It sent them to bluster and boast
upon the street corners. When people passing continued to think only of
their brick laying and of their shovelling of corn into cars, when the
sons of these war gods walking home at evening and hearing the vain
boastings of the fathers began to doubt even the facts of the great
struggle, a something snapped in their brains and they fell to chattering
and shouting their vain boastings to all as they looked hungrily about for
believing eyes.
When our own Thomas Carlyle comes to write of our Civil War he will make
much of our Windy McPhersons. He will see something big and pathetic in
their hungry search for auditors and in their endless war talk. He will go
filled with eager curiosity into little G. A. R. halls in the villages and
think of the men who coming there night after night, year after year, told
and re-told endlessly, monotonously, their story of battle.
Let us hope that in his fervour for the old fellows he will not fail to
treat tenderly the families of those veteran talkers; the families that
with their breakfasts and their dinners, by the fire at evening, through
fast day and feast day, at weddings and at funerals got again and again
endlessly, everlastingly this flow of war words.
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