Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  Control and censorship

  ‘We have been warned to be more careful than ever of what we say’.96

  On 23 February 1916 Amy Shield wrote from No. 12 General Hospital Rouen a letter in a green envelope saying, ‘Sorry this way but my letters from here are censored!’97 Evidence of censorship was clearly visible on every letter and postcard sent from the Front, the censors’ stamps in red ink changing design every year. Censorship was part of communication, as Shield knew, her use of the ‘green envelope’ requiring her signature to the statement ‘I certify on my honour that the contents of this envelope refer to nothing but private and family matters’; such a letter would not be ‘censored Regimentally’, but ‘the contents are liable to examination at the Base’. Officers were allowed a few green envelopes a month, but other ranks saw them more rarely, though an order of November 1916 stated that troops were to be given one per week; they were bartered between troops – in 1916 the price seems to have been 50 centimes and, with luck, three cigarettes.98 The green envelope generated its own slang: ‘green letter is at a standstill’,99 ‘a green one’,100 ‘sticky jack’,101 ‘Am writing green, hope to post tomorrow’.102

  FIGURE 2.5 The green envelope enclosing Amy Shield’s letter, 23 February 1916.

  The official view of censorship was that it served three purposes: checking that no information of use to the enemy was accessible, monitoring the morale of the troops, and that potential attacks on troop morale did not get through to the troops. Censorship of mail from soldiers was far more evidenced than civilian mail censorship, but by 1918 the War Office was employing around 5,000 people to censor mail to soldiers, and more diligently, mail to neutral countries. The statistics for mail show an enormous amount of correspondence to be checked – there were 12.5 million items of mail leaving the postal depot at Regents Park every week for the Front alone, which computes to 2,500 items of correspondence per censor per week. But censors were empowered to notify police, who in some cases searched offices and confiscated offending material.103 Information on the process of censorship of correspondence to soldiers remained sketchy, perhaps deliberately so since maintaining high levels of post would boost morale; a four-page article in The Illustrated War News of 24 October 1917 (pp. 30–3) on ‘The Campaign of the Postal Censor’ states that the unit ‘distributed mail … taken in from the Post Office … to various sections of the Censorship’, before passing it back to the Post Office, but concentrated on the censoring of mail to British and German PoWs, the detection of sensitive information and contraband, the unit’s translation section, and the staff canteen. A photograph showed a warehouse full of confiscated mail ‘stacked away until the end of the war, when, perhaps, they may be forwarded to their destination.’

  Mail from soldiers was censored by junior officers, while the ‘Home Fleet General Order No 43’ (2 August 1914) required that on every ship ‘one officer should be detailed to carry out the duties of censor’, with more than one officer on larger ships. Censorship was a matter of personal initiative, likely to be rigid where it came to place names, and no doubt caused friction from time to time. The censor’s discretion and advice probably helped smooth over occasional family difficulties, but Capt McDonald’s revelation of the ‘take a good look at the floor’ story (see p. 107) indicates that good stories did not always stay inside the envelope. The evidence of censorship on the millions of soldiers’ postcards and letters was not just the stamp and the censor’s signature but the scratching out of place names, largely pointless but dutiful, which, along with the ubiquitous ‘somewhere in France’, added to the mythologising of place at the Front. Thanks to repeated mentions in soldiers’ memoirs, the presence in the material culture of the war of so many soldiers’ postcards and letters, and the more recent digitisation of these, studies of wartime correspondence censorship have concentrated almost exclusively on mail from soldiers, itself an indication of the lasting dominance in both popular and academic culture of the soldiers’, rather than the civilians’ verbal mediation of the war.

