American Soldiers Greeted Christmas
Christmas Eve, 1898, found the Seventh Army Corps encamped along the hills at Quemados, near Havana, Cuba. Suddenly from the camp of the Forty-ninth Iowa rang a sentinel’s call, “Number ten; twelve o’clock, and all’s well!” Lieutenant-Colonel Curtis Guild thus wrote about it:
“It was Christmas morning. Scarcely had the cry of the sentinel died away, when from the bandsmen’s tents of that same regiment there rose the music of an old, familiar hymn, and one clear baritone voice led the chorus that quickly ran along the moonlit fields: ‘How firm a foundation ye saints of the Lord!’ Another voice joined in, and another, and another, and in a moment the whole regiment was singing, and then the Sixth Missouri joined in with the Fourth Virginia, and all the rest, till there on the long ridges above the city ... a whole American army corps was singing:
‘Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed,
For I am thy God, and will still give thee aid;
I’ll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand,
Upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.’
Protestant and Catholic, South and North, singing together on Christmas day in the morning,—that’s an American army!”
We next go to Palestine for two stories. One is about