News comes to the farm that England and France have blockaded Germany, and German children are starving. The Hungarian government asks people to volunteer to take as many children as they can in, feed them, and care for them until the war ends. The Nagys take six. The fourth Christmas of the war there are twenty people in the house, Hungarian, German and Russian, eating, exchanging presents and telling stories. That spring Uncle Márton tells them the about the singing tree—an apple tree the men spotted one morning when all around them was barren and dead. It sang because it was alive with birds, all kinds of birds, that had sheltered in it during the night. "Perhaps they... were merely passing time until it would be safe to travel" he told them, but the tree would stay, "she, mother of all, she would remain the same." Finally, in fall of 1918, the war ends and men began returning home. "Uncle" Moses' only living son comes home to be a shop keeper like his father, the Russians prisoners and German children go home, Kate's father is coming back to the farm and everyone hopes the world has learned how to live at peace at last.