Book Read Free

Words and The First World War

Page 3

by Julian Walker


  Insider slang is signalled by inverted commas indicating a code, a euphemism, something not intelligible to the non-initiate. Ian Hay talks about German artillery ‘distributing coal’ (‘coal-boxes’ – 5.9″ shells),41 ‘we’ve been “in” since the 8th’,42 ‘we had two “short arm” inspections’;43 and the ubiquitous ‘somewhere in France’ at the top of many On Active Service postcards, often shortened to ‘somewhere’, the tacit acknowledgement that the writer was being censored. Being part of the group was a useful commercial tool, and the advertiser’s claim could be highlighted by the use of inverted commas: ‘In the trenches – Symingtons Soups are easy to “fix up” ’;44 Ivelcon is ‘truly miraculous in its “bucking up” effect’;45 and ‘Somewhere in France’ begins Craven A’s advertisement using the story of Sir John French.46 It was not necessary that it should be actual soldiers’ slang, as the mere fact of using something identifiable as slang linked the product to the military experience. The educational drive may explain the use of inverted commas round slang expressions – ‘badly “smashed-up” ’; ‘Jerry’; ‘chatting’ – in “Frank Honywood, Private”,47 by Eric Partridge, the twentieth century’s expert on English slang. Partridge explains slang expressions unobtrusively: ‘delousing (“chatting” was the army phrase) always remained distasteful’; ‘a pleasant sight, all those “Diggers” (as the Australian soldiers were already called) sitting in the mellow sunlight’.48 The writer might indicate a learning experience for himself, as in ‘that piece of land which lies between the British and German trenches, and which is known as “no mans land”, and rightly so too’.49

  This use of inverted commas exploited inclusion, but strong class sociolects meant that some people wished to distance themselves from slang, while still claiming membership of the group identified by it. ‘And that put (in vulgar phrase) the tin hat on it’50 does this, while Coningsby Dawson uses inverted commas: ‘My sergeant is waiting, so, as the men say, “I must ring off” ’.51 There is an association here with the idea of ‘the men’ making mistakes with language – Emma Duffin twice points out the incorrect usage in ‘albumin water called “aluminium water” by the troops’, and ‘ “aluminium water” as they always call it’.52 Newspapers and magazines that were aimed at the better off might use inverted commas around slang to help their readers keep a safe social class distance from anything undesirable – the Daily Mail was still using inverted commas round ‘Tommies’ in May 1915. The punctuation here points out slang’s role – the bomb called a ‘Jack Johnson’ or a ‘Black Maria’53 – and conveys a combination of awareness of class difference, pointing out a mistake or a simulacrum, and fascination with a safe aspect of the working class: and this could be combined with supporting the army by sending them, through a newspaper-based charity, ‘the “smokes” that help to keep our heroes smiling’54 so that they should not have to share ‘one “Fag-end” among six’;55 The Weekly Dispatch famously marketed its Tobacco Fund campaign with the slogan ‘ ’Arf a ’mo, Kaiser’, always presented as a soldier’s quote. There is also a connection with the function of the inverted commas to apologise, to provide a safe place for the not quite polite, such as the headline ‘Two Women Who “Swanked” As Captains’,56 or a letter from a 48th Infantry Regiment soldier, Erwin, to Ben, Freda and Ruth saying ‘we had another “blow-out” the other evening’.57

  The progress of abandoning inverted commas shows the gradual acceptance of terms that were previously marked as not mainstream. The Illustrated London News was using the form ‘Tommy’ in early October 1914, and though it dropped the inverted commas the following month, they were resumed in February 1915, dropped in an advertisement that appeared in May and June 1916, then resumed until October 1916; after January 1918 there were no inverted commas round the word. The Birmingham Daily Post used inverted commas round ‘Jack Johnson’ (as the slang name for the shell) consistently from September 1914 until September 1915, after which it omitted inverted commas slightly more often than using them; the use of the term tailed off altogether through most of 1917, with an appearance with inverted commas in October, and without in November. Articles and letters in the Manchester Guardian omitted inverted commas round ‘Blighty’ only when it was in a quotation, until January 1917, after which there were more or less equal numbers of incidences with and without inverted commas. The Times began to use the word ‘cushy’ without inverted commas only after the Armistice. Emma Duffin’s treatment of ‘Blighty’ moves from ‘home or “Blighty” as they called it’ (before May 1916), to ‘wait till I get to “blighty” ’ (1915/16), to ‘the others were up and talking of going to Blighty’ (autumn 1917).58

