in unroyal fashion with flying velvet robes to safe citadels right and left, while the army prepares to defend the main citadel of capitalism with its golden disc of power.  The communards scale the steps to the fortress which they finally capture, haul down the disc and set their banner in its place.  The merry music of the Carmagnole is heard, and the victors are seen expressing their delight by dancing first on one foot and then on the other, like marionettes.  Below, the masses dance with them in a frenzy of joy.  But a pompous procession of Prussian legions is seen approaching, and, amid shrieks and wails of despair, the people are driven back, and their leaders set in a row and shot.  Thereafter came one of the most moving scenes in the drama.  Several dark-clad women appeared carrying a black pall supported on sticks, which they set in front of the bodies of the leaders so that it stood out, an irregular pointed black shape against the white columns behind.  But for this melancholy monument the stage was now empty.  Thick clouds of black smoke arose from braziers on either side and obscured the steps and the platform.  Through the smoke came the distant sound of Chopin’s Marche Funebre, and as the air became clearer white figures could be dimly seen moving around the black pall in a solemn dance of mourning.  Behind them the columns shone ghostly and unreal against the glimmering mauve rays of an uncertain and watery dawn.

The second part of the pageant opened in July 1914.  Once again the rulers were feasting and the workers at toil, but the scene was enlivened by the presence of the leaders of the Second International, a group of decrepit professorial old men, who waddled in in solemn procession carrying tomes full of international learning.  They sat in a row between the rulers and the people, deep in study, spectacles on nose.  The call to war was the signal for a dramatic appeal from the workers to these leaders, who refused to accept the Red Flag, but weakly received patriotic flags from their respective governments.  Jaures, elevated to be the symbol of protest, towered above the people, crying in a loud voice, but fell back immediately as the assassin’s shot rang out.  Then the people divided into their national groups and the war began.  It was at this point that “God Save the King” was played as the English soldiers marched out, in a comic manner which made one think of it as “Gawd save the King.”  Other national anthems were burlesqued in a similar fashion, but none quite so successfully.  A ridiculous effigy of the Tsar with a knout in his hand now occupied the symbolic position and dominated the scene.  The incidents of the war which affected Russia were then played.  Spectacular cavalry charges on the road, marching soldiers, batteries of artillery, a pathetic procession of cripples and nurses, and other scenes too numerous to describe, made up that part of the pageant devoted to the war.