Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/316

258 Up thru 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 green wreaths from forty-four unions of the city, formed a guard of honor for the dead gruzchiki. The coffins 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 color and sound and motion. But there was something else, a something which compelled fear and awe. I had seen a score of the great processions of Petrograd and Moscow, peace and victory and protest and memorial parades, military and civilian, impressive as only Russians could make them.

But this was different.

From these defenseless poor, stripped of their arms, and with sorrowing songs bearing off their dead, there came a threat more menacing than that from the twelve-inch guns of the Allied Fleet, riding in the harbor 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