Newspaper History

Category: The Birmingham Age-Herald

  • The Road to Homeland

    From The Birmingham Age Herald, April 13, 1915. By George V. Hobart.

    There’s a big road in the city
        That they call the Great White Way,
    Where the bright lights—staring white lights—
        Turn the night time into day;
    But you’re lonely when you walk it,
        For you want once more to find
    In the shadows, in the darkness,
        That old road you left behind.

    It’s the old road back to Homeland,
        It’s the outcast’s only goal,
    Where the ever-cruel white lights
        Throw no shadows on your soul.
    It’s the old road back to childhood,
        It’s the road you want to roam,
    With the stars above to guide you—
        It’s the road to Home Sweet Home!

  • Dealt

    From The Birmingham Age Herald, March 27, 1915. By Charles Miller.

    Life is a game of whist; from unseen sources
        The cards are shuffled and the hands are dealt.
    Blind our efforts to control the forces
        That, though unseen, are no less strongly felt.

    I do not like the way the cards are shuffled,
        But still I like the game and want to play.
    Thus through the long, long night will I, unruffled,
        Play what I get until the break of day.

  • Where is the Flag of England?

    From The Birmingham Age Herald, March 22, 1915. By James E. Coyle.

    Let the winds of the world make answer!
        North, south, and east and west;
    “Wherever there’s wealth to covet,
        Or land that can be possessed;
    Wherever are savage races
        To cozen, coerce and scare,
    Ye shall find the vaunted ensign:
        For the English flag is there!

    Aye, it waves o’er the blazing hovels
        Whence African victims fly,
    To be shot by explosive bullets,
        Or to wretchedly starve and die;
    And where the beachcomber harries
        The isles of the Southern sea,
    At the peak of his hellish vessels,
        ’Tis the English flag flies free.

    The Maori full oft have cursed it
        With his bitterest dying breath;
    And the Arab has hissed his hatred
        As he spits at its folds in death.
    The hapless fellah has feared it
        On Tel-el-Kebir’s parched plain,
    And the Zulu’s blood has stained it
        With a deep indelible stain.

    It has floated o’er scenes of pillage
        And has flaunted o’er deeds of shame;
    It has waved o’er the fell marauder
        As he ravished with sword and flame;
    It has looked upon ruthless slaughter,
        And massacres dire and grim;
    It has heard the shrieks of the victims
        Drown even the Jingo hymn.

    Where is the flag of England?
        Seek the lands where the natives rot;
    Where decay and assured extinction
        Must soon be the peoples’ lot.
    Go, search for the once glad islands,
        Where diseases and death are rife,
    And the greed of a callous commerce
        Now fattens on human life!

    Where is the flag of England?
        Go, sail where rich galleons come
    With shoddy and “loaded” cottons,
        And beer, and Bibles and rum!
    Go too, where brute force has triumphed,
        And hypocrisy makes its lair;
    And your question will find its answer,
        For the flag of England is there.

  • Hunger

    From The Birmingham Age Herald, February 23, 1915. By Dana Burnet.

    The Starving Men they walk the dusk,
        With hunger in their eyes.
    To them a Lighted House is like
        A lamp of Paradise.

    It is the Window in the dusk
        That marks the drifter’s coast;
    It is the thought of Love and Light
        That mocks the drifter most.

    Now I have been a Starving Man
        And walked the winter dusk;
    And I have known how life may be
        A Heaven and a Husk.

    The Fainting Hands they pulled my sleeve,
        And bade me curse the Light.
    But I had seen a Rich Man’s face
        That looked into the night.

    A hungry face, a brother face,
        That stared into the gloom,
    And starved for Life and starved for Love
        Within a lighted room.

  • Soldier, Soldier

    From The Birmingham Age Herald, February 16, 1915. By Rudyard Kipling.

