e 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