Words and The First World War
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FIGURE 1.2 Variations on the Field Service Postcard: an original FSP sent in January 1918; a pastiche sent from training camp; a pastiche published in The Lead-swinger 16 Oct 1915, p. 8, (Issues September – December, published 1916); a multiple-choice holiday card, 1920s.
FIGURE 1.2 Continued
FIGURE 1.2 Continued
FIGURE 1.2 Continued
Placards put up facing enemy troops tended to be more challenging than conciliatory: in May 1916 placards were put up facing Irish troops which stated that ‘English guns are firing on your wives and children’, and telling about the surrender at Kut-el-Amara.93 The War Illustrated 3 June 1916 claimed that this had infuriated the Munster Regiment so much that they mounted a raid and ‘brought back the placard in triumph’. Less successfully provocative, and less accurate, was one which appeared to read ‘Kitchener has been drowned in the Devon’; under better light the words were seen to be ‘Kitchener has been taken by the Devil’.94 Stephen Hewett suspected that one placard announcing the fall of Kut-el-Amara might have a machine-gun trained on it or be a mined lure to attract outraged British soldiers; taunts have always been part of warfare – at the Somme Australian soldiers shot to pieces a placard directed at them saying ‘Advance Australia – If You Can!’95 A conversation by various means in 1915 was reported by 2nd Lt Arthur Heath: the conversation was started by a sergeant shouting through a megaphone that ‘Fritz your navy is destroyed’, with a placard listing the ships destroyed (with the addition of ‘Hoch!’). This brought the response ‘Schwein’ and a placard listing Germany and Austro-Hungary’s successes against Russia.96 Masefield somehow heard in May 1917 of an exchange of information on the Eastern Front, with both the Germans and the Russians claiming success in the fall of the Tsar.97 On occasions there were no doubt misunderstandings, from badly translated English or from lack of understanding of other theatres of war: ‘Skeen told us that when the Turks stuck up a placard saying Warsaw had fallen, the Australians gave three hearty cheers’.98 There was scope for humour too, as a wiring party in no man’s land responded to a German placard announcing ‘Gott mit uns’ with one of their own saying ‘Don’t swank – we’ve got mittens too’.99 As the Germans withdrew to the Hindenburg Line in 1917 a more literary mind set up a large placard on the ruins of the town hall at Péronne with Goethe’s words ‘Nicht ärgen, nur wundern!’ (do not be angry, be amazed). The placard survived the war.
The canonical idea of ‘The Poetry of the First World War’ sometimes masks the fact that thousands of people wrote, and published, verse during the conflict; Vivien Noakes in her introduction to her anthology proposes that ‘no war in history has produced so much poetry as did the First World War’.100 These poems found their homes not in slim volumes, but in trench journals, autograph books, magazines and newspapers, collections published in support of a particular cause, and YMCA hut visitors’ books. E. B. Osborn’s anthology The Muse in Arms (1917), reprinted three times within a year, had as its object ‘to show what passes in the British warrior’s soul when … he has glimpses of the ultimate significance of warfare’; its authority was claimed by the title page’s note that these were ‘war poems’ and that they were for the most part written by those who were serving or had served in the war.101 The presence of works by Sassoon, Gurney and Brooke as well as less successful poems such as the imitation of Masefield by ‘Imtarfa’ (‘Let me back to the guns again, I hear them calling me’) and ‘The Death of the Zeppelin’ by ‘O.’ (‘At last! At last the wingéd Worm draws near, / The vulture-ship that dare not voyage by day’) indicate that the authenticity of having served in the forces was the prime determinant of inclusion. The writing of poetry, whether limerick, doggerel, ballad pastiche or sonnet, provided a medium for exploring unselfconscious patriotism, celebration of the group, and affirmation of continuity through narrative, as well as the familiar outrage of the canonical poets. But most of the presentation of poetry was not that of the isolated individual, but of people contextualised by the regiment, the army, the war: of the wartime anthologies which provided poems for Vivien Noakes’ book, over two-thirds had titles which referred specifically to the war – they are ‘war poems’, belonging to the experience of the group, and part of the communicating of the war.
