This article comes from The Crisis (Vol. 17 No. 2) and was published in December 1918.

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=129295166...

 The article itself is styled as a letter from an African American woman to her soldier son. I'm not exactly sure what the background for this article is, because the adopted boy is one whom the woman "has never seen". I think the "soldier boy" she's addressing might just be a stand-in for all of the young black soldiers of the war. Not sure.

Rather than addressing the toll or senselessness of the war itself, as many of the things I've read up to this point have done, she discusses the place of the young, African-American soldier within it. Black soldiers had a very complex relationship with the war. They loved their country, though their country treated them as lesser citizens. Even as they were dying to defend America, lynchings and other racial violence still ran rampant back home, often making them question their patriotism and the lives they were sacrificing. Soldiers themselves were still treated atrociously by their white counterparts.

Bentley is writing to a soldier boy feeling angry at this sort of injustice, and she responds by stating the nobleness inherent in the African American soldier. To the soldier boy, she says

you do not "go over seas to risk your life in the defense of a country which crucifies your brothers and denies you the ordinary rights of citizenship." You go to help to protect from disaster the Idea for which this country stands-- that Idea which, though maltreated and defaced by imperfect men, must be made manifest in all its glorious reality as Universal Freedom.

Throughout the war, the ostensible reason for the fighting was to help small, defenseless countries defend  and liberate themselves from the overbearing nations who would deny them their sovereignty. Though most people seemed to become were highly skeptical of this reasoning, Bentley uses it to make the sacrifices by African American soldiers seem worthwhile.