Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  Some German words were adopted into French, particularly by prisoners of war; Partridge lists several including arbeit (work), kartoffel (potato), krank (ill), but he notes that pfennig was pronounced also as fennich or péniche (barge), that ersatz-girl meant a temporary sweetheart, and that verboten was often pronounced faire de beau temps.195 A former PoW administrating a Russian PoW camp in Germany after the war noted the word ‘mould’, describing the demoralisation produced by boredom, frustration and malnutrition.196 Capt Gilbert Nobbs, in a prison hospital in Germany, noted that a French orderly used only one word of German, nix, ‘which he used on every possible occasion to express his disgust of the Germans’.197

  Many Central Powers soldiers were familiar with English – several Austrians picked it up while working in America and Canada,198 and immigration from Germany into Britain had doubled between 1861 and 1911, at which time the figure was over 50,000 annually. Perhaps the effect of so many Germans living and working in Britain and widely picking up the language led British soldiers to assume that German soldiers would speak English, or failing that, what would have been to them the most obvious foreign language, French. Pte L. M. Baldwin made a lasting friendship with a wounded German soldier who spoke English and French, and though this soldier was well educated,199 his facility with the language was not isolated. Adèle De L’Isle reported that many of the wounded Germans that came through her ward spoke English,200 and the Daily Express reported on German prisoners saying ‘Germany, thumbs up’, and ‘bad luck – two down’, on hearing of the loss of two Zeppelins;201 another newspaper article reported on a German prisoner being able to say his comrades were ‘in the soup’ when their field-kitchen was bombed – the paper described it as a ‘ghastly pun’;202 if intentional it indicates considerable confidence with the language. Though British soldiers knew or picked up a few words of German, particularly those that most affected them, such as strafe or Minenwerfer, fluency was rare. V.A.D. Emma Duffin spoke German to wounded soldiers,203 though she and her colleague found some of the dialect speech difficult, Aubrey Herbert spoke German to a captive at Gallipoli,204 and Walter Blumschein was asked by a British soldier only 15 metres away ‘Haben Zie Zigarren?’205

  CODE-SWITCHING

  For soldiers of all nations involved there was a commonality of experiences on the Western Front, which was both reinforced and reflected by the use of each other’s slang. A Punch cartoon of 11 April 1917 (p. 247) shows a British soldier guarding a German prisoner. The German scowls as the British soldier says to his mates, ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at ’im, but when I says “ ’ands up,” ’e answers back in puffick English, “Steady on with yer blinkin’ toothpick,” ’e sez, “an’ I’ll come quiet.” ’

  A later cartoon (20 March 1918, p. 184) shows a British officer in an Italian shop; he asks for apples, but the woman serving says, ‘Non, niente. English “napoo” ’. According to the Daily Record (29 December 1915, p. 5) French soldiers had picked up and were using the pronunciation ‘Wipers’ from British soldiers. But code-switching or competence in a second language allowed more than just the adoption of foreign terms: according to Brophy and Partgridge in The Long Trail, dégommé, the French for ‘sacked’ or ‘demoted’, was picked up by British soldiers as ‘ungummed’, and developed into ‘unstuck’ in the phrase ‘to come unstuck’.

  The mixture of English, French and German in conversations was common, and a mark of the need to communicate in conditions of stress: Aubrey Smith notes it as ‘the eternal remark’ when the French say to British soldiers, ‘Allemagne caput’,206 while Emma Duffin noted a dying German soldier say to her, ‘Schwester fini’.207 Graves noted a conversation between his own troops and Germans opposite which involved English, French and German, one German soldier being happy that the English had at last learned some German;208 in another incident a wounded German soldier says ‘Mercia, kamerade … tres bon English soldier’, in a muddle of languages.209 A problem in this situation was highlighted when a German soldier surrendered to Sgt Bradlaugh Sanderson ‘and said something like “merci” ’: Sanderson thinks at first he is saying thank you in French, but concludes he was asking for mercy in English.210

