(_He tiptoes to the door and peers into the night._) Come quick, Bettine, rockets are going up! They are breaking into clusters of green stars! Oh, there's a red one! You could see for miles When that one broke. The willow-trees jumped out Like witches; and, between them, the canal Dwindled away to a little thread of blood. And there were lines of men running and falling, And guns and horses floundering in a ditch. Oh, Rada! there's a bonfire by the mill. They've burned the little cottage. There's a man Hanging above the bonfire by his hands, And heaps of dead all round him. Come and see! It's terrible, but it's magnificent, Like one of Goya's pictures. That's the way _He_ painted war. Well, everybody's gone.... To think _I_ was the fittest, after all! (_He returns to the gramophone._) I wonder how this gramophone does work. He said the tune that he was putting in Was just the thing for Christmas Eve. I wonder, I wonder what it was. Listen to this! (_He reads the title._) It's a good omen, Rada--_A Christmas carol Sung by the Grand Imperial Choir_--d' you hear?-- _At midnight in St. Petersburg_--_Adeste Fideles!_ Fancy that! A Christmas carol Upon the gramophone! So all the future ages will be sure To know exactly what religion was. To think we must not hear it! Rada, they say The Angel Gabriel composed that tune On the first Christmas Eve. So don't you think That we might hear it? Everybody is gone, except the dead. It will not wake them.... Come, Rada, you're pretending! Do not make The war more dreadful than it really is. (_He accidentally sets the gramophone working and jumps back, a little alarmed. He runs to the bedroom door._) Rada! I've started it! Bettine, d' you hear? The gramophone's working. (_The artillery booms like a thunder-peal in the distance. Then the gramophone drowns it with the massed voices of the Imperial Choir singing_:) ADESTE FIDELES, LÆTI TRIUMPHANTES, ADESTE, ADESTE IN BETHLEHEM! NATUM VIDETE REGEM ANGELORUM: VENITE, ADOREMUS, VENITE, ADOREMUS, VENITE, ADOREMUS DOMINUM. (NANKO _touches the floor under the door of the bedroom and stares at his hand._) NANKO. Something red again? Trickling under the door? Blood, I suppose.... (_A look of horror comes into his face as he stands listening to the music. Then, as if slowly waking from a dream and almost as if sanity had returned for a moment, he cries_:) It's true! It's true! Rada, I am awake! I am awake! And, in the name of Christ, I accuse, I accuse ... O God, forgive us all! (_He falls on his knees by the bedroom door and calls, as if to the dead within_:)