Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  FIGURE 1.4 Three American soldiers receiving lessons in French. Stereoview photograph, published by the Success Portrait Company, Chattanooga, Tennessee.

  FIGURE 1.5 Card from Berthe Brifort to Billy, hoping to see him again. The image shows a studio photograph of a woman with a British soldier, and the legend ‘Doux Souvenir’.

  Many phrasebooks were available in 1914/15, but few in Flemish, a language with greater difficulties: for the average British soldier this was an unknown language. Phrasebook publishers did not recognise its importance at the Front; even if they had had pronunciation guides the dialect of West Flanders is distinct from other dialects.

  Lt Cecil Down’s servant was presented with a copy of ‘useful French phrases’ when he left for France,142 and while the BEF distributed a thousand French dictionaries at the Front in 1915, many Australian officers equipped themselves with such books before arriving in France.143 Though the Publishers’ Circular in September 1914144 noted the limitations of phrasebooks, commenting on the pronunciation guide in The Briton in France (eight editions 1906–1918) that it was ‘funny’ – ‘ “Kahrt der Frohngss” sounds more like German than Carte de France’ – by January 1915 they were proposing that ‘it would appear to be the duty of the State to supply [the soldier] with reliable language guides’.145 A soldier’s letter published in the Daily Mail in January 1915146 stated that ‘nearly everyone carries a book or pamphlet containing English and French sentences’, though with only ‘a vain hope of finding a sentence that will help him out’. Home Chat claimed that ‘[a]s a practical man, Tommy is no believer in the shilling phrase book, even with phonetic pronunciation. He prefers to hear the phrase with his own ears, and write it down in his own way’.147 Many phrasebooks were available in 1914/15, but few in Flemish, a language with greater difficulties: for the average British soldier this was an unknown language. Phrasebook publishers did not recognise its importance at the Front; even if they had had pronunciation guides the dialect of West Flanders is distinct from other dialects. War-Time Tips suggested that the soldier ‘buy an English–French dictionary and study it’, but not an English–Flemish one.148

  It emerged also that German publishing houses had prepared phrasebooks for German soldiers, which were clearly designed for campaigning abroad, such as Deutsch-Französischer Soldaten-Sprachführer (1914), also available as Deutsch-Englischer Soldaten-Sprachführer, by Siegfried Haasmann, which contained phrases such as ‘Are you a deserter? Write down why!’ British phrasebooks did not take such a peremptory approach, being firmly based on the tourist model, and retaining much of the tourist phrasebook’s organisation and choice of statements for translation. The Mayfield French Conversation Guide (1914) was quickly adapted to take a small supplement with words such as ‘mounted infantry’ and ‘gunner’ and phrases such as ‘I have a pass’ and ‘Have you seen the enemy?’ (but not ‘trench’ or ‘barbed wire’) before moving on to the more familiar (for the time) tourist phrases ‘Where does one procure tickets?’ and ‘At what time does the post office close?’149 More dedicated phrasebooks such as How to Say it in French (1914) showed a British soldier greeting a French soldier on the front cover, and included terms for ‘the battle field’ such as ‘give me something to drink please’, and ‘how many wounded?’, but still included ‘the smoking carriage’ and ‘could you repair my bicycle please’. As an indication of optimism, despite the horrific casualties and the pro-war feeling of 1914, it finishes with ‘let us hope peace will soon be declared’ and ‘cheer up’. What a British Soldier Wants to Say in French (Wimereux, 1914) and The British Soldiers’ Anglo-French Pocket Dictionary (1915) both, like How to Say it in French, carried pronunciation guides, but the English–Flemish Military Guide (Poperinghe, 1915) omitted this; all of these characteristically work from the principle of speaking rather than being spoken to. Carreras enterprisingly produced a series of four English–French dictionaries and phrasebooks to be included within Black Cat cigarette packets; the printers’ pragmatic approach to French included using an inverted 5 in place of ‘ç’. These phrasebooks tend to show an uncomfortable mix of tourism and military activity, requests for a footbath alongside ‘have you heard firing lately?’,150 or ‘I place you under arrest’ with ‘have you nothing cheaper?’151 Henry Buller’s The Soldiers’ English–German Conversation Book (‘for the man at the front’) published in 1915 is far more practical, with inclusions such as ‘cessation of firing’ and ‘I must search this house’, and ends with a poignant section ‘Tommy In Friendly Talk’, which provides conversational material such as ‘let us have a smoke’ and ‘how long were you in the trenches?’, imagining a range of possible scenarios, from hospital to Christmas truce to prisoner of war camp or even armistice. It was revised and re-issued in 1939.