  The censorship office based at Boulogne had the task of reading letters sent to and from India, including from wounded Indian soldiers in Britain, requiring close reading in any of seven languages. The particular role here was to detect signs of dissatisfaction, with a weekly report to be prepared, showing sample letters in translation; this task, undertaken by a team of up to five men, former interpreters with Indian cavalry regiments, involved reading and translating where necessary over 30,000 letters per week.104 As soldiers were aware that information about the survival of comrades might be deemed sensitive, writers’ codes for this and other matters developed; these involved mechanical coding, by means of adding signs, symbols or numbers, according to an agreed code, or the use of parables and puns.105 This might range from a code as simple as a wounded Sikh soldier advising his brother not to enlist by writing, ‘Think over what I say and you will understand what I mean when I say “stay in the village”, ’106 to references to black pepper, common code for Indian troops: ‘what is the condition of the market for black pepper? That which I brought with me has all been finished …’ (Tell me how recruiting is going in India. All the original Indian contingent are dead or wounded …).107 Similar codes were used by Welsh soldiers writing home in Welsh, for whom there seemed to be some confusion as to whether writing in Welsh was permitted,108 but so many letters in Welsh have survived that it appears that censors’ discretion and trust allowed free passage to correspondence in the language. This itself allowed the passage of information which would not otherwise have got through, not by virtue of being in Welsh, but through the obfuscating wordplay that was not immediately seen through by the censor. Ifor ap Glyn notes one letter where the writer puts in Welsh that he could not say where they were, but noted ‘that they eat apples here’; in English the censor would have instantly spotted the reference to Etaples.109 Pte W. Brock, writing home from Russia in 1918 states ‘where I am now … is about 70 miles south of an important town with a heavenly name no doubt you can guess it’.110 Coding operated in a wide range of fields within the forces, perhaps the most successful instance being the use of the word ‘tank’ to conceal the nature of the armoured vehicle.

  COLOUR-CODING

  ‘Khaki’ was adopted into English from an Urdu word during the early 1860s, and by the 1880s the colour was used for operational units working with the (British) Indian Army. The word soon appeared in army slang and by the turn of the century it was used in non-military slang in the UK, as in the term ‘khaki election’ – an election where military issues were of major importance. The term ‘in khaki’ was used after the adoption of the colour for army uniforms, to mean ‘in uniform’, changing from implying a visual description to an occupational description – effectively a soldier was ‘in khaki’ even when not wearing khaki. The first uniforms available for men enlisting in 1914 were blue, known as ‘Kitchener’s blue’, the earliest ones supposed to be unwanted transport and postal uniforms; even the quicklydeveloped version was not consistently available, and new recruits trained in anything from red tunics to canvas fatigues and their own clothes. The sponsors of the first Pals Battalions made it a point of honour to clothe their recruits in actual khaki. Blue uniforms with white details later became the uniform of convalescing soldiers; a Punch cartoon of 11 September 1918 (p. 165) refers to convalescing soldiers out on the town as ‘blue boys’.

  By early 1915 ‘in khaki’ was being used in recruitment posters. One poster asked ‘the Young Women of London’ ‘Is your “Best Boy” wearing khaki?’, while another commissioned by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee asked, with much more punch, ‘Why aren’t you in khaki?’ Australian (Australian English being often more direct than British English) posters urged men to ‘Get into khaki’. Despite the term’s association with the army, ‘khaki’ could have less than positive connotations: Home Chat in January 1916 warned its readers that the attraction of a uniform, a quick romance and a wedding might be followed by d
isillusion and solitude – the perils of ‘khaki-love’. Languages other than English colour-coded their servicemen; Germany had ‘Grau’ and ‘Blau’ (soldier, in feldgraue – field gray – and sailor in blue), while the French ‘bleus’ and ‘bleusailles’ were new recruits.

  FIGURE 2.6 German postcard, sent in October 1915: ‘We trust in grey and blue, in the fleet and the army, we build up Germany’s victory on land and at sea.’

  Censorship passed into general culture, from the use of references in fictionalised memoirs celebrating the feats of regiments such as the ‘Blankshires’,111 long after the war, to comic picture postcards showing messages pre-blacked out, the question ‘Who wrote “We have left the place I mentioned to you in my last letter home”?’ in the Fifth Gloucester Gazette, and the poem on ‘The Censaur’ in The Gasper (1915):

  The Censaur is half-beast, half-man:

  Which seems a reasonable plan:

  Since if there’s blame for what is done’

  Each puts it on the other one.

  Information about where a soldier was stationed could fairly easily be given without troubling the censor: Vivian Stevens, writing home on 3 April 1916, says ‘Yes, I am 2 miles east of where Father says’,112 while 2nd Lt J. Macleod conveyed his whereabouts via the initial letter of each line of a letter.113 These tricks in correspondence should be seen in the context of a culture that enjoyed codes such as ‘the language of flowers’ and ‘the language of stamps’, in which the angle of the stamp conveyed one of a set of meanings.

