Newspaper History presents media sourced from a United States newspaper dating back 108 years.

  • The Non-Combatants

    From The Sun, May 2, 1915.

    Why should we mourn that shot and shell
        Are sweeping lives away
    When each man has his private hell
        And dies anew each day?

    Upon the bloody field where death
        His thundering summons calls,
    The men who face the cannon’s breath
        May win to glory’s halls.

    Mixed in that elemental strife
        Perhaps they may forget
    The heartaches that we bear through life,
        The sorrow, the regret.

    Sweeter by far the lot they choose
        Than ours who stay behind,
    Who find what we would gain we lose,
        Unbound what we would bind.

    We envy them the deaths they die,
        Our hearts must die each day,
    We greet with sad and hopeless eye
        Each morn’s returning ray.

    They fall, to live forever more
        In glory’s brightest page,
    We live in sorrow to deplore
        The bars around our cage.

    The gods on high, if gods there be
        To comfort or condemn,
    Shall, if they judge with equity,
        Lament for us, not them.