a strip of moire, this splendid desolation blocked on each side by crowds
half the density of the sidewalk.

On one of these sun-drenched Saturdays dedicated by a growing tradition to
this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a flare of
music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned into a scene
thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after
impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will,
but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great
primordial mire of war.

There is no state of being so finely sensitized as national consciousness.
A gauntlet down and it surges up. One ripple of a flag defended can
goose-flesh a nation. How bitter and how sweet it is to give a soldier!

To the seething kinetic chemistry of such mingling emotions there were
women who stood in the frontal crowds of the sidewalks stifling hysteria,
or ran after in terror at sight of one so personally hers, receding in that
great impersonal wave of olive drab.

And yet the air was martial with banner and with shout. And the ecstasy of
such moments is like a dam against reality, pressing it back. It is in the
pompless watches of the night or of too long days that such dams break,
excoriating.

For the thirty blocks of its course Gertie Slayback followed that wave of
men, half run and half walk. Down from the curb, and at the beck and call
of this or that policeman up again, only to find opportunity for still
another dive out from the invisible roping off of the sidewalk crowds.