There
is much of man's life in the figure of the suburbanite standing
absorbed in his own thoughts in the midst of his radishes.
And so about the business of our lives we go and then of a sudden
there comes again the feeling that crept over us all in the year of
the Marching Men. In a moment we are again a part of the moving mass.
The old religious exaltation, strange emanation from the man McGregor,
returns. In fancy we feel the earth tremble under the feet of the men
--the marchers. With a conscious straining of the mind we strive to
grasp the processes of the mind of the leader during that year when
men sensed his meaning, when they saw as he saw the workers--saw them
massed and moving through the world.
My own mind, striving feebly to follow that greater and simpler mind,
gropes about. I remember sharply the words of a writer who said that
men make their own gods and realise that I myself saw something of the
birth of such a god. For he was near to being a god then--our
McGregor. The thing he did rumbles in the minds of men yet. His long
shadow will fall across men's thoughts for ages. The tantalising
effort to understand his meaning will tempt us always into endless
speculation.
Only last week I met a man--he was a steward in a club and lingered
talking to me by a cigar case in an empty billiard-room--who suddenly
turned away to conceal from me two large tears that had jumped into
his eyes because of a kind of tenderness in my voice at the mention of
the Marching Men.
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