C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Florence Kiper Frank (1885–1976)

(There are nearly a quarter of a million Jews in the Czar’s army alone.—Newspaper clipping.)

THEY have dressed me up in a soldier’s dress,

With a rifle in my hand,

And have sent me bravely forth to shoot

My own in a foreign land.

Oh, many shall die for the fields of their homes,

And many in conquest wild,

But I shall die for the fatherland

That murdered my little child!

How many hundreds of years ago—

The nations wax and cease!—

Did the God of our fathers doom us to bear

The flaming message of peace!

We are the mock and the sport of time!

Yet why should I complain!—

For a Jew that they hung on the bloody cross,

He also died in vain.