Christmas Every Day

Words fail me.

Big Chief put his war paint on and kissed his squaw goodbye
Throw away his pipe of peace, and went to do or die
He said, “Uncle Sammy feeds me, gives me all I get
Now that Uncle Sammy needs me, Big Chief no forget”

Chorus:
Big Chief’s on his way to Berlin, just to do his share
Big Chief’s goin’ to make ’em squawk
When he hits ’em with his tomahawk
Big Chief’s goin’ to scalp the Kaiser, take away his gun
Oh! oh he have heap much fun
Goodbye Herman, no more German
Big Chief Kill-a-Hun

Pershing wants to catch the Kaiser, take him live or dead
Big chief says he’s satisfied if he can get his head
There will be no more Budweiser, in the Kaiser’s brew
All he’s goin’ to get to drink will be some Waterloo

Canadians were also willing to set the Kaiser to rights, according to his piece of sheet music.

I always thought that “Yanks” and “doughboys” were the nicknames for American soldiers in World War I. Who knew that there was a brief craze for “Sammies” as in “Uncle Sam’s boys”?

Apparently, they liked to smoke.

Two observations about this one: (1) those are awfully effeminate-looking warriors (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and (2) they were incorrectly using apostrophes to pluralize even back then.

Here an Uncle Sam in shirt-sleeves uses a left jab to give it to the Kaiser. How merry it must have been to sing this around the parlor piano.

Here a French and American officer look approvingly on a group of American enlisted men who appear to be practising the French national anthem, so as to pass it on to “the Hun”. The Germans had a number of nicknames in World War I: “Fritz”, “the Boche”, “the Heinies”, but the most offensive was “Hun”. Kaiser Wilhelm had urged his troops being sent to China to quell the Boxer Rebellion to behave like Huns, and the name stuck.