SFP #3

Two Little Boys
by Theodore Morse and Edward Madden (1902)

Two little boys
Had two little toys,
Each had a wooden horse;
Gaily they played
Each summer's day -
Warriors both of course.
One little chap
Then had a mishap,
Broke off his horse's head;
Cried for his toy,
Then cried for joy
As his young playmate said:

"Did you think I would leave you crying
When there's room on my horse for two?
Climb up here, Jack. we'll soon be flying;
I can go just as fast with two.
When we grow up we'll both be soldiers,
And our horses will not be toys;
And I wonder if we'll remember
When we were two little boys."

Long years passed,
War came so fast;
Bravely they marched away.
Cannons roared loud
And in the mad crowd
Wounded and dying lay.
Up went a shout -
A horse dashes out,
Out from the ranks so blue,
Galloped away
To where Joe lay
And then came a voice he knew:

"Did you think I would leave you dying
When there's room on my horse for two?
Climb up here, Joe, we'll soon be flying
Back to the ranks so blue.
Do you know, Joe, I'm all a-tremble,
Perhaps it's the battle's noise;
But I think it's that I remember
When we were two little boys."

Again I learned this song at Namanu (the first summer it was really popular there) but upon further investigation I know that it has been around much longer.

The song would appear to have its origins in the fiction of the Victorian children's writer E.H. Ewing, whose book 'Jackanapes' was a story about the eponymous hero and his friend Tom, who having ridden wooden horses as two little boys end up together on a Napoleonic battlefield. There Jackanapes rides to the rescue of the wounded and dismounted Tom. Jackanapes nobly replies to Tom's entreaties to save himself, 'Leave you? To save my skin? No, Tom, Not to save my soul.'. And unfortunately takes a fatal bullet in the process. (-Wikipedia)