A poem beneath a United States flag calls on American boys to show the Kaiser.
Show the KaiserShow the Kaiser plainly When you meet him over there,That from now on and forever He must treat us on the square,Just go and make him settle For the cursed submarine,Or prove that you're the toughest boys A Kaiser's ever seen.2212
"Throughout June and into the first days of July, the Americans were part of the nail-biting waiting game—waiting for the German assault. Nightly shelling harassed the New Yorkers. Influenza struck, too, afflicting 40 percent of the men in the regiment. Nerves frayed. Sgt. Noble Sissle felt an 'air of tenseness that seemed to show that trouble brooded of a greater magnitude than we had witnessed in our section of the front.'"
By July Germany had already mounted four offensives on the Western Front in 1918, the last ending on June 14. Through the following month The Allies expected the fifth offensive at any time. The 'New Yorkers' were Black soldiers in America's segregated army. The country's and the army's racism forbade Black and White soldiers serving together, and kept the former from combat. Our author, Stephen Harris, elsewhere writes (page 175), 'The men of the Fifteenth New York had been moved out of St. Nazaire as common laborers and into the French Fourth Army as combat infantrymen. On 12 March the regiment had been placed at the disposal of the French Sixteenth Division "for service as a combat unit." French Black and other colonial soldiers were an integral part of the French army. The influenza would return in the autumn in a more deadly form.
Hellfighters of Harlem by Stephen L. Harris, page 216, copyright © 2003 by Brassey's Inc., publisher: Brassey's Inc., publication date: 2003
1918-07-09, 1918, July, Show the Kaiser flag, influenza, influenza epidemic, flu, flu epidemic,
