He stood, still strong, as ever unthinking; a
ready man with a vast empty past and with no future, with his childlike
impulses and his man's passions already dead within his tattooed breast.
The men who could understand his silence were gone--those men who knew
how to exist beyond the pale of life and within sight of eternity. They
had been strong, as those are strong who know neither doubts nor hopes.
They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted, unruly
and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to represent those men as
whining over every mouthful of their food; as going about their work
in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew toil,
privation, violence, debauchery--but knew not fear, and had no desire
of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to inspire;
voiceless men--but men enough to scorn in their hearts the sentimental
voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate. It was a fate unique
and their own; the capacity to bear it appeared to them the privilege
of the chosen! Their generation lived inarticulate and, indispensable,
without knowing the sweetness of affections or the refuge of a home--and
died free from the dark menace of a narrow grave.
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