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Revolt of the Masses. Later Colonel Lanser arrived, and told the Mayor: "We want to get along as well as we can. You see, sir, this is more like a business venture than anything else. We need the coal mine here and the fishing. We will try to get along with just as little friction as possible." He added that the people must go on working the mine. "But suppose," said the Mayor, "the people do not want to work the mine." "I hope they will want to," said the Colonel, "because they must." He explained that the Mayor would continue to give orders. Said the Mayor: "Sir, I am of this people, and yet I don't know what they will do. ... Some people accept appointed leaders and obey them.
But my people have elected me. They made me and they can unmake me. Perhaps they will if they think I have gone over to you." Just then the butler broke in: "It's Annie [the cook]. She's getting angry, sir.
. . . Annie doesn't like the soldiers on the back porch. . . . They are looking through the window at Annie. She hates that." "They are doing no harm," said the Colonel. "Well, Annie hates to be stared at." Soon "from the doorway came the sound of an angry woman's voice and a thump and a man's cry." The butler scuttled in.
"She's thrown boiling water," he said.
"She's very angry." "You will have to discipline your cook," said the Colonel. "I can't," said the Mayor, "she'll quit." "She can't quit," said the Colonel. "Then she'll throw water," said Dr. Winter. "I could have her shot," said the Colonel, "I could lock her up ... [but] we are instructed to get along with your people. . . . Please cooperate with us for the good of all. . . .
Will you?" "I don't know," said the Mayor. "But you are the authority," said the Colonel. Said the Mayor: "You won't believe this, but it is true: authority is in the town. I don't know how or why, but it is so. This means we cannot act as quickly as you can, but when a direction is set, we all act together..." Then the invaders moved into the Mayor's house. Among them were Lieutenants Prackle and Tonder. Prackle was "a dancing-partner, a gay young man who nevertheless could scowl like the Leader, could brood like the Leader. He hated degenerate art and had destroyed several canvases with his own hands." Tonder was "a bitter poet who dreamed of perfect, ideal love of elevated young men for poor girls. ... He longed for death on the battlefield. . . . He even had his dying words ready." Only Colonel Lanser "knew what war really is in the long run. Lanser had been in Belgium and France 20 years before and he tried not to think what he knew —that war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds." The invaders were almost entirely cut off from the population. "In the town the people moved sullenly through the streets.