Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/315



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

Looking up, I saw on the crest of the hill the first lines of some vast procession. It was the funeral of the gruzchiki (longshoremen) killed four days before in the siege of the Red Staff Building.

To-day the people, rising out of their grief and terror, were coming forth to bury these 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 hilltop by thousands until the whole long slope was choked with the dense, slow-moving throng, keeping time to the funeral march of the revolutionists.