cheated, too, of course. He hoped to emerge from the movement as the great man of the "moderate" party, i.e. of none other than the petty bourgeoisie, and instead was ignominiously forced to bolt under cover of darkness from his own party and from his best friends, on whom the terrible truth had suddenly dawned. He even hoped to keep open for himself the possibility of a grand-ducal ministry and instead received by way of thanks for his wisdom a good kicking from all parties and the impossibility of ever again playing even the smallest of roles. But in truth one can be shrewder than the entire petty bourgeoisie of any German robber-state [Raubstaat] and still see one's finest hopes dashed and one's most noble intentions pelted with mud!

From the first day of his government Herr Brentano did everything to keep the movement on the narrow, philistine course which it had scarcely attempted to overstep. Under the protection of the Karlsruhe civic militia, which was devoted to the Grand Duke and had fought against the movement only the day before, he moved into the Standehaus to curb the movement from there. The recall of the deserted soldiers could not have been carried out more sluggishly; the reorganisation of the battalions was pursued with just as little urgency. On the other hand, the Mannheim unarmed philistines, who everyone knew would not fight, and who after the battle of Waghausel even collaborated for the most part with a regiment of dragoons in the betrayal of Mannheim, were immediately armed. There was no question of a march on Frankfurt or Stuttgart or of spreading the insurrection to Nassau or Hesse. If a proposal were made to this effect, it was immediately brushed aside, like Sigel's. To speak of issuing bank-notes would have been considered a crime against the state, tantamount to communism. The Palatinate sent envoy after envoy to say that they were unarmed, that they had no rifles let alone artillery, that they had no ammunition and were without everything needed to carry out an insurrection and in particular to seize the Landau and Germersheim fortresses; but nothing was to be got out of Herr Brentano. The Palatinate proposed the immediate setting up of a joint military command, and even the unification of both provinces under a single joint government. Everything was delayed and deferred. I believe that a small financial contribution is all the Palatinate managed to get; later, when it was too late, eight cannon arrived with a little ammunition but no crew or draught-team, and finally, on a direct order from Mieroslawski, came a Baden battalion and two mortars, only one of which, if I remember rightly, fired a shot.

Because of this policy of delaying and brushing aside those measures most necessary to spread the insurrection, the whole movement was already betrayed. The same nonchalance was displayed in internal matters. There was not a word about abolishing feudal burdens; Herr Brentano knew full well that among the peasantry, especially in Upper Baden, there were elements more revolutionary than he cared for and that he must therefore hold them back rather than hurl them even more deeply into the movement. The new officials were mostly either creatures of Brentano or completely incompetent; the old officials, with the exception of those who had compromised themselves too directly in the reaction of the last twelve months and had hence deserted of themselves, all kept their positions, to the great delight of all the peaceful burghers. Even Herr Struve thought in the last days of May that the "revolution" should be commended for the fact that everything had passed off so very calmly and almost all the officials had been able to remain at their posts. As to the rest, Herr Brentano and his agents worked for the restoration, wherever possible, of the old routine, for a minimum of unrest and agitation and for a speedy removal of the trappings of revolution from the province.

In the military organisation the same routine prevailed. Only that was done which could not possibly remain undone. The troops were left without leaders, without anything to occupy them and without order; the incompetent "Minister of War" Eichfeld and his successor, the traitor Mayerhofer, did not even know how to deploy them properly. The convoys of troops crossed one another aimlessly and futilely on the railway. The battalions were led to one place one day and back the next, nobody could say why. In the garrisons the men went from one tavern to the next because they had nothing else to do. It seemed as if they were being demoralised on purpose, as if the government really wanted to drive out the last remnants of discipline. The organisation of the first call-up of the so-called people's militia, i.e. all men up to thirty years old capable of bearing arms, was assigned to the well-known Joh. Ph. Becker, a naturalised Swiss and an officer of the confederate army. I do not know to what extent Becker was obstructed in the execution of his mission by Brentano. I do know, however, that after the retreat of the Palatinate army onto Baden territory, when the peremptory demands of the badly clothed and badly armed Palatinate forces could no longer be rejected, Brentano washed his hands in innocence and said: "As far as I'm concerned, give them whatever you want; but when the Grand Duke comes back he should at least know who squandered his stores in this manner!" So if the Baden people's militia was organised in part badly and in part not at all, there is no doubt that the main responsibility for this too lies with Brentano and the ill will or ineptitude of his commissaries in the various districts.

When Marx and I first set foot on Baden territory after the suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (it must have been May 20 or 21, that is, more than a week after the flight of the Grand Duke) we were astonished to see how carelessly the border was guarded, or rather not guarded. From Frankfurt to Heppenheim the entire railway was in the hands of Wurttemberg and Hessian imperial troops; Frankfurt and Darmstadt themselves were full of soldiers; all the stations and all the villages were occupied by strong detachments; regular outposts were advanced right up to the border. From the border to Weinheim, by contrast, there was not a single man to be seen; the same was true of Weinheim. The one and only precaution was the demolition of a short stretch of railway between Heppenheim and Weinheim. Only while we were there did a weak detachment of the Prince's own regiment, at the most twenty-five men, arrive at Weinheim. From Weinheim to Mannheim the deepest peace prevailed; at the most there was here and there an odd, more than merry people's militiaman, who looked more like a straggler or a deserter than a soldier on duty. Needless to say, there was no question at all of border control. One went in or out, at will.

Mannheim, however, gave more the impression of being on a war footing. Crowds of soldiers stood around in the streets or sat in the taverns. The people's militia and the civic militia were drilling in the park, although for the most part in a very clumsy fashion and with bad instructors. At the town hall were sitting any number of committees, old and new officers, uniforms and tunics. The people mingled with the soldiers and volunteers and there was a great deal of drinking, laughing and embracing. But it was at once apparent that the initial impetus was spent and that many were unpleasantly disillusioned. The soldiers were discontented; we carried through the insurrection, they said, and now that it is the turn of the civilians to take over the leadership they let everything come to a standstill and go to pieces! The soldiers were also far from satisfied with their new officers; the new officers were on bad terms with those who had previously served the Grand Duke – at that time there were still many of them, although every day some deserted; the old officers found themselves against their will in an awkward situation, from which they did not know how to extricate themselves. Finally, everyone was bemoaning the lack of energetic and competent leadership.

On the other side of the Rhine, in Ludwigshafen, the movement seemed to us to be a much more cheerful affair. Whereas in Mannheim a great many young men who should clearly have been in the first call-up were quietly going about their business as if nothing had happened, here everyone was armed. Admittedly it was not so everywhere in the Palatinate, as later became evident, in Ludwigshafen the greatest unanimity prevailed between volunteers and military. In the taverns, which here too were, of course, overcrowded, the Marseillaise and other such songs rang out. There was no complaining and no grumbling, people were laughing and were body and soul with the movement, and at that time, especially amongst the fusiliers and volunteers, very understandable and innocent illusions prevailed about their own invincibility.

In Karlsruhe things took on a more solemn tone. In the Pariser Hof table d'hote had been announced for one o'clock. But it did not start until "the gentlemen of the provincial committee" had arrived. Little marks of respect of this sort were already giving the movement a reassuring bureaucratic veneer.

In opposition to various gentlemen from the provincial committee we expressed the views developed above, namely, that at the outset a march should have been made on Frankfurt and the insurrection thus extended, that it was most probably by now too late and that unless there were decisive blows in Hungary or a new revolution in Paris the whole movement was already irretrievably lost. It is impossible to imagine the outburst of indignation amongst these burghers of the provincial committee at such heresies. Only Blind and Goegg were on our side. Now that we have been proved right by events these same gentlemen naturally claim that they had all along been pressing for the offensive.

In Karlsruhe at that time there were already the first beginnings of that pretentious place-hunting which, under the equally pretentious title of "concentration of all the democratic forces of Germany", masqueraded as coming to the aid of the fatherland. Anyone who had ever held forth, however confusedly, in some club or other or had once called for hatred of tyrants in some democratic local paper hurried to Karlsruhe or Kaiserslautern, there to become at once a great man. As there is hardly need to emphasise, the performances were fully in keeping with the forces here concentrated. Thus there was in Karlsruhe a certain well-known, allegedly philosophical Atta Troll,[An ironical allusion to Arnold Ruge, an epic poem by Heinrich Heine. – Ed] ex-member of the Frankfurt Assembly and ex-editor of an allegedly democratic paper,[Die Reform. –Ed] suppressed by Manteuffel despite the tenders of our Atta Troll. Atta Troll was angling most assiduously for the little post of Baden envoy to Paris, for which he felt he had a special vocation because he had spent two years there at one time and learnt no French. Having been lucky enough actually to wheedle the credentials out of Herr Brentano, he was just packing his bags when Brentano unexpectedly summoned him and removed the accreditation papers from his pocket. It goes without saying that Atta Troll now made a point of going to Paris in order to spite Herr Brentano. Another staunch burgher who had been threatening Germany for years with revolution and the republic, Herr Heinzen, was also in Karlsruhe. This honourable gentleman was notorious before the February Revolution for calling on people everywhere and at all times to "go at them tooth and nail", and yet, after this revolution, he considered it more discreet to watch the various German insurrections from the neutral mountains of Switzerland. Now, at long last, he appeared to have got the urge to go tooth and nail himself at the "oppressors". After his earlier declared opinion that "Kossuth is a great man, but Kossuth has forgotten about fulminate of silver[A highly volatile explosive compound] it was to be expected that he would immediately organise the most colossal and hitherto unsuspected forces of destruction against the Prussians. He did no such thing. Since more ambitious plans did not appear to be appropriate, our hater of tyrants, as the saying goes, contented himself with setting up a republican elite corps, in the meantime writing articles in favour of Brentano in the Karlsruher Zeitung and frequenting the Club of Resolute Progress. The club was wound up, the republican elite did not put in an appearance and Herr Heinzen finally realised that not even he could defend Brentano's policies any longer. Misunderstood, exhausted and peeved, he first went to Upper Baden and from there to Switzerland, without having struck dead a single "oppressor". He is now taking his revenge on them from London, guillotining them in effigy in their millions.

We left Karlsruhe the next morning to visit the Palatinate.

As far as the conduct of general political matters and civil administration is concerned, there is little that remains to be said about the further course of the Baden insurrection. When Brentano felt strong enough he wiped out in one fell blow the tame opposition presented by the Club of Resolute Progress. The "Constituent Assembly", elected under the influence of the immense popularity of Brentano and the all-ruling petty bourgeoisie, gave its assent and blessing to every measure he took. The "Provisional Government with dictatorial power" (a dictatorship under an alleged convention!) was wholly under his control. Thus he continued to rule, obstructed the revolutionary and military development of the insurrection, had the day-to-day affairs discharged tant bien que mal[After a fashion.–Ed.] and jealously looked after the stores and private property of the Grand Duke, whom he continued to treat as his legitimate sovereign by the grace of God. In the Karlsruher Zeitung he declared that the Grand Duke could return at any time, and indeed the castle remained closed during this whole period, as if its occupant were merely away on a journey. He put off the emissaries from the Palatinate from day to day with vague answers; the most that could be achieved was the joint military command under Mieroslawski and a treaty abolishing the Mannheim-Ludwigshafen bridge-toll, which still did not prevent Herr Brentano from continuing to levy this toll on the Mannheim side.

When Mieroslawski was finally forced after the battle of Waghaeusel and Ubstadt to withdraw the remnants of his army through the mountains to the other side of the Murg, when Karlsruhe had to be abandoned with a mass of provisions, and when the defeat on the Murg settled the fate of the movement, the illusions of the Baden burghers, peasants and soldiers were dispelled and a universal cry went up accusing Brentano of treason. With one fell blow the whole edifice of Brentano's popularity, based on the cowardice of the petty bourgeois, the helplessness of the peasants and the lack of a concentrated working class, was demolished. Brentano fled to Switzerland under cover of darkness, pursued by the accusation of national betrayal with which his own "Constituent Assembly" stigmatised him, and went to ground in Feuerthalen in the canton of Zurich.

One could draw comfort from the thought that Herr Brentano has been punished enough by the total ruin of his political position and the universal contempt of all parties for his betrayal. The collapse of the Baden movement is of little consequence. The 13th June in Paris and Gorgey's refusal to march on Vienna put an end to any hopes that Baden and the Palatinate still had, even if the movement had been successfully transplanted to Hesse, Wurttemberg and Franconia. One would have fallen more honourably, but one would still have fallen. But what the revolutionary party will never forgive Herr Brentano, what it will always remember against the cowardly Baden petty bourgeoisie which supported him, is their direct responsibility for the death of those shot in Karlsruhe, in Freiburg and in Rastatt and of the countless and nameless victims silently executed by the Prussians with the help of typhus in the Rastatt casemates.

In the second issue of this Revue I will describe the conditions in the Palatinate and, to conclude, the Baden-Palatinate campaign.

III. The Palatinate

From Karlsruhe we went to the Palatinate [Marx and Engels left Karlsruhe for the Palatinate on May 24, 1849.–Ed] first stopping at Speyer where d'Ester and the Provisional Government were said to be. They had, however, already left for Kaiserslautern, where the government finally took up its seat at what it considered to be the "strategically best located point in the Palatinate". In its stead we found Willich and his volunteers in Speyer. With a corps of a few hundred men he was holding in check the garrisons of Landau and Germersheim, altogether over 4,000 men, cutting their lines of supply and harassing them in every possible way. That very day he had attacked two companies of the Germersheim garrison with about eighty riflemen and driven them back into the fortress without firing a single shot. The next day we accompanied Willich to Kaiserslautern where we met d'Ester, the Provisional Government, and the very flower of German democracy. Here also there could, of course, be no question of official participation in the movement, which was quite alien to our party. So after a few days we went back to Bingen, were arrested on the way, in the company of several friends, by Hessian troops, on suspicion of being implicated in the uprising, transported to Darmstadt and from there to Frankfurt, where we were finally set free.

Shortly after this we left Bingen and Marx went with a mandate from the Democratic Central Committee to Paris, where a crucial event was about to take place, as representative of the German revolutionary party to the French social-democrats. I returned to Kaiserslautern to live there for the time being as a simple political refugee and perhaps later, should a suitable opportunity offer itself, take up at the outbreak of fighting the only position that the Neue Rheinische Zeitung could take up in this movement: that of soldier.

Anyone who has seen the Palatinate even once will understand that in this wine-producing and wine-loving province any movement inevitably assumes a most cheerful character. The ponderous, pedantic, Old-Bavarian beer-souls had at long last been shaken off and merry Palatinate wine-bibbers appointed in their place. One had finally seen the last of that pompous pettifoggery practised by the Bavarian police which was so delightfully parodied in the otherwise dull pages of the Fliegende Blätter and which lay more heavily than anything else on the hearts of the gay people of the Palatinate. The first revolutionary act of the people of the Palatinate was to restore the freedom of the taverns; the entire Palatinate was transformed into one enormous pot-house and the quantities of strong drink which were consumed "in the name of the people of the Palatinate" during those six weeks were beyond all calculation. Even though active participation in the movement in the Palatinate was nowhere near as widespread as in Baden, and even though there were many reactionary districts here, the entire population was as one in this general wine-bibbing and even the most reactionary philistine and peasant was carried along on the general wave of merriment.