  But a wider sense of coding seen throughout the linguistic mediating of the war shows a complex relationship between language, speaker and experience. Soldiers needed to express a range of reactions to their situation without increasing the stress on their readers, while, as can be seen from responses in the lines of soldiers’ correspondence, civilians’ letters convey hopes and reassurances, with occasional desires to know ‘what it is like’. From soldiers’ words, protection is a key theme. Cpl W. Hartley writing to his parents (there may be a double layer of editing here, as the letter was published in the press), gives a description of being attacked with liquid fire (‘horrifying in its beauty’), shrapnel, lyddite, whizz-bangs and Jack Johnsons, ‘coupled with heavy rifle and machine-gun fire’; ‘the place was strewn with wounded and dying’. Yet Cpl Hartley prefaces this with ‘all of us thought we were in for a certain do this time’.114 In this case the event is framed by a phrase which belittles it before we meet the description. Belittling was a common rhetorical device, addressed both to another, and to the soldier himself: Lancelot Spicer, writing home in October 1915, wrote that the ‘shell fire was not altogether pleasant. I … wished to heaven that they would stop annoying us with their beastly shells’,115 while another soldier, in his diary in 1917, wrote, ‘the shells began to pepper along close to us’, conveying both unpleasantness (heat) and triviality.116 Some of this was survivors’ bravado – Pte G. Broadhead wrote in his diary, ‘Usual carry on. Bit of a strafe in the afternoon’117 – the text belittles the threat, allowing the writer to feel he is more likely to survive this kind of bombardment.

  Postcard messages are a particularly rich field for coded and controlled messages; not necessarily to do with giving accurate coded descriptions, phrases such as ‘We are at present busy and unsettled’118 convey an idea of the writer trying but being unable to say what is going on. Suggestions of what the writer might be going through, in a letter sent to his son, presumably another soldier on leave – ‘I caught it hot, I am glad you are at home, as you can give some idea of what it is like here from the papers but not all’,119 this draws the reader in to a complicit understanding of a multi-layered relationship with information. The formulaic repetition of comments – about the weather, the writer’s health, whether the soldier has received news from home, or a parcel, thanks for cigarettes – show minimal differences from the Field Service Postcard; their sequences of clichés, ‘in the pink’, ‘keep smiling’, ‘always merry and bright’, display a rhetoric of banal emptiness, but equally a statement of the fundamental, that the soldier was able to send such a message, to say anything at all; the appeal of the picture postcard was that it could look full, while having little content. Letters were often more problematic, being very much expected from soldiers, but often finding the writer had little to say. Some, like that one from Rifleman William Taffs to his ‘best girl’, ended up being about a rat-hunt in a barn;120 another, sent from Charlie to Bessie in October 1917, thanks Bessie for her letter, apologises for not writing, says the writer is busy, discusses the weather, notes that someone is well, hopes the war will end, notes other people are well, sends regards and notes that someone else will write soon.121 A popular song at home in 1916 urged people to send only good news when writing to soldiers:

  Send him a cheerful letter

  Say that it’s all ok.

  Tell him you’ve ne’er felt better

  Though it’s all the other way.122

  Codes often merge into clichés, as soldiers describe themselves as ‘merry and bright’ or ‘in the pink’; the continuous use of the familiar countered the unfamiliar, the constantly present unpredictability of life or death, creating a stasis that could counter the fear of death. Certainly a tradition of understatement and the hiding of emotion, especially fear, was expressed in a pattern of understatement and phlegmatic comments that undoubtedly helped people ‘carry on’. ‘Getting peppered pretty hot, aren’t you?’ asks a heavily under-fire 2nd Lt of Capt Gilbert Nobbs; ‘Rather lively’, he replies.123 The excited glorification of combat, as in the Vivid War Weekly, a penny magazine mixing combat and romance stories, could balance its gung-ho drawings and its repeated use of ‘glorious’ with the euphemistic ‘he must have done heavy execution with his six hundred bullets a minute’,124 echoing ‘our men … did some execution among the Germans’ (see p. 133), the language of the formal memoir and official report; officialese used in this context tells the reader, ‘you do not need to know the details’.

