Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  Not knowing protected both soldiers and civilians in many ways; the majority of deaths in the combat zone of the Western Front were caused by artillery,187 from guns like the French soixante-quinze that could fire a projectile over five miles, to the German Pariser Kanone with a range of eighty miles; and the editorial writer of The Gasper 8 January 1916 wrote that for the infantry much shooting was speculative: ‘we don’t even know how many Bosches we have butchered … one may have fallen; six may have fallen’. For the heavy artillery the question was practically meaningless: ‘How many do you reckon we killed?’ is the first line of Apollinaire’s poem Peu de Chose, dated 13 October 1915:

  Odd how it does not affect you at all…

  Each time you say Fire! the word becomes steel that explodes far off188

  The gunners never had to know the reality of the explosions they were responsible for. Linguistically too, distance, to the point of removal, moved people away from the reality of war.

  Wordplay

  Wordplay served several roles, the avoidance of failure, the fun of invention, a sense of creativity amid destruction, parody and downgrading, and alteration of the unfamiliar towards the familiar. All of these overlap.

  Many will be familiar with the sense of embarrassment at school at being required to speak French with a French accent, or German with a German accent; for many of us the response is to avoid speaking at all. This, combined with the inability to create anything like a French accent, with no useful models, makes reasonable a lot of the supposedly failed attempts of British soldiers to speak standard French, such as that by a soldier known to John Crofts as ‘Scrounger’, who pronounced briquet as ‘bricker’.189 It is easy to think of this, and ‘parley-voo’, ‘buckoo’, ‘toot sweet’ and the rest as mocking the French pronunciation, of belittling it by removing part of its identity; if so, we need to ask whether this was deliberate or an attempt to replicate the sounds of the language as transcribed in phrasebooks. Examination of a sample of phrasebooks from the first year of the war show that the given pronunciations are not so far from what is usually recognised as ‘Tommy French’:

  What a British Soldier Wants to Say in French (1914): seel voo play, bon-joor, vang, ler pong (the bridge), kaffay, bokkoo, tray bong

  How to Say it in French (1914): ray-ponday, boh-coo, du pang, jombong (ham), du buff (beef), du lay (milk), maircy, we/nong, un frong, parlay voo

  The British Soldier’s Anglo-French Pocket Dictionary (1915): frongsay, savay

  French Conversation (1914): pong (bridge)

  Large numbers of cheap phrasebooks were printed, opportunistically perhaps – Carreras produced a series of four, to be given away in packets of Black Cat cigarettes; the Anglo-French Pocket Dictionary got to at least nine editions, over 57,000 copies; What a British Soldier Wants to Say in French was printed in Pas-de-Calais with its British price printed on the cover; How to Say it in French attracted buyers by stating that profits from sales would go to the War Relief Fund, while French Conversation was a standard tourist phrase book with an added section on ‘Military and Hospital Phrases’. The transcriptions given above are not exclusive to wartime – The Briton in France (1906) gives ‘oo-ee’ and ‘nohng’, The French Phrasebook (1913) gives ‘pah bokoo’, ‘tray beeang’, and ‘toot ah koo’. The 1904 Board of Education Regulations for Secondary Schools established that a modern foreign language should be part of the four-year course, so, for many soldiers going to France, French would have been familiar, if forgotten. Considering how much time British soldiers spent in Flanders, and how little Flemish permeated through to soldiers’ speech, schooling and phrasebooks as well as contact with locals have to be considered as sources for ‘Tommy French’.

  But ‘napoo’, from il n’y a plus, and ‘sanfairyann’ from ça ne fait rien, or ‘just a minute’ from estaminet are more than creditable attempts to speak French, as they become new English words with distinct meanings. There are a number of possible interpretations for what is happening here, blending into each other: an acknowledgement of being in France, and mixing with French-speakers; a bit of showing off; a very long tradition of wordplay; a colonialist approach to the local, of pulling it into an English framework, making minimal concessions to the local; even a recognition of the longstanding link between English and French. Jimmy’s ‘I said, “Tray Bong” ’,190 2nd Lt Keay’s ‘it is a bon job’,191 Brophy and Partridge’s ‘japan’ (du pain) and ‘umpty-poo’ (un petit peu), ‘sink faranks’ (cinq francs)192 and ‘cat soo’ (quatre sous)193 all convey a sense of enjoyment of the potential of language. Exactly the same kind of wordplay could be done with more familiar language, ‘Georgius Rex’ on the cap badge being turned into ‘Gorgeous Wrecks’, and Montreuil being renamed ‘Geddesburg’ after Sir Eric Geddes, Director General of Transportation, established his headquarters there in 1916. The process could be extended: ‘toot sweet’ could give ‘to do something on the toot’, i.e. on the double, ‘sanfairyann’ became ‘snaffer’, and ‘somewhere in France’ slipped into ‘summers in France’.194 Faux childishness made a periscope into a ‘look stick’, and mock-trivialising made a senior officer’s visit to the trenches into a ‘Cook’s tour’ and staff memoranda into ‘Comic Cuts’. The home press and the civilian world echoed this mood with wordplay such as ‘assasinaucracy’195 and ‘Austrich’.196 Evidently the same thing was happening across no man’s land, where the typical name for a pilot, Franz, gave rise to the verb sich verfranzen, to get lost.197 Even Arabic could be played with: the Egyptian Labour Corps were known as ‘the Calm Laylas’ from their song ‘Kam Layla, Kam Yom?’ (‘How many nights, how many days?’)