  The more unfamiliar the context, rather than the language, the less likely it was that successful communication would develop; thus, Arabic in Egypt was more likely to be picked up than Greek, because of the British Empire’s association with Egypt. By December 1916 in Salonika, according to The Times, British soldiers had managed only the phrase ‘Hidy bros’ (the equivalent of ‘Buck up!’). This was ‘reinforced by gesture and “Hi! Johnny See!” ’, while the Greeks had picked up only ‘stop’ and ‘finish’.211 Harold Lake in In Salonica with our Army wrote ‘I have seen new drafts come out to Egypt, and I have heard them a fortnight later with all sorts of Arab slang at the tips of their tongues … Our men bring back words in many dialects from India, and the South African war made some additions to our vocabulary. But there is another tale to tell in Macedonia. Why it should be I cannot imagine, but no one seems to pick up the language. At the end of my own time I only knew three words (for “eggs” “water”, and “go away” or words to that effect)’.212 ‘Transport Officer’ in Gallipoli reckoned that half of Anzac slang was ‘Egyptian Arabic, picked up in Cairo’, while he believed that ‘Tommy’s slang is largely derived from Hindustani’.213 But no instances have come to light of Arabic being used as a lingua franca between Allied and Turkish troops, though pre-war British troops were accustomed to using non-European languages – a Hindi slang long used between British and Indian soldiers was recorded in Kut before the surrender, by a British soldier, P. W. Long.214 In this regard the long-term linguistic familiarities produced by trade, conquest and colonialism probably had more effect than western literary culture, educational curricula, diplomacy and European travel. The naval equivalent of the army ‘buckshee’, ‘cumshaw’, was derived from pidgin communication with Chinese people; ‘goody-la’, from the Chinese Labour Corps term for ‘good’, was, according to Brophy and Partridge, taken over for facetious use and became a catchword.215 But not everyone was going to become an ad hoc linguist: Emma Duffin reported in her diary on a Russian soldier who after serving with the Australians for a year ‘could hardly speak English at all’.216 British soldiers serving in Russia during the war and afterwards in support of the White Russian armies picked up a few terms, transcribed as ‘spassiba’ (thanks), ‘xaroshie/sharoshie’ (good), ‘bolos’ (Bolshevik fighters), ‘do svidanya’ (goodbye),217 and ‘tavarish’ (mate). On 2 October 1918 Pte W. Brock wrote home to London from the North Russian Expeditionary Force that ‘my knowledge only extends to names of things such as Bread (Kleb) (Skolka) How much (Catorie Chassi) whats the time (Spazebow) thank you (Neet pominair) don’t understand (Eggs) Ya, cet, sa Tea (chai) Gidea (where) …’; he then notes that ‘if I had stopped down the line much longer I should have learnt a lot mixing with the people’.218 Following the pattern of Western Front slang, ‘carachou, nichyvoo’ were the counterparts of ‘napoo’, ‘dobra’ (good) was extended to ‘niet fucking dobra’, and ‘skolka’ (how much) developed into ‘skolkering’ (black market trading).

  Multilinguism during the war provided the potential for bonds between people, the opportunity to learn, and the environment for chaos. In the Austro-Hungarian armies twelve languages had official status; the equivalent of the Field Service Postcard was printed in eight languages. But the use of Czech, Italian and Serbian raised questions of disloyalty, even though these were languages of the Habsburg Empire, while the use at the front of English or Russian – enemy languages – did not. In August 1914 an artillery gunner was shot by a French sentry because he did not understand the challenge,219 and George Barker remembered his disappointment at not being able to communicate with some Gurkhas he met – ‘they might as well speak to the moon’.220 One of the most distressing misunderstandings was over the supposed German ‘Corpse Utilisation Company’: according to a British soldier, who got it from a
German prisoner, this unit was boiling corpses ‘to make fat for ammunition making and to feed pigs and poultry, and God knows what else besides … Fritz calls his margarine “corpse fat”, because they suspect that’s what it comes from’;221 in the report on the incident in The Times the soldier says ‘mind, I don’t know that it’s true, but he told me’, which should have set some alarm bells ringing. The misunderstanding possibly arose from hard-nosed German slang, which renamed the commission that assessed recruits’ fitness for active service as the Kadaververwertungsgeseelschaft, or ‘carcase-grading factory’. Cartoonists in Punch222 and trench journals mocked the idea, but probably some real distress was caused. Misunderstandings could also prove advantageous: Lt Cecil Down’s Scottish servant was impressed when on asking for ‘twa oofs’ he was given three;223 the story is told elsewhere, appearing in Punch on 21 April 1916 (p. 287), so may be apocryphal, or a common occurrence.