  In terms of the management of the Allied campaigns it is useful to see this relationship between different registers of one language in terms of a wider linguistic perception of status between languages, which was highlighted by the war. Differences in sociolects seem to have brought the soldiers in the anglophone armies for the most part closer together, and there seem to have been no cases where misunderstandings through dialect or accent caused any operational difficulties. British soldiers came into contact with French soldiers to the south and Belgian soldiers to the north, but there are only rare occurrences of realisation that in both these armies languages other than French were spoken. In these armies there were clear status relationships between languages; British forces do not seem to have been aware of the range of languages in use in the French army, but there is evidence of an awareness of Flemish spoken by civilians. The Belgian army held the line, mostly fighting a defensive campaign, between the British army north of Ypres and the coast, a distance which over the period ranged from 11 to 38 kilometres,59 much of it marshy or flooded, creating unhealthy conditions which added to Belgian casualties.

  The Belgian army was not officially an ally of the British army or the French army, due to Belgium’s neutrality, but was in effect fighting its own campaign against the German invasion. The army reflected the social and linguistic structure of Belgium, where French was the language of administration, law and education, with the officer class speaking French and the administration of the army being in French; however, over two-thirds of the soldiers were Flemish-speaking, and many supported the campaign for greater recognition of the Flemish language and culture (also supported by the German army of occupation as Flamenpolitik). The French army, besides its colonial soldiers from Algeria, Senegal and elsewhere, had soldiers from mainland France whose first language was Breton, Flemish, Gallo or Occitan; in the case of Breton soldiers, for many Breton was their only language. The position of Breton-speaking soldiers was highlighted by memories of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) in which they had suffered both militarily, reflecting doubts as regards their loyalty, and as a result of the conditions in which they were maintained by the military and political authorities. Breton soldiers suffered proportionately twice the number of casualties as other sections of the French army during the First World War, and there were several claims that Breton-speaking soldiers had died unnecessarily through not understanding orders.60 Marc Bloch, telling the story of a Breton soldier who in effect died through not being able to understand or make himself understood, describes the situation in his section after the arrival of fresh troops: ‘recruitment had taken them from the four corners of Brittany so effectively that each spoke a different dialect, and those amongst them who knew a little French could barely serve as interpreters for the others’.61 Louis Barthas, from Languedoc, gives the story of a fellow-poilu who tellingly flings back a comment in Occitan rather than standard French as he deserts – Béni mé querré (viens me chercher – come and get me).62

  The position of French–Canadian soldiers was also conflicted. The French–Canadian community’s allegiance was to itself rather than to France, and particularly not to Britain. The effect of years of struggle as a minority language group rendered enlistment from this group constrained, and there were claims that they were pressurised into not enlisting;63 their language skills were n
ot particularly widely exploited in interpreting, and the small proportion of French used in the 1 January 1916 issue of The Growler, trench journal of the Royal Montreal Regiment – three out of four columns on one page of a twelve-page journal – indicates the small proportion of the language accommodation for them. Francophone Canadian soldiers tended to get a better deal from the locals in France, often involving greater access to alcohol, which did not impress the military authorities;64 a Canadian War Record Office report stated that ‘The population applauded us. The people rushed to the doors of their houses to offer us fruits and wine.… Gradually it dawned on these people that among the strange soldiers from across the ocean were men speaking their mother tongue, not the French of modern Brittany and Normandy, but French none the less’.65 Where anglophones could speak French, their French might be of no avail when confronted with a local dialect or accent, let alone the local dialects of Flemish; R. H. Mottram met a boy who spoke Flemish but said no one locally could read a Flemish inscription on a windmill, because it was ‘Vlamsch … of another commune’.66 Masefield tells in a letter of not being able to understand ‘a cruelly different patois’,67 and Douie failed to converse with a woodman who used ‘a flood of patois which I could not understand’.68