  FIGURE 2.9 Some of the dictionaries and phrasebooks available to British soldiers in France and Flanders, from 1914.

  While there were no doubt frequent instances of British soldiers teasing the French by teaching them obscenities and bizarre rhyming slang (see p. 36 Horace Stanley), there were also honourable attempts, and typically British glorious failures, to communicate in French: Brophy and Partridge tell the story of the soldier who knew the French for ‘milk’ warning the owner of his farm billet that the cow had got loose with the words ‘Madame! Madame! Dulay promenade’.198 Brophy and Partridge label this story as ‘immortal’ in appreciation; at the time soldiers enjoyed the hit-and-miss adventures of language: Rifleman William Taffs wrote, ‘I was a scream yesterday in the shops. My French is the absolute limit. I go in the shop with a carefully prepared sentence, they never understand but only laugh at. I beat about the bush an awful lot until the place is a mass of broad grins.… The other chaps with me laugh too, but I notice they get me to get the things for them’.199 Essentially empirical, this approach to language was usually going to work through its positivity and its humour, unlike the heavy-handed satire of Horace Wyatt’s Malice in Kulturland (1917) with its clumsy allegorising of Humpty-Dumpty as Army-Barmy, and:

  ’Twas dertag, and the slithy Huns

  Did sturm and sturgel through the sludge;

  All bulgous were the blunderguns,

  And the bosch bombs outbludge.

  Inventiveness with language at this time spread across several media – newspapers, letters, diaries, postcards, trench journals. Playing with words and sounds created ‘tres beans’ from très bien, and extended it into ‘fray bentos’,200 ‘having the wind up’ became ‘windy’, which became ‘breezy’,201 and a Scottish soldier was called ‘Tammas McAtkins’.202 ‘Mesopolonica’ was a particularly fortuitous conjunction of Mesopotamia and Salonika that highlighted the soldiers’ attitude to unknown foreign parts, while there is a razor-sharp wit in the Australian terms for those who enlisted in successive years of the war: the ‘tourists’ of the first year, out for adventure, followed by the ‘dinkums’, genuinely fighting for Australia, the late-coming ‘deep thinkers’, and the ‘Noah’s doves’ for those who arrived too late, with ‘methusiliers’ for those who should have been too old to fight. Some of the expressions, such as the American ‘swiss cheese air’,
for turbulent air pockets, require understanding of the environment, while ‘tinned cow’ for condensed milk is instantly recognisable.

  No doubt some of the apparent wordplay came from a longstanding phenomenon whereby simplifications or apparent mistakes become standardised – the poetic ‘Morpheus’ became ‘murphyised’. ‘Landslip’ for ‘landship’ (tank) shows that the idea of the mistake could be played with. Other forms of wordplay appear rarely, showing that what often is seen as general usage through the period and across the whole area was more likely used for a period, among a set of people, or even an individual: to ‘hop over the parapet’ occurs occasionally, but ‘sandbag street’ (the front line) is very rare,203 and given its source, may be a regional term. Similar instances of regionality are ‘Gribbles’, used by Northampton soldiers of Kitchener’s Army for comforts sent out from a fund established by a Mr Gribble of Northampton, recorded by Fraser and Gibbons, and the Kitchener’s Army Battalion called the Hull T’Others.

  Wordplay raises the question of authenticity, in terms of breadth of use and the privileging of the Front. Individual or nonce expressions are hard to label as ‘soldiers’ slang’. ‘Tobo’ for tobacco,204 in postcards sent to Fownhope in Herefordshire may be a local or family expression, unrecorded elsewhere; Dawson’s soldier saying of German prisoners ‘If they weren’t [well-behaved], I’d let the daylight into them’205 is very creative, but it may be Dawson’s or the soldier’s one-off creativity. When Brophy and Partridge say of ‘cannon-fodder’ ‘a journalistic expression, only used with the implication of quotation, by soldiers’, or when Fraser and Gibbons say of ‘mad minute’ ‘newspaper coined expression’, there is an implicit evaluation – ‘not soldier slang’ – which debases as ‘journalese’ such inventions as ‘limpet’ (someone with a government desk job), ‘cuthbert’ and ‘ladies from Hell’. And journalistic interpretation, made at the time and with no benefit of research over extended location or time, inevitably made claims based on quick impressions: a Yorkshire Evening Post correspondent’s assessment of ‘Nosey Parker’ as ‘one name [for a tank] being used more than any other at the front’ is really not borne out by other documentation.206

