Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  If rumours were an example of information getting out of control, they were in contrast to the concept of ‘cheerfulness’ pushed at people continuously. Troops were incessantly praised for their cheerfulness, their singing on the way to the Front, their joking under pressure; The Somme Times responded to it in their 31 July 1916 issue in the form of an advertisement offering to cure the reader of optimism; the first question to identify the condition was ‘Do you suffer from cheerfulness?’ This was in the face of such assaults on the mind as a YMCA service in the field with the motto ‘Keep your head down and your heart up!’,134 and Sunlight Soap’s advertisements proposing ‘Cheerfulness opposed to Frightfulness. Cheerfulness is uplifting. Frightfulness is a millstone round the neck. Cheerfulness will overcome Frightfulness. Cheerfulness at Sea – Cheerfulness on Land – Cheerfulness in Trenches – Cheerfulness in Factory – Cheerfulness at War – Cheerfulness at WORK. Sunlight users are always cheerful’.135 The injunction continued after the war, as the Daily Mail reckoned that the strikes of 1919 would be overcome ‘by smiling’.136 The concept of cheerfulness was to be found in the most unlikely situations: Sir Douglas Haig praised the work of the Gas Services, particularly the ‘very heavy work and great courage and devotion on the part of the personnel employed; … all demands have been met with unfailing cheerfulness and carried out with the greatest efficiency’.137

  This should all be contextualised within a verbal culture of phlegm, understatement and self-control (see p. 284 – stiff upper lip). Capt E. H. Wyndham described as ‘a very trying day’ one in which his trench had been shelled for 16 hours continuously, a position had been lost, retaken and given up, with the loss of several men;138 Ian Hay described the German artillery as ‘distributing coal’,139 while Pte Broadhead described this as ‘Fritz sent a few shells as a reminder’.140 Mottram described a heavily shelled area as ‘unhealthy’,141 and Kate Luard said of a wounded officer that ‘Like so many he was chiefly concerned about “giving so much trouble” ’.142 The words highlight the contrast between self-control and the massive loss of control in the speaker’s environment; the control of speech as a manifestation of the need to maintain control.

  Avoidance

  It is a familiar experience in language use that we make things a little less real by not naming them; this is seen most in our avoidance of saying the name of a disease, our use of euphemisms or abbreviations. For the sociologist Alfredo Niceforo writing in 1912 it was manifested in the survival of a primitive avoidance of naming death: ‘to pronounce the name of death, to speak of a dead person, is to provoke … a material contagion between death and the man who has spoken’.143 Eric Partridge, who was at Gallipoli and later in France, noted the irony in military slang, quoting Brophy’s idea that with irony ‘some of the terror disappeared, together with the pomp, from war and military glory’.144 Partridge proposed the flattening out as a mixture of dysphemism and euphemism, taking down the exalted, and lifting the debased: euphemism is ‘indulgent where the other is pitiless; kindly where the other is mocking; discreet where the other is brutally frank’. Added to these was the Greco-Roman tradition of meiosis, palliative or placatory devices, which took many forms during the war, pulling the frightening closer to create a less frightening reality, pushing the reality away into foreign or impersonal terms or generalisations, or refusing to name it at all. The mix of languages and new fields of language all helped in this process, allowing people to protect themselves and each other from the reality of their situations, often at the same time that they were exaggeratedly acknowledging the horror of what was happening to and around them.

