Night had fallen, the electric arcs burned blue overhead, she was in another street—­was it Stanley?  Sounds of music reached her, the rumble of marching feet; dark, massed figures were in the distance swimming toward her along the glistening line of the car tracks, and she heard the shrill whistling of the doffer boys, who acted as a sort of fife corps in these parades—­which by this time had become familiar to the citizens of Hampton.  And Janet remembered when the little red book that contained the songs had arrived at Headquarters from the west and had been distributed by thousands among the strikers.  She recalled the words of this song, though the procession was as yet too far away for her to distinguish them:—­

       “The People’s flag is deepest red,
        It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
        And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
        Their life-blood dyed its every fold.”

The song ceased, and she stood still, waiting for the procession to reach her.  A group of heavy Belgian women were marching together.  Suddenly, as by a simultaneous impulse, their voices rang out in the Internationale—­the terrible Marseillaise of the workers:—­

       “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! 
        Arise, ye wretched of the earth!”

And the refrain was taken up by hundreds of throats:—­

       “’Tis the final conflict,
        Let each stand in his place!”

The walls of the street flung it back.  On the sidewalk, pressed against the houses, men and women heard it with white faces.  But Janet was carried on....  The scene changed, now she was gazing at a mass of human beings hemmed in by a line of soldiers.  Behind the crowd was a row of old-fashioned brick houses, on the walls of which were patterned, by the cold electric light, the branches of the bare elms ranged along the sidewalk.  People leaned out of the windows, like theatregoers at a play.  The light illuminated the red and white bars of the ensign, upheld by the standard bearer of the regiment, the smaller flags flaunted by the strikers—­each side clinging hardily to the emblem of human liberty.  The light fell, too, harshly and brilliantly, on the workers in the front rank confronting the bayonets, and these seemed strangely indifferent, as though waiting for the flash of a photograph.  A little farther on a group of boys, hands in pockets, stared at the soldiers with bravado.  From the rear came that indescribable “booing” which those who have heard never forget, mingled with curses and cries:—­“Vive la greve!”

“To hell with the Cossacks!”

“Kahm on—­shoot!”

The backs of the soldiers, determined, unyielding, were covered with heavy brown capes that fell below the waist.  As Janet’s glance wandered down the line it was arrested by the face of a man in a visored woollen cap—­a face that was almost sepia, in which large white eyeballs struck a note of hatred.  And what she seemed to see in it, confronting her, were the hatred and despair of her own soul!  The man might have been a Hungarian or a Pole; the breadth of his chin was accentuated by a wide, black moustache, his attitude was tense,—­that of a maddened beast ready to spring at the soldier in front of him.  He was plainly one of those who had reached the mental limit of endurance.