  Inventiveness also extended words into different parts of speech: Weekley noted the use of ‘to rhondda’ (from Lord Rhondda, government food controller from 1917), meaning ‘to appropriate’, and Cassell’s New English Dictionary (1919) recorded the verb ‘to Lusitania’, meaning ‘to torpedo passenger ships’. Slang terms made the transmission easily: the sound-description ‘crump’ became the verb ‘to crump’; ‘napoo’s sense of ‘dead’ was transferred into a verb, meaning ‘to kill’; and Williamson shows the movement from one part of speech to another – ‘You know what to do with the kamerards – kamerard them with three inches in the throat’.207 Similarly Eric Verney in The Athenaeum recorded ‘to shanks it’ meaning to walk (from ‘Shanks’s pony’),208 and a battery firing too early and hitting their own troops was ‘prematuring’ – ‘the Battery denied that they were prematuring into us’.209

  FIGURE 2.10 Two cards from members of the same family, both saying thank you for a gift of ‘Tobo’.

  Partridge believed that soldier slang had an association with the criminal underworld and cockney verbal culture, which may have had some influence on the growth of rhyming slang at the Front. The same Yorkshire Evening Post article records the use of ‘a drop o’ pigs’ (‘pig’s ear’, beer), ‘a laugh and a titter’ (bitter), and ‘I’m so frisky’ (whisky),210 while Ward Muir records ‘plates of meat’ (feet)211 being used by an Australian soldier, though not necessarily picked up in France. The Notes and Queries correspondence (1919–22) recorded a lot of rhyming slang: ‘grasshopper’ (copper), ‘china’ (mate), ‘bushel and peck’ (neck), ‘Cain and Abel’ (table), ‘cough and sneeze’ (cheese), though all of these were around long before the war.

  Belittling one’s own side, presumably in a good-natured way, produced ‘snake-charmers’ and ‘flag-waggers’ (buglers and signallers), ‘cherry-nobs’ for the military police, and ‘canaries’ for the army instructors and sanitary orderlies, who wore yellow brassards. The roll-call of nicknames for regiments dated back to long before the war: the ‘Mutton-chops’ for the Royal West Surreys, whose emblem was the lamb and flag; the ‘Virgin Mary’s Bodyguard’ for the 7th Dragoon Guards, with a large proportion of Catholic soldiers; the ‘Lavatory Lancers’ for the Westmoreland and Cumberland Regiment. Fraser and Gibbons listed thirty-nine pages of them, including the rather more bitter wartime ‘Rob All My Comrades’ (Royal Army Medical Corps) and ‘All Very Cushy’ (Army Veterinary Corps).

  The same kind of wordplay was going on in German, with its long tradition of military language, and in French: Partridge’s chapter on Slang of Three Nations,212 including pre-war language, is a journey through the world of metaphor: Abfrühstücken (‘to breakfast away’, to be wounded), dépoter son géranium (‘unpot your geranium’, to die), être etalé (‘to be laid out for display’, killed), avoir un petit jardin sur le ventre (not unlike ‘pushing up daisies’), Kilometerschwein (‘kilometre-pig’, foot soldier), auf Gemüsetour gehen (‘tour the vegetables’, look for something to scrounge). Unsurprisingly similar terms appeared on both sides of no man’s land, for example ‘she bumps’ (‘we’re being shelled’) and es pumpert.

  French wordplay included the names of trench journals (L’Echo de Tranchéesville, Le Tacatacteufteuf, Journal Embuscophobe), but the most enthusiastic extensions were to the word ‘boche’: Sieveking in Notes and Queries213 notes Bochonnie (‘Germany’), and from French trench journals Le bochophage (‘boche-eater’) and the nonsense word Rigolboche, while Fraser and Gibbons add Bocheser (‘to germanise’), Bochonnerie (‘German foul play’), Bocherie (‘German cruelty’), Bochiser (‘to spy’), Bochisme (‘German “Kultur” ’); Olivier Leroy, in A Glossary of French Slang (1922), adds bochie (‘Germany’), bochisant (‘Germanophile’) and bochisme (‘Kultur’).

