Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  Soldiers across the ages have had technical preoccupations that inspired in-house jargon. Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby, a veteran of the 1695 siege of Namur, could not describe his experiences without becoming mired in the minutiae of fortification and siegecraft:

  my uncle Toby was generally more eloquent and particular in his account of it; and the many perplexities he was in, arose out of the almost insurmountable difficulties he found in telling his story intelligibly, and giving such clear ideas of the differences and distinctions between the scarp and counterscarp, – the glacis and the covered way, – the half-moon and ravelin, – as to make his company fully comprehend what he was about.2

  The words to ‘The British Grenadiers’ refer to the defining role of a grenadier in the fortress warfare of late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

  When ere we are commanded to storm the palisades

  Our leaders march with fusees, and we with hand grenades.

  We throw them from the glacis about our enemies’ ears,

  With a tow row row row row row row for the British Grenadiers.

  The palisades were the sharpened stakes that lined the edge of the covered way, an entrenched walkway running along the outer side of the ditch surrounding a fortress. Fusees were not ‘fuses’, for every grenadier carried his own ‘match’ – a length of smouldering cord – to light his grenades. Fusils were light muskets that enabled officers to lend a little fire support to their men, whose own muskets were slung across their backs, leaving their hands free to light and throw grenades. The glacis was the open, gently sloping landscape in front of a fortress. When British tank designers were seeking a word for the sloped armour on the front of a tank they borrowed from the seventeenth century to come up with glacis plate.

  Veterans of the First World War found it very hard to discuss their experiences with those who had not shared them. Part of their problem stemmed from the sheer difficulty of describing that juxtaposition of horror and normality, comradeship and obligation that had characterised their wartime existences. Part, too, arose from the way in which their language had been so coloured by jargon as to be almost unintelligible. A code of abbreviations confused outsiders, and sometimes insiders too: what was a GOC, BGRA, BGGS, GSO1, or an ADC to the CCRA?3 Where might one find a bomb stop or a bomb store, a hay box or some elephant iron, a Bangalore torpedo or a bearing picket? The phonetic alphabet in use at the time gave ‘Ack Emma’ for a.m. and ‘Pip Emma’ for p.m.; an observation post was an ‘O Pip’, and Talbot House, the all-ranks club at Poperinghe, was ‘Toc H’. The Distinguished Conduct Medal was a ‘Don C Emma’, and a machine gun an ‘Emma Gee’. Place names were mercilessly anglicised: Ypres was Wipers, Auchonvillers was Ocean Villas, Monchy Breton emerged as Monkey Britain, and Ploegsteert as Plug Street.

  The language of Racine and Molière was tortured to death. Il n’y en a plus (there is no more), too often heard by eager soldiers in search of home comforts in French villages, became the universal negative napoo. It was applicable to commodities, as in napoo rum or napoo jam, or to almost anything else: an exhausted man might grunt ‘napoo breath’, and a dead man was plain napoo. Ça ne fait rien (it doesn’t matter), became ‘sana fairy ann’, and tout de suite, immediately, was ‘toot sweet’. The German soldier, l’Allemand to the French, was soon the ‘Alleyman’ to the British. Bully beef (corned beef), one of the soldier’s main rations, had long been corrupted from the Napoleonic boeuf bouilli. Bombardier Fritz was not a German artillery NCO but pommes de terre frites, chips, ideally served with ‘erfs’ and a glass or three of ‘van blong’.

  And then there was slang. Senior officers were brass hats, from the gold-braided peaks of their caps; the deeply unpopular training ground at Etaples was the bull ring, and the yellow armbands of the staff who worked there gave them the nickname canaries. The long-handled German grenade’s visual similarity to a humble kitchen tool earned it the name potato-masher or, more simply, stick bomb. A large trench mortar bomb was a flying pig, a high-velocity German field gun a whizz bang, and the shell of the German 15cm heavy gun, which burst with a cloud of black smoke, was a coal-box or (from the black world heavyweight boxing champion), a Jack Johnson. To ‘funk’ a task was to shrink from it, to be in a funk (or, more seriously, in a blue funk) was to be in a state of panic, and so a funk hole was a small personal shelter scraped in the front wall of a trench. The music hall comedian Fred Karno lent his name to Fred Karno’s Army, first applied to Kitchener’s New Armies but soon part of the popular song, wrung out, as lugubriously as possible, to the tune of ‘The Church’s One Foundation’.

