Page:Albert Rhys Williams - The Red Funeral in Vladivostok (1917).djvu/3

 great processions of Petrograd and Moscow, peace and victory and protest and memorial parades, military and civilian. They were all vast and impressive because the Russians have a genius for this kind of thing. But this was different.

From. these defenceless poor, stripped of their arms, and with sorrowing songs bearing off their dead, there came a threat more menacing than that which frowned from the twelve-inch guns of the Allied Fleet, riding in the harbour below. It was impossible not to feel it. It was so simple, so spontaneous and so elemental. It came straight out of the heart of the people. It was the people, leaderless, isolated, beaten to earth, thrown upon its own resources, and yet, out of its grief, rising magnificently to take command of itself.

The dissolution of the Soviet, instead of plunging the people into inactive grief and dissipating their forces, begot a strange, unifying spirit. Seventeen thousand separate souls were welded into one. Seventeen thousand people, singing in unison found themselves thinking in unison. With a common mass will and mass consciousness, they formulated their decisions from their class standpoint—the determined standpoint of the revolutionary proletariat.

The Czecho Slovaks came, offering a guard of honour. "Ne noozhna!" (It is not necessary!) the people replied. "You killed our comrades. Forty to one you fought against them. They died for the Soviet and we are proud of them. We thank you, but we cannot let the guns which shot them down guard them in their death!"

"But there may be danger for you in this city," said the authorities.

"Never mind," they answered, "We, too, are not afraid of death. And what better way to die than beside the bodies of our comrades!"

Some bourgeois societies came, presenting memorial wreaths. (The Cadets officially denied that these wreaths came from them.)

"Ne noozhna, it is not necessary," the people answered. "Our comrades died in a struggle against the bourgeoisie. They died fighting cleanly. We must keep their memory clean. We thank you, but we dare not lay your wreaths upon their coffins."

The procession poured down the Aleutskaiya Hill, filled the large, open space at the bottom, and faced up toward the English Consulate. Near by was a work-car with a tower for repairing electric wires. Whether it was there by design or accident I do not know. Presently it was to serve as a speaker's rostrum.

The band played a solemn dirge. The men bared their heads. The women bowed. The music ceased and there was a silence. The band played a second time. Again there was the bowing and baring of heads and again the long silence. And