That silhouette remains eternally!
Five great transports were in. They were lined up along the docks in
the locks. A Y. M. C. A. secretary was standing on the docks yelling
up a word of welcome to the crowded railings of the great transports.
The boats were not "cleared" as yet. It would take an hour, and the
secretary knew that something must be done, so he started to lead first
one ship and then another in singing.
"What shall we sing, boys?" he would shout up to them from the docks
below. Some fellow from the railing yelled, "Keep the Home Fires
Burning," and that fine song rang out from five thousand throats. I
have heard it sung in the camps at home, I have heard it sung in great
huts in France, but I never heard it when it sounded so significant and
so sweet in its mighty volume as it sounded coming from that great
khaki-lined transport, which had just landed an hour before in France.
I stood beside the song-leader there on the docks looking up at that
great mass of American humanity, a hundred feet above us, so far away
that we could not recognize individual faces, on the high decks of one
of the largest ships that sails the seas, and as that sweet song of war
swept out over the docks and across the white town, and back across the
Atlantic, I said to myself: "That volume sounds as if it could make
itself heard back home.
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