Seven Hours of Music

An American captain, returned from France, tells an interesting story of the way in which our men went up to the front just before the first battles in which American troops participated. He was conducting transport trains to the front and coming back in an automobile he passed a continuous procession of our men on the way to the battle lines. He reports that they sang almost incessantly during the whole of the seven hours he occupied in passing them. The men had been taught to sing for months past by our nation’s song directors. Who can tell what the singing meant to those men at that thrilling time, when death hovered over the No Man’s Land from which so many failed to return. Albert N. Hoxie, who at the Philadelphia Navy Yard trained two of the companies of Marines who went into the decisive battle at Chateau Thierry, reports that the returning fighters have told him time and again that song was one of their greatest inspirations at the last crucial moments.