Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/153

 moved toward the royal palace. They escorted the bodies of those of the people who had been killed in the battle; the corpses of the slain were carried aloft on litters, their gaping wounds uncovered, their heads wreathed with laurel branches and immortelles. So the processions marched into the inner palace court, where the litters were placed in rows in ghastly parade, and around them the multitude of men with pallid faces, begrimed with blood and powder smoke, many of them still carrying the weapons with which they had fought during the night; and among them women and children bewailing their dead. Then the king was loudly called for. He appeared in an open gallery, pale and dejected, by his side the weeping queen. “Hat off!” the multitude shouted, and the king took off his hat to the dead below. Then a deep voice among the crowd intoned the old hymn, “Jesus, meine Zuversicht”—“Jesus, my Refuge,” in which all present joined. The chorus finished, the king silently withdrew and the procession moved away in grim solemnity. This was a terrible humiliation to the crown, but at the same time a pointed answer to the king's address in which the fighters had been denounced as a band of miscreants, or as the seduced victims of such a band. Had there really been such miscreants, or persons answering our present conception of anarchists, among them, Frederick William IV. would hardly have survived that terrible moment when he stood before them, alone and defenseless, and they fresh from the battlefield with guns in their hands. But at that moment their cry was not “Death to the king!” nor “Down with royalty!” but “Jesus, my Refuge!”

Nor was the history of those fateful days tainted by any act of heinous crime; indeed, two private houses were sacked, the owners of which had been caught betraying the fighting