One did not need an especially penetrating glance to recognise how bitterly the Prussian army was to disillusion these cheerful Palatinate souls in a few weeks' time. And yet the number of people in the Palatinate who did not revel in the most carefree manner could be counted on one's fingers. Scarcely anyone believed that the Prussians would come, but everyone was quite sure that if they did come they would be thrown out again with the greatest of ease. There was no trace here of that staunch gloominess whose motto "Ernst ist der Mann"[Seriousness above all things. –Ed] is engraved on the brow of every Baden people's militia officer and which still did not prevent all those wonderful things happening which I shall have to relate presently - that respectable solemnity which the philistine character of the movement in Baden had impressed on the majority of its participants. In the Palatinate people were only "serious" by the way. Here "enthusiasm" and "seriousness" only served to gloss over the universal jollity. But people were always "serious" and "enthusiastic" enough to believe themselves invincible before any power in the world, and especially the Prussian army; and if in the quiet hours of reflection a faint doubt raised its head, it was brushed aside with the irrefutable argument that even if it were true, one still should not say it. The longer the movement dragged on and the more undeniable and massive the concentration of Prussian battalions between Saarbrucken and Kreuznach, the more frequent became these doubts, and the more vehement the bluster, precisely among the doubters and the timid, about the invincibility of a "people enraptured with its freedom", as the people of the Palatinate were called. This bluster soon grew into a regular soporific system which, encouraged only too readily by the government, had the effect of relaxing all work on defence measures and exposing everyone who opposed it to the danger of arrest as a reactionary.

This carefree attitude, this bluster about "enthusiasm" carrying all before it, in view of its minute material resources and the tiny corner of land where it asserted itself, provided the comic side of the Palatinate "uprising", and gave the handful of people whose advanced views and independent position permitted a detached judgment more than enough cause for hilarity.

The whole outward appearance of the movement in the Palatinate was cheerful, carefree and spontaneous. Whereas in Baden every newly appointed second lieutenant, in the regular army or the people's militia, laced himself into a heavy uniform and paraded with silver epaulettes which later, on the day of the battle, immediately found their way into his pockets, people in the Palatinate were much more sensible. As soon as the great heat of the first days of June made itself felt all the worsted coats, waistcoats and cravats disappeared to make way for a light tunic. It seemed as if all the old unsociable constraints had been thrown off along with the old bureaucracy. People dressed in a completely free-and-easy fashion, dictated solely by comfort and the season of the year; and together with differentiation in clothing disappeared in a moment every other differentiation in social intercourse. All social classes came together in the same public places and in this unrestrained intercourse a socialist dreamer would have glimpsed the dawn of universal brotherhood.

As the Palatinate, so its Provisional Government. It consisted almost exclusively of genial wine-bibbers, who were never so astonished as when they suddenly found themselves having to be the Provisional Government of their Bacchus-beloved fatherland. And yet there is no denying that these laughing regents conducted themselves better and accomplished relatively more than their Baden neighbours under the leadership of the "staunch-minded" Brentano. They were at least well-intentioned and in spite of their carousing had a more sober understanding than the philistine-serious gentlemen in Karlsruhe; and hardly any of them became angry if one laughed at their easy-going fashion of making revolution and their impotent little decrees.

The Provisional Government of the Palatinate could not get anything done as long as it was left in the lurch by the Baden government. And it completely fulfilled its obligations towards Baden. It sent envoy after envoy and made one concession after another solely in order to come to an understanding, but all in vain. Herr Brentano was obdurate.

While the Baden government found everything ready at hand, the Palatinate government found nothing. It had no money, no weapons, a number of reactionary districts and two enemy fortresses on its territory. France at once banned the export of arms to Baden and the Palatinate, and all arms dispatched thither were impounded by Prussia and Hesse. The government of the Palatinate sent agents forthwith to France and Belgium to buy up arms and send them back; the arms were purchased but they never arrived. The government can be reproached with not proceeding with sufficient energy in the matter and in particular with failing to organise the smuggling in of rifles through the large number of contrabandists along the frontier; the greater blame, however, lies with its agents, who acted very negligently and in part allowed themselves to be fobbed off with empty promises instead of getting the French arms at least as far as Saargemund and Lauterburg.

As far as funds were concerned, not much could be done with bank-notes in the little Palatinate. When the government found itself in pecuniary embarrassment it at least had the courage to take refuge in a forced loan on a progressive, albeit gently graduated, scale.

The only reproaches which can be made against the Palatinate government are that in its feeling of impotence it allowed itself to be too much infected by the universal light-heartedness and the related illusions about its own security; and that therefore, instead of energetically setting in motion the admittedly limited means of defending the state, it preferred to rely on the victory of the Montagne in Paris, the taking of Vienna by the Hungarians or even on actual miracles which were to happen somewhere or other to save the Palatinate –uprisings in the Prussian army, etc. Hence the remissness in procuring arms in a country where even a thousand serviceable muskets more or less would have made an infinite amount of difference and where finally, on the day the Prussians marched in, the first and last consignment of forty rifles arrived from abroad, namely from Switzerland. Hence the frivolous selection of civil and military commissaries, who consisted mainly of the most incompetent and confused dreamers, and the retention of so many old officials and of all the judges. Hence finally the neglect of all the means, even those immediately at hand, of harassing and perhaps taking Landau. To this question I shall return later.

Behind the Provisional Government stood d'Ester, like a sort of secret General Secretary or, as Herr Brentano put it, like a "red camarilla which surrounded the moderate government of Kaiserslautern". Moreover, this "red camarilla" included other German democrats too, in particular Dresden refugees. In d'Ester the Palatinate regents found that broad administrative vision which they lacked, together with a revolutionary understanding which impressed them because it always confined itself to what was immediately at hand, to that which was unquestionably practicable, and was therefore never at a loss for detailed measures. Because of this d'Ester acquired a significant influence and the unconditional confidence of the government. If even he at times took the movement too seriously and thought for example that he could achieve something worthwhile through the introduction of his for the moment totally unsuitable municipal regulations, it is none the less certain that d'Ester impelled the Provisional Government to each comparatively vigorous step and in particular always had appropriate solutions at hand when it came to conflicts over details.

If in Rhenish Prussia reactionary and revolutionary classes stood facing each other from the very outset and if in Baden a class which was initially in raptures about the movement, the petty bourgeoisie, gradually allowed itself at the approach of danger to be won over first into indifference and later into hostility towards the movement it itself had provoked, in the Palatinate it was not so much particular classes of the population as particular districts which, governed by local interests, declared themselves against the movement, some from the first and others little by little. Certainly the townspeople of Speyer were reactionary from the start; in Kaiserslautern, Neustadt, Zweibrucken, etc., they became so with the passage of time; but the main strength of the reactionary party was to be found in agricultural districts spread over the whole of the Palatinate. This confused configuration of the parties could only have been eliminated by one measure: a direct attack on the private property invested in mortgages and mortgage-usury, in favour of the debt-ridden peasants who had been sucked dry by the usurers. But this single measure, which would immediately have given the whole of the rural population a stake in the uprising, presupposes a much larger territory and much more developed social conditions in the towns than is the case in the Palatinate. It was only feasible at the beginning of the insurrection, simultaneously with an extension of the uprising to the Moselle and the Eifel, where the same conditions obtain on the land and find their complement in the industrial development of the Rhenish towns. And the movement was directed outwards just as little in the Palatinate as it was in Baden.

Under these conditions the government had only limited means of combating the reactionary districts: isolated military expeditions into the refractory villages, arrests, especially of the Catholic priests, who placed themselves at the head of the resistance, and so on; appointment of energetic civil and military commissaries, and last of all propaganda. The expeditions, mostly of a very comical nature, only had a momentary effect, the propaganda none at all, and the commissaries mostly committed blunder upon blunder in their pompous ineptitude or confined themselves to the consumption of vast quantities of Palatinate wine and the inevitable bluster in the taverns.

Amongst the propagandists, the commissaries and the officials of the central administration, the democrats, of whom even more had gathered in the Palatinate than in Baden, played a very considerable role. Here, in addition to the refugees from Dresden and from Rhenish Prussia, a number of more or less enthusiastic "men of the people" had turned up to consecrate themselves to the service of the fatherland. The government of the Palatinate, which unlike its Karlsruhe counterpart understood instinctively that the resources of the Palatinate alone were not equal to the demands even of this movement, received them gladly. It was impossible to spend more than two hours in the Palatinate without being offered a dozen of the most varied and on the whole very honourable posts. The democrats, who saw in the Palatinate-Baden movement not a local uprising which was becoming daily more local and more insignificant, but the glorious dawn of the glorious uprising of all Germany's democrats, and who everywhere in the movement saw their more or less petty bourgeois tendency prevailing, fell over themselves to accept these offers. At the same time, however, each felt he owed it to himself only to accept a post which satisfied his naturally very lofty pretensions of the part he should play in an all-German movement. At first this was possible. Whoever came along was at once put in charge of an office or made a government commissary, a major or a lieutenant-colonel. Little by little, however, the number of rivals increased, the positions became fewer and there started a petty, philistine place-hunting which presented the disinterested spectator with a highly diverting spectacle. I imagine I do not have to underline the fact that in this strange hotchpotch of industry and confusion, importunacy and incompetence which the Neue Rheinische Zeitung has so often had occasion to wonder at among the German democrats, the officials and propagandists of the Palatinate faithfully mirrored the whole unpleasant medley.

As a matter of course I also was offered any number of civil and military positions, positions which in a proletarian movement I would not have hesitated for a moment to accept. As things were, I turned them all down. The only thing I agreed to was to write some agitational articles for a small paper of which the Provisional Government had large quantities distributed in the Palatinate. I knew that this too would come to nothing, but I finally accepted the offer upon the urgent request of d'Ester and several members of the government in order at least to demonstrate my good will. Since I naturally felt few constraints, exception was taken to the very second article I wrote because it was too "inflammatory"; I wasted no words, took the article back, tore it up in d'Ester's presence and that was the end of the matter.

The best of the foreign democrats in the Palatinate were, incidentally, those who had come fresh from the struggle in their home provinces: the Saxons and the Rhenish Prussians. The handful of Saxons were mostly employed in the central offices, where they worked hard and distinguished themselves by their administrative knowledge, their calm, clear understanding and their lack of any pretensions or illusions. The Rhinelanders, mostly workers, joined the army en masse; the few who initially worked in the offices later also took up the musket.

In the offices of the central administration in the Fruchthalle at Kaiserslautern there was a very easy-going atmosphere. What with the general laisser aller, the complete lack of any form of active intervention in the movement and the uncommonly large number of officials, there was on the whole little to do. It was a matter of hardly more than the day-to-day business of administration, and this was disposed of tant bien que mal. Unless a courier arrived, some patriotic citizen came with a profound proposal concerning the salvation of the fatherland, some peasant brought a complaint or some village sent a deputatlon, most of the offices had nothing to do. People yawned and chatted, told anecdotes and made bad jokes and strategic plans and went from one office to another trying as well as they could to kill time. The main topics of conversation were naturally the political events of the day, about which the most contradictory rumours were circulating. The intelligence service was greatly neglected. The old post-office officials had almost without exception stayed at their posts and were needless to say very unreliable. Alongside them a "field-post" was set up, superintended by the Palatinate Chevaulegers who had come over to our side. The commandants and the commissaries of the border areas paid not the slightest heed to what was happening on the other side of the border. The government took only the Frankfurter Journal and the Karlsruher Zeitung and I still remember with delight the astonishment it gave rise to when I discovered in the officers' club, in an issue of the Kolnische Zeitung which had arrived several days before, the news of the concentration of 27 Prussian battalions, 9 batteries and 9 regiments of cavalry, together with their exact location between Saarbrucken and Kreuznach.

At last I come to the main point, the military organisation. About three thousand Palatinate soldiers from the Bavarian army had defected with bag and baggage. At the same time a number of volunteers, from the Palatinate and elsewhere, had placed themselves under arms. In addition to that the Provisional Government issued a decree calling up the first age group, in the first instance all unmarried men between the ages of eighteen and thirty. This call-up, however, only took place on paper, owing partly to the incompetence and negligence of the military commissaries, partly to the lack of arms and partly to the indolence of the government itself. Wherever the lack of arms was the main obstacle to the whole defence, as it was in the Palatinate, every means had to be used to muster arms. If none were forthcoming from abroad, then it was necessary to fetch out every musket, every rifle and every sporting-gun which could be unearthed in the Palatinate and place them in the hands of the active fighters. However, there were not only large numbers of private weapons at hand, but on top of that at least another 1,500 to 2,000 rifles, not counting carbines, in the hands of the various civic militia units. One could at least have demanded the handing over of private arms and rifles in the hands of those civic militiamen who were not obliged to join the first call-up and did not intend to volunteer. But nothing of the sort happened. After much insistence a resolution along these lines was finally adopted regarding the arms held by the civic militia, but never put into effect the Kaiserslautern civic militia over three hundred philistines strong, paraded at the Fruchthalle every day in uniform, shouldering their arms, and the Prussians, when they marched in, had the pleasure of disarming these gentlemen. And thus it was everywhere.

In the official newspaper an appeal was issued to the forestry officials and the keepers of the woods, asking them to report to Kaiserslautern in order to form rifle corps; of these it was the forestry officials who did not turn up.

Throughout the whole land scythes were forged, or at least a call went out to that effect; a few scythes were actually produced. In the Rhenish Hessian corps at Kirchheimbolanden I saw several casks of scythe-blades being loaded and sent to Kaiserslautern. The journey takes roughly seven to eight hours; four days later the government was forced to abandon Kaiserslautern to the Prussians and the scythes had still not arrived. If the scythes had been given to those civic militiamen not yet mobilised, the so-called second age group, as compensation for giving up their guns, then the affair would have made sense; instead of this the lazy philistines kept their percussion-guns and the young recruits were expected to march against the Prussian cannon and needle-muskets with scythes.

While there was a general lack of fire-arms, there was by contrast a just as remarkable profusion of cavalry sabres; those who could not lay hands on a gun strapped on all the more eagerly a clattering broadsword, believing that by merely so doing they stamped themselves as officers. Precisely in Kaiserslautern these self-stamped officers were too numerous to count and the streets rang day and night to the clatter of their fearful weapons. It was the students in particular who by this new manner of intimidating the enemy and by their pretension of forming an academic legion entirely of cavalry on foot rendered great service for the saving of the fatherland.

In addition there was half a squadron of defected Chevaulegers at hand; however, they were so scattered due to their work for the field-post, etc., that they never came to form a special combat corps. The artillery, under the command of "Lieutenant-Colonel" Anneke, consisted of a few three-pounders whose horses I do not recall having ever seen, and a number of mortars. Lying in front of the Fruchthalle at Kaiserslautern was the most beautiful collection of old iron cannon-barrels one could ever wish to see. Needless to say, most of them remained lying there unused. The two biggest were laid on colossal home-made gun-carriages and carried off. The Baden government finally sold the Palatinate a shot-out six-pound battery together with some ammunition; but without a team of horses, a crew of sufficient ammunition. The ammunition was as far as possible manufactured; the team of horses and riders was made up tant bien que mal with requisitioned peasants and horses; for the crew a few old Bavarian artillerymen were gathered together to train men in the ponderous and complicated Bavarian drill.

