And who shall forget the silhouette of approaching the shores of France by night as they have sailed down along the coast, cautiously and carefully, to find the opening of the submarine nets?  Who shall forget the sense of exhilaration that the news that land was near brought?  Who shall forget the crowding to the railings by all on board to scan anxiously through the night for the first sight of land?  Then who shall forget seeing that first light from shore flash out through the darkness of night?  Who shall forget the red and green and white lights that began to twinkle, and gleam, and flash, and signal, and call?  How beautiful those lights looked after the long, dangerous, eventful, and dark voyage, without a single light showing on the ship!  And who shall forget the man along the railing who said, “I never knew before the meaning of that old song, ‘The Lights Along the Shore’”?  And then, who can forget the fact that suddenly somebody started to sing that old hymn, “The Lights Along the Shore,” and of how it swept along the lower decks, and then to the upper decks, until a whole ship-load of people was singing it?  And then who shall forget how somebody else started “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning”?  Can such scenes ever be obliterated from one’s memory?  No, not forever.  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.”

The man beside me said:  “The folks back home hear it all right, for they are eagerly listening for every sound that comes from that crowd of boys.  Yes, the folks back home hear it, and they’ll ’keep the home fires burning’ all right.  God bless them!”

The last Silhouette of Song stands out against a background of green trees and spring, and the odor of a hospital, and Red Cross nurses going and coming, and boys lying in white robes everywhere.  My friend the song-leader had gone with me to hold the vesper service in the hospital.  Then we visited in the wards in order to see those who were so severely wounded that they could not get to the service.