  For a basic range of how avoidance was used we can compare a postcard, a literary memoir, and a report. On 23 October 1915 ‘W.C.A.’ wrote to his mother in London that ‘I have come out of the Ts. well & we are resting for a while’, avoiding using the word ‘trenches’; in In Parenthesis Jones writes ‘the more solicitous disposed themselves in groups and … rather tended to speak in undertones as though not to hasten or not disturb, to not activate too soon the immense potential empoweredness – and talk about impending dooms – it fair gets you in the guts’;145 and Fussell describing Alexander Aitken’s realisation that ‘the use of euphemistic adjectives, such as “sharp”, “brisk” ’ in descriptions of fighting carried specific meanings in terms of the number of casualties.146 In the first of these we see the writer protecting his mother, and allowing her to move over the fact that her son had been in the trenches; in the second David Jones describes a kind of superstition by which we lower our voices so as not to ‘call on’ what we are talking about; and Fussell and Aitken describe the use of code to avoid saying ‘50 per cent of our men were killed’. While the first example appears to quickly gloss over the reality, it equally draws attention to itself, like an exaggerated voiceless speech act that adults use when children might be listening. David Jones touches on a trope in use since Greek culture gave palliative names to the Fates – the Kindly Ones – in an attempt to meliorate danger. The third example packages reality in an impersonal way, a defining methodology of ‘the report’.

  In The Attack, a sound dramatisation made in the 1920s, an officer gives instructions: ‘Look here Corporal, don’t forget when you get into the Boche trench you must work your way up to the right, and then clean up that big Boche dug-out as you go past’. ‘Clean up’ here is clearly a euphemism for killing or capturing men; conversely in War Letters Lt W. B. Spencer writes of his own potential death as the familiar ‘if anything did happen’ or ‘should anything happen’.147 But with many codes terms can vary between users, and at different times: thus it is difficult to know exactly what is being described when encountering the terms ‘knocked up’, ‘knocked down’, ‘knocked out’ or ‘knocked over’, all of which are used frequently to described the experience of being shelled in trenches.

  While there is ample documentation of slang words for the enemy, the use of any term carried the power to make the enemy real. There is documentation of avoidance of giving the enemy a name at all, though, while refusing to grant the enemy the power of a name, using ‘he’ or ‘they’ makes the enemy appear more familiar, closer even. As early as January 1915 this was noted:

  When talking to French people the British soldier does not usually say ‘Boches’; he prefers to be more correct, and so makes a sound which must be spelt Ollermon. And, to be perfectly accurate, most British soldiers do not find it necessary to use anything more descriptive than ‘They’ or ‘Them’.148

  This quite powerful acknowledgement of the enemy as the counterpart of the self was picked up by writers: David Jones writes ‘they were at breakfast and were as cold as he, they too made their dole’ and ‘Mr Rhys and the new sergeant were left on his wire; you could see them plainly …; but on the second night after, Mr Jenkins’s patrol watched his bearers lift them beyond their parapets’,149 ‘they’, ‘his’ and ‘their’ referring to the Germans. Sassoon also used ‘They’ as the title of a poem about ‘the other’, but here it is the wounded and altered British soldiers who are a challenge. A variation appears in Sydney de Loghe’s The Straits Impregnable where the Turkish soldiers at Gallipoli are described as ‘the other blokes’.150 The form ‘they’ is seen in other languages, for example in Jean Rogissart’s autobiographical novel Les Retranchés (1955), in which Gavin Bowd notes that ‘ILS’, used to describe the German occupying forces in the Ardennes, is the only fully capitalised word in the book.151

  Similar to ‘they’, ‘it’ referenced what people preferred not to utter. The widespread use of ‘it’ to describe the experience of the war, or the war itself, worked as avoidance and as creating a relationship of both knowledge and distance. Many soldiers write of ‘being in it’; though ‘it’ cannot be said to represent anything in phrases such as ‘in the thick of it’, often there is a sense that ‘it’ does mean ‘the fighting’, ‘the war’, ‘the area of danger’. David Jones’s closely observed In Parenthesis has soldiers in a bar, one of them saying ‘
We shall be in it alright’;152 Sgt B. W. Carmichael wrote of ‘housing fit for NCOs who had been through it’ and Rifleman F. White wrote ‘you’d be lying in bed with your wife and you’d see it all before you’.153 Or there was the frequently used phrase ‘to get it’; like ‘going under’154 it combined the quickest passing over of the actuality of death with an awful simplicity of the essence of war. Its fellow phrase ‘to cop it’ was clearly more final than ‘to cop a packet’. ‘I’ve got “It” badly’ says a soldier talking about flu;155 something very clear is being referred to, and the utterance of it avoided, in ‘1914 closes with the hope that we shall soon be “in it” ’.156 ‘It’ was the unspeakable and the too well known – David Jones has his soldier observe ‘not much use hearing It coming’, where ‘It’ may be poison gas, an unheard shell, or death in any form.157 ‘It’ acknowledged the existence of the war as an entity, a business so inconceivable and yet so known that it defied expression on both counts. ‘It’ was the great thing that hung over the world from 1914 to 1918 and beyond.