The top leadership of military affairs was in the worst hands. Herr Reichardt, who had taken over the military department in the Provisional Government, was active, but lacked vigour and professional knowledge. The first commander-in-chief of the military forces of the Palatinate, the enterprising Fenner von Fenneberg, was soon dismissed on account of his ambiguous conduct; he was temporarily replaced by Raquilliet, a Polish officer. At last it was learnt that Mieroslawski was to take over the supreme command of Baden and the Palatinate and that the command of the troops of the Palatinate was to be entrusted to "General" Sznayde, also a Pole.

General Sznayde arrived. He was a small, fat man, who looked more like an elderly bon vivant than a "Menelaus, caller to battle"." General Sznayde took over the command with a great deal of gravity. He had a report made on the state of affairs and at once issued a whole series of orders of the day. Most of these orders related to uniform (tunics and marks of rank for officers – tricolour armbands or sashes), or appeals to veteran cavalrymen and riflemen to come forward as volunteers (appeals which had already been made ten times without success) and things of a similar nature. He himself set a good example by immediately procuring a hussar tunic with tricolour braid, in order to inspire the army with respect. The really practical and important things in his orders of the day were merely repetitions of orders long since issued and proposals already made earlier by the handful of good officers present, but never carried out, and which only now, through the authority of a commanding general, could b be put into effect. As for the rest, "General" Sznayde placed his trust in God and Mieroslawski and dedicated himself to the pleasures of the table, the only reasonable thing that a so totally incompetent individual could do.

Amongst the other officers in Kaiserslautern was the uniquely capable Techow, the same Techow who as a Prussian first lieutenant with Natzmer and gave the Berlin arsenal over to the people after having taken it by storm and, sentenced to fifteen years detention in a fortress, escaped from Magdeburg. Techow, chief of the Palatinate general staff, proved in all things to be knowledgeable, circumspect and calm, perhaps a little too calm to be trusted to make the rapid decisions on which everything often depends on the battlefield. "Lieutenant-Colonel" Anneke proved to he incompetent and indolent in organising the artillery, though he rendered good services in the ordnance shops. At Ubstadt he won no laurels as commander-in-chief and from Rastatt, where Mieroslawski had put him in charge of the materials for the siege, he escaped across the Rhine under strange circumstances already before the investment, leaving his horses behind.

There was not much to be said for the officers in the various districts either. A number of Poles had appeared, some in advance of Sznayde and some with him. As the best of the Polish emigres were already in Hungary, one may suspect that these Polish officers were a pretty mixed bunch. Most of them made haste to obtain an appropriate number of saddle-horses and give out a few orders, paying only scanty attention to their execution. They tended to lord it over people and wanted to treat the peasants of the Palatinate like cringing Polish serfs. They were not familiar with the country, the language or the command, and hence accomplished little or nothing at all as military commissaries, i.e. organisers of battalions. In the course of the campaign they soon strayed into Sznayde's headquarters and shortly afterwards, when Sznayde was assailed and roughly handled by his soldiers, disappeared altogether. The better ones among them arrived too late to be able to organise anything.

There was not much talent of any use among the German officers either. The Rhenish Hessian corps, though it included elements who could have developed militarily, was under the leadership of a certain Hausner, a completely useless man, and under the even more lamentable moral and political influence of the two heroes Zitz and Bamberger, who later in Karlsruhe extricated themselves so successfully from the situation. In the Palatinate hinterland a former Prussian officer, Schimmelpfennig, organised a corps.

The only two officers who had already distinguished themselves in active service before the Prussian invasion were Willich and Blenker.

With a small corps of volunteers Willich took over the observation and later the siege of Landau and Germersheim. A company of students, a company of workers who had lived with him in Besancon, three weak companies of gymnasts (from Landau, Nerrstadt and Kaiserlautern), two companies formed from volunteers from the surrounding villages and lastly a company of Rhenish Prussians armed with scythes, most of them fugitives from the Prum and Elberfeld uprisings, gradually mustered under his command. In the end they amounted to between 700 and 800 men, certainly the most reliable soldiers in the whole Palatinate; most of the NCOs had seen service and some of them had been familiarised in Algeria with guerrilla warfare. With this scanty force Willich took up a position halfway between Landau and Germersheim, organised the civic militia in the villages, using them to guard the roads and do outpost duty, beat back all the sorties from the two fortresses in spite of the superior forces, in particular of the Germersheim garrison, blockaded Landau so effectively that almost all its supplies were intercepted, cut off its water-supplies, dammed up the Queich so that all the fortress cellars were flooded, and yet there was a lack of drinking-water, and harassed the garrison every night with patrols which not only cleared out the abandoned outworks and auctioned the guardroom stoves they found there for five guilders each, but also pushed forward even into the fortress trenches and frequently caused the garrison to open fire on a corporal and two men with a cannonade of twenty-four-pounders which was as intense as it was harmless. This was by far the most brilliant period during the existence of Willich's volunteer corps. If only a few howitzers had been at his disposal at that time, or even only field-guns, according to the reports of the spies who daily went in and out of Landau, the fortress, with its demoralised, weak garrison and its rebellious inhabitants, would have been taken in a few days. Even without artillery a continuation of the siege would have compelled capitulation in a week. In Kaiserslautern were two seven-pound howitzers, good enough to set fire to a few houses in Landau during the night. Had they been on the spot, then the unheard of, the taking of a fortress like Landau with a few field-guns, would have become a probability. Every day I preached to the general staff in Kaiserslautern the necessity of at least making the attempt. To no avail. One of the howitzers stayed in Kaiserslautern and the other found its way to Homburg, where it almost fell into the hands of the Prussians. Both came over the Rhine without having fired a shot.

"Colonel" Blenker, however, distinguished himself even more than Willich. "Colonel" Blenker, a former travelling salesman for a wine-firm, who had been in Greece as a philhellenist and later set himself up as a wine-merchant in Worms, can in any case be numbered among the most outstanding military personalities of the whole glorious campaign. Always on horseback, surrounded by a numerous staff, big, strong, with a defiant face, an impressive Hecker-type beard, a stentorian voice and all the other characteristics that go to make up a South German "man of the people", and among which, as everybody knows, intelligence does not exactly feature, "Colonel" Blenker gave the impression of a man at the mere sight of whom Napoleon would have to sneak away, a man worthy to figure in that refrain with which we opened these accounts. "Colonel" Blenker felt he had it in himself to overthrow the German princes even without "Hecker, Struve, Zitz and Blum" and immediately set about the task. It was his intention to fight the war not as a soldier but as a travelling wine-salesman, and to this end he resolved to conquer Landau. Willich was not yet there at that time. Blenker got together everything at hand in the Palatinate, both regular troops and people's militia, organised foot-soldiers, cavalry and artillery that had all been jumbled up together, and moved off in the direction of Landau. A council of war was held in front of the fortress, the assault columns formed up and the position of the artillery fixed. The artillery, however, consisted of a few mortars whose calibre varied from 1/2 lb. to 1 3/8 lb., and was brought up on a hay-cart which at the same time served to carry the ammunition. The ammunition for these various mortars consisted of one, I repeat one, 24 lb. cannon-ball; there was no question of any gunpowder. After everything had been organised, everyone moved forward full of contempt for death. The glacis was reached without meeting any resistance; the march continued, right up to the gate. At the head were the soldiers who had defected from Landau. A few soldiers appeared on the ramparts to parley. They were called upon to open the gate. There began already a quite good-natured exchange and everything appeared to be going according to wish. All at once a cannon-shot rang out from the ramparts, case-shot whistled over the heads of the assailants and in no time the whole heroic army broke into wild flight together with their Palatinate Prince Eugene. Everyone was running, running, running, with such irresistible momentum that the couple of cannon-balls loosed off soon afterwards from the ramparts were already no longer whistling over the heads of the fleeing men, but only over their discarded guns, cartridge-pouches and knapsacks. A few hours away from Landau a halt was finally made and the army was gathered together again and led home by Herr "Colonel" Blenker, without the keys of Landau but none the less proud for that. Such is the story of the conquest, of Landau with three mortars and a 24 lb. cannon-ball that never happened.

The case-shot was fired off in all haste by some Bavarian officers, when they saw that their soldiers wanted to open the gate. The gun was brought off the target by soldiers themselves, and it was because of this that nobody was hit. But when the Landau garrison saw what an effect this random shot had, there was naturally no more talk of surrender.

Hero Blenker, however, was not the sort of man to take such a piece of bad luck lying down. He now resolved to conquer Worms. He moved up from Frankenthal, where he commanded a battalion. The handful of Hessian soldiers stationed in Worms made themselves scarce and hero Blenker marched into his home town with drums beating and trumpets sounding. After the liberation of Worms had been celebrated with a solemn luncheon, the main ceremony began, that is, the rendering of an oath of allegiance to the Imperial Constitution to twenty Hessian soldiers who had stayed behind sick. During the night after this prodigious success, however, the imperial troops under Peucker brought up artillery on the right bank of the Rhine and gave the victorious conquerors a most violent awakening with the early thunder of cannon. There was no mistake about it: the imperial troops were sending over round shot and shells. Without uttering a word hero Blenker gathered together his brave men, and stole away from Worms back to Frankenthal. The muse will report further particulars of his later heroic deeds in the appropriate place.

While in the districts the motliest collection of characters were each in their own way giving themselves vent and the soldiers and people's militiamen, instead of drilling, sat in the taverns and sang, the gallant officers were in Kaiserslautern busy thinking up the most profound strategic plans. It was a question of nothing less than the possibility of holding a small province like the Palatinate, accessible from several sides, with almost wholly imaginary forces against an extremely real army of over 30,000 men and 60 cannon. Precisely because in such a situation every project was equally useless and equally absurd, and precisely because all the conditions for any strategic plan were absent, precisely for those reasons these profound military men, these thinking heads of the Palatinate army, were all the more resolved to concoct some strategic miracle which would bar to the Prussians the way into the Palatinate. Every freshly baked lieutenant, every sabre-trailer from the academic legion finally established under the auspices of Herr Sznayde, with the rank of lieutenant for every member, every administrative pen-pusher, stared pensively at the map of the Palatinate in the hope of finding the strategic philosophers stone. It is easy to imagine the amusing results this had. The Hungarian method of warfare was especially popular. From "General" Sznayde down to the as yet least recognised Napoleon in the army one could constantly hear the phrase: "We must do as Kossuth did, we must give up a piece of our territory and retreat, here or there, into the mountains or onto the plain according to the situation." "We must do as Kossuth did," the cry went up in every tavern. "We must do as Kossuth did," echoed every corporal, every soldier and every street-urchin. "We must do as Kossuth did," echoed the Provisional Government goodnaturedly, for they knew better than anyone else that it was best not to meddle in these things, and in the long run it was all the same to them how it was done. "We must do as Kossuth did, or we are lost."– The Palatinate and Kossuth!

Before I go on to describe the campaign itself, I must briefly mention a matter which has been touched on in various newspapers: my momentary arrest in Kirchheim. A few days before the Prussians marched in I accompanied my friend Moll on a mission he had undertaken to Kirchheimbolanden, on the border. Here was stationed a part of the Rhenish Hessian corps, in which we had acquaintances. We were sitting in the evening with these and several other volunteers from the corps in an inn. Among the volunteers were a number of those serious, enthusiastic "men of action" of whom mention has been made on more than one occasion and who foresaw no difficulties in beating any army in the world, with few arms and much enthusiasm. These are men whose experience of the military does not extend beyond the changing of the guards, who never pay the slightest heed to the material means of attaining a given purpose and who for this reason mostly experience such a shattering disillusion in their first battle, as I was later to observe on more than one occasion, that they make off as fast as their legs can carry them. I asked one such hero if he really intended to defeat the Prussians with the thirty thousand cavalry sabres and three and a half thousand fire-arms, including several rusty carbines, available in the Palatinate, and I was in proper train to enjoy the holy indignation of a man of action wounded in his noblest enthusiasm when in stepped the guard and declared me under arrest. At the same time I saw two men rush upon me from behind foaming with rage. One of them announced that he was Civil Commissary Müller and the other was Herr Greiner, the only member of the government with whom I had never entered into more intimate contact, on account of his frequent absence from Kaiserslautern (he had been turning his wealth into movable property on the quiet) and his suspicious-looking, snivellingly sullen appearance. At the same time an old acquaintance of mine, [Victor Schily.–Ed.] a captain in the Rhenish Hessian corps, stood up and declared that if I were to be arrested, he, together with a considerable number of the best men in the corps, would leave it at once. Moll and others were for defending me there and then with force. Those present split into two parties, the scene promised to become interesting and I declared I would naturally allow myself to be arrested with pleasure: it would finally be clear for all to see what the colour of the Palatinate movement was. I went with the guard.

The next morning, after a comical interrogation which Herr Zitz put me through, I was handed over to the civil commissary and by him to a gendarme. The gendarme, on whom it had been impressed to treat me as a spy, handcuffed me and led me on foot to Kaiserslautern, accused of disparaging the uprising of the Palatinate people and inciting against the government, which, by the way, I had not mentioned. On the way I succeeded in getting a carriage. In Kaiserslautern, where Moll had hurried on ahead of me, I found the government highly bewildered at the valiant Greiner's bevue and even more bewildered at the treatment meted out to me. Needless to say I carried on quite a bit at the gentlemen in the presence of the gendarme. Since no report from Herr Greiner had yet arrived, I was offered freedom on parole. I refused to give my parole and went into the cantonal gaol–without an escort, which condition was agreed to at d'Ester's request. D'Ester declared that he could stay no longer after such treatment had been meted out to a party comrade. Tzschirner, who arrived just at that time, also took a very resolute stand. The same evening the news spread throughout the town and everyone who belonged to the resolute trend immediately sided with me. On top of that, news arrived that disturbances had broken out in the Rhenish Hessian corps on account of this affair and that a large part of the corps intended to disband. It would have taken less than that to demonstrate to the provisional regents, in whose company I had been daily, the necessity of giving me satisfaction. After I had spent 24 quite amusing hours in gaol, d'Ester and Schmitt came to see me; Schmitt explained to me that I was unconditionally free and that the government hoped that I would not be deterred from continuing to take part in the movement. Besides this, I was told, the order had been given that in future no political prisoner was to be brought in handcuffed, and the investigation against the investigator of this infamous treatment as well as of the arrest and its cause was proceeding. After the government had taken these steps to give me all the satisfaction that it could for the moment, since Herr Greiner had still not sent in a report, the solemn faces on both sides were discarded and the company had a few drinks together in the Donnersberg. The next day Tzschirner departed for the Rhenish Hessian corps in order to appease it and I gave him a short note to take with him. When Herr Greiner returned he made such a snivelling exhibition of himself that his colleagues gave him a doubly severe dressing-down.

At the same time the Prussians marched in from Homburg. Since things thus took an interesting turn, since I had no intention of letting slip the opportunity of gaining some military education, and lastly since the Neue Rheinische Zeitung also had to be represented honoris causa in the army of Baden and the Palatinate, I too buckled on a broadsword and went off to join Willich.

