From Our Paper, Volume 34, Number 51 (Concord Junction, Mass.: Massachusetts Reformatory, December 22, 1917), page 608:


WHEN THE WAR IS GOING TO END

Absolute knowledge I have none,
But my aunt's washer-woman's son
Heard a policemen on his beat
Say to a laborer on the street
That he had a letter last week
Written in Latin, or maybe Greek,
From a Chinese coolie in Timbuctoo,
Who said the niggers in Cuba knew
Of a colored man in a Texas town,
Who got it straight from a circus clown,
That a man from the Klondike heard the news,
From a gang of South American Jews,
About somebody in Borneo
Who heard of a man who claimed to know
Of a swell society dame at a lake,
Whose mother-in-law will undertake
To prove that her seventh husband's niece
Has stated in a printed piece,
That she has a son who has a friend
Who knows when the War is going to end.

[Several other publications printed copies of the same poem around the same time. The wording varies somewhat.]