I

FIRST impressions may have symbolic value. At the Düsseldorf quay, where I entered the French zone of occupation, I saw on the right a barbedwire enclosure, containing a dozen trucks and horse-carts filled with coal. They had been seized upon the public street. The guard of soldiers detailed to watch them occupied a one-story building one hundred feet or so away.

A French officer whom I met at the home of a mine official where he was billeted said with some hesitation that he and his comrades were rather subdued by the strangeness of the Ruhr. They felt lost in the network of railways, pit-heads, and furnaces. They were greatly surprised to find such densely overlapping settlements, -villages, towns, big cities, mining camps, furnaces, and works, -a mosaic of villages, cities, and parks, whose trees were factory chimneys, ore lifts, lofty condensers, towering furnace-stacks and blast heaters. They never imagined that the Ruhr had so many cities of over one hundred thousand inhabitants. They thought of Bochum and Gelsenkirchen as modest provincial towns. They had never heard of the neighboring places. The only further comment the officer ventured was that they expected to find ragged workingmen and half-starved children, ready to welcome the French as saviors. They were surprised at the great number of children they saw everywhere. In one workingmen's colony the officer counted

seventy-two, staring curiously at his automobile.

Essen celebrates May Day. A long parade of workingmen, accompanied by music, advances slowly up lindenshaded Huyssen Boulevard. The Communists have red flowers in the buttonholes of their Sunday coats and wear red cravats. Bright trade-union flags and banners and wooden and pasteboard standards with propaganda mottoes flutter and sway above the moving mass. A few of the inscriptions remain in my memory: "The grain is ripe, the harvest near; stand ready, proletariat!' 'Only he merits freedom who daily fights for liberty.' And in French: 'Vive la République des Soviets!' The Krupp workers form an impressive column. They are evidently proud of the great establishment that they serve, and of their skill as mechanics. The French, a few of whom are watching from the top of the deserted railwaystation, have expressly permitted this May Day procession-some say as a favor to the Communists, with whom they are dickering, and some say in order to wipe out the memory of the bloody slaughter at the Krupp works.

At the house of a boyhood friend I meet two bright young girls who relate to me the exploits of the 'Scissors Club.' This is a local vigilance society to punish any girl who associates with a Frenchman. Blue and red placards are first posted on the house, and sometimes smuggled into the room of any

woman who defies this prohibition. The punishment - cutting off the hair

can only be inflicted in the darkest hours of the night, for should the girl recognize the scissors-man and report him to the French, long years of imprisonment would await him.

No one is permitted abroad at night without a lantern. In some places all Germans must remain indoors after 7 P. M. Even a person who ventures out on his doorstep to get a breath of cool evening air is promptly arrested, and forced to black a specified number of soldiers' boots, to unload a quantity of coke, or to clean the streets, as punishment. One old gentleman, however, was recently excused because French told him he remarkably resembled Poincaré. Whether he felt flattered or not, history does not record.

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In the early dusk the streets offer an oddly old-time scene. Shifts are changing in the mines. The miners leave their houses, carrying lighted minelamps in their hands. A few other citizens hurry hither and thither on hasty errands, likewise carrying lamps or lanterns. They look like fireflies flitting down the street.

Not far from Gelsenkirchen station a market is being held in a dreary little triangular space. Rhubarb and lettuce do not interest me. I pass on to where two women are selling - not vegetables but flowers. They have come from some distance, one bringing her wares in a baby carriage, the other in two baskets carried by a yoke over her shoulders. Their meagre stock consists of wild flowers and greenery gathered in the forest-pale violets, a few bunches of purple cress, little bouquets of valerian, branches of broom with many buds and few blossoms, and inferior twigs of birch, hemlock, pine, larch, and laurel - none longer than

twice the breadth of one's hand. Yet all sells readily, at one hundred and two hundred marks for a twig or a tiny bouquet. The eagerness of the humble workingwomen to secure these pitiful little reminders of the country opens my eyes to the fact that the industrial laborer is wholly cut off from nature. These men and their families no longer can visit the woods and fields, as they could even here only a few years ago. Under normal conditions, to be sure, they made Sunday excursions of some length to Sisen and beyond, but since the French came that is no longer possible.

The French have seized all the more important railway lines of the network that covers the Ruhr district, without regard to their relation with other lines. They have left us Germans merely loose odds and ends that were not intended to afford continuous routes. But our railway people have connected up freight tracks and sidings and mine railways so ingeniously as to reëstablish at least a semblance of through service at places where it had seemed impossible. Yet to make a trip of any length often requires several changes from railways to street cars and vice versa, and occasional intervals on foot.

