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Words and The First World War

Page 13

by Julian Walker


  The tiredness, the inexplicability and the absurdity of it all was summed up in the expression noted by Archibald Sparke: ‘when everything seems to be going wrong … the soldier turns to sarcasm, and says, “Well, we’re winning”’.

  The sense that the soldier should ‘be allowed his grouse’ respected the creativity of much grumbling, the nature of humour as a safety-valve, and realisation by both soldier and authority that there was a line that could be stretched, but not broken. Bruce Bairnsfather’s cartoons, using the typical cockney soldier who has seen it all, Ole’ Bill, provided a model for grousing, so successful that the caption ‘Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it’ became widely applied: ‘… every gun we have in this section is going to fairly give Bosche jumps; in fact he will have to find a “better ’ole.” This remark caused considerable laughter’.274 The expression provided the title for a 1917 film and another in 1926 starring Charlie Chaplin, and was cemented as a name for a character-type, seen in the report of the 1928 British Legion pilgrimage – ‘ “Look at them blarsted trees”, said an “Old Bill” of the party’.275 Irony could be fairly harmless – soldiers who complained about the quality or paucity of food had long been reprimanded for ‘wanting jam on it’, and ‘wanting jam on it’ became a term for hoping for a betterment of anything. But irony could be hurtful: American Expeditionary Force slang included the term ‘toyshop’ for the factory in France that produced camouflage materiel, and the interpretation of their own initials as ‘After England Fails’. Beyond this lies gallows humour, the wit of the territory where care is no longer an issue; James Kilpatrick describes troops in 1914 going into their first action shouting ‘Early doors, this way! Early doors, ninepence!’,276 but a more plausible comment when going over the top is ‘Do you want to live for ever?’277 Civilians were not fully protected from this – a postcard shows a boy waiting to hit a fly that has landed on his father’s bald head, with the caption ‘if that fly don’t move soon it’ll be figurin’ in the casualty list’; Coningsby Dawson related how, after nights of Zeppelin raids in London, a paper-seller said to him, ‘They forgot us.’ ‘Who forgot us?’ I asked. ‘The bloomin ‘Uns. I was expecting them last night.’278

  FIGURE 2.13 A ‘resentment’ caption, the card sent in January 1917; the censoring officer has made an attempt to erase the place name.

  By the end of the war gallows humour had become the norm. The tiredness, the inexplicability and the absurdity of it all was summed up in the expression noted by Archibald Sparke: ‘when everything seems to be going wrong … the soldier turns to sarcasm, and says, “Well, we’re winning” ’.279

  The AEF glossary, compiled by Jonathan Lighter, shows some extremely hard expressions – ‘permanent rest camp’ for cemetery, ‘meat-grinder’ for battle-front280, ‘second children’s crusade’ for Boy Scouts – but Anzac slang was sharp too, and possibly a little wittier: ‘Fanny Durack’ was ‘The hanging Virgin of Albert Basilica (i.e., the champion lady diver)’ – the statue at the top of the spire had been hit by a shell and for years leaned over below the horizontal.281 The humour in this depended on very sharp understanding that the appropriateness of the words would just outweigh any distaste. A less harsh quick-wittedness, deriving from the largely oral urban culture of music-hall comedians having to work with unforgiving audiences, produced examples of verbal wit that would have graced later radio-comedy scripts – indeed perhaps here is the beginning of that link between the army and radio comedy that flowered after the Second World War and through National Service in the 1940s and 50s. The quick verbal wit that characterised dense urban societies was easily transferred to the trenches: Aubrey Smith recorded one soldier asking a French woman, ‘ “how many oranges for a penny?” “Two for seexpence,” replied Mademoiselle. “Phew! Chuck us ’arf a one then.” ’282

  Pte Robert Sturges described being on a night patrol in no man’s land when a star shell would light up the area – ‘At such times we flattened our noses into the mud, kept perfectly still and made a noise like a corpse’.283 Capt R. McDonald censoring his men’s letters read one which said ‘Dear Jeannie, I am expecting leave soon. Take a good look at the floor. You’ll see nothing but the ceiling when I get home’.284

