"He was a young man with his hand on his father's shoulder watching the regiments moving out of the city to invade Mexico [...] and he was the old veteran leaning upon a crutch, seeing the boys off to Cuba. He was that one man.
And to that one man, whose single lifetime had passed every instant in the present, all the regiments that had passed before him were caught up into that present and were as one regiment. The drums of a century sounded as a single drumming in his ears. And the drums rolling in the future thundered the same step as those that had gone before. The step of men marching, marching one foot after the other under the compulsion of time, out of the past into the future, fighting their battles along the way.
'Now we are engaged in a great war to...'
And he understood that 'now' for the first time. There was no end to it. It renewed itself for each man and so for all men in the ever-living present. It was an eternal now that belonged to the ages. It meant 'forever.'
How long, O Lord, how long . . . The present was all, was more than a man could bear."
--Hervey Allen, Action at Aquila, 1938