  The quest for effective communication across language barriers went on to the end of the war and beyond. Cavanders introduced ‘the “American Doughboy” ’ in their advertising campaign for Army Club cigarettes at the end of the war,224 showing him reading a book entitled French and English Phrase Book, and saying ‘Can’t make nothing of this gol-darned French phrase book. All about the wooden leg of the gardener and the pens of my aunt, and that kind o’ junk’, referencing the phrases of school exercises. The American Thirty Second News for November 1918 has several documentations of disappointment, of soldiers not being able to speak French, of misunderstanding, and of attempts at lingua franca collapsing into American slang. An American cartoon book When I was in Germany dating from after the withdrawal of American troops in 1923 contains considerable code-switching into accurate German:

  Lebe wohl Fräuleins – I’m through.

  Each Mädschen I have met

  I’ll say good-bye to you – and all my chocolate

  I’m through with all spazieren

  And even being near ‘em…

  FIGURE 1.8 From the Thirty Second News, November 1918, the journal of the American 32nd Division, nicknamed Les Terribles.

  2 LANGUAGE AT THE FRONT

  Words: sources and trajectories

  Words and phrases came from a variety of sources, old army slang, criminal slang, street slang, school slang, rhyming slang, topical events, common home experience, music-hall songs, other languages, close observation of the experience of the trench. There was interest in etymology, as well as the words themselves, during the war: Ward Muir, a lance corporal in the R.A.M.C., wrote in Observations of an Orderly ‘Whether the derivations of army slang have been investigated I do not know. It appears to me a subject worth examination’.1 Cadet N. R. wrote in The White Band a brief entry on the etymology of ‘Uhlan’,2 while in 1917 the Manchester Guardian carried three paragraphs on some Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu) and gambling origins of slang, hoping that the subject would be studied in future3 (an earlier column, written on 4 June that year, had suggested the slang was in too much of a flux for it to be done yet).

  Claims for the origin of slang expressions also pitted Britain against other anglophone countries: ‘some’ as an intensifier was felt to be an Americanism, and there was some concern about the influence of American slang – ‘The new Whitehall officialdom is far sunk in the more generally adopted colloquialisms of Canada and the United States’.4 ‘But I say, kid, some cigarette’ was the way Cavanders characterised an American sailor. But ‘a Bachelor of Science’ writing to the Birmingham Gazette claimed the use of ‘some’ in this way ‘at least thirty years ago’ in Cornwall,5 and the Burnley News quoted a correspondent claiming the term’s use in Lancashire, rather than its originating in America.6 And while the guardians of British English feared the influence of American slang, The Times correspondent in New York in 1918 observed that ‘the Americans [were] showing a much greater facility in acquiring British slang than the Tommies in learning American slang’.7 Certainly on reading Jonathan Lighter’s Slang of the AEF it is noticeable how many of the terms just did not appear in the record of British soldiers’ speech.

  Eric Partridge’s 1933 study of army slang described several words which predated the war, many of them having been in army use for many decades; criminal slang – ‘make’, ‘nab’, ‘nail’, ‘scrounge’, ‘snaffle’ and ‘win’ were pre-1830, while ‘as to the slang that arose in India, nearly all of it dates from the period of the Indian Mutiny or from the subsequent … occupation of India by the British Army’.8 A ‘King’s bad bargain’ was centuries old by 1914, as were ‘clink’ and ‘cage’ for holding offending soldiers, while ‘push’, ‘padre’ and ‘grouse’ were nineteenth century terms. In the military environment terms came together from various sources: the ‘padre’ might be mockingly called the ‘amen-wallah’; and ‘binge’, according to Partridge, was possibly a mixture of Lincolnshire ‘binge’, meaning ‘to soak’, and ‘bingo’ – spirits: it was pre-war Oxford University slang, taken to the Front and adopted by other ranks soldiers. ‘Jipper’, nautical slang for gravy, evolved into ‘gippo’, sitting alongside ‘gypo’, an Egyptian. The large number of words from Indian languages – khaki, cushy, bandook, gone phutt, dekko, rooty, kutcha, muckin, chokey, bolo the bat, pukka, chit, coggage, booka, bobbajee, dum-dum, doolally, wallah, and Blighty – many of which have stayed in spoken English, anchor the British military experience of the time in contact with Indian culture. Military contact with African languages had brought ‘pozzy’, and South African troops brought ‘mainga’, while army slang had acquired several words from Arabic from the involvement in north-east Africa – bint, burgoo, iggri, imshi, buckshee, mungaree. These words were passed on through the army during the war, rather than through direct new contact with Arabic-speakers or Indian soldiers; very few new adoptions of words from these languages occurred, though Fraser and Gibbons list ‘cooker’ from the Ghurka ‘kukri’, and Downing’s Digger Dialects (1919) has the earliest documentation of ‘iggoree’, more often ‘iggry’, from the Arabic for ‘quickly’.

