An old soldier of the Civil War, still an alien in the eyes of the law, a Kentuckian seventy-six years old with a wife and six children, all born on this soil, and Americans beyond cavil, took advantage of the opportunity to file his tattered old army discharge of 1865 in lieu of “first papers.” There will be, till he dies, two Great Dates in that old fellow’s life--1861, when, like the aliens of this war, he pledged his life to maintain the United States, and 1918, when the United States formally accepted him into full recorded fealty and fellowship. Yet the _Fact_ had been a human reality for nearly sixty years! There were not a few officers who had been commissioned in oversight of the fact that their alienage legally should have barred them. The defect was swiftly removed. And there were English and Irish and Scotch and Welsh--and others, too--who had been here so many years and were so saturated with all that is essential of Americanism that their naturalization seemed a formality almost absurdly superfluous. To all of these at various times and under diverse conditions--sometimes in glaring noonday inbreaks of dreary camp routine; sometimes at night in the last hours before the grim setting forth for France--great words were spoken to solemnize and signalize the transaction. Perhaps the best of all was that tense sentence of General Bell: _I beg of you not to take this oath of allegiance to the United States unless it is in your heart to do so._ Let it not be forgotten that nobody compelled these men to utilize this privilege. The law stipulated only that they “_may_ petition.” Their alienage would have exempted them from service and the peril that awaited them. At first, the certificates of naturalization were delivered; but later, as the flood of applicants became overwhelming and the complications involved hurried departure overseas, before the papers were ready, and other considerations, the delivery was delayed, and the men were advised to arrange to have their precious “last papers” sent rather to their homes, or even retained in Washington until after the war. This was a deep disappointment to the new citizens; and at Camp Upton, for one example, a judge, who knew men by heart, caused the drawing up of a mimeographed temporary certificate, properly embellished with “SS,” “Be it known,” and all the rest of the imposing verbiage, with the soldier’s name suitably prominent in mid-page. THOSE WHO WENT WITHOUT CITIZENSHIP