It is tempting to assume that the further in time we are from the event the more likely it is that memories are diluted; selectivity is manifested by the need to tell a good story, or the relationship between speaker/writer and listener/reader. This is always so, not only when removed at a temporal distance from the event. The legal frameworks at the beginning of the twentieth century constraining the printing of taboo words, and the near uniformity with which soldiers’ postcards are limited to talking about the weather, cigarettes, cake, the writer’s health, and the irregularity of receipt of letters from home show that not all that was in the writer’s head or mouth went down on paper. The size of the available medium of communication necessarily influenced the text: apparently terse comments in pocket diaries were constrained by the size of the page. Different micro-discourses emerge, and all merit consideration, including where their absence is noticeable. Some discourses emerge more strongly than others: soldiers’ and sailors’ correspondence to home has survived much more than correspondence in the other direction – there has been more documentation of soldiers’ letters and postcards, more research and infinitely more publishing. Letters from home were read and reread, stored in conditions of stress, and are documented as being strewn across the battlefields after attacks.7 We may surmise that after the war there was no need for former servicemen to keep them, or that they were reminders of distress for the recipient, even that there was a general perception that they were no longer needed; while correspondence from troops to their families would always carry emotions of gratitude for the writer’s survival, or remembrance in case of loss.
From the various discourses of the period emerge a range of voices creating texts which either repeat terms, or initiate terms which are later repeated, or, in situations where certain terms might be expected, use other terms which are not encountered again. A new weapon is used, gas for example: people encounter it, and ‘are gassed’; they try to hide the fact that they are using it and call their own weapon ‘the accessory’, ‘roger’, and other names; they become so familiar with it and its effects that they feel it is acceptable to re-use an existing metaphor for being drunk (‘gassed’); a particular kind of gas, from its colour, becomes ‘mustard gas’, while protection against it becomes, not an ‘anti-gas mask’, but a ‘gas-mask’. In this situation calling it a ‘goggle-eyed bugger with a tit’ stands out as an idiolect or a sociolect; we could investigate where, among whom, and for how long the term lasted, and certainly even if there was no mention of it elsewhere, or until Robert Graves published Goodbye to All That in 1929, and it would still require to be considered as an example of ‘the language of the First World War’. The more frequently a term is used the more likely there are to be variants, even contradictory variants: was ‘a Blighty touch’ a wound received in combat that would be welcomed for its assurance of a return to Blighty, or a wound self-inflicted with the same intention? There is documentation for both usages.8
However, problematic areas remain, especially where documentation and literature overlap: how do we deal with the subject of ‘authenticity’ which came under question during the war itself, how do we treat fiction drawn from fact? Descriptions of combat, such as those in Charles Edmonds’ A Subaltern’s War (1929) or Lord Moran’s Anatomy of Courage (1945) seem far more authentic than Ian Hay’s The First Hundred Thousand (1915/16), but Lancelot Spicer’s letter home on 3 December 1915 stated that Hay’s work was ‘exceedingly true to life’.9 Evaluations have to weigh up Edmonds’ edge of fear and Moran’s use of the present tense in describing a trench raid with Sidney de Loghe’s claim at the beginning of The Straits Impregnable (1917): ‘This book, written in Australia, Egypt and Gallipoli, is true’.
As an example of how complex are questions of authenticity within fiction it is useful to examine some sound recordings of dramatisations of trench scenes, which were the subject of study by Paul Fussell;10 it is also essential to consider the gap between composed speech and documented speech. These recordings were published on disc by Parlophone, with titles such as The Attack/The Estaminet, the artists being named as ‘Some of The Boys’.11 Clearly recorded in the studio, they feature a range of sound effects best described as ‘suggestive of artillery’, but the sound-acting is strong and reasonably natural. A range of regional and class accents is noticeable. Fussell describes The Attack as being ‘played absolutely straight, with great attention to “realism” ’. The script is full of words and phrases that act as markers, both of the place and experience, such as calls for stretcher-bearers, observations of the need to cut the wire; and there are markers, such as ‘Jerry’s got the wind up’ and ‘clean out that big boche dug-out’, which use vocabulary that has come to be associated with the period. But there are more subtle markers, the regional slang: ‘lumme’, ‘ ’ark at that bird’ and ‘I couldn’t ’arf do with a cup of char’; and what would have seemed most authenticating to veterans: the opening noise, of birdsong.