  Multilingual phrasebooks offered publishers an attractive product, apparently useful, though probably less so in practice. Melik David-Bey’s Manuel de la Conversation Française, Anglaise, Turque & Russe (Paris, 1916) mainly comprised non-military phrases, which could indeed have been ignored while the useful ones would still be useful; there would have been limited opportunities to use phrases such as ‘To the opera, I am so fond of music’, but it was always going to be helpful to be able to say ‘the town – the little town – the houses’ and ‘Avez-vous du vin?’.

  Its inclusion of the four languages from the context of the closing Gallipoli campaign and the development of the Salonika campaign, involving French and British forces from October 1915, and Russian forces, along with Serbian and Italian units, from summer 1916, indicates less a practical book for interpreters or soldiers than an enterprising publisher catering for the perception during the war of the value of being able to communicate in other languages. Enterprising, opportunistic or just lazy, the 1918 (eighth) edition of the phrasebook The Briton in France, unchanged from the edition of 1906, still gave details of how to get to Brussels via Harwich and Antwerp via the night boat and the Belgian State Railway, as if the war had never happened.

  Civilians in Britain probably had about as much contact with Flemish as did the British soldiers in Flanders, since the north-west of Belgium quickly became a militarised zone, with the local population making up no more than 15 per cent of those present in the ‘unoccupied’ zone. Very few Flemish-based terms entered soldiers’ conversation, and those that did – Bandagehem, Dosinghem, Mendinghem – significantly are parodies of place names. One soldier did note that when Flemish speakers spoke French it was easier to understand, because they spoke slower and with an accent closer to that of English-speakers.152 Comfortingly perhaps, some German soldiers also found Flemish hard to understand,153 while in Dundee in November 1914 there was some surprise that communication in French or Flemish with Belgian refugees was successful at all,154 and in Glasgow Flemish classes for hosts of refugees were proposed.155 But the soldiers had little successful contact with Flemish speakers: John Bullock, the protagonist of Henry Williamson’s The Patriot’s Progress has a dispiriting encounter with a prostitute who swears in Flemish,156 R. H. Mottram notes that the ‘Flemish–French dialect [is] not easily understood’,157 and the private’s diary of the 9th Royal Scots, February–March 1915, remarks on ‘comments made in guttural Vlaamsch, which no-one understood’.158

  The most obvious obstacle faced by British soldiers in France was how to communicate with French people. The ability to speak a little French was not uncommon throughout the armies of men who enlisted from 1914, and contributed towards easier relations with locals – though looking back after the war the ‘Miscellany’ writer of the Manchester Guardian reckoned that ‘only a few advanced linguists [in a shopping situation] went so far as “je prong” ’.159 Among the officer class holidays abroad and education made the ability to speak French more common,160 and might, as in the case of ‘other ranks’ soldiers such as R. H. Mottram, lead to a safer posting as an interpreter. Most British soldiers picked up a few words, but many found that extended conversations were beyond them; any soldiers
who could speak at all fluently, as could Manning’s Bourne in Her Privates We, were pounced on as informal interpreters. And with commerce as an incentive, it was reckoned that by 1917 most of the inhabitants of the combat zone and its hinterland had a working knowledge of English. In extraordinary circumstances there was inevitable breakdown – Aubrey Smith failed entirely with his French and his billet-owner’s little English to explain how to make a jam roly-poly pudding.161

  For non-officers the record of documentation shows regular conversations partly in French, partly in English, frequently involving some Tommy French or Trench French – utterances such as ‘no-bleedin’-bon’ – and particularly occurring in estaminets, and including some swearing. Horace Stanley’s diary includes a scene where rhyming slang is thrown into the mix too, concluding with a French woman saying, ‘out bleeding bird and winder, bonne’.162 This kind of code-switching was described as ‘Arf an’ Arf’ language.163 French and English side-by-side were also frequently found as captions on soldiers’ postcards, sometimes incongruously, as in the tongue-twister song ‘Sister Susie’s sewing shirts for sailors’, translated pointlessly as Nini travaille aussi pour les soldats.164 Bilingual texts occurred in other war-related contexts – an advertisement in the Navy and Army Magazine 20 March 1915 for a civilian badge gives the motto as both ‘lest we forget’ and n’oublions jamais.