IV. To Die for the Republic!

Nur im Sturz von sechsunddreissig Thronen

Kann die deutsche Republik gedeihn;

Darum, Bruder, sturzt sie ohne Schonen,

Setzet Gut und Blut und Leben ein.

Fur Republik zu sterben,

Ist ein Los, hehr und gross, ist das Ziel unsres Muts!

[Only through the overthrow of thirty-six thrones

Can the German republic prosper;

Therefore, brothers, overthrow them without mercy,

And stake property, life and limb.

To die for the Republic

Is a lofty and great destiny, the aim of our courage.]

Thus sang the volunteers on the train when I was on my way to Neustadt to seek out Willich's temporary headquarters.

So from now on to die for the republic was the aim of my courage or at least was supposed to be. It seemed strange to me to have this new aim. I looked at the volunteers, young, handsome, lively lads. They did not at all look as if death for the republic was just now the aim of their courage.

From Neustadt I travelled on a requisitioned peasant's cart to Offenbach, between Landau and Germersheim, where Willich was still to be found. Just the other side of Edenkoben I came across the first sentries, posted by the peasants on his orders, who were from now on to be found at the entrance and exit of every village and at every cross-road and who allowed nobody through without a written authorisation of the insurgent authorities. It was clear that one was getting a little nearer to war conditions. Late in the night I arrived at Offenbach and at once took up duties as Willich's adjutant.

In the course of that day (it was June 13) a small part of Willich's corps had fought a brilliant engagement. A few days previously Willich had got reinforcements for his volunteer corps in the shape of a Baden people's militia battalion, the Dreher-Obermuller Battalion, and had moved up some fifty men of this battalion to Bellheim against Germersheim. To their rear, in Knittelsheim, there was still a company of volunteers together with a few scythe-men. A battalion of Bavarians with two cannon and a squadron of Chevaulegers made a sortie. The Badeners fled without putting up any resistance; only one of them, overtaken by three mounted gendarmes, defended himself furiously until finally, hacked to pieces by sabre blows, he fell and was finished off by his assailants. When the fugitives arrived at Knittelsheim the captain [Loreck –Ed] stationed there set out against the Bavarians with a little less than fifty men, some of whom were still armed with scythes. He expertly divided up his men into several detachments and advanced in extended order with such determination that after two hours' fighting the Bavarians, who were over ten times more numerous, were driven back into the village abandoned by the Badeners and finally, when some reinforcements arrived from Willich's corps, thrown out of the village again. They retreated with a loss of some twenty dead and wounded to Germersheim. I am sorry to say that I cannot give the name of this bold and talented young officer, since he is probably not yet in safety. His men had only five wounded, none seriously. One of these five, a French volunteer, had been shot in the upper arm before he himself had fired a shot. Nevertheless he fired all his sixteen cartridges and when his wound prevented him from loading his gun he got one of the scythe-men to load it for him so that he could just fire. The next day we went to Bellheim to look at the battlefield and make new arrangements. The Bavarians had fired at our skirmishers with round shot and case-shot but hit nothing except the twigs on the trees, with which the whole road was strewn, and the tree behind which the captain was standing.

The Dreher-Obermuller Battalion was now present in full strength with the intention of establishing itself firmly in Bellheim and the surrounding area. It was a splendid, well-armed battalion and the officers especially, with their turned-up moustaches and their tanned faces full of seriousness and enthusiasm, really did look like man-eaters endowed with reason. Fortunately, they were not so dangerous, as we were to become more and more aware.

To my amazement I discovered that there was almost no ammunition whatever available, that most men only had five or six cartridges, and in a few cases twenty, and that the stock in hand would not be enough even to replenish the now completely empty cartridge-pouches of the men who had been under fire the day before. I at once volunteered to go to Kaiserslautern and fetch ammunition, and set out the same evening.

The peasants' carts were slow; the necessity of requisitioning new carts at regular stages, unfamiliarity with the roads, etc., also helped to slow things down. It was daybreak when I arrived at Maikammer, about halfway to Neustadt. Here I came across a detachment of Pirmasens people's militia with the four cannon sent to Homburg, which in Kaiserslautern were already believed lost. By way of Zweibrucken and Pirmasens, and then by the most wretched mountain tracks, they had succeeded in getting as far as here, where they at last came out into the plain. The gentlemen from Prussia were in no great hurry to pursue them, even though our men from Pirmasens, excited by exertions, night marches and wine, believed they were right on their heels.

A few hours later (it was on June 15) I arrived at Neustadt. The whole population was on the streets, among them soldiers and volunteers, as all people's militiamen in tunics were indiscriminately called in the Palatinate. Carts, cannon and horses blocked every approach. In short, I had landed up in the middle of the retreat of the entire Palatinate army. The Provisional Government, General Sznayde, the general staff, the office staff, everyone was there. Kaiserslautern had been abandoned, the Fruchthalle, the "Donnersberg", the beerhouses, the "strategically best located point in the Palatinate", and for the moment Neustadt had become the centre of the Palatinate's confusion, which reached its climax only now that it came to fighting. Suffice it to say, I made myself acquainted with the facts, took as many kegs of gunpowder, lead-shot and ready-made cartridges as I could (what further use was this ammunition to an army which had gone to pieces without even a battle?), after countless vain attempts finally got hold of a wain in a neighbouring village and left in the evening with my booty and a small escort.

But before doing so I went to Herr Sznayde and asked if he did not have any message for Willich. The old gourmand gave me a few meaningless instructions and added with an air of importance: "You see, we are now doing just as Kossuth did."

How the Palatinate came to do just as Kossuth did, however, was to be explained as follows. In the heyday of the "rebellion", that is to say, on the day before the Prussians marched in, the Palatinate had roughly 5,000 to 6,000 men armed with weapons of all sorts and about 1,000 to 1,500 scythe-men. These 5,000 to 6,000 possible combatants consisted firstly of Willich's and the Rhenish Hessian volunteer corps and secondly of the so-called people's militia. In the area covered by each provincial commissariat was a military commissary whose task was to organise a battalion. The defected soldiers belonging to each district were to serve as nucleus and as instructors. This system of mixing regular troops with raw recruits, though it could have had excellent results during an active campaign with strict discipline and continual military exercise, ruined everything under the circumstances. The battalions did not materialise owing to lack of arms; the soldiers, having nothing to do, neglected all discipline and military bearing and for the most part melted away. Eventually a battalion of sorts came together in some districts but in the others only armed crowds existed. There was absolutely nothing to be done with the scythe-men; everywhere in the way and never really of any use, they were partly left with their respective battalions as a provisional appendage until such a time as guns could be acquired for them, and partly concentrated in a special corps under the half-crazy Captain Zinn. Citizen Zinn, the most perfect Shakespearean Pistol [character in Shakespeare's Henry V] one could ever meet, who on bolting from Landau under hero Blenker stumbled over his scabbard and broke it and afterwards swore blind that a "fiery 24 lb. cannon-ball" had rent it asunder, this same invincible Pistol had hitherto been employed in executions of fractionary villages. He had applied himself with great zeal to this office, so that the peasants held him and his corps in very great respect, but they gave him a sound thrashing every time they caught him by himself. On their way back from such trips the men had to beat their scythes to smithereens and when he arrived in Kaiserslautern he would relate murderous Falstaffiads about his fights with the peasants.

Since it was obvious that little could be accomplished with such forces, Mieroslawski, who only arrived at the Baden headquarters on the 10th, ordered the Palatinate troops to make a fighting withdrawal to the Rhine and if possible win the Rhine crossing at Mannheim; otherwise they were to go over to the right bank of the Rhine at Speyer or Knielingen and then defend the Rhine crossings from Baden. At the same time as this order, the news came in that the Prussians had penetrated the Palatinate from Saarbrucken and after a few musket-shots driven back towards Kaiserslautern the meagre forces we had drawn up at the border. At the same time all the more or less organised units were concentrating in the direction of Kaiserslautern and Neustadt; an unbounded confusion ensued and a large number of the recruits melted away. A young officer, Rakow, from the 1848 Schleswig-Holstein volunteer corps, went out with thirty men to round up the deserters and in the space of two days had rallied 1,400 of them. He formed them into a "Kaiserslautern Battalion" and led them until the end of the campaign.

The Palatinate, strategically speaking, is such a straightforward terrain that not even the Prussians could make any blunders here. Along the Rhine lies a valley four to five hours' journey across and completely free from any natural obstacles. In a comfortable three days' march the Prussians came from Kreuznach and Worms as far as Landau and Germersheim. The "Kaiserstrasse" leads over the mountainous hinterland of the Palatinate from Saargemund to Mainz, mostly on the mountain ridge or through a broad gully. Here too there are as good as no natural obstacles behind which a numerically weak and tactically unschooled army could hold out to any extent. Close by the Prussian border, near Homburg, there is at last an excellent road which leads from the "Kaiserstrasse" to Landau via Zweibriicken and Pirmasens, running partly through river valleys and partly over the ridge of the Vosges. It is true that this route presents greater difficulties, but it cannot be blocked with few troops and no artillery, especially when an enemy corps manoeuvres on the plain and can cut off the retreat via Landau and Bergzabern.

In the light of this, the Prussians' offensive was a very straightforward matter. The first thrust was from Saarbrucken against Homburg; from here one column marched directly on Kaiserslautern and the other on Landau via Pirmasens. Thereupon a second corps immediately attacked in the Rhine valley. In Kirchheimbolanden this corps met its first violent resistance from the Rhenish Hessians stationed there. The Mainz riflemen defended the castle garden with great doggedness and in spite of considerable losses. They were eventually outflanked and retreated. Seventeen of them fell into the hands of the Prussians. They were forthwith put up against trees and shot without further ado by these heroes of the "glorious army", who were drunk on schnaps. With this piece of villainy the Prussians began their "short but glorious campaign"[From the order issued by Frederick William IV on July 28, 1849, on the occasion of the end of the Baden-Palatinate campaign (Preussischer Staats-Anzeiger, Berlin, No. 21).–Ed.] in the Palatinate.

This meant that the whole northern half of the Palatinate was won and the link-up effected between the two main columns. Now they only needed to advance in the plain and relieve Landau and Germersheim to secure the rest of the Palatinate and capture all those corps that might still be holding out in the mountains.

There were some 30,000 Prussians in the Palatinate, equipped with numerous cavalry and artillery. On the plain, where the Prince of Prussia and Hirschfeld were pressing forward with the strongest corps, nothing stood between them and Neustadt except a few people's militia detachments, incapable of resistance and already half disbanded, and a section of the Rhenish Hessians. A swift march on Speyer and Germersheim, and all the 4,000 to 5,000 troops of the Palatinate concentrated or rather chaotically entangled at Neustadt and Landau would have been doomed, routed, scattered and captured. But the Prussian gentlemen, who were so active when it came to shooting unarmed prisoners, were extremely cautious about fighting and extremely somnolent in pursuit.

If throughout the campaign I am frequently forced to return to this decidedly strange lukewarmness which the Prussians and the other imperial troops displayed in attack as well as in pursuit, against an army mostly six times and never less than three times smaller, badly organised and in parts pitifully commanded, it should be understood that I am not blaming it on some singular cowardice on the part of the Prussian soldiers, all the less so since I had absolutely no illusions, as will already have become clear, that our troops were especially brave. Neither do I ascribe it, as reactionaries would do, to some sort of magnanimity or the desire to avoid the inconvenience of too many prisoners. The Prussian civil and military bureaucracy has from time immemorial gloried in gaining striking victories over weak enemies and taking its revenge on defenceless men in a frenzy of blood-lust. It did this also in Baden and the Palatinate. Proof: the executions by firing squad in Kirchheim, the night-time shootings in the Karlsruhe peasantry, the countless instances on all the battlefields of the wounded and those who had surrendered being butchered, the ill-treatment of the few who were taken prisoner, the murders by summary justice in Freiburg and Rastatt and lastly the slow, secret and therefore all the more inhuman killing of the Rastatt prisoners through ill-treatment, hunger, overcrowding in damp, suffocating dungeons and the typhus that resulted. The Prussians, lukewarm prosecution of the war was certainly rooted in cowardice, and indeed in that of the commanders. Quite apart from the slow, faint-hearted precision of our Prussian martinets and manoeuvre heroes, which is enough in itself to inhibit any bold move or quick decision, quite apart from the complicated service regulations intended to prevent in a roundabout way a recurrence of so many ignominious defeats–would the Prussians ever have conducted a war in a manner so insufferably boring for us and so downright disgraceful for them if they had been sure of their own men? Therein lay the key. Messrs the Generals knew that a third of their army consisted of recalcitrant army reserve regiments who after the first victory of the insurgent army would go over to it and very soon bring after them half the regular troops and in particular all the artillery. And it is not very difficult to see what the prospects would then have been for the House of Hohenzollern and the unimpaired crown.

In Maikammer, where I was forced to wait until the morning of the 16th for a new cart and escort, the army, which had set out from Neustadt very early in the morning, caught up with me again. The previous day there had still been talk of a march on Speyer, but this plan had evidently been abandoned and they were making directly for the Knielingen bridge. With fifteen Pirmasensers, half-wild peasant lads from the virgin forests of the Palatinate hinterland, I marched off. It was not until I reached the vicinity of Offenbach that I learned that Willich had marched off with all his troops to Frankweiler. a place situated to the north-west of Landau. I therefore turned round and arrived towards noon at Frankweiler. Here I found not only Willich, but once again the entire advanced guard of the Palatinate, which had taken the route to the west of Landau in order not to have to march between Landau and Germersheim. In the tavern Sat the Provisional Government with its officials, the general staff and the large numbers of democratic hangers-on who had attached themselves to both of these. General Sznayde was having breakfast. Everyone was rushing around in great confusion – in the inn the regents, the commandants and the hangers-on and in the street the soldiers. Gradually the main body of the army moved in: Herr Blenker, Herr Trocinski, Herr Strasser and whatever their names were, all mounted on horseback at the head of their valiant troops. The confusion grew and grew. Little by little it became possible to send individual corps further on in the direction of Impflingen and Kandel.

One would not guess from looking at it that this army was on the retreat. Disorder was from the very beginning as if at home in it, and even if the young warriors were already starting to grumble about the unaccustomed marching, that still did not stop them from carousing in the taverns to their hearts' content, talking big and threatening the Prussians with imminent extinction. Despite their certainty of victory, one regiment of cavalry with some horse-artillery would have sufficed to blow the whole merry company to the four winds and totally disperse the "liberation army of the Rhenish Palatinate". It needed only a quick decision and a dash of boldness; but in the Prussian camp there was no question of either.

The next morning we set out. While the main body of the fleeing troops moved off towards the Knielingen bridge, Willich marched with his corps and the Dreher Battalion into the mountains against the Prussians. One of our companies, some fifty Landau gymnasts, had advanced right up into the highest mountains, to Johanniskreuz. Schimmelpfennig and his corps were likewise still on the road from Pirmasens to Landau. The idea was to hold the Prussians up and bar the roads to them in Hinterweidenthal to Bergzabern and the Lauter valley.

