“Keep the home-fires burning, While your hearts are yearning; Though your lads are far away They dream of home; There’s a silver lining Through the dark cloud shining; Turn the dark cloud inside out Till the boys come home.” To the American returning from France in 1919, the whole country that had been the scene of the war came back like a panorama or a dream. The moans of the dying and the devastation of homes and villages mingled with the treasures of art and the shrines of devotion. Perhaps he recalled the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the Palace of Kings at Fontainebleau, the tombs of Voltaire and Rousseau and Hugo, the Luxembourg, or the never-to-be-forgotten Promenade at Nice. Roman ruins and amphitheatres, the parade on Bastille Day, fireworks on the Seine, nights at the opera, the games at the Pershing Stadium, the endless coming and going at Brest, even memories of Héloïse and Abelard, all crowded upon the mind to awaken wonder. But above all, far above all, came back the France of the Great Soul, of Liberty and Fraternity and Courage, of the “Marseillaise,”--of Verdun and the deathless word, “Ils ne passeront pas.” It is a country to love, a country worth dying for. Yet few Americans would prefer even France to their own wonderful land. Memories of those at home rushed back even on the field of battle; and though he lived in Mississippi or Montana, to the returning soldier even the harbor of New York spoke of home. After all there is nothing like the land of one’s birth and loved ones. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” To the Negro soldier who went to France the experience was, as for every soldier, one ever to be remembered. Some men who in Alabama or Louisiana had in all their lives hardly been twenty-five miles from home were suddenly taken thousands of miles away, across the Atlantic, to decide the fate of empires. Altogether four hundred thousand Negro men answered their country’s call. Of these a little more than half saw service abroad, and many never came back. Of those who remained at home importance attached to an organization of which little has been said in these pages, that of the Students’ Army Training Corps. Units of this were established in twenty representative educational institutions, and with inspiring ceremony on October 1, 1918, the flower of the young men of the nation, in these and other colleges, took the oath of loyalty to the flag. Meanwhile black fathers and mothers invested millions of dollars in Liberty Bonds and War Savings Stamps and contributed generously to all the numerous “drives”; and history has not yet told of how much the Negro woman, working hard in the fields of the South, did to feed her country and the world while the war was on.