  We are Fred Karno’s army

  The ragtime infantry

  We cannot shoot, we cannot fight,

  What bloody use are we?

  And when we get to Berlin,

  The Kaiser he will say,

  Hoch hoch! Mein Gott, what a bloody rotten lot,

  The ragtime infantry.

  Something not quite up to scratch might be termed ‘a bit Fred Karno’.

  Soldiers of previous generations had larded their conversation with words or phrases acquired in India, and many of these survived into the world wars and beyond. I remember the kindly CSM Fred Burrows, as late as 1969, warning the company, hard at work on rifle-cleaning after getting back from exercise: ‘Jildi, jildi, it’s your own time you’re wasting.’ ‘You put some juldi in it,’ shouted Kipling’s soldiers to the regimental water-carrier, Gunga Din, ‘Or I’ll marrow (hit) you this minute.’ Even in the late 1960s men might still refer to a rifle as a bundook (indeed, the word is currently experiencing a revival, alongside gat and bang-stick) and a bed as a charpoy, though those who called a cell in the guard-room chokey had little idea that it derived from cauki, a lockup. But the heyday of military Hindustani had been a century before. When Edwin Mole joined the 14th Hussars in 1863, he found that

  There were fifteen men in my mess, fourteen of whom wore three or four medals. They were good-natured fellows in the main, though a little short-tempered; and all bore signs of their long residence in India, where the regiment had been for nineteen years without coming home. They used many queer Hindustan names and terms, which it took me some time to get the hang of. For instance, they never spoke of knives, or salt, or bread, but always ‘Give me a churrie!’ ‘Pass the neemuck!’ or ‘Sling over some rootee!’4

  Rootee, or bread, gave its name to the rootee gong, the long service and good conduct medal, awarded before 1870 for eating army bread for 21 years in the infantry or 24 in the cavalry, though the qualifying period was reduced to a uniform 18 years in 1870.5

  The bukshee was a paymaster or military officer in Mogul India. ‘The bukshee is an awful bahadur, but he keeps a first-rate bobachee’: tells us that this gentleman was ‘a haughty or pompous personage’, but had a good cook.6 The anglicised word buckshee – ‘something in addition to the usual allowance’ is actually a corruption of baksheesh, tip or bribe.

  Fourteen annas, one rupee,

  Fifteen annas, one buckshee.

  Even today a wise Company Quartermaster Sergeant will keep a buckshee store of items that do not feature on his official ledgers but can be deployed to alleviate individual misfortune or avert collective disgrace when kit is being checked. Pani, water, produced not only brandy-pani for the stout-hearted, and limbu-pani, lime juice, for the less resolute, but furnished a nickname for anyone with the surname Waters. Mufti or plain clothes, derives from a Muslim scholar and official, informally clad ‘in dressing gown, smoking cap and slippers’, though the best-known glossary of Anglo-Indian terms generously admits that ‘the transition is a little obscure.’7

  The dam was a small copper coin, and the Anglo-Indian equivalent of ‘I don’t care a brass farthing’ was ‘I don’t give a dam.’ The change in spelling and implication came later, although the phrase ‘twopenny damn’ (a favourite of the Duke of Wellington’s) emphasises the word’s numismatic origins. Burra (great) gave not only burra sahib, for the most impor
tant individual in a station or garrison; burra khana, for big dinner; burra din for great day (Christmas Day in particular); and burra peg, for a large measure of spirits. Chota, in contrast, meant small, and chota hazri was an early morning cup of tea and biscuit, and tiffin a light lunch. Dekko, a look or a peep, sprang from dekh-na, to look, and although ramsammy had begun life as a collective noun for Indians, it was enlisted by the army to mean a fight or wild gathering. Ernest Shephard recalled that on 14 March 1915:

  In the evening we were expecting to be called up for the trenches, and to break the monotony we (the Sgts) had a ramsammy with sawdust and jam. We all agreed after that it was the best laugh we have had for ages. We were smothered in sawdust and jam all over, and to cap it all could not get water to wash after the hour’s horseplay.