At one point I learned that the French were just occupying a mine with which I was familiar fifteen years ago. I was curious to observe the operation at first hand, but my expectation of seeing something dramatic was disappointed. These proceedings occur in three steps. The first is the shortest. A detail of thirty men in complete campaign-equipment, with steel helmets, full cartridge-belts and fixed bayonets, take possession of the railway junction to the mine, ejecting the regular switchman. The officer in command then calls at the administration building and in

forms the superintendent that he has not come to take possession of the mine, but merely to seize the coal and coke waiting shipment. The mine may continue operation as usual; he expects to be there only one day. Sentries are posted around the coal- and coke-piles; barbed wire is strung between them and the rest of the mining property; the soldiers billet themselves in one of the sheds.

The second stage begins a day or two later. Eight civilian members of the so-called Engineers' Commission present themselves at the mine. They make inquiries as to the quantity of coke and coal at hand, and consider ways and means for carrying it away. The foremen of the various departments are summoned, and give the minimum of information necessary to prevent the French from wrecking the property, but refuse all further aid. This causes irritation on both sides and demands the utmost prudence and selfcontrol on the part of the Germans. One engineer hunts around and finds the great bins that are ordinarily filled with sulphate of ammonia empty. He anticipates this from his experience at other works. He points around with his finger and asks 'Where?' What he means is that this valuable fertilizer has probably been concealed in some out-of-the-way part of the property. The tar in the great collecting reservoir is cold, and will not flow when the outlet is opened. The engineer has to heat it with steam before it will move. That will take two days at least. How much benzol is there? Which are the pumps to pump it into the tank cars? The French must be on the lookout not to pump tar oil instead of benzol. The great piles to the left of the coke ovens

- which have been cold for weekslook like coal dust. Is there coke beneath them? If so, is it worth the labor to transport the mixture of coke and

coal dust to France, where it will all have to be sifted before it can be used? What kind of coal is in the dumps behind yonder carriers? Can it be used for coking? These and a hundred other questions are on the lips of the French engineers.

The third step is when workingmen appear, who have been recruited by a private contractor to take away the supplies on hand at the works. For weeks the men loaf around the establishment. First they have to secure some kind of cars, more or less in disrepair. Then no tools can be found. Special railway-lines must be laid. During the interval the German miners work after a fashion, getting out only enough coal to keep the mine running. The rest of the time they devote to underground work that is not immediately productive-opening new galleries and crosscuts, timbering, and the like. Naturally a chance visitor does not find this very entertaining. The result is a net loss for the French and a net loss for the Germans.

II

ESPIONAGE thrives tremendously throughout the Ruhr. The German Government, the German Fascisti, the French military police, and the French criminal police, all have their spies everywhere, watching the working people- above all the Communists. One Sunday some proletarian organizations arranged for a little outing near Bochum. Before they reached the beer garden appointed as their rendezvous, two gentlemen in ulsters were already sitting there, buried in their newspapers. Each was reading — with a show of great interest - a Communist sheet. Both these gentlemen were well known to our comrades, although they were unaware of the fact. The first was a French criminal detective, the second a German criminal detective.

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fraternizing. If you want your paper, go out and get it in the woods, and not in a public place like this.'

Evidently French noncommissioned officers are not fully in sympathy with all the orders they are compelled to enforce.

Army officers are professional patriots in every country. It is their business to uphold the credit of the nation they serve. At Essen there is an especially savage 'German eater.' He is the captain of a French tank-company. He has repeatedly struck and abused German workingmen and civilian officials. He speaks German fluently. He is an Alsatian, and before and during the war was a regular officer in a Prussian guard regiment. He has changed his uniform, but still remains loyal to his profession.

In the districts of Hengstey and Scharnhorst the French have shown great anxiety to get Soviet Stars. Suspicious-looking people turn up at our Communist Party headquarters, asking in the Alsatian dialect for a halfdozen of our Stars. General Degoutte, who commands the army of occupation, is sedulously represented to our comrades as a devoted friend of the working classes. So the boys say he intends to substitute the Soviet Star for the Croix de Guerre for decorating his soldiers. Anyway, we see a number of his agents, wearing Soviet Stars in their buttonholes, at all our mass meetings and demonstrations. Of course, these gentlemen are not in uniform. Oddly enough, however, they are on hand as witnesses whenever the French hold a court-martial.

As all the world knows, the death of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria was for decades wrapped in a shroud of mystery. The Imperial Court would permit no light to be thrown upon the tragedy. Only recently has the veil been withdrawn slightly from the drama of Mierling. We now know from indubitable evidence evidence that Crown Prince Rudolf, on the night of January 29, 1889, shot Baroness Marie Vetsera and then himself in his room at Castle Mierling. This was with the full consent of the young Baroness, with whom the Prince had made a suicide-pact.

Her body was not delivered to her family; her mother was not permitted to see the dead daughter; and the Marshal of the Court forced two male relatives relatives her uncles, Count Stockau and Alexander von Baltazzi - to commit an act of cruel indignity toward the remains. They were compelled to take the bloody and half-clothed corpse in an ordinary cab, by night, to the Cistercian Cloister of the Holy Cross near Mierling, where it was hastily dumped into a rough pine coffin and buried without further ceremony.

The victim's mother, Baroness