Broadway was a riot of light, thronged as he had never seen it with a
carnival crowd which swept its glittering way through scraps of paper,
piled ankle-deep on the sidewalks. Here and there, elevated upon benches
and boxes, soldiers addressed the heedless mass, each face in which was
clear cut and distinct under the white glare overhead. Anthony picked
out half a dozen figures--a drunken sailor, tipped backward and
supported by two other gobs, was waving his hat and emitting a wild
series of roars; a wounded soldier, crutch in hand, was borne along in
an eddy on the shoulders of some shrieking civilians; a dark-haired girl
sat cross-legged and meditative on top of a parked taxicab. Here surely
the victory had come in time, the climax had been scheduled with the
uttermost celestial foresight. The great rich nation had made triumphant
war, suffered enough for poignancy but not enough for bitterness--hence
the carnival, the feasting, the triumph. Under these bright lights
glittered the faces of peoples whose glory had long since passed away,
whose very civilizations were dead-men whose ancestors had heard the
news of victory in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Bagdad, in Tyre, a hundred
generations before; men whose ancestors had seen a flower-decked,
slave-adorned cortege drift with its wake of captives down the avenues
of Imperial Rome.
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