  Another phenomenon was the casual dropping in of foreign, usually French, words and phrases into communication. Lancelot Spicer writes ‘fresh milk – well, we never see it in the trenches – seulement le lait condensed’.165 A postcard sent to ‘Angleterre’ hopes it will find the addressee ‘in the pink as it leaves me in that awfull condition compree’, and another sent to ‘Ella’ in Glasgow from France ends ‘yours lovingly, Cheero, Salute’.166 A soldier sent a postcard home to M. Wilson in Peterborough on 1 October 1914 with the words ‘Au revoir mon cher maman, Bert’,167 his eagerness to use French not hampered by correct word-endings. John Masefield describes his voyage to France: ‘everyone was sick but myself, spuage universal, so to speak …’. This practice is to be found in diaries as well: Cpl R. D. Doughty writes in his diary for 11th October 1916, ‘Gun Officer all day. Nothing much doing only trying to forget London. Tres Bon, I don’t think. On duty tonight.’168 Walter Shuttleworth wrote on 22 August 1917, ‘Letter from Nellie Mason makes absurd statement that I write tales of woe. Trés [sic] fâché’,169 and Bombardier Spires wrote, ‘Haslers and I regularly visit the ‘Au Nouveau’ estaminet as the ale is not so bad and the oeufs were certainly good.’170 The Pow-Wow 26 February 1915 has a pastiche of the Arabian Nights titled ‘Un Petit More-So’; the war environment was renewing a practice of dropping French words and phrases into English that has been a regular practice for over a thousand years.

  In this environment of French being the primary ‘other language’ it was natural that French should be used as a lingua franca. 2nd Lt Cyril Drummond reported that during the Christmas truce in 1914 the conversation between Irish and German soldiers was in French,171 and Cpl A. E. Lee had a conversation with a wounded Bavarian sergeant in no man’s land – ‘we had a good old chat in schoolboy French’.172 French was the standard lingua franca in communication with the Turkish army, but a French/English mix was more common for the British army’s communications in France and Flanders – R. H. Mottram describes an elderly woman in Poperinghe saying ‘Monsieur, est-ce bombarde soon finish?’173 The process of French people speaking English to arriving troops began at the port towns. Donald McNair reported residents of Cherbourg picking up and shouting the appropriate response to ‘Are we downhearted?’,174 and Lt Cecil Down reported ‘the Franco-Belgian woman’s war cry “Chocolat, good for English soldiers” ’.175 French and Belgian children were often noted as picking up English: Graves documented children pimping their older sisters at Cherbourg,176 Douie heard children at Etaples selling ‘three apples – une pennee’,177 and A. M. Burrage remembered a small boy near Bavincourt selling newspapers shouting ‘Bloody good news for the Ingleese!’178 Frequently, as here, the documentation shows transcribed accents, usually indicating that the accented English was understood: Henry Williamson describes French boys begging in English, saying ‘biskeets and booly biff’,179 and a postcard in the series ‘Sketches of Tommy’s Life’ by Fergus Mackain shows French children shouting ‘Orangeez! Ah-pools! Shock-o-la!’180 Adults’ speech is transcribed too, and taboo terms were of especial interest: Bombardier Spires noted in his diary that as he had lost his cap and had to wear his helmet, the local estaminet proprietor insisted on calling him ‘ “M le Pisspot” ’.181 Harold Harvey describes a local Frenchman saying, ‘Vat your vife say if she see you in ze water?’182 British advertising copywriters naturally made use of this, regularly employing ‘ze’ for ‘the’, or extending the idea into applying recognisably French syntax to English, as in the Army Club cigarette advertisement, in which the ‘Sous Lieutenant Aviateur’ says ‘But since I am arrive here … I essay the golden tobacco of the English’:183 its counterpart lies in a British nurse saying to a French soldier, ‘Tasy vous toot sweet or je vous donnerai la colleek’.184

  FIGURE 1.6 Postcard sent ‘On Active Service’ in 1917: ‘Am getting on tray-bon now. Hope all are well. Love, Arthur.’