A group mindset drove the trench journals, particularly avoiding the individual in favour of the group experience. Ranging from single sheets to multipage magazines, with methods that included individual handwritten sheets produced in a trench, and professionally designed and set runs produced in Britain or America, these publications depended on the shared experience of the military unit, expressed through a shared voice. Though the voice may be identifiable by class, education, degree of deference to military authority, it is almost always the unidentifiable voice of the soldier rather than the named journalist, for though Roberts and Pearson are now well known as the editors of the Wipers Times, their names did not feature at the time, the magazine always being ‘published by Sherwood, Forester & Co’. Individuals did stand out – the poet ‘F.W.H.’ (Will Harvey) of the Fifth Gloucester Gazette, Philip Harris, editor of Aussie – but trench journals thrived on providing a recognisably familiar, if unnamed voice. For material they required shared experience, identifiably distinct from peacetime and non-army life, as the first British trench journals appeared far from the frontline trenches, in the training camps in Britain – The Pow-Wow, the journal of the University and Public School Battalions, first appeared in November 1914. As the war progressed and the units moved to France, Flanders and Gallipoli, the journals moved with them, being written, edited and sometimes printed within the sound of the guns – The Gasper proudly, though perhaps opaquely, proclaimed that it was ‘edited from the trenches’. The tone of the journals has been recognised as essentially humorous, balancing a support for the prosecution of the war while maintaining a constant barrage of complaint against its details – poor food, vermin, excessive paperwork, poor support at home, the claims of journalists, the absence of women. The attitude towards the enemy is more of annoyance than hatred, but Graham Seal’s assessment is that the journals were primarily a negotiation of compromise between the soldier and the authority that sent him out to risk his life; the conflict appeared more in terms of dying than of killing, and the trench journal, in demanding that the voice of the soldier exist on record, in effect makes the statement that ‘you may have my body, but not my mind’, echoing comments that the army took a soldier’s body but not his soul (see p. 246). It is the fulfilment of the idea that the British soldier will do anything if you let him have his grouse. Columns such as ‘We Know But We Shan’t Say’ set up a paradigm for ‘us and them’ in which there was a tacit acknowledgement that anyone other than the private soldier could be the target of satire; for Graham Seal this goes towards the creation of the trench journal as a ‘democratic cultural republic’,102 but this goes only for the more daring journals. Declarations that others were published ‘by permission’ or edited by a high-ranking officer103 indicate that the negotiation was not all from the soldiers’ side. Trench journals flourished: there were over 100 titles published in English, and twice this number in French; Robert Nelson proposes that every German soldier would have read trench journals regularly.104 The British Museum received copies of trench journals for archiving as part of the Legal Deposit process, but the diligence with which very flimsy material was acquired indicates a sense at the time of its importance; journal editors perhaps realised the worth of the papers too, suggesting that readers should buy two copies, one to send home. They were also constantly testing the boundaries of what was permissible. When in 1916 some journals started to claim that they had been passed by the censor, nobody was really sure whether this was so or whether this was another push at authority.105
Where the body was obliterated or lost, the name on the unignorable architectural structure made some compensation for the absence of the body, the word thus becoming the most permanent communication across time, monumentalised i
n the phrase ‘their name liveth for evermore’.
The desire of the British Museum to preserve the verbal culture of the war is just one of many aspects of the preservation of words through and after the conflict. Of these the most fundamental was the preservation of the names of soldiers who died, attaching the name to a place, a monument or a tombstone. In the French army bottles functioned as receptacles for preserving the names of soldiers, the names written on paper and placed in bottles on the soldiers’ graves ‘that they may not be obliterated by snow and rain’.106 Where the body was obliterated or lost, the name on the unignorable architectural structure made some compensation for the absence of the body, the word thus becoming the most permanent communication across time, monumentalised in the phrase ‘their name liveth for evermore’. Home Chat as early as October 1914 proposed that ‘every parish should … have its list of heroes to be engraved on brass or stone after the war’.107 Winter and Walter describe the phenomenon of family members touching the names of lost loved ones on memorials,108 where the word functions as a metonym for the person and the loss. This continuity of communication through the word indicates a continuity of the impulse towards communication during the war, as the fixing and repetition of names provides a model for commemoration to the present.
An article in the South Shields Daily Gazette indicates the sense that somehow or other people would manage to communicate with each other: ‘An English Lieutenant writes from Salonica: “A characteristic Salonica incident on the way to camp. The man with whom I was was a Serbian Jew attached to the Zadruga Bank. We met two Tommies in language difficulties with two men, the one of whom spoke Russian and the other Greek. So the Tommies talked English to me; I talked German to my friend, who talked Serbian to the Russian (who replied in his own language), who talked Greek to the other fellow.”109
Managing languages
The variety of theatres of conflict and the range of languages involved meant that the war was fought in a multilingual environment. Though the British Army in 1914 already had a term, ‘bolo the bat’, from Hindi, meaning to speak the (local) language, the First World War extended the experience beyond anything that had gone before. R. H. Mottram, finding himself an interpreter in Flanders, was under the command of staff officers who were able to speak other languages, but these were the languages used in administering the British Army in India. The King’s Regulations of 1912, which in paragraph 900 encouraged the study of French and German ‘at certain large military centres’, and in paragraph 901 proposed the secondment of officers to Russia, Japan and China, for the purposes of language study, had recognised the need for competence in other languages, but the early losses to the officer corps had probably undone much of the preparation that had come from this.