    “Soldier, soldier, come from the wars,
        Why don’t you march with my true love?”
    “We’re fresh from off the ship an’ ‘e’s maybe give the slip,
        An’ you’d best go look for a new love.

    “New love! True love!
        Best go look for a new love:
    The dead they cannot rise, an’ you’d better dry your eyes,
        An’ you’d best go look for a new love.”

    “Soldier, soldier come from the wars,
        What did you see o’ my true love?”
    “I seed ‘im serve the Queen in a suit o’ rifle green,
        An’ you’d best go look for a new love.”

    “Soldier, soldier, come from the wars,
        Did ye see no more o’ my true love?”
    “I seed ‘im runnin’ by when the shots began to fly—
        But you’d best go look for a new love.”

    “Soldier, soldier, come from the wars,
        Did aught take ‘arm to my true love?”
    “I couldn’t see the fight, for the smoke it lay so white—
        An’ you’d best go look for a new love.”

    “Soldier, soldier, come from the wars,
        I’ll up an’ tend to my true love!”
    “‘E’s lying on the dead with a bullet through ‘is ‘ead,
        An’ you’d best go look for a new love.”

    “Soldier, soldier, come from the wars,
        I’ll down an’ die with my true love!”
    “The pit we dug’ll ‘ide ‘im an’ the twenty men beside ‘im—
        An’ you’d best go look for a new love.”

    “Soldier, soldier, come from the wars,
        Do you bring no sign from my true love?”
    “I bring a lock of ‘air that ‘e allus used to wear,
        An’ you’d best go look for a new love.”

    “Soldier, soldier, come from the wars,
        O then I know it’s true I’ve lost my true love!”
    “An’ I tell you truth again—when you’ve lost the feel o’ pain
        You’d best take me for your true love.”

    True love! New love!
        Best take ‘im for a new love.
    The dead they cannot rise, an’ you’d better dry your eyes,
        An’ you’d best take ‘im for your true love.

  • Psyche

    From The Birmingham Age Herald, February 14, 1915. By Bliss Carman.

    Tender as the wind of summer
        That wanders among the flowers,
    Down worldly aisles with enchanted smiles
        She leads the mysterious hours.

    This is immortal Psyche,
        The winged soul of man—
    Ardor unspent and innocent
        As when the world began.

    Out of the ancient silence
        Over the darkling earth,
    As streamers swim on the sunrise rim,
        She moves between sorrow and mirth.

    The impulse of things eternal,
        The transport hidden in clay,
    Like a dancing beam on a noonday stream
        She signals along the way.

    Her feet are poised over peril,
        Her eyes are familiar with death,
    Her radiant wings are daring things,
        Frail as the beat of a breath.

    Over the ocean of being,
        In her gay, incredible flight,
    See her float and run in the gold of the sun
        Down to the gates of night.

    The storm may darken above her,
        The surges thunder below,
    But on through a rift where the gold lights drift,
        Still she will dancing go.

    Treasuring things forgotten,
        As dreams and destinies fade;
    Spirit of truth and ageless youth
        She laughs and is not afraid.

  • Live and Let Live

    From The Birmingham Age Herald, February 13, 1915.

    If we were cured
        Of all our ills,
    The man would starve
        Who makes the pills.

  • Around the Hearth

    From The Birmingham Age Herald, February 12, 1915. By John Greenleaf Whittier.

    Shut in from all the world without,
    We sat the clean winged hearth about,
    Content to let the north wind roar
    In baffled rage at pane and door
    While the red logs before us beat
    The frost line back with tropic heat;
    And ever, when a louder blast
    Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
    The merrier up its roaring draught
    The great throat of the chimney laughed.

    The house dog on his paws outspread
    Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
    The cat’s dark silhouette on the wall
    A couchant tiger’s seemed to fall;
    And, for the winter fireside meet,
    Between the andirons’ straddling feet,
    A mug of cider simmering slow,
    The apples sputtered in a row,
    And close at hand, the basket stood
    With nuts from brown October’s wood.