  Before the war itself became the almost exclusive topical news story,9 one non-associated term shows how quickly words were both taken up, and recorded: in the fourth week of September, while the B.E.F. were settling in trenches facing the German lines along the route of the River Aisne, the press was reporting the story of Jack Johnson’s brush with the law (Johnson was the black heavyweight boxing champion). Johnson’s name had been reported in the British provincial press ten times during August 1914, mostly to do with prospective matches, but not at all from 1 until 19 September. On 22 September the story broke that Johnson had been served with a summons on 17 September, following a parking infringement, the newspapers reporting the following day the full story of the incident, including Johnson’s alleged aggressive reaction. Within two days the Sheffield Evening Telegraph (24 September 1914) was reporting that when a large shell landed ‘our boys dub the pillar of smoke which it makes “Black Maria” or “Jack Johnson” ’. ‘Jack Johnson’ became the standard term for a heavy German shell giving a large cloud of smoke, but was also applied to the guns that fired the shells; there were also ‘JJ’s,10 ‘black Johnsons’,11 and both ‘Jacks’ and ‘Johnsons’.12

  Words and phrases continued their development during the course of the war. ‘Blighty’, from the Urdu biliayati, meaning ‘a foreigner’, was adopted in India by British troops and colonials, and was immensely popular during the war, to the extent that frequently soldiers addressed their postcards and letters home to ‘Blighty’ rather than ‘England’ or ‘Britain’. A coveted wound that did not do life-changing damage but would take the soldier home, was called ‘a blighty wound’, or ‘a blighty one’, or simply ‘a blighty’. Soldiers with a ‘Blighty ticket’ were called ‘Blighties’, ‘a blighty touch’ was a self-inflicted wound,13 but ‘the Blighty touch’ was a mysterious ability projected onto one V.A.D. nurse by wounded soldiers, supposing she had the ability to decide which wounds merited treatment in Britain.14

 
FIGURE 2.1 Soldiers’ ‘On Active Service’ postcards, sent between February 1917 and October 1918, addressed to Blighty.

  Other developments were less celebrated. Ernest Weekley, in Words Ancient and Modern (1926), wrote of the word ‘raider’ that ‘when air raids on London began to be really unpleasant, a large proportion of the alien population [sic] took to evacuating the capital, as soon as the evening shades prevailed, and camping in the villages of the home counties, where they were commonly known as “raiders”. The inhabitants of one village, stricken with compassion at a first invasion, but unable, for many reasons, to offer house-room to the “raiders,” provided them with all they could spare in the way of tents, rugs, and mattresses. When they arose in the morning, they found that their visitors had folded their tents like the Arabs and silently stolen away, transitively as well as intransitively’.15

  The extent to which terms were used, in terms of time period, individuals, groups, locations, is hard to gauge. Wilfred Owen in his letters used the word ‘tamboo’ for a shelter (it derived from the Persian and Hindi tambu, so was presumably an Indian Army adoption), but few others used it. ‘Bugwarm’ for a tight dug-out in a trench is known but was seldom used. ‘Our present billet is a big house only 600 yards from “sandbag street” or the firing line; everything has a nickname out here’, wrote Pte P. Gilbert, Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry,16 but apart from here and in a poem in the Sporting Times17 other documentation has proved elusive. There was a vogue for saying ‘over the lid’ in the summer of 1916, but it was recorded at other times also. Obviously the introduction of new weaponry or equipment, where it can be dated, gives a date ‘after which’ for the requisite terms: the introduction of corrugated metal huts in late 1916 gives ‘elephants’, recorded from 1917; the ‘gaspirator’ appeared in 1916.