72
The Way of the Cross
You go into a baker's shop and ask:
—Have you any white bread?
The shopman looks at you in wonder.
—We bake no white. Only black, and even that's all taken for the fugitives.
—The fugitives will eat us up, says Roslavl in terror.
But the wave of fugitives comes on and on, and a stench is given forth from it.
Here the great river stops, and its waters turn round and round, like a whirlpool.
Roslavl is overwhelmed; the tide rises above its head.
The reason?
—The railway.
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people will remember with horror:
—The desolation of Roslavl.
Here is enacted a dreadful scene,
"The completion of the process."