Schimmelpfennig, however, had already abandoned Hinterweidenthal and was in Rinnthal and Annweiler. The road makes a curve here, and it is precisely here that the mountains enclosing the Queich valley form a sort of defile beyond which lies the village of Rinnthal. This defile was manned by a sort of picket. In the night his patrols had reported that they had been shot at; early in the morning ex-Civil Commissary Weiss from Zweibrucken and a young Rhinelander, M.J.Becker, brought the news that the Prussians were advancing and demanded that reconnaissance patrols be sent out. However, no reconnaissance was undertaken nor were the heights on either side of the defile manned, so that Weiss and Becker decided to go reconnoitring on their own initiative. As further reports came of the approach of the enemy, Schimmelpfennig's men began to barricade the defile; Willich arrived, reconnoitred the position, issued some orders to man the heights and had the completely useless barricade removed. He then rode quickly back to Annweiler and fetched his troops.

As we were marching through Rinnthal we heard the first shots. We hurried through the village and saw Schimmelpfennig's troops drawn up on the highway, many scythe-men and few flintlocks, some already advancing into action. The Prussians were pushing forward on the heights, shooting as they went; Schimmelpfennig had calmly allowed them to get into the position that he was supposed to occupy himself. No bullets fell into our columns yet; they all went flying high over our heads. Whenever a bullet went whistling over the heads of the scythe-men the whole line swayed and everyone started shouting at the same time.

Only with difficulty did we get past these troops, who blocked almost the whole of the road, brought everything into disorder and anyway were quite useless with their scythes. The company commanders and lieutenants were just as helpless and confused as the soldiers themselves. Our riflemen were ordered to the front, where they were to advance on the heights, some to the right, some to the left; on the left were two additional companies to reinforce the riflemen and outflank the Prussians. The main column stayed where it was in the valley. Some riflemen posted themselves behind the remains of the barricade in the curve of the road and shot at the Prussian column, which was positioned a few hundred paces back. I went with a few men up the mountain to the left.

We had scarcely climbed the bushy slope when we came to an open field from the opposite wooded edge of which Prussian riflemen were loosing off their elongated bullets at us. I fetched up a few more of the volunteers, who were scrambling around the slope helpless and rather nervous, posted them with as much cover as possible and took a closer look at the terrain. I could not advance with these few men over a completely exposed field 200 to 250 paces across, as long as the outflanking detachment sent ahead further to the left had not reached the Prussians' flank; at the very most we could hold out, since we were badly covered in any case. In spite of their elongated-bullet guns, incidentally, the Prussians shot extremely badly; we stood for over half an hour with next to no cover in the fiercest possible skirmish fire, and the enemy sharpshooters hit only one shotgun barrel and the lappet of one tunic.

At last I had to go and see where Willich was. My men promised to hold their ground and I climbed back down the slope. Down below everything was fine. The Prussian main column, shot at by our riflemen on the road and to the right of it, was forced to retreat a little further. All of a sudden our volunteers came leaping down the slope to the left, where I had been positioned, and abandoned their ground. The companies which had advanced on the extreme left flank, weakened by having left behind numerous skirmishers, considered that the route through a coppice lying further on would take too long; with the captain who had won the battle of Bellheim at their head, they advanced across the fields. They were met with a hail of fire; the captain and several others fell; the rest, leaderless, yielded to the superior forces. The Prussians now advanced, attacked our skirmishers in the flank, shot down on them from above and thus forced them to retreat. The whole mountain was soon in the hands of the Prussians. They shot into our columns from above; there was nothing more to be done, and we started to retreat. The road was blocked by Schimmelpfennig's troops and the Dreher-Obermuller battalion, which in accordance with the laudable Baden custom marched not in sections of four to six but in half-platoons of twelve to fifteen abreast and took up the whole breadth of the highway. Our men had to march through swampy meadows to get to the village. I stayed with the riflemen to cover the retreat.

The battle was lost partly because Schimmelpfennig had disobeyed Willich's order and not manned the heights, which we could not retake from the Prussians with the few troops at our disposal; partly because of the utter uselessness of Schimmelpfennig's troops and the Dreher Battalion; and last of all partly because of the impatience of the captain who had been ordered to outflank the enemy, and that impatience almost cost him his life and exposed our left flank. It was, incidentally, lucky for us that we were beaten; a Prussian column was already on the way to Bergzabern, Landau was relieved, and thus we would have been surrounded on all sides in Hinterweidenthal.

We lost more men during the retreat than in the battle. From time to time Prussian musket bullets hit the dense column, which was progressing, for the most part a model of disorder, shrieking and bawling. We had about fifteen wounded, among them Schimmelpfennig, who had received a shot in the knee soon after the beginning of the battle. Once again the Prussians showed no great eagerness to pursue us and soon stopped shooting. Only a few skirmishers on the mountain slopes came after us. In Annweiler, half an hour away from the battlefield, we were able to take some food quite undisturbed and then marched to Albersweiler. We had the most important thing: 3,000 guilders payment towards the forced loan which had been waiting for us in Annweiler. Afterwards the Prussians called it robbery. They also maintained in the elation of victory that at Rinnthal they had killed Captain Manteuffel, a member of our corps, cousin of Ehren-Manteuffel [A pun on Ehrenmann (man of honour) and Teufel (devil). The Manteuffel in Berlin refers to Otto von Manteuffel, Minister of the Interior–Ed] in Berlin and a Prussian NCO who had come over to us. Herr Manteuffel is so far from being dead that he has since even won a prize for gymnastics in Zurich.

In Albersweiler two Baden guns joined up with us, part of the reinforcements sent by Mieroslawski. We wanted to use them to make one more stand in the vicinity; but then we were brought the news that the Prussians were already in Landau, so we were left with no choice but to march straight to Langenkandel.

In Albersweiler we were safely rid of the ineffectual troops that had been marching with us. The Schimmelpfennig corps had already partially disbanded following the loss of its leader and on its own initiative was branching off to Kandel. At every step it left behind in the taverns exhausted soldiers and other stragglers. In Albersweiler the Dreher Battalion started to become rebellious. Willich and I went there to ask what they wanted. They all remained silent. At last a volunteer, already pretty advanced in years, cried out: "They want to lead us to the slaughter!" This exclamation was highly comical coming from a corps that had not even once seen battle and had sustained two or at the most three light casualties during the retreat. Willich bade the man step forward and surrender his rifle. The greybeard, rather the worse for drink, did so, staged a tragi-comic scene and snivelled his way through a long speech, the gist of which was that no such thing had ever happened to him before. This gave rise to general indignation among these very good-natured but badly disciplined warriors, so that Willich ordered the whole company to march off at once, saying he was sick of chatter and grumbling and did not intend to lead such soldiers one moment longer. The company, which needed no second bidding, wheeled to the right and started marching. The rest of the battalion, to which Willich had further allocated two cannon, followed suit five minutes later. It was more than they could bear that they should be "led to the slaughter" and expected to keep discipline! We let them go with pleasure.

We turned right into the mountains in the direction of Impflingen. Soon we arrived in the proximity of the Prussians; our riflemen exchanged a few shots with them. Throughout the evening shots were fired from time to time. I stayed behind in the first village we came to in order to send news by messenger to our company of gymnasts from Landau; whether or not they received it, I do not know, but they got safely to France and from there went over to Baden. Because of this I lost the corps and had to make my own way to Kandel. The roads were crowded with army stragglers; all the taverns were full; the whole splendour seemed to have faded into complacency. Officers without soldiers here, soldiers without officers there, and volunteers from all corps hurrying in colourful confusion on foot and by wagon in the direction of Kandel. And yet the Prussians never gave a thought to serious pursuit! Impflingen is only an hour away from Landau, and Warth (which is just before the Knielingen bridge) only four to five hours from Germersheim; yet the Prussians made no hurry to dispatch troops to either of the two positions, here to cut off the stragglers, there to cut off the entire army. The Prince of Prussia certainly won his laurels in an odd way!

In Kandel I found Willich but not the corps, which was billeted further back. Instead, I once more found the Provisional Government, the general staff and the large retinue of hangers-on. The same cram of troops, only a much greater disorder and confusion than yesterday in Frankweiler. There was a continuous stream of officers making enquiries about their corps and soldiers making enquiries about their leaders. Nobody could tell them anything. The disintegration was complete.

The next morning, June 18, the entire gathering defiled through Warth and over the Knielingen bridge. In spite of the large number of troops who had been cut off from the main body or gone home, the army, with the reinforcements arrived from Baden, still numbered some 5,000 to 6,000 men. They marched as proudly through Worth as if they had just conquered the village and were pushing on to fresh triumphs. They were still doing as Kossuth did. A Baden battalion of regulars was the only one to display any military bearing and march past a tavern without some of its number diving in. At last our corps came. We stayed behind as cover until the bridge could be carted off; when everything was in order we marched over to Baden and helped carry out the piles.

The government of Baden, in order to spare the valiant Karlsruhe philistines who had made such a courageous stand against the republicans on June 6, billeted everyone from the Palatinate in the surrounding districts. We had explicitly insisted on coming to Karlsruhe with our corps; we needed a lot of repairs and articles of clothing, and we also considered the presence of a reliable, revolutionary corps in Karlsruhe very desirable. But Herr Brentano had taken care of us. He directed us to Daxlanden, a village an hour and a half away from Karlsruhe, which was pictured to us as a veritable Eldorado. We marched there and discovered the most reactionary den in the whole area. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, scarcely any straw; half the corps had to sleep on the bare floor. Added to that, scowling faces at all the doors and windows. We acted quickly. Herr Brentano was warned: unless he had by then assigned us other and better quarters, we would be in Karlsruhe the next morning, June 19. We kept our word. We marched off at nine o'clock in the morning. Not a rifle-shot away from the village Herr Brentano came up to us with a staff officer and summoned up all his powers of flattery and eloquence to keep us away from Karlsruhe. The town was already putting up 5,000 men, he said, the wealthier class had departed and the middle-class was overburdened with billeted soldiers; he would not tolerate bad accommodation for the valiant Willich corps, he continued, whose praises were on everybody's lips, etc. But nothing helped. Willich demanded a few empty palaces belonging to the departed aristocrats, and when Brentano refused we went to Karlsruhe for our billets.

In Karlsruhe we acquired rifles for our company of scythe-men and some cloth for topcoats. We had our shoes and clothes mended as quickly as possible. Fresh forces came to us too, several workers whom I knew from the Elberfeld uprising, then Kinkel, who joined the Besancon workers' company as a musketeer, and Zychlinski, adjutant to the supreme command in the Dresden uprising and leader of the rearguard during the retreat of the insurgents. He joined the students' company as a rifleman.

While we were replenishing our equipment, we did not neglect tactical instruction. Drill was assiduously carried out and on our second day there we undertook a mock storm of Karlsruhe from the castle yard. The philistines demonstrated by their universal and deeply-felt indignation at the manoeuvre that they had fully understood the threat.

Eventually the bold decision was taken to requisition the Grand Duke's arms collection, which had up to now remained inviolable like something holy. We were just on the point of having twenty of the guns thus obtained fitted with pistons when the news arrived that the Prussians had crossed the Rhine near Germersheim and were in Graben and Bruchsal.

We marched off at once (on the evening of June 20) with two Palatinate cannon. When we arrived at Blankenloch, an hour and a half from Karlsruhe in the direction of Bruchsal, we found Herr Clement and his battalion there and learned that the Prussian advanced posts had pushed forward to about an hour's march from Blankenloch. While our men were taking their evening meal under arms, we held a council of war. Willich was for attacking the Prussians at once. Herr Clement declared that with his untrained troops he could not make a night-attack. It was therefore decided that we should immediately go ahead to Karlsdorf, attack shortly before daybreak and try to break through the Prussian line. If we were successful, then we intended to march on Bruchsal and throw in our forces wherever we could. Herr Clement was to attack at daybreak by way of Friedrichsthal and support our left flank.

It was about midnight when we set out. Our venture was fairly risky. We had not quite 700 men with two cannon; our troops were better drilled and more reliable than the rest of the Palatinate troops, and also pretty accustomed to fire. With them we intended to attack an enemy corps which was at all events much better experienced and staffed with more experienced subalterns than ours, among whom were some captains who had scarcely even been in the civic militia; a corps whose exact strength we did not know, but which numbered not less than 4,000 men. Our corps had already fought more unequal battles, however, and there was certainly no hope of less unfavourable odds in this campaign.

We sent ten students a hundred paces ahead as an advance guard; then followed the first column, at the head of which were half a dozen Baden dragoons allocated to us for courier service, and behind them three companies. The artillery, along with the three other companies, were a little further back and the riflemen brought up the rear. The order was given not to shoot under any circumstances, to march as quietly as possible and, as soon as the enemy showed himself, to attack him with the bayonet.

Soon we saw in the distance the glow of the Prussian watch-fires We got as far as Spöck without being challenged. The main body halted; only the advance guard pushed forward. All at once there were shots; on the road at the entrance to the village a blazing straw-fire flared up and the tocsin rang. To the right and to the left our skirmishers circumvented the village and the column marched in. Large fires were also burning inside; at every corner we expected a volley. But everything was quiet and only a sort of guard of peasants was encamped in front of the town hall. The Prussian guard had already made off.

In spite of their colossal numerical superiority, the Prussian gentlemen did not consider themselves safe, as we saw on this occasion, unless they had carried out the pedantic service regulations covering outpost duties to the last boring detail. This outermost post was a whole hour away from their camp. If we had wanted to tire our own men, unaccustomed to the exertions of war, with outpost duties, just as the Prussians did, numbers of them would have been unfit to march. We relied on the Prussian nervousness and were of the opinion that they would hold us in more respect than we did them. And rightly so. Our outposts were never attacked the whole way to the Swiss frontier and our quarters never raided.

At all events the Prussians had now been warned. Ought we to turn back? We decided not, and marched on.

At Neuthard once more the tocsin; this time, however, neither beacons nor shots. Here too we marched in fairly closed order through the village and the heights up to Karlsdorf. Our advance guard, now only thirty paces ahead, had scarcely reached the high ground when it saw the Prussian outpost close in front of it and was challenged by it. I heard the "Who goes there?" and leapt forward. One of my comrades said: "He's a goner, we won't see him again." But it was precisely my going forward that saved me.

For at the same moment the enemy outpost loosed off a volley and our advance guard, instead of despatching them with the bayonet, fired back. The dragoons, alongside whom I had been marching, did an immediate about-turn in keeping with their customary cowardice, charged at a gallop into the column, rode down a number of men, totally dispersed the first four to six sections and galloped off. At the same time the enemy's mounted guards posted in the fields to right and left fired at us and to put the finishing touch to the confusion some blockheads in the middle of our column started firing on our own men at the head, whereupon other blockheads followed suit. In next to no time the first half of the column was routed, some scattered across the fields, some put to flight, and some caught up in a confused tangle on the road. Wounded men, knapsacks, hats and flintlocks lay in motley confusion amidst the young corn. All this was interspersed with wild, distraught cries, shots and the whistle of bullets in all possible directions. And as the noise subsided a little, far to the rear I heard our cannon trundling off in headlong flight. They had performed the same service for the second half of the column as the dragoons for the first.

Though at that moment I was seized with rage at the childish terror that had gripped our soldiers, I felt equal contempt for the behaviour of the Prussians who, notified as they had been of our arrival, stopped firing after a few shots and likewise bolted off at top speed. Our advance guard was still in its old position and had not been attacked once. A cavalry squadron or a tolerably sustained skirmish fire would have put us to headlong flight.