  The fund of shared verbal knowledge in songs and catchphrases provided scope for variation. John Brophy pointed out that when considering the origin of First World War song lyrics the style of material to be considered should include ‘Christmas card verses or parish magazine poetry’ as well as ‘personal abuse’285 – again that mix of polarities that embraced both the Sunday School and the all-male workplace. Brophy also points out the songs’ lack of universality – the essential situational references that exclude the outsider – and the fact that so many were parodies, often sung by one inventor against existing song lyrics, reacting to the soldiers’ circumstances and deliberately and, in the case of hymns, defiantly rejecting expectations of both the lyrics and the level of respect for authority. Many of the songs survived decades – even into 1960s school playgrounds – with ‘Mademoiselle from Armentieres’, ‘The Bells of Hell go Ting-a-ling-a-ling’, ‘Far Far from Wipers I Long to Be’ and ‘Old Soldiers Never Die’ passing into folklore as recognised if not fully remembered. Humorously obscene lyrics, encouraged by the all-male environment, flourished, and many, protected by their nature as verse, and therefore having a structural link to the classification of ‘literature’, have survived much more widely than passing comments using the same terminology. Matching content to the natural rhythms of English speech probably contributed to the longevity of the song, hence the survival of nonsense lyrics like ‘inky-pinky-parley-voo’. Shoeing Smith C. Williams’ song (though he felt some of it was too strong to record) was performed in an all-male environment, was known and frequently repeated but admired as an individual performance, had lyrics which were obscene and a non-sequitur, and it stays in the mind:

  I once knew a fellow

  His name was Ben

  He had nine of a family

  (nearly ten!)

  … Now all you gents

  If you want any more,

  I’ve an apple up me arse

  And you can have the core!286

  Catchphrases in the same way took the known and changed it to a new known, owned by the soldiers, affirming their existence by adapting a well-known phrase, sometimes one specifically directed or donated to them by the authorities or the press; Brophy and Partridge point out that music-hall catchphrases were common for the first months of the war, but the soldier’s ‘first disillusionment’ led to the alteration or ironic use of ‘the fine phrases which had stirred his heart into the patriotic desire to enlist’.287 ‘That’s the stuff to give them’ became ‘that’s the give to stuff them’,288 and ‘Are we downhearted? No!’ became ‘Are we downhearted? No! Then you bloody well soon will be!’ Occasionally documented is the facetious use of unchanged catchphrases, such as Colonel Nicholson’s comment on the possibility of a truce in 1916 that could have ended the war – ‘and what would mother have said then?’289

  The enemy or enemy actions as an object of derisive humour were more often seen in the civilian world. This kind of humour quickly grew from reactions to the news coming from the German invasion of Belgium, and was generally quite aggressive. Wry comments about the war tended to be the province of the servicemen and women, and civilian phrases like ‘Business as Usual, during European alterations’ seldom outlived the first months of the conflict.290 More in keeping with the national mood was a staged photograph of a German falling from an aeroplane, illustrating how he had captured the plane and its French aviator on the ground, forced him to take off, but was thrown out when the pilot looped the loop; this was presented as ‘Resourcefulness sometimes introduces an element of humour into the most perilous situation’.291 The presentation of death or mutilation as humour is not typical of soldiers at the Front; the record of Tommy humour against Germans is much more verbal than visual. Under the headline ‘The Gre
en Howards’ Joke’:

  A racy account of the 2nd Yorkshires at the front appears in the ‘Green Howards’ Gazette.’ The bomb throwers (says the writer) are a great adjunct to the brigade. The bombs are made out of old jam tins: and it is related how, when one Pure Plum and Apple, bearing the maker’s name, had succeeded in reaching it’s destination, the following plaintive remark was heard from the German trenches: ‘Mein Gott, these English, these shopkeepers, how dey vos advertise!’292