Aubrey Herbert at Gallipoli met a Serbian who had been learning Italian specifically to aid his ambition of stabbing a Cretan,110 while Emma Duffin nursing soldiers in France found herself tending Portuguese officers, one of whom was ‘very keen to learn English and asked me the English name of everything in the book’.111 The administrators of Flemish-speaking refugees in Britain were bewildered by what they saw as ‘the Shakespearean tendency of the Flemish peasant to spell his surname differently on any occasion that arose for spelling it’,112 while those in Wales suggested helping the situation by ‘the distribution of French, Flemish and English glossaries’.113 It was not uncommon for soldiers to use Field Service Postcards or picture postcards printed in languages other than their own, to send home; a German Feldpostkarte was sent to Manchester in September 1918 by a British soldier.114
Gallipoli particularly was a multilingual environment, with many Turks able to speak French, which became a de facto lingua franca and language of negotiation for temporary truces, though Aubrey Herbert’s ability to speak Turkish as well as French meant he was much in demand.115 The changes of control over trenches on the Western Front, between allies and enemies, led to changes of language for the names of the trenches,116 and required transliteration into non-Latin scripts. The war in Africa involved 100,000 soldiers from several language groups, and British troops also encountered as allies speakers of Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Greek, Serbian, Russian, Arabic and Italian.
The changes brought about by so much cross-language communication were seen as ultimately beneficial by one writer to the Daily Express in June 1918, who felt that ‘we were too insular before the war’; the British soldier had pragmatically abandoned ‘the pen of my grandmother’ in favour of ‘Whisky nahpoo’, but, rather than an eventual multilingual world, what he envisages is a situation where ‘we shall hear Kai Lung, of the Labour Corps, calling out : “My hat, old top; Ah Song’s wangled a Military Medal.” ’117 In other words, less multilinguism than the ubiquity of English slang – in fact Lt J. B. Morton believed that the ubiquity of English slang and soldiers’ songs was holding the alliance together.118 But as early as January 1915 it was being realised that inadequate British teaching of languages was being shown up by the war: a correspondence in The Daily Mirror suggested that modern systems based on conversation rather than rote-learning of grammar would be seen as necessary.119
While multilinguism was to be expected from the nature of an international war that involved people being stationed in countries away from their residence, the mingling of groups within each national grouping involved the bringing together of languages. The French army embraced Occitan and Breton, as well as standard French, and the particular form of French called ‘petit français’ developed for officers to speak to tirailleurs from Senegal.120 The British Army had speakers of French from Canada and Guernsey, Gaelic from Scotland, Irish and Welsh; there were Maori-speakers from New Zealand, and South African soldiers brought Afrikaans (also to be seen on the text of victory medals for South African soldiers); American indigenous languages were brought to Europe by Canadian and American forces; several languages were brought to Europe by Ghurkas and Indian troops from South Asia.
Skill in foreign languages was noted and often its contribution was recognised: at the Villa Trento hospital in Italy, staffed by English nurses and VADs, ‘the skill in the language acquired by many of our nurses’, added to the value of the hospital’s work.121 Generally, where British soldiers knew other languages, this was limited to a little French or more rarely German, or some Hindi, but it is notable that an Indian soldier remarks that the Military Secretary to the India Office General H. V. Cox ‘knows Hindi very well, and spoke to us in that language’.122 Aubrey Herbert was an exception, having what he called ‘a fairly fluent smattering of several eastern languages’.123 Stephen Hewett recognised that ‘it is a useful thing to have some facility with the language’ (French in this case),124 and though Lancelot Spicer wrote ‘my French has improved greatly as a result of a month down here’,125 and a 9th Royal Scots private’s diary noted ‘a “would-be linguist” [saying] où êtes-nous monsieur’,126 more common were observations of failure to speak French: ‘I’m tired of buying eggs and milk in execrable French’,127 or ‘Trying to speak French. A splendid failure’.128
FIGURE 1.3 A German postcard sent to Manchester in September 1918 by a British soldier.
FIGURE 1.3 Continued
Language learning and teaching took various forms. Sgt John Ward, wounded and transferred to the management of a Chinese convalescent camp, taught himself some Chinese,129 while a convalescent Portuguese officer tried to learn English from the VAD nurse tending him.130 Language courses for British soldiers were advertised in trench journals and regimental and military magazines,131 including in the Navy and Army Magazine, Hugo’s courses in ‘French, Spanish or even German’, and Belgian refugees in Reigate advertised their services to teach French and Flemish to British soldiers.132 Evidence for more casual teaching includes M. MacDonald teaching English to French troops,133 a stereograph photo titled ‘Lessons in French’, showing three American soldiers studying with a woman,134 and parodies of language-teaching in trench journals – an advertisement for ‘Speci
alists in Dead Languages’ and ‘Bad language by post’, and a test on slang.135
Most language learning though was incidental, and involved picking up the most necessary terms. Within two weeks of his arrival in Egypt James Jones had picked up the term ‘backsheesh’,136 and Belgian refugee children in Scotland were reported to have speedily picked up the local accent.137 Some of this involved the traditional British embarrassment when faced with French: Adèle De L’Isle reporting that she is intending ‘to learn to “parley-voo” ’.138 A more enticing way of learning was through contact with the opposite sex: Badshah Khan in a letter home noted that when British troops were away from the trenches ‘it was “bonsoir madame” ’,139 while RSM Harry Atkin ‘spen[t] a pleasant evening with the girls trying to make something of the French language’.140 Rather more cynical evidence comes in the American Expeditionary Force description of a French girl as a ‘sleeping dictionary’.141 A card from Berthe Brifort to Billy indicates that such relationships involved language acquisition in both directions.