  • My Son!

    From The Birmingham Age Herald, February 7, 1915.

    Yes, sir, I know; and your words are kind, an’ I tell you, sir, I’ve tried
    To think we can find the things we’ve lost, when we get to the other side.
    I’d give all I’ve got, sir, to know ’twas true, but I can’t, I just can’t see
    How some of those lost, those dear lost things’ll ever come back to me.
    I shall see her there; I know she stands right close to the pearly gate,
    Waitin’; and soon I too’ll be there; she won’t have long to wait,
    But when she asks for the boy—our boy—‘at she left when she went away—
    Asks all those questions a mother will—Oh, what am I going to say?
    Well, as I know he’s been dead this many and many a year,
    Do you think I’d dare to ask up there, “What! haven’t you seen him here?”

    God gives men power for good or ill that ain’t for this world alone;
    They can lift a soul to the gates up there in the light of the great white throne,
    Or sink it low as they sunk my boy—such beautiful eyes he had—
    Brown like his mother’s—you’d never have thought such eyes could have turned out so bad.
    An’ he wern’t bad either, but true and good, but—perhaps you know the rest—
    There was only one for to bring him up, and I tried to do my best;
    But the world, an’ the flesh, an’ the drink are strong an’ some men’s hearts are stone,
    An’ I tell you it seemed sometimes as if I was fightin’ ‘em all alone.
    For them as’ll lift their fellowmen there’s waitin’ a starry crown,
    But honor and power and wealth is got by them as’ll pull ‘em down.

    Most men they hope for the crown sometime, but they want it the shortest way,
    An’ they do their best an’ their hardest work for a different sort o’ pay.
    So, the world spins on at its rattlin’ gait as hard as ever she can,
    An’ it don’t much matter that boys are lost if they belong to some other man.
    One night—dead drunk—they brought him home—my boy—an’ I laid him there,
    The blood of a street fight on his face, an’ the gutter mud in his hair.
    He never knew me nor spoke again, drunk an’ asleep he died,
    An’ I prayed that his mother’d never know how we laid him by her side.
    Yes, the golden streets an’ the jasper walls—I’ve read of ‘em all—but then
    Do you believe, sir, that over there I shall find my boy again?

  • Death of Henry Wohlleb

    From The Birmingham Age Herald, February 2, 1915. By John Osborn Sargent.

    On the field in front of Frastenz, drawn up in battle array,
    Stretched spear on spear in a crescent, the German army lay;
    Behind a wall of bucklers stood bosoms steeled with pride,
    And a stiff wood of lances that all assaults defied.

    Oh, why, ye men of Switzerland, from your Alpine summits sally,
    And armed with clubs and axes descend into the valley?
    “The wood just grown at Frastenz with our axes we would fell,
    To build homesteads from its branches, where Liberty may dwell.”

    The Swiss on the German lances rush with impetuous shock;
    It is spear on spear in all quarters—they are dashed like waves from a rock.
    His teeth then gnashed the Switzer, and the mocking German cried:
    “See how the snout of the greyhound is pierced by the hedgehog’s hide!”

    Like a song of resurrection, then sounded from the ranks:
    “Illustrious shade, Von Winkelried! To thee I render thanks;
    Thou beckonest, I obey thee! Up, Swiss, and follow me!”
    Thus the voice of Henry Wohlleb from the ranks rang loud and free.

    From its shaft he tore the banner and twined it round his breast,
    And hot with lust of death on the serried lances pressed;
    His red eyes from their sockets like flaming torches glared,
    And in front, in place of the banner, waved the locks of his snow white hair.

    The spears of six knights together—in his hands he seizes all—
    And thereon thrusts his bosom—there’s a breach in the lances’ wall.
    With vengeance fired, the Switzers storm the battle’s perilous ridge,
    And the corpse of Henry Wohlleb to their vengeance is the bridge.