CHAPTER XIII
THE STEPPES RISE UP
It is the end of April, 1918. Kuntz and I are saying good-bye to the Red Commune of Petrograd. The snow-flakes are falling, the night descending. Stormy, hungry old city, but dear to us, with its thousand lights and shadows of the Revolution, for nearly every street and prospekt has staged some act in the colossal revolutionary drama.
The square we gaze upon from the steps of the Nicholas Station, has been sprinkled red by the first sacrifices of the Revolution, and we have helped to sprinkle it white with a shower of Soviet posters, flung from a plunging truck at midnight. It has rumbled beneath the tread of marching columns chanting their funeral hymn, bearing away their dead; and we have heard it ring with triumphant shouts proclaiming: "All Power to the Soviets." It has witnessed the rush of Cossack horses thru the ranks of workingmen, felling them to the cobbles. And it has seen the return of these workers, welded together in the iron battalions of the proletariat—the invincible Red Army of Russia.
A multitude of memories bind us to the city. But
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