The poor love each
other so!
All the long day the funeral procession passed, coming in by the
Iberian Gate and leaving the Square by way of the Nikolskaya, a river
of red banners, bearing words of hope and brotherhood and stupendous
prophecies, against a back-ground of fifty thousand people,-under the
eyes of the world's workers and their descendants forever....
One by one the five hundred coffins were laid in the pits. Dusk fell,
and still the banners came drooping and fluttering, the band played
the Funeral March, and the huge assemblage chanted. In the leafless
branches of the trees above the grave the wreaths were hung, like
strange, multi-coloured blossoms. Two hundred men began to shovel in
the dirt. It rained dully down upon the coffins with a thudding
sound, audible beneath the singing....
The lights came out. The last banners passed, and the last moaning
women, looking back with awful intensity as they went. Slowly from
the great Square ebbed the proletarian tide....
I suddenly realised that the devout Russian people no longer needed
priests to pray them into heaven. On earth they were building a
kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer, and for which it
was a glory to die....
Chapter XI
The Conquest of Power (See App. XI, Sect. 1)
DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLES OF RUSSIA (See App.
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