The sequence of activity is accelerated from calm to preparation to the point where the soldiers go over the top; Fussell’s view is that ‘the suspense is well managed, and the effect is surprisingly exciting’, but essentially it is theatrical, ‘a sort of folk-memoir’. It is thus a mix of the authentic – the accents and dialect phrases, seldom documented elsewhere, plus the birdsong – and the inauthentic, that is, something made with the intention that the home listeners would be informed, stimulated and to a certain extent entertained.
This can be contrasted with a similar recording, directed by Major A. E. Rees, issued in 1917 as In the Trenches, one of a six-part series in which Privates Ginger and Tippy progress from ‘Leaving for the Front’ to ‘Back Home in Blighty’. In In the Trenches Privates Ginger and Tippy have a bet on whether a whizz-bang is a dud or not, Tippy is found to be learning French (‘Oui-oui – that’s yus, yus’), and Tippy unasked goes out to rescue a wounded comrade in no man’s land. Ginger keeps up a commentary on his actions:
Bravo Tippy, my boy, I’m covering yer. Go it laddie. Gently does it. They’ve spotted yer. That’s it, lie still a bit. Ah, the perishers, they’ve turned the machine-gun on him, he’s down. They’ve done ’im in. Oh, no, he’s creeping forward again. Good boy, good boy. That’s it, Tippy, get ’im on yer back. That’s the idea. Hello, what’s that, a sniper? I saw him move. You touch my pal if you dare. Ah you would, would yer? Take that (shoots), and that (shoots). Got him, the dirty Hun. Come on Tippy my boy, that’s it. Let me give you a hand.
After this Tippy (introducing himself as Reginald Winter to the visiting officer who rather suddenly appears) looks set to get a medal. This mix of melodrama and plausibly accurate observation may not have employed the exact terminology of the trenches – ‘perishers’ and ‘done him in’ are seldom documented for this context – but there is much about this to corroborate claims for authenticity, particularly the voice of its author. Major A. E. Rees was a serving soldier who had been at Gallipoli and, from 1915, was acting as a recruiting officer in Britain, his work including writing and directing this material for Columbia records. Though the speech given above is a difficult one to act, especially given the time constraints, it is preceded with what appears to be entirely natural male conversation:
Ginger: Here’s old Tippy learning to say ‘yes’ and ‘good morning’ to the French girls.
Tippy: Non comprenez – that’s ‘I don’t understand’.
Ginger: Not half you don’t. Garn – narpoo to you.12
If this sounds very authentic, beneath this layer of speech-authenticity is another layer, which would not have been noticed by most of the non-veteran listeners, typified by the statement, ‘Here comes a whizz-bang’ – these shells were so called because the whizz of the shell passing was heard before the bang of the gun’s report, so in no way could anyone see them coming; thus, again, this is a mix of degrees and kinds of authenticity.
Tim Cook’s study of these productions proposes that ‘the tendency for superficial and cartoon style treatmen
t is sometimes diluted with touches of realism’ and that ‘the script continues to link sentimental dialogue with an ever-present truth that the next sequence of action could be their last’.13 So within this ‘theatre’ there is realism and truth present, the truth of the situation, and the realism, which, since it cannot come from the recording situation or the sound effects, must come from the words and/or their presentation.
The question of authenticity is effectively rhetorical; it requires us to evaluate our own criteria as well as those of people nearer the time who evaluated the language of the war. Frequently Fraser and Gibbons in 1925, and Brophy and Partridge from 1930, label terms as ‘a newspaper coined expression’ or ‘journalese’, comments easy to interpret as implying ‘less authentic’ or ‘secondary’. How do we deal with ‘Arf a Mo Kaiser’, a caption to an image of a soldier smoking, which has all the feeling of true First World War language? It was initiated by Bert Thomas a cartoonist, before he became a soldier, and publicised and promoted by the press, but is scarcely documented as being used by soldiers. Whereas ‘Are we downhearted?’ was around long before the war, was parodied mercilessly by soldiers, and was pushed into extended use throughout the Home Front (for example, into bachelor fear of babies), but remains a strong linguistic marker for the war.
