We all leaned over the railings and looked down into the street beneath
us. To our left the Fontanka Bridge was quite deserted--then, suddenly,
an extraordinary procession poured across it. At that same moment (at
any rate it seems so now to me on looking back) the sun disappeared,
leaving a world of pale grey mist shot with gold and purple. The stars
were, many of them, already out, piercing with their sharp cold
brilliance the winter sky.
We could not at first see of what exactly the crowd now pouring over the
bridge was composed. Then, as it turned and came down our street, it
revealed itself as something so theatrical and melodramatic as to be
incredible. Incredible, I say, because the rest of the world was not
theatrical with it. That was always to be the amazing feature of the new
scene into which, without knowing it, I was at that moment stepping. In
Galicia the stage had been set--ruined villages, plague-stricken
peasants, shell-holes, trenches, roads cut to pieces, huge trees
levelled to the ground, historic chateaux pillaged and robbed. But here
the world was still the good old jog-trot world that one had always
known; the shops and hotels and theatres remained as they had always
been.
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