Page:Albert Rhys Williams - The Red Funeral in Vladivostok (1917).djvu/2



It was the Fourth of July. I was standing on the Kitaiskaya looking down upon the holiday flags on the American battleship in Vladivostok Bay. Suddenly I heard a far away sound. Listening, I caught the strains of the Revolutionary Hymn:—

With hearts heavy and sad we bring our dead

Who shed their blood in the fight for freedom.

Looking up, I saw on the crest of the hill the first lines of the funeral procession of the gruzshchiki.

Four days before, when the Czecho-Slovaks, aided by Japanese and English troops, suddenly seized the Soviet and its officials, throwing confusion and terror into the ranks of the workers, the gruzshchiki (longshoremen), rushed into the Red Staff Building, and, though outnumbered forty to one, refused to surrender until the building was fired by an incendiary bomb.

To-day, the people were burying the defenders of the fallen Soviet. Out of the workmen's quarters they streamed, jamming the street, not from curb to curb, but from wall to wall. They came billowing over the hill-top by thousands until the whole long slope was choked with the dense, slow-moving throng, keeping time to the funeral march of the revolutionists.

Up through the gray and black mass of men and women ran two lines of white-bloused sailors of the Bolshevik fleet. Above their heads tossed a cloud of crimson standards with: silvered cords and tassels. In the vanguard, four men carried a huge red banner with the words: "Long Live the Soviet of Workmen's and Peasants' Deputies! Hail to the International Brotherhood of the Toilers!"

A hundred girls in white, carrying the green wreaths from forty-four unions of the city, formed a guard of honour for the coffins of the gruzshchiki, which, with the red paint still wet upon them, were borne upon the shoulders of their comrades. The music crashed out by the Red Fleet Band was lost in the volume of song that rose from the seventeen thousand singers.

Here was colour and sound and motion—but there was a something else, a something which compelled fear and awe. I have seen a score of the