  The following morning he was still ‘Roaring at last night. I feel ten years to the good.’8 A madman was fanti or doolally, the former springing from the Urdu and the latter from Deolali, a military hospital just outside Bombay, where men worn out by long service in India (and copious libations of locally distilled arrack) awaited the boat home, their twitchy symptoms known as the doolally tap.

  The suffix wallah derived from wala and, just as Indians added it to other words to produce compounds like attar-wallah for perfume seller, so the British applied it widely. As far as private soldiers were concerned, the dhobi-wallah was a laundryman, the char-wallah dispensed tea, and the nappy-wallah crept into early-morning barrack rooms to shave recumbent men. To officers, a competition-wallah had gained admission to the Indian Civil Service by the competitive examination that was introduced in 1856; and a box-wallah, an itinerant pedlar to the Indians, was any European engaged in trade or commerce. Wallah was added to military terms to produce compounds like transport-wallah and machine-gun wallah for a battalion’s transport and machine gun officers and amen-wallah for its chaplain. A trench mortarman might simply be a trench mortar wallah, or, in a mixed marriage with the phonetic alphabet, a Toc Emma wallah.

  The British soldier in India prized his ability to ‘sling the bat’ (speak the language) but a popular couplet was not far from the truth in suggesting that

  His Hindustani words were few – they could not very well be fewer Just idharao, and jaldi jao and khabadar, you soor.

  Which translates as ‘Come here, go quickly, and take care, you swine.’9 ‘Bat’ was often curt and imperative. When Private Frank Richards reached France with 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers in August 1914 one of his comrades persisted in calling for drinks in bat, and assured Richards that the only way of dealing with foreigners was to shout the order as loudly as possible, and to reward non-compliance with a prompt thrashing. ‘Soldier bat’ did not just provide men with a lingua franca that enabled them to communicate around the cantonment, but marked them out as veterans, and many soldiers who had never served in India gleaned enough bat to sling it convincingly about a Portsmouth pub.

  It is the most extreme example of the word-borrowing that has added another page to the addenda of the military vocabulary after each successive campaign. In the Second World War bint, Arabic for daughter, became a general (and at best slightly derogatory) term for women in general, while soldiers who fought in Italy called the Germans Teds, from the Italian Tedeschi, though the word never gained wider currency. Malaya brought ulu – remote, rural, out of the way – into the vocabulary, and soldiers of my generation might describe trudging out onto Salisbury Plain as ‘shagging off into the ulu’. The army’s long tour of garrison duty in Germany left a surprisingly small linguistic mark, though most soldiers struggled to get their German much beyond zwei bier bitte and bratwurst mit frites, and to seek a persuasive translation of ‘My friend will pay’.

  Regimental nicknames littered military English. The Gloucesters, their ‘back badge’ earned at Alexandra in 1801 when the rear rank faced about to repel an attack, were the ‘Back Numbers’. The Queen’s were either the Mutton-Chop Lancers, from their paschal lamb cap-badge or, in rhyming slang, the Pork and Beans. Both the Leicesters and the Hampshires, with their Bengal tiger badges, were Tigers, and the Middlesex, thanks to the 57th Foot’s performance at Albuhera, were the Die-hards. The Norfolks were the Holy Boys, apparently because a Spanish soldier mistook the figure of Britannia on their badges for the Virgin Mary. The ability of men of the Northamptonshires to tolerate flogging gave the regiment its nickname the Steelbacks. The York and Lancaster Regiment was the Twin Roses, the Young and Livelies or, more contentiously, the Cork and Doncaster. The Gaelic war-cry Faugh-a-Ballagh, clear the way, led to the Royal Irish Fusiliers being the Faugh-a-Ballagh Boys or simply the Old Fogs. The Royal Signals, who originated in the Royal Engineers Signal Service and became a corps in their own right in 1920, were Scalybacks, probably because the batteries of early man-pack radios leaked acid and scarred their users’ backs.