1 LANGUAGE, DIALECT AND THE NEED TO COMMUNICATE
Slang, dialect and status
The growth of education in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century involved the meeting of different linguistic cultures in the classroom, especially in urban areas, where the concept of ‘bad English’ became associated with failure. John Walker’s A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language (1791) and his lecture tours had provided the aspirational middle classes with a model for social improvement, and editions1 fifty years after the first publication were still offering ‘Rules to be observed by the Natives of Ireland in order to obtain a just Pronunciation of English’, and similarly for ‘Natives of Scotland’ and ‘the Londoners’. For Londoners in particular four ‘faults’ were proscribed, including not sounding ‘h’ after ‘w’, and not sounding ‘h’ where it ought to be sounded, and sounding it where it should not be heard – both of which are frequently transcribed in documentation of the war period as ‘wot ’e said’. Walker recommended a ‘cultured’ London accent, compared to which the ‘vulgar pronunciation of London’ was ‘a thousand times more offensive and disgusting’.2 As middle-class accents took on more characteristics of the ‘cultured London accent’ with the growth of the railways, working class accents grew with the spread of conurbations in the North and the Midlands. As children were taught to pronounce, and to write, in school in a way that was distinct from their home environments, a two-tier system developed, seen in the operation of state funding for schools, by which children’s failures in tests were punished by cuts in funding to schools. The concept arose then of a sense of language failure, which was exacerbated by the status of slang. Henry Alford, whose A Plea for the Queen’s English is for the most part a sensible plea for clear communication, recommends ‘Avoid likewise all slang words. There is no greater nuisance in society than a talker of slang. It is only fit (when innocent, which it seldom is) for raw schoolboys, and one-term freshmen, to astonish their sisters with’.3 The very presentation of so many slang dictionaries in the course of the nineteenth century cemented the position of this aspect of the language as something separate, not mainstream. This sense of language being susceptible to value judgements has been retained to the 21st century, with GCSE examination boards reminding students that their work will be marked according to their use of ‘good English’.4 Despite public support for slang during the war, after the war standard English, effectively middle-class speech, continued to be the aspiration in education, and was the benchmark for success or failure in the use of language. The Newbolt Report (1921) offered a model of what was to be avoided; ‘The great difficulty of teachers in Elementary Schools in many districts is that they have to fight against the powerful influence of evil habits of speech contracted in home and street. The teachers’ struggle is thus not with ignorance but with a perverted power’.5 Though there had been a fascination with army language during the years 1914 to 1918, and though sociolinguists at an academic level found it worthy of collection and study, what the Newbolt Report did was to formalise a default stratification of quality within the English language. In the same year George Sampson’s English for the English, while maintaining Newbolt’s stance on the value of plain non-obfuscating English, claimed that, ‘Much of the failure in elementary and even in secondary education is due to the fact that the children do not possess language, and are treated as if they did, … Boys from bad homes come to school with their speech in a state of disease, …’.6
Many of the British troops during the war are shown as having had very little education: ‘A few of them [ASC men] were men with a certain amount of education, but the bulk were of the genus Gor Blimey’;7 Richard Holmes’ comment in Tommy, ‘units such as 23/Royal Fusiliers or 6/Camerons, with their high proportion of educated men serving in the ranks’ indicates that generally this was not the case.8 Arthur Heath, 2nd Lt, reckoned that it was no use encouraging his men to ‘remember Waterloo’ because most of them would think he was referring to the railway station.9 Occasional spelling queries indicate a view of the value of correct English: Rifleman William Taffs was concerned about how to spell ‘bandeau’,10 but the contrast is most noticeable in the assumption of a higher level of education among Germans, who were expected at least to know other languages: ‘It was a huge disappointment to all that the [captured] German could speak no English’.11 German levels of elementary education were higher than those in England and Wales, and Germans frequently commented on ‘how stupid and ill-informed British prisoners were’.12 In the French Army literacy levels were a problem, with one writer claiming that in some regiments there was an ‘inability to understand any orders, either verbal or written’.13