Willich came rushing up to us from the advance guard. The Besancon company was the first to be formed up again. The others, more or less ashamed, closed ranks. Day was just breaking. Our losses amounted to six wounded, among whom was one of our staff officers: he had been trampled underfoot on the same spot that I had left the moment before to hurry to the advance guard. Several others had clearly been hit by the bullets of our own men. We carefully collected up all the discarded accoutrements so that not even the slightest trophy would fall into the hands of the Prussians, and then retreated slowly to Neuthard. The riflemen took up a position behind the first houses as cover. But there was no sign of the Prussians; and when Zychlinski went reconnoitring again he found them still on the other side of the heights, whence they fired a few shots without hitting anything.

The Palatinate peasants who had been conveying our artillery had taken the one cannon right through to the other side of the village; the other had overturned and the men in charge had ridden off with five horses, whose traces they had removed. We had to get the cannon upright and shift it with just the one wheel-horse.

When we arrived at Spöck we heard rifle fire to our right, in the direction of Friedrichsthal. It was gradually getting more intense. Herr Clement had at last attacked, an hour later than arranged. I proposed supporting him with an attack on the flank, in order to make up for his mistake. Willich was of the same opinion and gave the order to take the first path to the right. A part of our corps had already taken the turning when one of Clement's orderly officers reported that Clement was retreating. We therefore went to Blankenloch. Soon Herr Beust of the general staff met us and was most surprised to see us alive and the corps in such fine trim. The blackguardly dragoons had spread the word everywhere on their flight, which took them as far as Karlsruhe, that Willich was dead, the officers all dead, and the corps scattered to the four winds and annihilated. We were said to have been shot at with case-shot and "fiery cannon-balls".

Outside Blankenloch we were met by troops of the Palatinate and Baden and finally Herr Sznayde and his staff. The old codger, who had probably spent a very comfortable night in bed, had the impudence to call over to us: "Gentlemen, where are you going! The enemy is that way!" Needless to say we gave him a fitting reply, marched on past him and saw about getting some rest and refreshment in Blankenloch. After two hours Herr Sznayde returned with his troops, naturally without having seen the enemy, and had breakfast.

Counting the reinforcements received from Karlsruhe and the surrounding area, Herr Sznayde now had approximately 8,000 to 9,000 troops under his command, including three Baden regular battalions and two Baden batteries. All in all there were probably some twently-five pieces of ordnance. As a consequence of Mieroslawski's rather vague orders and even more of the total incompetence of Herr Sznayde, the entire army of the Palatinate stayed put in the region of Karlsruhe until the Prussians had made their way across the Rhine under the cover of the Germersheim bridge-head. Mieroslawski (vid. his reports on the campaign in Baden) had issued the general order to defend the Rhine crossings from Speyer to Knielingen after the withdrawal from the Palatinate and the special order to cover Karlsruhe and to make the Knielingen bridge the assembly point of the entire army corps. Herr Sznayde interpreted this as meaning that he should stay at Karlsruhe and Knielingen until further notice. If, as Mieroslawski's general orders implied, he had sent a strong corps with artillery against the Germersheim bridgehead, then the absurdity would never have occurred of sending Major Mniewski, with 450 recruits and no artillery, to capture the bridge-head, 30,000 Prussians would never have got over the Rhine unchallenged, communications with Mieroslawski would never have been broken and the Palatinate army could have appeared in good time on the battlefield of Waghausel. Instead of this, on the day of the battle of Waghausel, June 21, it wandered around aimlessly between Friedrichsthal, Weingarten and Bruchsal, lost sight of the enemy and wasted its time marching in all directions.

We received the order to set out for the right flank and skirt the mountains via Weingarten. We started out at noon on the same day, June 21, from Blankenloch and about five in the afternoon from Weingarten. The Palatinate troops at last began to get uneasy; they noticed that the odds were heavy against them and they lost that boastful certainty which up to now they had at least had before battle. From now on the people's militia of the Palatinate and Baden, and gradually the regular infantry and artillery too, began to smell Prussians everywhere, and false alarms, which now became a regular daily occurrence, threw everything into disorder and gave rise to the most amusing scenes. At the very first piece of high ground beyond Weingarten patrols and peasants came rushing up to us with the cry: "The Prussians are here!" Our corps formed up in battle order and advanced. I went back to the little town to have the alarm sounded and in doing so lost the corps. The whole fuss was without foundation, needless to say. The Prussians had withdrawn towards Waghausel and the same evening Willich marched into Bruchsal.

I spent the night in Obergrombach with Herr Oswald and his Palatinate battalion and marched with him the next morning to Bruchsal. Outside the town we met wagons full of stragglers coming in our direction: "The Prussians are here!" At once the whole battalion started to waver and could only with difficulty be made to advance. Of course it was another false alarm; Willich and the rest of the Palatinate advance guard were in Bruchsal; the others came marching in one after the other and there was no trace of the Prussians. Besides the army and its leaders, d'Ester, the ex-government of the Palatinate and Goegg were there. Since Brentano's dictatorship had become indisputable; Goegg had stayed almost exclusively with the army and helped to look after the day-to-day civil affairs. The victualling was bad and the confusion was great. As usual, only the headquarters lived well.

Once again we obtained a considerable number of cartridges from the Karlsruhe supplies and marched off in the evening, the entire advance guard with us. The latter took up quarters in Ubstadt, while we marched off to the right to Unterowisheim to cover the flank in the mountains.

To all appearances we were now quite a respectable force. Our corps had been reinforced with two new units. The first of these was the Langenkandel Battalion, which had dispersed on the way from its home town to the Knielingen bridge and whose beaux restes [Beautiful remains.–Ed] had joined up with us; they consisted of a captain, a lieutenant, a standard-bearer, a sergeant, an NCO and two men. The other was the "Robert Blum Column" with a red flag, a body of approximately sixty men who looked like cannibals and had performed heroic deeds in requisitioning. Besides that we were allocated four Baden cannon and a Baden people's militia battalion, the Kniery, Knüry or Knierim Battalion (it was impossible to discover the correct reading of the name). The Knierim Battalion was worthy of its leader and Herr Knierim worthy of his battalion. Both were staunch-minded, both were braggarts and roisterers and both constantly drunk. The famous "enthusiasm" kindled their hearts to deeds of the most prodigious heroism, as we shall have occasion to see.

On the morning of the 23rd Willich received a note from Anneke, who commanded the advance guard of the Palatinate in Ubstadt. It announced that the enemy was advancing, a council of war had been held and the decision made to withdraw. Willich, flabbergasted at this strange piece of news, rode over at once and managed to persuade Anneke and his officers to give battle at Ubstadt. He reconnoitred the position himself and specified the deployment of the artillery. He then returned and had his troops stand to their arms. While our troops were forming up we received the following order from the Bruchsal headquarters, signed by Techow: the main body of the army was to proceed along the road to Heidelberg and should expect to get as far as Mingolsheim the same day; at the same time we were to march via Odenheim to Waldangelloch and spend the night there. Further news as to the successes of the main corps and instructions as to our subsequent course of action were to be sent there.

In his fanciful Geschichte der drei Volkserhebungen in Baden, pp. 311-17, Herr Struve published a report on the operations of the Palatinate army from June 20 to 26 which is nothing more than an apologia for the incompetent Sznayde and teems with inaccuracies and misrepresentations. The following points emerge from what was said above: firstly, it is not true that Sznayde "received reliable news of the battle of Waghausel and its outcome a few hours after marching into Bruchsal (on the 22nd)"; secondly, it is therefore not true that "because of this he changed his plan and, instead of marching to Mingolsheim, as at first had been the plan, decided" (as early as the 22nd) "to stay with the main body of his division in Bruchsal" (the note from Techow which is referred to was written during the night of the 22nd to the 23rd); thirdly, it is not true that "on the morning of the 23rd a large-scale reconnaissance was to be carried out" – on the contrary, it was the march on Mingolsheim which was to take place; and to say that fourthly "all detachments received the order to march in the direction of the firing as soon as they heard that firing"; and fifthly that "the detachment on the right flank (Willich) excused its failure to turn up at the battle of Ubstadt by saying that it had heard nothing of the firing", is a gross lie, as will be seen.

We marched off at once. We were to have breakfast in Odenheim. Some Bavarian Chevaulegers, who had been attached to us for dispatch duties, rode around the village to the left to reconnoitre possible enemy corps. Prussian hussars had been in the village requisitioning fodder, which they intended to collect later. While we were confiscating this fodder, and wine and food was being distributed to our men under arms, one of the Chevaulegers came dashing in and shouted: "The Prussians are here!" In next to no time the Knierim Battalion, which was nearest, broke ranks and stampeded in all directions in a wild tangle, screaming, cursing and lumbering, while the major was forced to leave his men in the lurch because his horse shied. Willich came riding up, restored order and we marched off. Needless to say there were no Prussians there.

On the heights beyond Odenheim we heard the roar of cannon coming from the direction of Ubstadt. The gunfire soon became more intense. More experienced ears were already able to distinguish between the sound of bullets and the sound of case-shot. We deliberated whether to continue our march or to go in the direction of the firing. Since our order was positive and since the firing seemed to be moving in the direction of Mingolsheim, which indicated an advance by our side, we resolved on the more dangerous march, the march on Waldangelloch. If the forces of the Palatinate were defeated at Ubstadt, we would be as good as cut off up there in the mountains and in a fairly critical position.

Herr Struve maintains that the battle of Ubstadt "could have led to brilliant results if the flank detachments had attacked at the right moment". The gunfire did not last an hour and we would have needed two to two and a half hours to reach the battlefield between Stettfeld and Ubstadt, that is an hour and a half after it had been abandoned. That is the way Herr Struve writes "history" A halt was called near Tiefenbach. While our troops were refreshing themselves, Willich sent out some dispatches. The Knierim Battalion discovered a kind of municipal cellar in Tiefenbach, slapped a confiscation order on it, fetched out the barrels of wine and within an hour everyone was drunk. Annoyance at the Prussian scare of that morning, the cannon-roar from Ubstadt, the lack of confidence that these heroes had in one another and their officers – all this, aggravated by the wine, suddenly broke out in open rebellion. They demanded an immediate retreat; they said they did not care for eternally marching through the mountains in the face of the enemy. As this was of course out of the question, they faced about and marched off on their own. The man-eating "Robert Blum Column" joined them. We let them go and marched to Waldangelloch.

Here, in a deep basin-shaped valley, it was impossible to pass the night in any safety. Therefore a halt was called and intelligence collected about the conditions of the terrain in the area and the position of the enemy. In the meantime a few vague rumours of the retreat of the army on the Neckar had been spread by peasants. It was claimed that considerable Baden corps had marched on Bretten via Sinsheim and Eppingen, that Mierosiawski himself had passed through in strictest incognito and that people in Sinsheim had wanted to arrest him. The artillerymen became uneasy and even our students started to murmur. So the artillery was sent back and we marched on Hilsbach. Here we learned further particulars about the retreat of the Neckar army 48 hours earlier and about the Bavarians stationed in Sinsheim, an hour and a half away from where we were. Their number was given as 7,000, but in fact, as we later discovered, it was about 10,000. We were at the most only 700 strong. Our men could not march any further. We therefore quartered them in barns, as we always did when we had to keep them together as much as possible, detailed strong outposts and lay down to sleep. As we marched out the next morning, the 24th, we could hear quite distinctly the sound of the Bavarians' marching step. A good quarter of an hour after we had marched off the Bavarians were in Hilsbach.

Two days before, on the 22nd, Mieroslawski had spent the night in Sinsheim and was already in Bretten with his troops when we marched into Hilsbach. Becker, who was commanding the rear-guard, was likewise already through. It follows that he cannot, as Herr Struve maintains [on page 308,] have passed the night of the 23rd to the 24th in Sinsheim, for the Bavarians, who the evening before had fought a small engagement with Mieroslawski, were there at eight o'clock in the evening and probably even earlier. Mieroslawski's retreat from Waghäusel via Heidelberg to Bretten is depicted by the men who took part in it as a highly dangerous manoeuvre. Mieroslawski's operations from June 20 to 24, the rapid concentration of a corps at Heidelberg, with which he hurled himself against the Prussians, and his speedy retreat after losing the battle of Waghausel certainly constituted the most brilliant episode of his entire activity in Baden; but the fact that this manoeuvre in the face of such a lethargic enemy was by no means so dangerous is proved by the fact that 24 hours later our little corps effected its retreat from Hilsbach without once being molested. We even passed through the Flehingen defile, where Mieroslawski had already expected an attack on the 23rd, without being attacked and marched on Biichig. Here we intended staying in order to cover against a first attack the camp Mieroslawski had set up at Bretten.

Everywhere on our march, which led through Eppingen, Zaisenhausen and Flehingen, we were the object of amazement, since all the corps of the Neckar army, including the rearguard, had already marched through. When we marched into Buchig and our bugler started to play, we panicked people into thinking that the Prussians had arrived. A commando of the Bretten civic militia, requisitioning victuals for Mieroslawski's camp, took us for Prussians and were the very picture of confusion until we turned the corner and the sight of our tunics reassured them. We at once confiscated the victuals and had barely consumed them when the news that Mieroslawski had set out from Bretten with all the troops caused us to withdraw to Bretten.

We stayed overnight in Bretten, the civic militia providing outposts. Wagons were requisitioned for the next morning to carry the whole corps to Ettlingen. Since Bruchsal had already been taken by the Prussians on the 24th and we could not afford to engage in a battle in case the road via Diedelsheim to Durlach was occupied by the enemy (it actually was, as we later discovered), this was the only route to the main army open to us.

In Bretten a deputation of students came to us with a declaration that they did not like constantly marching in the face of the enemy and they asked to be discharged. Needless to say they were told by way of reply that no one is discharged in the face of the enemy; but if they wished to desert, then they were free to do so. Thereupon about half the company marched off; the number of those remaining soon dwindled so much due to individual desertions that only the riflemen were left. During the course of the entire campaign the students generally showed themselves to be malcontent and timid young gentlemen; they always wanted to be let into all the plans of operation, complained about sore feet and grumbled when the campaign did not afford all the comforts of a holiday trip. Among these "representatives of intelligence" there were only a handful who through their truly revolutionary character and shining courage proved themselves exceptions.

We were later informed that the enemy had marched into Bretten half an hour after we left. We arrived at Ettlingen, and there Herr Corvin-Wiersbitzki directed us to march to Durlach, where Becker was to hold up the enemy until Karlsruhe had been evacuated. Willich sent a Chevauleger with a note to Becker in order to find out whether he intended to stay for a while; the man returned in a quarter of an hour with the news that he had met Becker's troops already in full retreat. We therefore marched off to Rastatt, where everyone was concentrating.

