It was not easy to cross the deck; every inch was covered by a boot.  The whole superstructure was coated with brown uniforms; they clung to the boat davits, the winches, the railings and ventilators, like bees in a swarm.  Just as the vessel was backing out, a breeze sprang up and cleared the air.  Blue sky broke overhead, and the pale silhouette of buildings on the long island grew sharp and hard.  Windows flashed flame-coloured in their grey sides, the gold and bronze tops of towers began to gleam where the sunlight struggled through.  The transport was sliding down toward the point, and to the left the eye caught the silver cobweb of bridges, seen confusingly against each other.

“There she is!” “Hello, old girl!” “Good-bye, sweetheart!”

The swarm surged to starboard.  They shouted and gesticulated to the image they were all looking for,—­so much nearer than they had expected to see her, clad in green folds, with the mist streaming up like smoke behind.  For nearly every one of those twenty-five hundred boys, as for Claude, it was their first glimpse of the Bartholdi statue.  Though she was such a definite image in their minds, they had not imagined her in her setting of sea and sky, with the shipping of the world coming and going at her feet, and the moving cloud masses behind her.  Post-card pictures had given them no idea of the energy of her large gesture, or how her heaviness becomes light among the vapourish elements.  “France gave her to us,” they kept saying, as they saluted her.  Before Claude had got over his first thrill, the Kansas band in the bow began playing “Over There.”  Two thousand voices took it up, booming out over the water the gay, indomitable resolution of that jaunty air.

A Staten Island ferry-boat passed close under the bow of the transport.  The passengers were office-going people, on their way to work, and when they looked up and saw these hundreds of faces, all young, all bronzed and grinning, they began to shout and wave their handkerchiefs.  One of the passengers was an old clergyman, a famous speaker in his day, now retired, who went over to the City every morning to write editorials for a church paper.  He closed the book he was reading, stood by the rail, and taking off his hat began solemnly to quote from a poet who in his time was still popular.  “Sail on,” he quavered,

  “Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State,
  Humanity, with all its fears,
  With all its hopes of future years,
  Is hanging breathless on thy fate.”

As the troop ship glided down the sea lane, the old man still watched it from the turtle-back.  That howling swarm of brown arms and hats and faces looked like nothing, but a crowd of American boys going to a football game somewhere.  But the scene was ageless; youths were sailing away to die for an idea, a sentiment, for the mere sound of a phrase... and on their departure they were making vows to a bronze image in the sea.