He threw back his
shoulders and walked with martial tread; he drew an imaginary sword from
its scabbard and waved it aloft; stopping, he aimed carefully at a body of
imaginary men who advanced yelling toward him across a wheatfield; he felt
that life in making him a housepainter in a farming village in Iowa and in
giving him an unappreciative son had been cruelly unfair; he wept at the
injustice of it.
The American Civil War was a thing so passionate, so inflaming, so vast,
so absorbing, it so touched to the quick the men and women of those
pregnant days that but a faint echo of it has been able to penetrate down
to our days and to our minds; no real sense of it has as yet crept into
the pages of a printed book; it yet wants its Thomas Carlyle; and in the
end we are put to the need of listening to old fellows boasting on our
village streets to get upon our cheeks the living breath of it. For four
years the men of American cities, villages and farms walked across the
smoking embers of a burning land, advancing and receding as the flame of
that universal, passionate, death-spitting thing swept down upon them or
receded toward the smoking sky-line. Is it so strange that they could not
come home and begin again peacefully painting houses or mending broken
shoes? A something in them cried out.
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