WORDS AND THE
FIRST WORLD WAR
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY
Linguanomics, Gabrielle Hogan-Brun
The Language of War Monuments, David Machin and Gill Abousnnouga
Wordcrime, John Olsson
To my grandparents, who went through it
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction
1 Language, Dialect and the Need to Communicate
2 Language at the Front
3 Us and Them
4 The Home Front
5 Owning the Language
6 Letting Go
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people have given support to this research and writing through conversations and suggestions in person or through the internet; thanks particularly to Alistair Martin, Jonathon Green, Lynda Mugglestone and Rob Schäfer. I wish to thank Christophe Declercq and Peter Doyle, for their encouragement and assistance; the editorial and design team at Bloomsbury for bringing it to realisation, and Sara Bryant for her copy editing; my family for their support; and my parents, from whom I learned the love of words.
ILLUSTRATIONS
0.1 1915 postcard sent ‘On Active Service’ including, against regulations, details of unit.
1.1 Postcard sent ‘On Active Service’: ‘I am writing a letter to you today. But I have not received one from you for a long time.’
1.2 Variations on the Field Service Postcard.
1.3 A German postcard sent to Manchester in September 1918 by a British soldier.
1.4 Three American soldiers receiving lessons in French.
1.5 Card from Berthe Brifort to Billy, ‘Doux Souvenir’.
1.6 Postcard sent ‘On Active Service’ in 1917: ‘Am getting on tray-bon now.’
1.7 Postcard from Bert to his mother in October 1914, ‘On Active Service’. Note the use of ‘Angleterre’.
1.8 From the Thirty Second News, November 1918, the journal of the American 32nd Division, nicknamed Les Terribles.
2.1 ‘On Active Service’ postcards, sent between February 1917 and October 1918, addressed to Blighty.
2.2 A single entry glossary in The Gasper, 8 January 1916.
2.3 Two cartoon slang glossary postcards.
2.4 Two German ‘poster’ stamps; German postcard sent November 1917; British postcard indicating the downgrading of the word ‘strafe’.
2.5 The green envelope enclosing Amy Shield’s letter, 23 February 1916.
2.6 German postcard, sent October 1915: ‘We trust in grey and blue, in the fleet and the army, we build up Germany’s victory on land and at sea.’
2.7 Letter from Charlie to Bessie, 30 October 1917.
2.8 Ada Self’s ration book, issued November 1918, showing an example of the increased level of officialese.
2.9 Some of the dictionaries and phrasebooks available to British soldiers in France and Flanders, from 1914.
2.10 Two cards from members of the same family, both saying thank you for a gift of ‘Tobo’.
2.11 Photograph of seven cavalry troopers, with the chalked board locating them ‘Somme where in France’.
2.12 In October 1918 Rifleman Fred Walker was stationed near Houplines, written in his diary entry for 5 October as ‘Hoop Lane’.
2.13 A ‘resentment’ caption, the card sent in January 1917; the censoring officer has made an attempt to erase the place name.
2.14 One of Charles Graves’s cartoons for The Hun’s Handbook (1915).
2.15 Postcard sent in February 1916.
3.1 Multilingual postcard used by the Austro-Hungarian army, allowing the sender to say only ‘I am well and everything is fine’.
3.2 French civilian propaganda, showing photos of destruction on French territory, explicitly blamed on ‘the Boches’.
3.3 The Gasper, edited by UPS Battalion soldiers, uses ‘parlez-vous’ rather than the more frequent soldiers’ ‘parley-voo’. 8 January 1916.
3.4 Pte F. Hopkinson conveys his concerns about the pronunciation of Indian names on a chit, the word ‘chit’ coming from Hindi.
3.5 From A Book of Manx Songs, published in 1915 ‘for the use of Manxmen and Manxwomen serving in His Majesty’s Forces, and the Manx Societies throughout the World’.