  The need to communicate

  The lowest level of literacy among the British troops was usually sufficient to allow for letter-writing and reading, and the facilities provided encouraged this – the YMCA provided free writing paper and envelopes for soldiers’ letters.69 Combined with the newly available telephone, cheap printing, and the logistics of managing huge numbers of people, there quickly developed a huge and diverse culture of verbal and written communication. To see this in context, in 1910 nearly one person in ten purchased a national daily newspaper, and at the outbreak of war the postal service in Britain was such that any conurbation was receiving up to twelve postal deliveries daily. In the eighteen months from March 1916 to August 1917 approximately 8.5 million bags of mail were received by the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) in France, an average of 15,500 bags per day; the maximum strength of the Army Postal Service with the BEF, at 18 December 1918, was 3,031.70 In the French army four million letters were exchanged daily between the Front and home,71 with a quarter of a million parcels sorted in Paris daily.72

  The expectation of mail from home is one of the most repeated messages in soldiers’ letters and postcards, comments such as ‘I have not heard from you today’ indicating the hope, almost the expectation, of daily news from home. In April 1915 John Masefield followed the custom in the French army of writing to his family nearly every day, twice a day sometimes. Up to 20,000 letters a week were sent home by Indian soldiers – their deep desire for communication with home is expressed in a letter from Raja Khan to Mohamed Fazl, sent on 17 October 1917: ‘Be good enough to tell my father to write every week. If it is too much trouble to write at length it will do if he simply makes his thumb impression on a sheet of paper and sends it … if I get no letter from India I have no appetite at all and feel useless for my work’.73 For another Indian soldier the need to write was so strong that he had to break a frozen pot of ink, and melt the ink to be able to write.74 John Masefield, working as a nurse with the French army in March 1915, watched a soldier die on his ward before the man’s wife could get there: ‘all his marching & fighting & narrow escapes came to nothing, & all his letters that he wrote with a stub of pencil in the trenches will be all the poor woman has’.75 From the distance of a hundred years, the soldiers are most present in their names and in their surviving words; there is a possibility that they had some idea of this, in that editors of The Pow-Wow, issue 23 April 1915, suggested that readers should keep a copy of the journal for posterity.

  In the correspondence of British soldiers the overwhelming realisation is that the fact of the letter or card sent from or to the Front was as important as its content.

  So many soldiers’ postcards say very little beyond the fact that the writer is well, that a letter or card or parcel has or has not been received, and the state of the weather, though Indian soldiers’ letters tended to be less restricted by the desire not to worry families at home. In the correspondence of British soldiers the overwhelming realisation is that the fact of the letter or card sent from or to the Front was as important as its content: just as the very act of a communication from the Front meant that the soldier was alive, the soldiers needed the constant reminders and reassurance of home. The Field Service Postcard, available from 1914, in Urdu as well as English, was a pragmatic combination of the rigid censorship needs of the army, the authorities’ awareness that the main value of a card was the fact of its being written rather than its content, and the realisation that many soldiers would not know what to write. It annoyed some with its limitations, and quickly gave rise to pastiches, many in trench journals, which referenced idealised or bizarre situations at home and at the Front, and offered suggestions for answering postcards; pastiches of the Field Service Postcard published in trench journals tended to be heavily referential of army life. Bureaucracy spawned acres of paper, memoranda from HQ quickly referred to as ‘Comic Cuts’ by officers, and generally as ‘bumf’ (bum fodder). Officers in the trenches were exasperated by the form-filling and record-keeping required of them: Lancelot Spicer complained about fatuous reports requiring him to let HQ know ‘the number of men who have not cut their toenails for the last fortnight (giving reasons)’.76

  FIGURE 1.1 A postcard sent ‘On Active Service’ with the common complaint ‘I am writing a letter to you today. But I have not received one from you for a long time’.

