Per the '
Answers to Correspondents' column,
Labor Call, 21 June, 1917, p.7, this poem appears to have attracted the attention of the censor, who objected to McDougall's original line 'Yet to kill for a king is to kill for the devil' (stanza 5). For the poem to pass for publication, the
Labor Call editor was obliged to substitute the word 'kaiser' for 'king', which significantly alters the nuance of meaning and tames the work's anti war sentiment.