3.6 Photograph of a group of soldiers in camp; the barrel is labelled ‘Quinine No. 11 B’Hoys’.
3.7 Postcard sent in July 1918.
3.8 Postcard sent ‘On Active Service’, 5 July 1918. View of a hospital with the location information scratched out: ‘have any Berthas been near your place yet?’
3.9 Frank Reynolds’ cartoon of a Prussian family engaged in their morning hate, published in Punch.
4.1 A typical use of war terminology and the exploitation of the emotional links between the Home Front and servicemen and women. Advertisement in Public Opinion, 8 September 1916.
4.2 Boots advertisement in the War Budget, 5 October 1916.
4.3 Pastiche iron crosses, produced by cottage industries, ‘celebrating’ the sites of conquest and the German mindset, using the word ‘Kultur’.
4.4 Undated postcard: ‘Dear Eva, what do you think of the postcard –’
4.5 Postcards sent in 1919 and 1918, including a ‘Granny-dears’ card.
4.6 Postcard, not sent, perhaps referring to the rumour of a secret Russian army supposed to have travelled from Scotland to the south coast by train overnight.
4.7 Giving children names relating to the war began very early, in this case eight days after the declaration of war on Germany. Daily Graphic, 12 August 1914, p. 10.
4.8 Postcard sent on 28 August 1915.
ABBREVIATIONS
AEF American Expeditionary Force
AIF Australian Imperial Force
ANZAC Australian and New Zealand Army Corps
ASC Army Service Corps
BEF British Expeditionary Corps
CLC Chinese Labour Corps
DORA Defence of the Realm Act
FSP Field Service Postcard
GHQ General Headquarters
ILP Independent Labour Party
NCO Non-Commissioned Officer
PBI Poor bloody infantry
PoW Prisoner of War
RAF Royal Air Force
RAMC Royal Army Medical Corps
RFA Royal Field Artillery
RFC Royal Flying Corps
RNAS Royal Naval Air Service
RSM Regimental Sergeant Major
UPS University and Public School
VAD Voluntary Aid Detachment
WREN Women’s Royal Naval Service
PREFACE
In 1914 my grandfather was living in east London, was working as a clerk, and was an enthusiastic performer of comic songs. Pre-war photographs show him in evening dress, with top hat and monocle, slicked-back hair and a performer’s smile. A programme for a charity concert in October 1914 shows him singing four songs: ‘Now are we all here?’, ‘Tally Ho’, ‘As far as it goes’, and ‘I followed her here, and I followed her there’. In 1915 he attested under the Derby Scheme, which involved enlisting, but returning to work until called for; at some stage he was either wounded or declared unfit, as he was on garrison duty in late 1916. There is a sudden change in 1918, seen in his diary, with entries only from the autumn, which show him at the Front, temporarily blinded in a gas attack, on burial parties, learning to use a Lewis gun. The spare pages at back and front have a few addresses and the lyrics for a comic song, which I assume was his own composition.
I was six when my grandfather died, so I have few m
emories, but those I have are of him performing, singing either to me or on stage. He was one of those hundreds of thousands who ‘never spoke about the war’. My memories are of a gentle-mannered old man; these were also the memories of those I knew who knew him. How could I reconcile these with the knowledge both that he had been trained to use a Lewis gun, had in some capacity been involved in the fighting, and possibly had killed; but also that, from the evidence of the diary, a single letter to my grandmother, and another programme from February 1919, he had been thinking about dressing up in a Pierrot costume and singing songs with silly, harmless and naïve lyrics? This is a question that I cannot answer. How did people switch between the extremely harmless and the ultimately harmful? How did they manoeuvre between the creative and the destructive, and what can their surviving words tell us about this?
