Some of the lifeless heroes were just being borne past on litters,
greeted by the wine-flushed faces of armed students and citizens. The
teachers who had overtaken us on the way recognized among them college
friends who praised the delicious vintage supplied by the palace guards.

My brother and I were also fated to see Frederick William IV. ride down
the Behrenstrasse and the Unter den Linden with a large black, red, and
yellow band around his arm.

The burial of those who had fallen during the night of the revolution was
one of the most imposing ceremonies ever witnessed in Berlin. We boys
were permitted to look at it only for a short time, yet the whole
impression of the procession, which we really ought not to have been
allowed to see, has lingered in my memory.

It was wonderful weather, as warm as summer, and the vast escort which
accompanied the two hundred coffins of the champions of freedom to their
last resting-place seemed endless. We were forbidden to go on the
platform in front of the Neuenkirche where they were placed, but the
spectacle must have produced a strange yet deeply pathetic impression.

Pastor Sydow, who represented the Protestant clergy as the Prelate Roland
did the Catholics, and the Rabbi Dr. Sachs the Jews, afterwards told me
that the multitude of coffins, adorned with the rarest flowers and
lavishly draped with black, presented an image of mournful splendour
never to be forgotten, and I can easily believe it.

This funeral remains in my memory as an endless line of coffins and
black-garbed men with banners and hats bound with crape, bearing flowers,