  Officialese, avoiding the personal, was well equipped to manage avoidance language. As ‘quarter-bloke’s English’158 (such as ‘rifles, soldiers, for the use of’) removed the narrative linear structure from the language in place of a reductive taxonomy, officialese reduced ‘men’ to ‘rifles’ and ‘soldiers’ to ‘rank and file’. The 1st Life Guards War Diary for 12 October 1914 reads:

  BRAINE – French 1st Corps on our right. Lost 600 men in ten minutes in an attack early this morning. Ran into a wall of machine guns. Lovely day.

  Here a clipped and flat tone reduces all observation to the same level. There were various style choices which removed the personal; Fussell noted how official euphemism blossomed during the war, especially the use of the passive voice to push personal responsibility into the background.159 Ian Hay catches the way in which staff officers pushed away their failure to get supplies to the front line: ‘How many men are deficient of an emergency ration?’160 If officialese played with language for its own purposes, then it created an environment whereby others could extend the game for theirs, usually mocking authority. But direct communication of horror might be incidentally hindered further. If gunners accidentally fired on their own troops, Capt E. R. Hepper could describe this as getting ‘some premature in the neck’.161 In a diary the writer knows what it means, but also knows that it is an insider term, excluding but also protecting the uninitiated.

  As so often, wordplay, irony, sarcasm, and cynicism provided other ways of looking at the banality of death, pain and loss. The simplest form of this, personalising and familiarising the enemy, gave the Germans names that were almost comforting – ‘Mister Boche’,162 ‘Old Man Fritz’;163 ‘Cousin Fritz’164 or ‘Hiney’.165 The same was evident in the widespread naming of guns and projectiles, and the personalising into individual names of both enemy and ally. More threatening material, especially shells, could be ‘un-named’ as ‘a few “big stuff” went over us’166 or ‘heavy stuff sent over’, which rendered certain locations as ‘unhealthy’.167 Belittling language like this was allied to the romanticising ‘gone west’, ‘pushing up daisies’, and ‘being a landowner in France’, all of which pushed reality away and provided a filter for violent death. Trivialising campaigns or raids as a ‘show’ or a ‘stunt’ of course fooled nobody involved in them as to their seriousness, but gave some superiority to the speaker in comparison. Light irony, borrowing terms such as ‘liveliness’168 to describe fighting, or calling the operating theatre ‘the pictures’169 raised the status of the speaker over his environment; heavier irony, such as calling the Spanish Flu ‘the plague’,170 challenged it. Downright cynicism faced the horror directly like medieval representations of Hell, and stared it down: speaking of some wounded Germans helping wounded British soldiers, their guard says ‘They have to be [good]. If they weren’t, I’d let the daylight into them’;171 ‘Anzac soup’ was the term used to describe a watery shell crater holding the corpse of an Australian or New Zealand soldier;172 RFC and RAF pilots in training were in the habit of destroying planes to such an extent that they were called ‘Huns’.173 Some of these shock still; in a general sensibility so stunned by the cheapness of life reality did not matter.

  FIGURE 2.8 Ada Self’s ration book, issued in November 1918. The instructions note that ‘For convenience of writing at the Food Office the Reference Leaf … has purposely been printed upside down’, presumably allowing the document to be read simultaneously by two people facing each other; civilians as well as soldiers were exposed to an increased level of officialese.