‘Fritz has made a mess of this place’, my grandfather wrote in the one surviving letter; the war made a mess of people, people’s bodies and minds, so much so that many – perhaps most – of the soldiers who survived tried to close the doors on that period of their lives. Yet through this bewilderingly horrific period of history, people talked, wrote and read; some record of their spoken words survives, and we look through the written record for evidence of how they talked to each other. There are so many fields of language that indicate how people managed: journalism, soldiers’ postcards, memoirs, official reports, poster slogans, song lyrics, graffiti, politicians’ speeches. All of them can take us some way to understanding how words got people into this situation, how words helped them get through it, and how words helped them deal with it afterwards.
R. H. Mottram has a charming description of British soldiers doing little domestic services in a Flemish farmhouse, with ‘elaborate Sunday-school politeness, … tittering slightly at anything not quite nice, and singing, not so often the vulgar music-hall numbers, as the more sentimental “Christmas successes” from the pantomimes’. I can easily imagine my grandfather there, not so far from the nice front rooms of lower middle-class terraced houses in east London, and the household that he grew up in; it was an environment where words mattered – where his ‘best girl’, my grandmother, who was in service, learned that the choice of one word rather than another showed you to be slightly more refined. Yet the lyrics of the song in my grandfather’s diary have an edge, a sharpness, an acceptance of violence, that make for uneasy reading. Time and again, while researching and writing this book, I have found myself discomfited by the polarity of the simple, sometimes silly, almost childish, use of words, in the same environment as the most cynical, callous and inhumane actions; I find myself repeating the question – how can this have been? If this study does not provide an answer, I hope it helps to formulate the question.
INTRODUCTION
We have become accustomed to think of the First World War as affecting everyone by loss, with terms such as ‘the Fallen’ and ‘the lost generation’ focusing on death and grieving. But the period saw great creativity in the English language: changes in how words were used to persuade and inform people, incentives to find ways of expressing the apparently inexpressible, and the development of ways to control communication. Slang became an object of fascination, with competing claims over meanings, forms and origins, a diversion from the usual disapproval of new forms of language; English-speakers were exposed to languages that were new to them, and temporarily adopted or created terms from those languages; and their own language separated people at the Front from those at home.
As well as changing in use and meaning as terms moved between different groups, some terms changed during the course of the war, as part of the normal process of language change, possibly accelerated through extreme circumstances. The spelling ‘Gerry’ largely disappeared and was replaced by ‘Jerry’,1 ‘I am going on fine’ began to be superseded by ‘I am getting on fine’. ‘Wanky’ changed to ‘wonky’ during the course of the war,2 and, as a result of soldiers’ contact with French, some words in longstanding use were edged out by French replacements. Certain regional variants became dominant within some groups, technical jargon became widespread, and the precursor of ‘politically correct language’ emerged; wordplay and irony became prevalent, and, while a tension developed between verbal expression and verbal retention, as the war dragged on verbal humour became more important. Charles Wilson, Lord Moran, writing long after the war, noted how monotony had become a serious problem in the trenches from 1916, as few soldiers read, apart from the repeated reading of letters from home, evidenced by the constant requests for a letter; as Moran saw it, apathy and ‘doing nothing’ were only relieved by humour.3
At this point it is necessary to establish the subject, to determine how to answer the question – what is the language of the First World War? There are many types of language to be examined. If we look at just postcards sent home by soldiers – and these are among the nearest formats to people speaking freely to each other that have survived – we would have to consider the following: the postcard message, the text printed on the postcard, the officially authorised postcard (Field Service Postcard), family slang and colloquialisms within the message, the use of French expressions which might not be understood at home, the awareness of what cannot be written, the relationship between what is written and what would have been spoken, and the language of the censor. This range of different types of language would apply across several fields of linguistic activity, from the words chalked on a shell to the wording of an official citation for bravery. A corpus study of the period would have to study every accessible utterance in order to make a satisfactory statistical analysis, but would effectively create itself, a linguistic one-to-one map of the world. The present study has of necessity been based on selectivity, a working selectivity based on extensive reading across the spectrum, but with the awareness that everybody was affected by the language of the war. From this focuses emerge, focuses that are very much influenced by the way we now look at the conflict, dominated in the twentieth-century mind by ‘the trench’. Dan Todman has proposed that since the post-war period ‘culture came to focus on the soldier in the trench as the iconic experience of the real war’,4 though Richard S. Grayson’s study of the time spent in various activities by all the sections of the military indicates that less time than might be expected was actually spent in the trenches.5
