We hear a good deal of how our boys sing "Hail! Hail! The Gang's All
Here" and "Where Do We Go From Here, Boys?" as a ship is sinking. I
know American soldiers pretty well. I do not know what they sang when
the _Tuscania_ went down, but I am glad to add my picture to the other
and to say that I for one heard a crowd of American gunners singing
"Jesus, Saviour, Pilot Me Over Life's Tempestuous Sea." The mothers
and fathers of America must know that the average American boy will
have the lighter songs at the end of his lips, but buried down deep in
his heart there is a feeling of reverence for the old hymns, and
whether he sings them aloud or not they are there singing in his heart;
and sometimes, under circumstances such as I have described, he sings
them aloud in the darkness and the storm.

If you do not believe this because you have been told so often by
magazine correspondents, who see only the surface things, that all the
boys sing is ragtime, let Bishop McConnell, of the Methodist Episcopal
Church, tell you of that Sunday evening when, at the invitation of
General Byng, he addressed, under the auspices of the Y. M. C. A., a
great regiment of the Scottish Guards. That night, in a
shell-destroyed stone theatre, he spoke to them on "How Men Die." In a
week from that night more than two-thirds of them had been killed.
When Bishop McConnell asked them what they would like to sing, this
great crowd of sturdy, bare-kneed soldiers of democracy, who had borne
the brunt of battle for three years, asked for "O God, Our Help in Ages
Past."

Yes, I know that the boys sing the rag-time, but this must not be the
only side of the picture. They sing the old hymns, too, and memories