Slang then should be seen in a context that evaluated different kinds of English within an educational structure, and the written and printed presentation of it frequently reinforced its apartness. Occasionally its impending use was highlighted with the term ‘langwidge’, usually shown within inverted commas. ‘Language’ had been a code-word for ‘bad language’ since the early 19th century, but the spelling ‘langwidge’, in use from mid-century, specifically located it in the field of poor literacy and transcription of working-class accents.14 The relationship between standard English and slang is seen in the use of inverted commas in documentation, as a marker of a range of ways to understand the enclosed text. Inverted commas had evolved as part of the formulation of punctuation towards the end of the nineteenth century to indicate direct speech, glosses, technical terms, titles and special meanings, in all cases creating a notice of otherness from the main text. In some cases there would be an overlap between senses; it is seen in the advertisement for Onoto Pens in Punch ‘Unless you are a “neutral” ’,15 with the implication that this is an untruth; for ‘neutral’ read ‘not really neutral’. Foreign words were regularly placed in inverted commas – ‘by this time there is a regular “strafe” on’,16 or ‘I have not been “dans les tranchées” for about a fortnight now’.17 An immediately post-war advertisement for clothing uses inverted commas to emulate speech – ‘ “The” house for mufti dress and service kit’,18 clearly indicating the stress on the first syllable.
Inverted commas around slang can indicate the expression as either new to the English language generally, expected to be new to the reader, or new to the writer. Thus there are inverted commas round ‘No-man’s-land’;19 ‘The “Tanks” seem to be Fritz’s pet aversion’,20 ‘Suggestions for “Sammy” ’,21 ‘we should have been shot thirty seconds ago if the “Jerries” could shoot’,22 ‘Perennial duel between “Archies” and Skycraft’,23 ‘Black Marias or “coal boxes” ’.24 Though the terms may have been in use for a few years, their quasi-unofficial statu
s may be marked by inverted commas. For the benefit of his readers John Crofts uses inverted commas to advertise unfamiliar terms; ‘stunt’, ‘pill-box’, ‘going over’,25 ‘they had “taken us in” ’ writes Walter Brindle;26 ‘the “dixies” were filled with water’.27 Curious usages might be emphasised, involving new terms, slang or jargon: ‘helping to ward off “war panic” ’;28 ‘Don’t “War-Scare” the Children!’29 ‘An early morning “Soviet” gathered’, ‘it was usually a “hot shop” ’;30 ‘the continual “plonks” outside are very irksome’,31 ‘we jocularly said that the “morning hate” was a little worse’,32 ‘twelve unfortunate brethren are “told off” to don the gum-boots’.33 Inverted commas might indicate a teaching act, an explanation: ‘ “no man’s land”– that is the land between our trenches and the Germans’,34 and though an explanation may not be given, children are clearly being introduced to adult language, and a stoically British viewpoint, in ‘our men “stuck it” ’.35 Slang or vocabulary new or strange to the writer is marked as a curiosity: Emma Duffin marks ‘swing the lead’, ‘blighty’, ‘cushy job’; there may also be a sense of enjoying the new expression in ‘Sister Rankin “straffed” me on the top of her voice’,36 the unfamiliarity given away by her idiosyncratic spelling. Ethel Bilbrough wrote in her diary that ‘only the other day they were “shelling out” for the French red cross day’;37 Aubrey Smith notes that ‘in December they started to “ear-mark” twenty-five men from each company’;38 ‘[I was] quite “jiggered” ’;39 and Edward Stuart wrote home ‘After dinner we put the “cap on” our rest (why so called I do not know) by having a route march for two hours’.40
Words and The First World War Page 2