  The war saw the fast development of many forms of communication; runners, dogs and carrier pigeons used in 1914 were supplemented and replaced by telephone wires, necessitating constant repairs and the reburying of exposed cables. The American Signal Corps created their own telephone network in France using 250,000 kilometres of cabling to enable 150,000 local and 4,000 long-distance calls daily at the end of the war, while hand-signalling by aviators and flag-signalling and morse in the Navy were supplemented by electron-tube radio by 1919.77 But at the same time that newspapers and magazines were exciting their readers with information about science in the service of the military campaigns, they were publishing morale-boosting photographs of shells carrying hand-chalked messages ‘To Fritz’, ‘To Willie with Compliments’, or ‘To Captain Fryatt’s Murderers’;78 Louis Barthas noted in 1914 ‘How many bellicose, bragging inscriptions scrawled in chalk on the railway cars!’,79 and the tunnels below Arras are a mass of messages, names and regimental insignia carved into the chalk walls. The open celebration of verbal communication in such destructive circumstances is seen in the culture of the trench-name, with all its references to home and safety, as well as the alphabetical structure by which names could be cross-referenced to corps maps; the trench names may have started as chalked words on a spare plank, but by 1917 the Royal Engineers were using sign-writers to make them.

  The communicative imperative did not stop at the parapet, for there are countless instances of communication of many kinds between the frontline trenches. Graves noted ‘a daily exchange of courtesies between our machine-guns and the Germans’ at stand-to; by removing cartridges from the ammunition belt one could rap out the rhythm of the former prostitutes’ call: ‘MEET ME DOWN IN PIC-A-DILL-Y’, to which the Germans would reply … : ‘YES, with-OUT my DRAWERS ON!’80 The simplest form of cross-no-man’s-land communication was the shouted message, sometimes challenging, sometimes friendly or just acknowledging the other’s existence. One Bavarian cornet-player responded positively to a request from British soldiers opposite.81 The ‘live and let live’ attitude or the desire to maintain a quiet sector encouraged low-level conversation to retain a calm atmosphere. Tony Ashworth gives several examples of German soldiers sending messages either in defused grenades or tied to stones, and of informal truces, up to as late as May 1918;82 the breaking of one truce provoked a German placard to be put up telling
the British to ‘Chuck It’.83 Despite the appalling death toll on both sides in the early months of the war there were curious anecdotes of communication across no man’s land; one case involved the Germans sending newspapers to the French via a horse,84 though these did carry news of German successes, while the same article reported a singing contest, and an attempt to exchange news via a goat, which unfortunately could not be made to return to the German trench it had been sent from. Unsurprisingly for an agricultural area which, at least in the early months of the war, continued to be farmed, animals were involved incidentally in the business of warfare: one angry Belgian farmer appeared in front of a British trench and accused, through an interpreter, the British troops of killing a pig; when the charge was denied he strode off across no man’s land to harangue the trench opposite.85 Truces involving fraternisation in no man’s land between anglophone and German troops inevitably were conducted in English: Archie Stanley, during the 1914 Christmas Truce, heard a German soldier say ‘Cor blimey, mate, I was in a London hotel when the war broke out’.86 Areas where the front lines were close together seemed to almost encourage conversation, and Lancelot Spicer described while out on patrol having a conversation with German soldiers in their trench.87 Aubrey Herbert in Gallipoli used French to ‘make speeches’ across no man’s land assuring that those Turks who surrendered would not be killed.88 Sometimes the conversation was tactical – trying to get the enemy to speak in order to identify a regional accent, to identify the speaker’s regiment; Lancelot Spicer tells how this attempt failed on one occasion because the German soldier was determined to speak English.89 In a more sinister way German soldiers would creep up to the British parapet at night and ‘converse in slang English’ and ‘ask for “a fag” ’ in order to get into British trenches unseen,90 though the live-and-let-live spirit is seen in the anecdote of a British soldier who lost his way in no man’s land and asked over a parapet, ‘Are you the Scottish?’, to receive the polite reply, ‘No, we are the Bavarians. The Scottish are opposite’.91 The use of trench mortars, which allowed little chance of protection or avoidance, pushed any negotiation through conversation aside: one trench mortar attack on the German lines provoked the shouted response, ‘You bloody Welsh murderers!’92

 

‹ Prev