  Another way to avoid reality was to express it in a different language. This is often seen in situations of accidental death, or reprisals, the incidents of war that disturb, but which one can do nothing about, except shrug them off. ‘I am more sorry than I can say about this [the death of a comrade], mais c’est la guerre, I suppose’, and later ‘[retaliation to a raid is strong] mais c’est la guerre’.174 The term became so debased that it was applied to any disappointment caused by the war, thus trivialising the war (Masefield used it to describe his annoyance at mail getting held up175). The rarity of instances of ‘such is war’176 indicate the normality of the French version. A curious incident of the use of a foreign language in a case of reprisal is related by Walter Brindle who describes how anti-personnel bombs are dropped on a camp of the CLC (Chinese Labour Corps) wounding several; they go to a nearby infantry camp, acquire some Mills bombs and deliberately throw them into a PoW camp, ‘and with them fired the following question: “You like um, plomb? Eh you like um plomb?” ’ Brindle describes the event as ‘very comical at the time’.177 While we have no mention of Chinese being used as well, what we do have is the description of an atrocity being carried out in a foreign language.

  Mediating one’s own ‘unacceptable’ was done with linguistic resources. It was perhaps the nature of the articulate ‘citizen war’ that it could be so. There can be little doubt that the killing of prisoners and the wounded took place during the war, and sworn accounts are sworn accounts. Graves gives two reports ‘two first-hand accounts’ that he heard, which prove that these stories were told, not that they took place; tellingly he describes atrocities against prisoners ‘a boast, not a confession’.178 For George Coppard the shooting of surrendering men was ‘the extreme treatment’,179 while A. M. Burrage wrote that ‘men are threatened with a shortage of rations if they take too many prisoners’, a roundabout direction to shoot surrendering men.180

  On 26 February 1916 the editorial writer in the trench journal The Gasper wrote about the need for weapons that would ‘go one further than poison gas and the flammenwerfer, and take a little of the burden off his [the infantryman’s] shoulders’. By this time the British had been using gas, unsuccessfully at first, for five months. But it was not at first officially called ‘gas’; the outrage launched at the Germans for introducing clouds of poison gas to the battlefield would have been hollow unless it could be demonstrated that they alone were responsible for it, though soldiers on both sides felt it was an unacceptable weapon. Sir John French noted in 1915 that ‘I much regret that during the period under report the fighting has been characterised on the enemy’s side by a cynical and barbarous disregard of the well-known usages of civilised war and a flagrant defiance of the Hague Convention.’181 Yet within three months the British were using ‘the accessory’; other nicknames developed – ‘bottles’, ‘rogers’, ‘rats’, ‘mice’ and ‘jackets’ – but the cold officialness of ‘accessory’ is still disturbing. A few weeks after its introduction Robert Graves’s unit was told that an attack was to be preceded by ‘forty minutes’ discharge of the accessory’; a footnote states that ‘severe penalties [would be imposed] on anyone who used any word but “accessory” in speaking of the gas’.182 But a few weeks after that, on 6 October 1915 Lancelot Spicer wrote ‘It does not seem to have been mentioned in the papers that we used gas, although I can’t see that there can be any harm in saying it
as the Germans must know, many of them having died from it’.183 Spicer’s assessment that the information was being kept secret was partially right, but he missed the point that avoidance of the word was to protect the British troops not so much materially as morally. Of course, the soldiers had their own caustic take on this: ‘gassed at Mons’, the response to enquiries regarding an absent man, mocked authority and the inaccuracies of the Home Front, and commented fatalistically on their own situation.184 When one discharged soldier unwisely tried using ‘gassed at Mons’ as an excuse for slow work, he was fined £3.185 In the period of the publishing of memoirs, ten years after the Armistice, there seemed to be fewer qualms about naming the weapon; ‘the gas projectors … went off …, hurling opened cylinders of gas on to the enemy position’.186