  And an ‘official joke’ from what is described as ‘the official newsheet’ of the Royal Engineers: ‘Owing to the frequent adulteration of flour with sawdust in Germany, a child was born in Berlin with a wooden leg’.293 The 2nd Division Christmas Card for 1917 shows a German soldier mistaking the Christmas star for star shells. German humour was naturally castigated as heavy-handed: under the headline ‘German Humour’: ‘The following witticism of Jugend apparently appeals to the German, for it is widely reproduced in the Press: “The musicians at a London concert refused to play the Siegfried Idyll, by Richard Wagner. If the musicians were English they need not have hesitated to play the piece, for the audience would not have recognised it” ’.294

  A challenge to current sensibilities is the popularity of puns in the early twentieth century. From their widespread use over a range of situations it appears that puns were generally accepted – they appear frequently in trench journals, in soldiers’ postcards (see ‘Somme/some’), even the booklet title Huns Ancient and Modern is a semi-pun on Hymns Ancient and Modern. Some of these seem ponderous now, especially in advertising: the advertisement for Sanitas disinfecting fluid with the caption ‘Did anyone say there was a GERMany anywhere?’,295 or the advertisement for Sunlight Soap with the caption ‘It’s the SAVON that you SAVE ON – Tommy, dear’,296 or the editorial for a trench journal that hopes ‘it will be a HOOGE success’,297 Some of those in the military are a little more subtle, such as the divisional sign of a polar bear, referring to its commander’s name, ‘Snow’, or the apocryphal pun across languages: ‘A popular joke that spread like wildfire told of the cockney [NB] soldier who was about to enter a dugout in a newly captured German trench. With a Mills bomb in his hand he shouted down the dugout steps, “Anybody there?” Back came the answer, “Nein.” “Nine, eh? Well bloody well share that amongst yer,” and he hurled the bomb down the steps’.298

  If puns were a knowing humour there are many documentations of incidental and accidental verbal humour; the fact of their documentation shows people putting importance on recording this as part of daily life. Adèle De L’Isle relates the story of an invalided soldier who was told to cough into a jar so that the doctor could test his sputum – he accordingly coughed into the jar, leaving nothing but air inside;299 a soldier newly arrived in Gallipoli is asked if he knows where Oxford Circus is, and ‘ “Rather!” I told him, proud to throw light on his ignorance, and I began to tell him, till he cut me short by snapping that he wasn’t talking about London, but the trenches’.300 Communication between people with different sociolects could always lead to confusion: Pte Davies finds himself on a charge – ‘It was all along of the missus bein’ took bad—’er wot I lives wiv, Sir—an’ me ’oppin’ it, and arsking for no leave. Of course I cops out and Colonel, ’e says, speaking very quick, “I suppose, my man,” ses ’e, “I suppose you realise the gravity of wot you was doing?” Thinking as ’ow he wants to know if I sees now wot I done I ses, “Yessir,” meaning as ’ow I sees now as I ought to ’ave put in for leave and ’opped it if leave didn’t come orf. “O, you did realise it, did you?” says the ole man. “Yessir,” ses I. “That makes it ten times worse,” ses ’e, “twenty-eight days detention!” Corporal on p’lice tells me as ’ow I ought to ’ave sed “No, Sir!” me not realisin’ nothin’ at the time. But ’ow was I to know wot ’e meant?’301

  Post-war investigations into wartime language produced their own incidental humour: Notes and Queries’ first collection of ‘English Army Slang’ was made from ‘contributions kindly sent in by the following members of The Times’ staff’, giving the names of ‘Mr Beaumont, Mr Benest, Mr Cohen, and so on, a total of 17 names, all presented as ‘Mr …’ An early entry in the glossary is ‘Erb. Substitute used when a man’s Christian name is unknown’.302 A fantastic idealisation of Anzac slang appears in a glossary in the Cairns Post in March 1918: ‘Heinie – A pen-name for the German soldier. Possibly suggested by the name of the well-known poet’;303 there was some confusion here though – ‘the Canadians call their enemy Heine and not Fritz’ was a comment in the Yorkshire Evening Post.304 Unintentional humour in phrasebooks was inevitable given their stumbling transition from aids for tourists to well-meaning but one-directional guides for soldiers. The Huns’ Handbook, published in 1915, as a representation with cartoons of a captured copy of Tornister Wörterbuch Englisch (A Knapsack English Dictionary), exploited this mercilessly with drawings of short-sighted Germans slowly reading out ‘The mayor will certainly be shot’, or in a shop holding up the book and asking the indignant assistant, ‘Have you got socks?’305 Seriously intentioned phrasebooks could create curious sequences of phrases presumably not recognised by the author:

  I am an airman

  I have an aeroplane

  There goes an airship

  It is ascending

  It is descending

  I wish to make a flight

  My aeroplane is damaged

  Is the engine damaged?