  FIGURE 1.7 Postcard sent from Bert to his mother in October 1914, while ‘On Active Service’. Note the use of ‘Angleterre’.

  French use of English was naturally not always successful; editing would have benefitted the text in a few bilingual postcards, such as ‘A Zeppelin thrown down in the Vardar marshes’, ‘Reims cathedral, fired from the Germans’, or ‘Rimains of splendie church after the bombardment’. French-speakers picking up inappropriate slang as well as incorrect English was of particular amusement: Gibson gives the example of a Flemish café owner telling her customers, ‘Messieurs, when you ’ave finis, ’op it’,185 and Douie records a Belgian saying ‘ ’Ello, my boy! Me speak Eengleesh’,186 the transcribed accent alerting the reader to the speaker’s foreignness. And while the environment of foreign languages gave scope for teasing – Masefield records French wounded soldiers saying to anglophone nurses ‘Seester, what is Will you kiss me mean?’187 – Aubrey Smith records a sharp conversation between a British soldier arriving at Rouen and a French women selling oranges, which ends with her saying ‘You damn fool’.188

  A number of English words were taken into French as well: L’Argot de la Guerre by Albert Dauzat included:189

  bizness, for work or business, a longstanding usage in Paris

  souinger, to bomb, from ‘swing’, originally ‘donner un swing’, probably from boxing

  uppercut, eau-de-vie, also from boxing

  rider, pronounced ‘ridèr’– chic, especially in the language of the cavalry (Dauzat states le rider est le cavalier anglais, donc le cavalier chic – a case of the French looking to the English for style)

  ours, horse, maybe picked up from Londoners

  go, meaning ‘ça va’

  come on, meaning just that

  tanks, which Dauzat translates as les auto-mitrailleuses ou les auto-camions blindés (armoured) – blindés itself meant ‘tanks’.

  Eric Partridge adds to this list the following wartime adoptions:190

  Sops, planes, from Sopwith, cf. ‘taube’ for German planes.

  Finish, meaning ‘there’s no more’, a mirror of the anglicisation ‘finee’.

  Strafer, taken from the British adoption of the German strafen, so a bounced-on adoption.

  Coltar, wine (coal tar).

  Afnaf, ‘either not too well pleased’, or ‘satisfied’, or else ‘exhausted’; imitative of the cockney “ ’arf ’n ’arf”.

  Olrède, alright.

  Lorry, with the plural lorrys.

  From Déchelette can be added saucissemen (‘Germans’, the term seldom documented as being used by anglophones) and the ironic billard (‘billiard-table’, for no man’s land, also to be found in Partridge).191 A French trench journal, the Télé-Mèl,
produced by a section of telegraphists, borrowed its title, with altered spelling, from the Daily Mail. And at least one word was bounced back: Fraser and Gibbons record ‘chicot’ meaning verminous, coming from the French chicot, itself an adoption from the American ‘hitchy-koo’.

  Some mixed English/French conversations were given the label ‘pidgin’: a Chairman Cigarettes advertisement runs:

  When Tom and Jacques meet in a trench

  They parlez-vous in ‘pidgin’ French.

  Says Tommy ‘prenez cigarette?’

  And Jacques exclaims ‘Oui, oui, you bet’

  …

  ‘Who ees zis Chairman zat I see?’

  ‘He’s top man at the feed, compris?’192

  While not actually a pidgin (though some aspects of Tommy French would count as pidgin), this shows one of the labels given to this kind of speech at the time, another being seen in a review of a performed sketch called ‘My Lonely Soldier’, which used the term ‘broken English’ to describe a French woman’s attempts to speak English.193 Successful Franco-English communication in Europe seems to have depended on the management of key words – compree, fini, chocolat, vin; an ability to pick up vocabulary might be the essential factor to make communication work: Ian Hay194 describes a Sgt Goffin managing to make a successful purchase with ‘I want vinblank one, vinrooge two, bogeys six (bougies – candles), Dom one. Compree?’, where ‘Dom’ refers to a bottle of Benedictine, the sergeant having the habit of naming wines after the largest word printed on the label.