  FIGURE 2.7 Letter from Charlie to Bessie, 30 October 1917.

  FIGURE 2.7 Continued

  FIGURE 2.7 Continued

  While rage seems to have been the burden of much war poetry, soldiers in the combat zone needed some way of surviving – a way of protecting themselves which involved protecting others at home, codes again being employed to fix levels of information the writer was prepared to allow the reader access to. Harold wrote a card to Miss J. Morris at Bedford Place, London (a well-off address, though she may have been in service there), on 26 March 1916 stating ‘we are all at a new part of the line now and expect some real dirty work here’.125 In a letter home to Sydney, Pte Ernie Hough pulled himself up when he felt he was conveying too graphic an account of men dying: ‘I am afraid I am making this note a little strong for you’.126 It was rare for a soldier to imply involvement in fighting; instead the word ‘busy’ is used to let the reader know that the writer is actively doing what war involves, but that no details are to be expected. An environment of censorship helped here, taking the responsibility away from the writer. A writer says he is ‘more busy than I have ever been in my life, but it will only last a day or two longer I hope. I haven’t had any clothes off or my boots even for two nights’.127 ‘Lively’ and ‘unsettled’ were used to indicate that the writer had been involved in shelling or fighting; ‘Am perfectly well. Letter following. Had some hard work last night, hard but healthy’, wrote Cyril on a postcard, 4 March 1916. Essentially whatever was written in any code was less important than ‘Am perfectly well’.

  Formulaic writing, as on a picture postcard of the destroyed village of Foncquevillers (Funky Villas) with the message ‘Hoping it finds you in the best of health as it leaves me at present’,128 may have been learned in correspondence offices before enlistment. In a letter home – ‘Dear Mother’ – Will writes ‘Just a few lines to let you know that I am still well and in good health hope you are the same and have got rid of the flu we are having grand weather
here now hot enough for anything during the day’, takes up a quarter of the text and could be a letter from holiday or boarding school.129 Certainly clichés and formulaic writing allowed the filling up of letter space without the writer having to provide frightening information, but equally this was the contemporary language of correspondence. The multiple-choice format of the Field Service Postcard was so reductionist that it became almost pointless to tick in the boxes – ‘I am very busy just now so will not be able to write letters for some days, no need to worry, will send a field card at times’, wrote Walter to ‘My dear Rose’ on 8 August 1917. The multiple-choice approach to information became so much part of this abroad-to-home correspondence discourse that it was re-used for holiday postcards for decades afterwards.

  While selectivity or parcelling reality to protect those at home was commonplace, downright mendacity was also part of Front-to-home communication. There was a variety of incentives – the context of the heroic ‘our boys’ trope, the potential to strengthen the nerves, the chances of getting away with it; Sgt Bernard Brookes admitted in his diary that he had got away with telling tall stories to newly arrived soldiers, noting that ‘the biggest liar always gets the largest audience’.130 Masefield reported catching out two young Australian recruits, and met a gunner who, in censoring his battery’s post, had read the words ‘The enemy are shelling terribly as I write & I may be blown to pieces at any moment, but I would not be anywhere else. I am proud to be out here, doing my bit for England’ – the man had in fact ‘never been under fire, & was writing in a base, & “his bit”, that he was so proud of, was cleaning latrines, he being useless at anything else’.131 Information spread like this easily got out of control: in July 1918 Andrew Clark was told by a tramp of a ‘glorious victory’, which had no substance at all, and for a while in September 1914 it seemed that few people in Britain did not believe that a Russian army had been brought by train from Scotland to the south coast. This story, according to the Hull Daily Mail, emanated from a ‘Berlin telegram’ in Rome; ‘ “the Press Bureau did not object to the publication” of the statement’; supposedly the War Office was keeping the press quiet about it, but ‘on reliable authority, we learned of the landing of Russian troops at Hull from Arcangel, and of the passage of thousands of Russian troops, with horse, guns and full equipment, from Hull, Newcastle and Scotland, … to the South’.132 Six days later the Press Bureau stated there was no truth in the story, and that it should be ‘discredited’.133