The ‘man in the trench’ as the icon of the war has maintained an unchallengeable position down to the present, through mediations such as the BBC series The Trench (2002), the market for fragments of shrapnel, the number of books focusing on the soldiers’ gear, clothing or journeys to the Front. The front line occupies a place in the public consciousness of the war as being more important than any other place or activity – the ‘business end’ of the war, the most dangerous part. It is inevitable that this should be so, because this was, it is supposed, where the most extreme experiences happened – it makes up the majority of what is remembered, and what is thought of as documented. In fact it was not just the frontline trench that was a locus of extreme danger; communication trenches were under heavy artillery fire, and intersection points behind the fire trench were frequently ‘taped’ by snipers and machine-gunners, resulting in high casualties. But the front line and its close merging, through saps (listening posts), into no man’s land, has remained more iconic than the naval patrol, the home area under Zeppelin raid, the hospital ten miles behind the lines, and countless other sites and experiences.
This was not just a post-war perception. During the war the military, emotional, and political movement was towards the trenches at the Front. Specimen trenches were dug in parks as fundraisers, children and unattached ladies sent letters to soldiers ‘in the trenches’, and prospective soldiers were advised to ‘Learn to use your entrenching tool, and to make the most of it’.6
The most basic awareness of the war includes a line of trenches stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland; the basic chronological icons – the Christmas Truce, The Somme, The Armistic
e – are located there, as is the iconic imagery of the soldier carrying his wounded comrade on his shoulders, the section going over the parapet, or the sentry pressed against the side of the trench peering over the edge; Pearson’s Weekly on 17 April 1915 reckoned that ‘ “Trench” is at present the commonest word in the English language’ (p. 921). The frequency of use of the term ‘in the trenches’, and its value as both very specific and not a problem to the censors, shows how much it mattered; ‘in the trenches’ particularly embraced more than one concept – for the people at home it was a place, while for the soldier it was place, experience, a nemesis, a set period of time, an ordeal and, if survived, an achievement.
FIGURE 0.1 1915 postcard sent ‘On Active Service’. The writer notes that ‘we are in the trenches fighting at present’, and has, against regulations, given details of his unit.
But the experience of the war was just as much a round of petty tasks, training, sleeping, being bored, fantasising about home leave, repair, amusement, convalescence, sentry duty and drill. It was an experience that included veterans too old to fight, and people at home, both of which sections of the populace found themselves linguistically at odds with the men at the Front: ‘old soldiers’ felt that the slang of the new armies was poor stuff compared to the slang of the pre-war professional army, and those at home found their vocabulary enriched by terms such as ‘over the top’ – which by the time it was being used in Britain had acquired a different meaning at the Front – or ‘toot the sweet’, which was considered passé at the Front when it was ‘the new language’ at home.
All fields of activity to do with the war produced new terms, many of them involving picking up terms from other languages, or parodying official expressions. The linguistic phenomena of the period emerged from the relationships between groups of people, the rank-and-file soldier struggling with the staff officers, the home press struggling with the desire of their readership to know as much as possible and the desire of the authorities to tell them as little as possible, the relationship based on what could not be said by the soldier to his family. All those who had a voice, and some who did not, should be taken into account. And the phenomenon did not stop at 11 o’clock on 11 November 1918; indeed some of its most interesting aspects involve how people recorded the language of the war afterwards, how people abandoned war terms, and the kinds of memoirs that emerged into the public domain in the decades after 1918. This should surely include the language of war memorials, post-war expressions such as ‘the lost generation’ and ‘lions led by donkeys’, and the survival of First World War slang a hundred years after the event.
Words and The First World War Page 1