The road to Rastatt presented a picture of the most splendid disorder. Any number of the most varied corps were marching or camping in motley confusion, and we had difficulty in holding our troops together under the blazing sun and amidst the universal disarray. The Palatinate troops and a few Baden battalions were encamped on the Rastatt glacis. The Palatinate forces were severely depleted. The best corps, the Rhenish Hessian, had been assembled in Karlsruhe by Zitz and Bamberger before the battle of Ubstadt. These bold freedom-fighters had declared to the corps that all was lost, the odds were too great but there was still time to get home in safety; that they, the parliamentary windbag Zitz and the valiant Bamberger, did not want innocent blood or any other calamity on their hands and thereupon declared the corps disbanded. The Rhenish Hessians were naturally so indignant at this infamous presumption that they wanted to arrest the two traitors and shoot them; d'Ester and the government of the Palatinate were also after them to arrest them. But the honourable citizens had already fled and the valiant Zitz watched the further course of the campaign for an Imperial Constitution from the safety of Basle. As in September 1848, in his Frakturschrift, so also in May 1849, Herr Zitz was among those parliamentary braggarts who did most to incite the people to rise up, but on both occasions he occupied a prominent place among those who during the uprising were the first to leave the people in the lurch. At Kirchheimbolanden too Herr Zitz was among the first to bolt, while his riflemen were fighting and being shot.

The Rhenish Hessian corps, in any case seriously weakened by desertion, as all corps were, and disheartened by the retreat to Baden, at once lost its balance completely. Part of it disbanded and went home; the remainder constituted itself anew and fought on until the end of the campaign. The rest of the Palatinate troops were demoralised at Rastatt by the news that all those who returned home before July 5 were to be amnestied. More than half of them dispersed, battalions dwindled to company size, the subaltern officers were for the most part gone and the 1,200 or so troops still remaining were now hardly of any more value. Our corps, although not in the least disheartened, had also dwindled to little more than 500 men through losses, illness and the desertion of the students.

We went to Kuppenheim, where other troops were already present, for our billets. The next morning I accompanied Willich to Rastatt and there met Moll once again.

There have been memorials from all sides in the press, in the democratic clubs, in verse and in prose to the more or less educated victims of the Baden uprising. But no voice is raised on behalf of the hundreds and thousands of workers who fought out the battles, who fell on the field, who rotted alive in the Rastatt casemates or who now, alone of all the refugees, must drain to the dregs the cup of exile. The exploitation of the workers is a traditional affair, too familiar for our official "democrats" to consider the workers as anything else than raw material for agitation, for exploiting, for causing trouble, as anything but cannon-fodder. Our "democrats" are far too ignorant and bourgeois to comprehend the revolutionary position of the proletariat, the future of the working class. That is why they hate those genuinely proletarian characters who, too proud to flatter them and too discerning to allow themselves to be used by them, are none the less always there, arms in hand, whenever it is a question of overthrowing an existing authority, and who in every revolutionary movement directly represent the party of the proletariat. But if it is not in the interests of the so-called democrats to recognise such workers, it is the duty of the party of the proletariat to honour them as they deserve. And among the best of these workers was Joseph Moll of Cologne.

Moll was a watchmaker. He had left Germany years ago and in France, Belgium and England played his part in all the public and secret revolutionary societies. He helped found the German Workers' Society in London in 1840. After the February Revolution he returned to Germany and with his friend Schappelsoon took over the leadership of the Cologne Workers Association. A fugitive in London since the Cologne riots of September 1848, he soon returned to Germany under an assumed name, agitated in all sorts of districts and undertook missions so dangerous that everyone else shrank back from them. I met him again in Kaiserslautern. Here too he undertook missions to Prussia which if he had been found out, would have incurred the summary grace of a firing squad. Returning from his second mission, he got safely through all the enemy armies to Rastatt, where he immediately joined the Besancon workers' company in our corps. Three days later he had fallen. I lost in him an old friend and the party one of its most unflagging, intrepid and reliable champions.

The party of the proletariat was quite strongly represented in the army of Baden and the Palatinate, especially in the volunteer corps, as for example in our own, in the refugee legion, etc., and it can safely challenge all the other parties to find even the slightest fault with any one of Its members. The most resolute Communists made the most courageous soldiers.

On the next day, the 27th, we were moved somewhat further into the mountains, to Rothenfels. The detailing of the army and the distribution of the various corps was gradually established. We belonged to the right-flank division, which was commanded by Colonel Theme, the same as had wanted to arrest Mieroslawski in Meckesheim and who had childishly been allowed to retain his command, and then from the 27th onwards by Mersy. Willich, who had refused the command of the Palatinate forces which Sigel had offered him, was acting as chief of divisional staff. The division was located in the area stretching from Gernsbach and the Wurttemberg frontier to the other side of Rothenfels and leaned on its left side against the Oborski division, which was concentrated around Kuppenheim. The advance guard was pushed forward to the frontier as well as to Sulzbach, Michelbach and Winkel. The victualling, at first irregular and bad, improved from the 27th on. Our division consisted of several Baden regular battalions, the remainder of the Palatinate forces under hero Blenker, our corps and one or one and a half batteries of artillery. The Palatinate forces were stationed in Gernsbach and the surrounding area and the regulars and ourselves in around Rothenfels. The headquarters were in the hotel in Elisbethenquelle opposite Rothenlels.

On the 28th we – the divisional staff and that of our own corps together with Moll, Kinkel and other volunteers – were just taking coffee after our meal in this hotel when the news arrived that our advance guard near Michelbach had been attacked by the Prussians. We at once set out, although we had every reason to suppose that the enemy had nothing more than a reconnaissance in mind. It indeed proved to be nothing more. The village of Michelbach situated down in the valley which had momentarily been captured by the Prussians had already been re-taken by the time we arrived. There was shooting across the valley from both mountain-sides and much ammunition was expended to no purpose. I saw only one dead and one wounded. While the regulars were pointlessly shooting off their cartridges at distances of 600 to 800 paces, Willich bade our troops quietly pile their rifles and take a rest close by the alleged fighters and in the thick of the alleged firing. Only the riflemen went down the wooded slope and, supported by a handful of regulars, drove the Prussians from the heights opposite. One of our riflemen shot a Prussian officer off his horse at about 900 paces with his colossal heavy rifle, a veritable portable cannon; the officer's entire company at once did a right-about turn and marched back into the wood. A number of Prussian dead and wounded as well as two prisoners fell into our hands.

The next day the general attack on the whole line took place. This time the Prussian gentlemen disturbed us at our midday meal. The first attack of which we were notified was against Bischweier, that is, against the point at which the Oborski division linked up with ours Willich urged that our troops should be held in the greatest possible readiness at Rothenfels, since the main attack was expected in any case in the opposite direction, at Gernsbach. But Mersy replied that we knew how things were, that if one of our battalions were attacked and the others did not come to its aid at once and in force, then the cry of treason would go up and everyone would take to their heels. We therefore marched towards Bischweier.

Willich and I advanced with the rifle company along the road to Bischweier on the right bank of the Murg. Half an hour away from Rothenfels we came across the enemy. The riflemen spread out in extended order and Willich rode back to fetch the corps, which stood a little way in the rear, up into the fighting line. For a while our riflemen, taking cover behind fruit-trees and vineyards, stood up to some quite heavy fire, which they returned in good measure. But when a strong enemy column advanced along the road in support of its skirmishers, the left flank of our riflemen gave way and no amount of talking to could persuade them to stand their ground. The right flank had advanced further towards the heights and was later taken into our corps.

When I saw that nothing was to be done with the riflemen I abandoned them to their fate and went towards the heights, where I could see the flags of our corps. One company had stayed behind; its captain, a tailor, usually a brave fellow, was all of a dither. I took the company along to join the others and met Willich, just as he was pushing the Besancon company forward in extended order and drawing up the rest behind them in two battle lines, together with a company pushed forward on the right towards the mountains to cover the flank.

Our skirmishers were met with a hail of fire. Facing them were Prussian riflemen, and against their elongated-bullet rifles our workers only had muskets. However, they advanced so resolutely, reinforced by the right flank of our riflemen who joined up with them, that the inferior quality of their arms was soon made up for by the closeness of the range, especially on the right flank, and the Prussians were dislodged. The two battle lines kept quite close on the heels of the skirmishers. In the meantime two Baden artillery pieces had also been brought up on our left, in the Murg valley, and they opened fire on the Prussian infantry and artillery occupying the road.

The battle here had probably been going on for an hour or so with intense rifle and musket fire, the Prussians continually retreating (some of our riflemen had already penetrated as far as Bischweier), when the Prussians received reinforcements and pushed their battalions forward. Our skirmishers retreated; the first line gave platoon fire and the second moved to the left into a defile and also started firing. But the Prussians pressed forward in serried masses along the entire line; both the Baden artillery pieces covering our left flank had already retreated. On the right flank the Prussians came down from the mountains and we were forced to fall back.

As soon as we were out of the enemy cross-fire we took up a fresh position on the mountain range. If up to now we had been facing the Rhine plain, and Bischweier and Niederweier, we were now facing the mountains which the Prussians had occupied from Oberweier. Now the regular battalions at last joined the fighting line and gave battle, together with two companies of our corps which were once more pushed forward in extended order.

We had suffered heavy losses. About thirty men were missing, including Kinkel and Moll and not counting the dispersed riflemen. The two above-named had advanced too far with the right flank of their company and some riflemen. The riflemen's captain, head forester Emmermann from Thronecken in Rhenish Prussia, who marched against the Prussians as if he were hunting hares, had led them into a position from which they fired into a Prussian artillery section and forced it to beat a speedy retreat. However, a company of Prussians at once emerged from a defile and fired upon them. Kinkel fell to the ground, hit in the head, and he was dragged along until he could once more walk unaided; soon, however, they came under cross-fire and had to hurry to get out of it. Kinkel was unable to keep up and went into a farm-house, where he was taken prisoner by the Prussians and ill-treated; Moll received a shot in the abdomen, was also taken prisoner and died later of his wound. Zychlinski too had been hit in the neck by a ricochet, but this did not stop him staying with his corps.

While the main body remained where it was and Willich rode to another part of the battlefield, I hastened to the Murg bridge lower down than Rothenfels, which formed a sort of assembly point. I wanted news of Gernsbach. But even before I reached there I saw the smoke rising from Gernsbach which was in flames,and on the bridge itself I learned that they had heard the cannon-roar from there. Later I returned to this bridge a few more times; each time the news about Gernsbach was worse and each time there were more Baden regular troops assembled behind the bridge, demoralised already even though they had scarcely been under fire. Eventually I learned that the enemy was already in Gaggenau. It was now high time to face up to him. Willich marched over the Murg with the corps in order to take up position opposite Rothenfeis and took with him another four artillery pieces which had just happened to come his way. I went to fetch our two companies of skirmishers, who in the meantime had pushed far ahead. Everywhere I met regular troops, mostly without officers. One detachment was led by a doctor, who made use of the occasion to introduce himself to me with the following words: "You must know me, I am Neuhaus, chief of the Thuringian movement!" These good fellows had beaten the Prussians on all fronts and were now on their way back because they could no longer see any of the enemy. Our companies were nowhere to be found – they had made their way back through Rothenfels for the same reason – and I returned to the bridge. Here I met Mersy with his staff and troops. I begged him to give me at least a few companies with which to support Willich. "Take the whole division if you can still do something with them," was the reply. The same soldiers who had driven back the enemy at all points and who had only been on their feet for five hours now lay around in the meadows, dispersed, demoralised and fit for nothing. The news that they had been outflanked in Gernsbach had done for them. I went my way. A company I came across on its way back from Michelbach was not to be moved either. When I found the corps again at our old headquarters, the fugitive forces of the Palatinate–Pistol Zinn and his gang, now with muskets, by the way–came pressing on from Gaggenau. While Willich had been looking for and had found a position for the artillery, a position that dominated the Murg valley and offered considerable advantages for simultaneous skirmishing, the artillerists had run away with the cannon and the captain had been unable to do anything to stop them. They were already back with Mersy at the bridge. At the same time Willich showed me a note from Mersy in which the latter informed him that everything was lost and that he was going to pull back to Oos. We had no other choice but to do the same and we marched into the mountains at once. It was about seven o'clock.

At Gernsbach things had taken the following course. Peucker's imperial troops, whom our patrols had already sighted the day before at Herrenalb on Wurttemberg territory, had taken the Wurttemberg troops drawn up at the frontier with them and attacked Gernsbach on the afternoon of the 29th, after using treachery to make our advanced troops withdraw; they approached them with the call not to shoot, saying they were brothers, and then fired off a volley at eighty paces. They then shelled Gernsbach, setting it on fire, and when the flames got out of hand Herr Sigel, who had been sent by Mieroslawski to hold the position at any price, Herr Sigel himself gave the order that Herr Blenker should make a fighting retreat with his troops. Herr Sigel will no more deny this now than he did in Berne, when one of Herr Blenker's adjutants related the curious fact in his, Herr Sigel's, and Willich's presence. With this order to make a "fighting"(!) surrender of the key to the whole Murg position, the battle along the whole line, and with it the Baden army's last position, was needless to say lost.

The Prussians incidentally did not particularly enhance their reputation by winning the battle of Rastatt. We had 13,000 troops, for the most part demoralised and with few exceptions abominably led; their army, together with the imperial troops that marched on Gernsbach, numbered at least 60,000 men. In spite of this colossal superiority they did not venture a serious frontal attack, but defeated us through cowardice and treachery by encroaching upon the neutral territory of Wurttemberg, which was closed to us. But even this piece of treachery would not have done them much good, at least to begin with, and in the long run would not have saved them the necessity of a decisive frontal attack, had not Gernsbach been so incredibly badly manned and had not Herr Sigel given the priceless order spoken of above. There cannot be any doubt that the by no means formidable position would have been snatched from us the next day; but victory would have cost the Prussians many more casualties and would have done endless harm to their military reputation. For this reason they preferred to violate Wurttemberg's neutrality, and Wurttemberg calmly let it happen.

By now barely 450 men strong, we marched back through the mountains to Oos. The road was covered with troops in the wildest disarray, with wagons, artillery, etc., all in the greatest confusion. We marched through and rested in Sinzheim. The next morning we assembled a number of fugitives the other side of Buhl and spent the night in Oberachern. That day the last battle took place; the German-Polish Legion, alongside some other troops from Becker's division, beat back the imperial troops at Oos and captured from them a (Mecklenburg) howitzer which they got safely into Switzerland.

The army was completely disbanded; Mieroslawski and the other Poles laid down their commands; Colonel Oborski already on the evening of the 29th left his post on the battlefield. However, this momentary disbandment did not really mean much. The Palatinate forces had already been disbanded three or four times and each time had formed up anew tant bien que mal. A retreat spun out as long as possible, accompanied by the call-up of all the age groups in the territories to be ceded and a rapid concentration of the conscripts from Upper Baden at Freiburg and Donaueschingen, were two measures still to be tried. This would soon have restored order and discipline to a tolerable level and made possible a last hopeless but honourable battle on the Kaiserstuhl near Freiburg or at Donaueschingen. But the chiefs of the civil as well as the military administration were more demoralised than the soldiers. They abandoned the army and the entire movement to their fate and fell further and further back, dejected, distraught and shattered.

