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And once more the spring sun has risen twice, and once more the immense city wears a festive air; but the color of this solemnity is that of mourning, for the feast they celebrate is the feast of the dead.
Black banners are waving from the towers and parapets of the royal palace; mourning crape is floating from all the windows; crape is seen on the bonnets of ladies and on the hats of men, on the arms of countless numbers, who are all making their way towards the beautiful open square in the heart of the city, where, amid temples bathed in the rays of the noon-day sun, the coffins of all the victims of that night of terror are standing on a huge platform. One hundred and eighty-seven coffins, some containing women and children, innocent flowers, that fell under the pitiless scythe when the grim mowers of the bloody harvest were reaping the field on which the seed of liberty was to have ripened.
And even this did not complete the bloody harvest. The hospitals, as well as numberless private houses, had besides their wounded men, many of whom were never to see the golden day of freedom.
And now the bells begin to toll solemnly on all the steeples--the same bells which in the night of the barricade had rang the alarm.
The church ceremonies are ended. The procession is in motion. A procession such as that city had never seen; such as the world's history perhaps never recorded.
In endless length the coffins with their rich loads of flowers are borne on the shoulders of citizens, and twenty thousand men of every age and every rank form the escort. On every coffin is a paper with the name of the deceased. Unmeaning names! Who was Oswald Stein? Who was Eberhard Wolfgang Berger?
What is there in a name? What matters it who they were in life? what they did and suffered, blundered and sinned, desired and failed to achieve? All desires are crowned, all sins are expiated, by their dying for freedom. This was felt by the hundred thousands who stood on both sides of the streets through which the procession moved, reverently baring their heads before every coffin.
And thus the endless procession moves slowly in silent, solemn stillness to its destination, a high hill at one of the gates of the city, where the men of the barricades have on the day before dug out an immense square hole. The procession enters the cutting. The bearers quietly set down the coffins and move on, and so the others, till the whole procession has passed out again.
And the thousands are standing around in solemn silence. Guns are fired and a whole nation prays at the graves of its martyrs.