  Puns were common and apparently enjoyed; they are found in trench journals, letters, newspaper advertisements, songs, picture postcards: an advertisement for Beecham’s Pills shows a soldier with a machine-gun under the banner ‘A Good Maxim To Remember’.214 Simple puns like this required little invention, but the increasing awareness of other languages gave scope for more intricate intra-lingual puns, beyond the trois/twa and the inevitable oui/wee beers jokes. The Fuze carried a joke in French based on the sound similarities between femme and faim.215 Or mixing visual and verbal communication: the 9.45 inch trench mortar was known as the ‘quarter to ten’.216

  PUNS

  Puns as a form of rhetoric were widespread during the conflict. ‘Dug-outs’ were both shelters in trenches and retired officers recalled to the colours to help train the new armies. The involvement of French allowed multi-layering: the Sunday Mirror, 25 February 1917, p. 7 carried a cartoon of an ex-soldier delivering coal asking his customer whether she wants ‘coal a la carte’ or ‘coal de sac’. Trench journals are liberally decorated with puns and semi-homonyms between English and French: ‘Who asked for “weak nerves” when all he wanted was “huit oeufs”?’ (Fifth Gloucester Gazette, 12 March 1916), as well as the more straightforward ‘Rumour hath it that an Intelligence Department is not necessarily an intelligent Department’ (The Gasper, 28 February 1916).

  But puns could also convey popular propaganda and pathos: ‘Boche’ was always useful for downsizing the enemy by sounding the same as ‘bosh’, while Passchendaele morphed into ‘Passion Dale’, its association with heavy losses of Canadian troops giving this an official name status after the war, a remembrance which makes the some/Somme pun all the more difficult to later observers.

  FIGURE 2.11 Photograph of seven cavalry troopers, with the chalked board locating them ‘Somme where in France’.

  Avoidance, a theme that comes up repeatedly in this study, was a strong contributor to the language developed in various branches of the army. The voices of the army became easily recognisable in terms s
uch as ‘wastage’, or ‘the accessory’, where the avoidance of direct description – here, the acceptable number of troops killed in an operation, or ‘poison gas’ – were seen to be either removing moral problems, and thus making an officer’s job easier, or avoiding recognition of the unacceptable and painting a propagandist picture of combat. Though the term ‘officialese’ had been around for 30 years by 1914, it was the First World War that familiarised millions of people with its manipulation of direct language. In its extreme form it allowed a voice that is impersonal, neither active nor passive, allowing a dehumanising of soldiers, as when Ian Hamilton writes ‘At the end, I told them I had asked for 95,000 fresh rifles’ rather than so many ‘men’.217 Similar usages are ‘order to off-saddle received’,218 and the repeated uses of ‘entrain’, ‘embus’, and even ‘disentrain’.219 The dehumanising power of this is seen in Graves’s narration of a soldier charged for ‘committing excreta’.220 When in Bairnsfather’s cartoon Colonel Fitz-Shrapnel receives a message from GHQ asking him ‘Please let us know, as soon as possible, the number of tins of raspberry jam issued to you last Friday’, this reflected the exasperation junior officers felt at the endless requests for information from quartermasters and staff officers; Lancelot Spicer gave another example – ‘the number of men who have not cut their toenails for the last fortnight (giving reasons)’.221 Given that shelling was directed as much at the supply lines as at the firing trenches, continual reporting of such information was necessary, if tiresome. The supplies process was responsible for another linguistic form, known as ‘quarter-bloke’s English’; Brophy and Partridge characterised it as ‘Gum Boots and Thigh Boots were in Quarterese described as Boots, gum and Boots, Thigh, Soldiers, for the use of’.222 What happens here is a word order that places ideas in order of importance rather than the usual syntactic form, a kind of ranking; the same concept appears in Sidney de Loghe’s transcription of the instructions for the firing of a battery: ‘Guns in action! Aiming point right-hand edge of Battleship Hill! Line of fire five degrees five minutes right! Corrector one-five-ough – three-three hundred! Angle of sight three degrees three-five minutes elevation! One round battery fire!’223 While operational orders and records had to be given in abbreviated form – ‘Heavy gunning about 7 pm, so saddled up 1st squadron. Quiet again, 9 pm. Went up to Headquarters. Likely to move tomorrow. Orders to move came, 6 pm’224 – these occasionally failed to sit comfortably with standard English syntax, as in ‘I in command of rearguard of ourselves’.225 New vocabulary too came from officialese, though as H. M. Denham said of ‘mine-bumpers’,226 not everyone understood it. Nor did everyone in authority like it – General Allenby disliked the term ‘camelry’ which had emerged as a counterpart to ‘cavalry’. Clearly some of it did not lodge in the mind – War-Time Tips had to remind prospective soldiers that the question was not ‘Who goes there?’ but ‘Who comes there?’,227 but ANZAC, claimed by some to be the first English acronym, and invented by desk clerks in Egypt in 1915, has to be one of the most felicitous terms to come from the period.228