  Organisational abbreviations offered wide opportunities for abuse. RAOC, Royal Army Ordnance Corps, was transliterated as Rag and Oil Company. The First World War Army Service Corps (ASC) took on the name of a comic-strip character to become Ally Sloper’s Cavalry, and after the corps had gained its royal title in 1918 there were those who maintained that the initials now stood for Run Away, Someone’s Coming. It was cheaper for officers to serve in the Indian than the British army, and an officer with neither private income nor social pretensions might finish up in the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, only to discover that brother officers in smart cavalry regiments maintained that the corps’ initials stood for Really I Am So Common. Wounded soldiers whose kit mysteriously disappeared somewhere down the painful line of medical evacuation subscribed to the notion that RAMC stood, not for Royal Army Medical Corps, but for Rob All My Comrades. Matters have not much improved recently, with the Royal Logistic Corps (RLC) becoming the Really Large Corps, and the Adjutant General’s Corps (AGC) the All Girls’ Corps.

  The alphabet soup has thickened since 1945, with a rich stock of abbreviations for organisations, individuals, and objects. An AFV is an Armoured Fighting Vehicle, the ARRC is the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (its commander COMARRC and his chief of staff COSARRC), while the FEBA is the Forward Edge of Battle Area and the FLOT the Forward Location of Own Troops. POL stands for Petrol, Oil, and Lubricants, and has spawned its own verb, as in: ‘Get those vehicles polled up’. A TCP is a Traffic Control Point, and a TCV a Troop Carrying Vehicle. Many abbreviations are most frequently pronounced as words: Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), is shape and to be Absent Without Leave (AWOL) is to be awol. The 7.62mm General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMC) is a gimpy, and the 84mm Carl Gustav anti-tank weapon (a beastly thing to carry, and now happily obsolete) was a Charlie Gee.

  Recent slang includes its own derogatory asides, like blanket stacker for a storeman or logistician of any sort; dropshort for a gunner; donkey-walloper for a cavalryman. Craphat (‘Harry the Hat, or ‘hat’ tout court), is used by members of the Parachute Regiment to describe anyone who does not wear their distinctive maroon beret. A cunt cap, however, is altogether different: it is the flat sidehat with a distinctive fold along its top. Guardsmen are woodentops, and the black-buttoned Royal Green Jackets were known as the Black Mafia. The term shiny-arse reminds us that the seats of polyester barrack-dress trousers grew glossy after repeated application to an office chair, while a REMF (Rear Echelon Mother-Fucker) is any individual who, in the speaker’s highly subjective opinion, lives a comfortable life, out of danger. The heavy wool jersey was a woolly pully; drawers cellular (standard-issue army underwear) were simply drawers Dracula; and the zip-fronted Norwegian shirt was a noggie. A bed is a scratcher and a sleeping-bag a green maggot or doss-bag. Food is scoff or scran, and a knife, fork and spoon can be KFS or noshing-rods. Something unspeakably grubby (say a rifle, barrack room, or woman of doubtful habits) is gopping, and rubbish is gash, best entrusted to a rubbish sack or gash-bag. Rhyming slang still puts in an appearance, perhaps most frequently as cream-crackered for knackered.

  ‘The army passe
d over into Flanders and swore horribly,’ complained a seventeenth-century commentator. It has never really stopped. In 1939 Fitzroy Maclean abandoned a colourful diplomatic career to join the Cameron Highlanders, his father’s old regiment, as a private soldier. He arrived at the depot at Inverness with several hundred other recruits, and they hung about the barrack square in the drizzle until they were pounced on by half a dozen NCOs:

  And given numbers. And divided up into squads … And issued with things … And told not to ——— lose them. And told to look out and look sharp and use our ——— initiative. And given mops and pails and scrubbing brushes and told to ——— scrub the ——— floor.

  The process of recruit training changed men physically and mentally.

  We ceased to be recruits and became trained soldiers. Effortlessly, we fell into the linguistic habits of the army; every other word in our conversation was the same meaningless and monotonous, yet somehow satisfying, expletive.10

  Stephen Graham served as a private in the Scots Guards during the First World War, and thought that once a man ‘begins to use the army’s language wishing it he has ceased to be an individual soldier, he has become soldiery.’11 There were many who found military language not a source of unifying strength but a constant reminder of their own debased status. Alfred M. Hale was a middle-class, middle-aged man conscripted in the summer of 1916. Hale hated every moment of his time in the army, and found its language especially wearing. ‘One got so very wearied of hearing everything being described as f-cking this and f-cking that,’ he wrote, ‘the very word, with its original indecent meaning, being at length a mere stupid and meaningless vulgarity.’12