  No, a wing is broken306

  Phrasebooks were hampered by unfamiliarity with the reality of military procedures, by an apparent desire to use English of such formality (to avoid misunderstandings) that it looked more like English spoken by a foreigner than by a first-language speaker, and by providing little in the way of potential answers to the statements given.

  FIGURE 2.14 One of Charles Graves’s cartoons for The Huns’ Handbook (1915).

  Humour during wartime challenges the observer to reconcile, if such a thing is possible, the extremes of being under bombardment and the naïve silliness of some popular culture. How did men in the trenches or in rest camps react to Comic Cuts (‘the paper that tickles our Tommies’) with its spelling ‘sosige’, if they had seen observation balloons fall from the sky in flames? Or were such events safely distant? The name of a Comic Cuts ‘Germ-hun’ commander, Captain Stuffleheimpotsteinheinitz, is not so far from ‘Karl Schnitzel-Wurzel’ in the Fifth Gloucester Gazette,307 or ‘General von Sauerkraut and Hauptmann von Götzer’ in The B.E.F Times,308 but all of them contrast strongly with the actuality of ‘Fritz’. Through the record of trench journals, letters, memoirs, there are continual riddles, simple jokes, comic alphabets, pastiches of the ‘And then there was one’ poem model, all of which display a worrying simplicity, at times almost childlike. Made in the Trenches gives a full page cartoon of the Chinese whisper ‘Troops advance, send reinforcements’ becoming ‘Going to a dance, send three and four-pence’;309 The Fifth Gloucester Gazette has:

  Q. What is the difference between a 5th Gloucester and the Kaiser?

  A. One makes Will ill, the other ill will.310

  The Gasper311 gives ‘Over the Top’:

  Sergeant Sauerkraut: You should emulate the Prussian Guard. They think nothing of going over.

  Fritz: Nor do the Saxons!

  Sergeant S.: What! The Saxons go over?

  Fritz: Yes, to the enemy!

  (Ten days No.1)

  If this looks like schoolboy humour, many of those reading it in the trenches were little more than schoolboys.

  Swearing and the documentation of extreme speech

  When examining language phenomena during the war it is necessary to look at a huge number of terms emerging from conversation, wordplay, and dialogue with ‘others’, whether speaking the same language or in meetings between languages, dialects, and accents. Terms are used in situations of extreme stress and immediacy, where it is conventional to use terms which are spoken but not written.

  The model of langua
ge development is generally perceived as progressing from the combat zones and the rest and administrative areas to the home areas. In this model a certain kind of language is seen as being created in the front line, seen variously as ‘the most authentic’, ‘the real’, ‘the soldiers’ slang’, or even ‘Trench Talk’. Looking at the progression of this model in terms of movement in the other direction, there is an implication that the ‘most real’ language would have been that used under bombardment, during combat, or, at its most extreme, at the point of killing or dying. For these we have very little documentation, too little to give any sense of what was typical, normal, or what might give any model for the people in these situations. We have indications here and there – Turkish soldiers saying ‘Allah’ as they died (Aubrey Herbert), dying French soldiers calling ‘Maman’ (Masefield), a soldier using the bayonet and shouting out training ground instructions (Graves). But we do not know what most people shouted, cried, whispered under bombardment, or while choking from gas.

  In documentation, often a widely used expression might exist only as an omission – blanks or documentation that people swore. And given that our evidence largely comes from documentation that required the observation of social conventions, these words could not be written down. A letter sent to The Athenaeum in 1919 as part of an extensive correspondence on soldiers’ slang, makes the point:

 

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