Since the attack on Gernsbach, the fear of being outflanked through Wurttemberg territory had spread everywhere and contributed greatly to the general demoralisation. Willich's corps now went to cover the Wurttemberg frontier, taking two mountain howitzers through the Kappel valley into the mountains–several other artillery pieces assigned to us did not want to go any further than Kappel. Our march through the Black Forest, in which we did not sight the enemy, was a veritable pleasure tour. On July 1 we arrived at Oppenau via Allerheiligen and on the 2nd at Wolfach via the Hundskopf. Here we learned on July 3 that the government was in Freiburg and that the abandonment of that town also was being considered. We therefore set out for there at once. We intended to force Messrs.the Regents and the high command, which hero Sigel now led, not to relinquish Freiburg without a fight. It was already late when we marched off from Wolfach, and so it was not until late that evening that we arrived at Waldkirch. Here we learned that Freiburg had already been relinquished and that government and headquarters had been removed to Donaueschingen. At the same time we received the positive order to occupy and entrench ourselves in the Simonswald valley and set up our headquarters in Furtwangen. We therefore had to go back to Bleibach.

Herr Sigel had now drawn up his troops behind the Black Forest mountain ridge. The defence line was supposed to stretch from Lorrach via Todtnau and Furtwangen to the Wurttemberg frontier, in the direction of Schramberg. The left flank was formed by Mersy and Blenker, who marched through the Rhine valley towards Lorrach; then followed Herr Doll, a former commis voyageur, who in his capacity as one of Hecker's generals had been appointed divisional commander and was posted in the region of the Hollental; then our corps in Furtwangen and the Simonswald valley and, lastly on the right flank, Becker at St. Georgen and Triberg. On the other side of the mountains at Donaueschingen was Herr Sigel with the reserve. The forces, considerably weakened by desertion and not reinforced by any contingents of conscripts, still amounted to 9,000 men and 40 cannon.

The orders which reached us one after the other from headquarters in Freiburg, Neustadt on the Gutach and Donaueschingen breathed the most resolute defiance of death. Though the enemy was expected to come through Wurttemberg again and attack us in the rear via Rottweil and Villingen, there was a determination to defeat him and to hold the Black Forest ridge come what may, in fact to do so, as it said in one of these orders, "almost without any regard for the movements of the enemy", in other words, Herr Sigel had ensured for himself a glorious retreat in four hours from Donaueschingen onto Swiss territory; he could then sit back in Schaffhausen and wait in perfect calm for news of what had become of us, encircled in the mountains. We shall soon see what a merry end this defiance of death came to.

On the 4th we arrived at Furtwangen with two companies (160 men). The rest was employed to occupy the Simonswald valley and the passes of Gutenbach and St. Margen. Via the last-mentioned place we were in contact with Doll's corps, via Schonwald with Becker. All the passes were blocked. We stayed in Furtwangen on the 5th. On the 6th news came from Becker that the Prussians were advancing on Villingen, together with the request to attack them via Vohrenbach and thus support Sigel's operation. At the same time he informed us that his main corps was duly entrenched in Triberg, whither he himself would go as soon as Villingen was occupied by Sigel.

There could be no question of an attack from our side. With fewer than 450 men we had three square miles to occupy and therefore could not spare a single man. We had to stay where we were and informed Becker to this effect. Soon afterwards a dispatch arrived from headquarters: Willich was to go to Donaueschingen at once and assume command of the entire artillery. We were just getting ready to hurry over there when a column of the people's militia, followed by artillery and several other battalions of the people's militia, came marching into Furtwangen. It was Becker with his corps. His men had grown rebellious, it was said. I made enquiries of a staff officer who was a friend of mine, "Major" Nerlinger, and learned the following: He, Nerlinger, had the position at Triberg under his command and was having the trenches dug when the officer staff delivered him a written declaration, signed by them all. It said that the troops were rebellious and that unless the order to march off were given at once, they would leave with all the troops. I took a look at the signatures. It was the valiant Dreher-Obermüller Battalion again! Nerlinger had no choice but to inform Becker and march to Furtwangen. Becker set out at once to catch them up and so arrived with all his troops at Furtwangen, where the faint-hearted officers and soldiers were received with immense laughter by our volunteers. They were ashamed of themselves and in the evening Becker was able to lead them back to their positions again.

In the meantime we went to Donaueschingen, followed by the Besancon company. There were already swarms of Prussians right up to the highway; Villingen was occupied by them. We nevertheless got through unchallenged and towards ten o'clock in the evening the Besancons arrived as well. In Donaueschingen I found d'Ester and learned from him that in the Constituent Assembly in Freiburg Herr Struve had demanded an immediate move to Switzerland, saying everything was lost, and that hero Blenker had followed this advice and had already crossed over onto Swiss territory that morning at Basle. Both of these reports were quite correct. Hero Blenker had gone to Basle on July 6, though it was he that was farthest from the enemy. He had paused only to make a final number of requisitions so odd that they put him in bad odour with Herr Sigel and later with the Swiss authorities. And hero Struve, the same hero Struve who even on June 29 had declared that Herr Brentano and all those wanting to negotiate with the enemy were traitors to the fatherland, was so shattered three days later, on July 2, that he was not ashamed to put the following motion to a session in camera of the Baden Constituent Assembly:

"In order that Upper Baden will not suffer the same horrors of war as Lower Baden and to prevent a great deal more precious blood being spilt, and since it is necessary to save what can be saved(!), therefore everyone participating in the revolution, together with the Provincial Assembly, should have his salary or wage paid up to July 10 with appropriate travelling expenses and all should withdraw to Swiss territory together with cash, provisions, arms, etc.!"

The valiant Struve proposed this fine motion on July 2, when we were in Wolfach up in the Black Forest, 10 hours away from Freiburg and 20 hours away from the Swiss frontier! Herr Struve is naive enough to relate this incident himself and even to boast of it in his Geschichte. The only consequence that the acceptance of such a motion could have was that the Prussians would press us as hard as possible in order to "save what could be saved", that is, to do us out of our cash, artillery and provisions, since this resolution assured them that there was no danger in vigorous pursuit, and that our troops would then immediately disband en masse, and whole corps make off on their own to Switzerland, as actually happened. Our corps would have come off worst; it was on Baden territory up to the 12th and was paid up to the 17th.

Herr Sigel, instead of re-taking Villingen, at first resolved to take up position at Hufingen the other side of Donaueschingen and await the enemy. The same evening, however, it was decided to march to Stuhlingen, close by the Swiss frontier. We hastily sent dispatch-riders to Furtwangen, to inform our own corps and that of Becker. Both were likewise to make their way to Stuhlingen via Neustadt and Bonndorf. Willich went to Neustadt to meet his corps and I stayed with the Besancon company. We spent the night in Riedbohringen and arrived at Stuhlingen on the afternoon of the next day, July 7. On the 8th Herr Sigel held a review of his half-disbanded army, recommended it not to ride in future but to march (at the frontier!) and departed. He left behind for us half a battery and in order for Willich.

In the meantime news of the general retreat had been sent from Furtwangen first to Becker and then to our own companies stationed to the fore. Our corps gathered first in Furtwangen and met Willich in Neustadt. Becker, who was closer to Furtwangen than were our outlying troops, still did not arrive till later and took the same road. He ran into entrenchments which held up his march and which were later said in the Swiss press to have been dug by our corps. That is incorrect; our corps only blocked the roads on the other side of the Black Forest ridge, and not on the way from Triberg to Furtwangen, which it never occupied. Besides, our volunteers did not march off from Furtwangen until Becker's advance guard had arrived there.

In Donaueschingen it was agreed that the remains of the entire army should gather on the other side of the Wutach, from Eggingen to Thiengen, and there await the approach of the enemy. Here, with our flanks abutting upon Swiss territory, we could attempt a last battle with our considerable artillery. We could even wait and see whether the Prussians would violate Swiss territory and thus bring the Swiss into the war. But how amazed we were when Willich arrived and we read in the valiant Sigel's order:

"The main body of the army is to proceed to Thiengen and Waldshut and take up a firm position there(!!). Endeavour to maintain the position (at Stuhlingen and Eggingen) as long as possible."

A "firm position" at Thiengen and Waldshut, the Rhine to the rear and heights accessible to the enemy in front! The only possible interpretation of this was: We intend to cross the Sackingen bridge into Switzerland. And this was the same hero Sigel who had said on the occasion of Struve's motion that if it were passed then he, Sigel, would be the first to rebel.

We now occupied the position behind the Wutach itself and distributed our troops from Eggingen to Wutöschingen, where our headquarters were. Here we received the following even more priceless document from Herr Sigel:

"Order. Thiengen headquarters, July 8, 1849. – To Colonel Willich in Eggingen. Since the canton of Schaffhausen is already taking up a hostile stance towards me, it is impossible for me to take up the position we discussed. You will order your movements accordingly and move in the direction of Griessen, Lauchringen and Thiengen. I am marching off from here tomorrow, either to Waldshut or beyond the Alb" (i.e. to Sackingen). "General-in-Chief Sigel."

That capped it all. That evening Willich and I went to Thiengen, where the "General Quartermaster" Schlinke admitted that they really were going to Sackingen and thence over the Rhine. At first Sigel tried to come the "general-in-chief", but Willich did not fall for that and eventually prevailed upon him to give the order to turn round and march on Griessen. The pretext for the march to Sackingen was a junction with Doll, who had marched thither, and an allegedly strong position. The position, evidently the same one from which Moreau gave battle in 1800, had only one drawback: it faced in quite another direction from that where our enemy was coming from; and as for the noble Doll, he did not hesitate to prove that he could go to Switzerland even without Herr Sigel.

Between the cantons of Zurich and Schaffhausen lies a small strip of Baden territory, with the villages of Jestetten and Lottstetten, completely closed in by Switzerland apart from a narrow access at Baltersweil. Here the last stand was to be made. The heights on both sides of the road behind Baltersweil presented excellent positions for our artillery, and our infantry was still numerous enough to cover them if necessary until they had reached Swiss territory. It was agreed that we should wait here and see whether the Prussians would attack us or starve us out. The main body of the army, to which Becker had attached himself, went into camp here. Willich had selected the position for the artillery (we later found their park where their battle-position was to be). We ourselves formed the rearguard and slowly followed after the main body of the army. On the evening of the 9th we went to Erzingen, on the 10th to Riedern. On that day a general council of war was held in the camp. Willich alone spoke for continued defence, Sigel, Becker and others for a withdrawal onto Swiss territory. A Swiss commissioner, Colonel Kurz, I believe, was present and declared that Switzerland would not grant asylum if another battle were fought. When it came to the vote Willich was alone with two or three officers. Apart from him, no one from our corps was present.

While Willich was still in the camp the half-battery posted with us received orders to move off; it departed without so much as a mention being made to us. All the other troops apart from us also received orders to go into the camp. During the night I went once more with Willich to the headquarters in Lottstetten; when we were on our way back, at daybreak, we met on the road all those who had struck camp and were trundling towards the frontier in the most frantic confusion. The same day, early on the morning of the 11th, Herr Sigel crossed onto Swiss territory with his troops near Raft and Herr Becker with his near Rheinau. We concentrated our corps, followed into the camp and from there to Jestetten. While we were there, at about midday, an orderly officer brought us a letter Sigel had written from Eglisau. In it he said that he was already safely in Switzerland, that the officers had retained their sabres and that we should join them as soon as we could. They did not give us a thought until they were on neutral ground!

We marched through Lottstetten to the frontier, bivouacked that night still on German soil, discharged our rifles on the morning of the 12th and then set foot on Swiss territory, the last of the army of Baden and the Palatinate to do so. On the same day and at the same time, Constance was abandoned by the corps stationed there. A week later Rastatt fell through treachery and the counter-revolution had for the moment reconquered Germany down to the last corner.

The campaign for the Imperial Constitution foundered because of its own half-heartedness and its wretched internal state. Ever since the defeat of June 1848 the question for the civilised part of the European continent has stood thus: either the rule of the revolutionary proletariat or the rule of the classes who ruled before February. A middle road is no longer possible. In Germany in particular the bourgeoisie has shown itself incapable of ruling; it could only maintain its rule over the people by surrendering it once more to the aristocracy and the bureaucracy. In the Imperial Constitution the petty bourgeoisie, in alliance with the German ideology, attempted an impossible arrangement aimed at postponing the decisive struggle. The attempt was bound to fail: those who were serious about the movement were not serious about the Imperial Constitution, and those who were serious about the Imperial Constitution were not serious about the movement.

This does not mean to say, however, that the consequences of the campaign for the Imperial Constitution were any the less significant. Above all the campaign simplified the situation. It cut short an endless series of attempts at reconciliation; now that it has been lost, only the somewhat constitutionalised feudal-bureaucratic monarchy or the true revolution can be victorious. And the revolution can no longer be brought to a conclusion in Germany except with the complete rule of the proletariat.

The Imperial Constitution campaign in addition contributed considerably to the development of class antagonisms in those German provinces where they were not yet sharply developed. Especially in Baden. In Baden, as we have seen, there existed hardly any class antagonisms at all before the insurrection. Hence the acknowledged supremacy of the petty bourgeois over all other classes in the opposition, hence the apparent unanimity of the population, hence the speed with which the Badeners, like the Viennese, pass from opposition to insurrection, attempt an uprising at every opportunity and do not even shy away from a battle in the field with a regular army. But as soon as the insurrection had broken out, the classes emerged in definite outline and the petty bourgeois separated themselves from the workers and peasants. Through their representative Brentano they disgraced themselves for all time. They themselves have been driven to such despair by the Prussian dictatorship of the sabre that they now prefer any regime, even that of the workers, to the present oppression; they will take a much more active part in the next movement than in any previous one; but fortunately they never again will be able to play the independent, dominant role they played under Brentano's dictatorship. The workers and peasants, who suffer just as much as the petty bourgeois under the present dictatorship of the sabre, did not go through the experience of the last uprising for nothing; they who besides having their fallen and murdered brothers to avenge will take care that when the next insurrection comes it is they and not the petty bourgeois who get the reins in their hands. And even though no experience of insurrection can substitute for the development of classes, which is only achieved by the operation of large-scale industry over a period of years, Baden has none the less through its latest uprising and its consequences joined the ranks of those German provinces which in the coming revolution will play one of the most important roles.

Looked at from the political point of view, the campaign for the Imperial Constitution was a failure from the very start. The same is true from the military point of view. Its only prospect of succeeding lay outside of Germany, in the victory of the republicans in Paris on June 13, and June 13 came to nothing. After this event the campaign could be nothing but a more or less bloody farce. And that is all it was. Stupidity and treachery ruined it completely. With the exception of a small handful, the military chiefs were either traitors or intrusive, ignorant and cowardly place-hunters, and the few exceptions were everywhere left in the lurch both by the others and by the Brentano government. In the coming convulsion anyone who can produce no other title than that of one of Hecker's generals or an officer of the Imperial Constitution deserves to be shown the door at once. As the chiefs, so the soldiers. The people of Baden possess the very finest fighting elements; during the insurrection these elements were from the start so demoralised and neglected that there arose the wretched situation which we have broadly described. The whole "revolution" was reduced to a veritable comedy and the sole consolation was that the opponent, although six times as strong, had six times as little courage.

But this comedy came to a tragic end, thanks to the blood-thirstiness of the counter-revolution. The same warriors who on the march or on the battlefield were more than once seized by panic, died in the ditches of Rastatt like heroes. Not a single one of them pleaded, not a single one of them trembled. The German people will not forget the executions and the casemates of Rastatt, they will not forget the great gentlemen who ordered these infamies, but neither will they forget the traitors who through their cowardice were responsible for them: the Brentanos of Karlsruhe and of Frankfurt.