Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  In the bewildering world of the Front soldiers grasped for sounds they knew; just as the metaphor of the machine-gun as office machine tells us about the environment of the citizen-soldier, so descriptions of shells passing tell us about the world back home.

  Often machine-guns were likened to typewriters,526 a sound image which transferred back to the offices of Britain in an extraordinary advertisement for Burroughs Adding machines showing a woman firing a machine-gun from an office desk.527 This was extended to other office equipment, such as Kalamazoo Loose leaf Account Books, who advertised with the line ‘What the Machine Gun is to an Army the Kalamazoo is to an office – it holds the line with fewer men’.528 In the bewildering world of the Front soldiers grasped for sounds they knew; just as the metaphor of the machine-gun as office machine tells us about the environment of the citizen-soldier, so descriptions of shells passing tell us about the world back home. Specifically high-passing or fast shells were frequently likened to trains and trams. Brophy and Partridge document the name ‘tube train’ for ‘a heavy shell passing well above with a rumble’,529 a rather contradictory metaphor, while less benign shells were compared to express trains: a shell from a long-range gun ‘shrieked past like an express train’,530 the ‘Ypres Express’531 or, a local reference for the Leinster Regiment, the Roscrea Express.532 Americans preferred the terms ‘street-car’ and ‘trolley-car’533 for non-threatening shells passing high overhead, and ‘freight cars’ or ‘freight trains’ for the shells that concerned them more.534 In flight the largest shells sounded like ‘huge traction engines running through the air’,535 or ‘a tramcar turning round a corner’.536

  Given the extent, complexity and range of noise caused by the combat one word sufficed for absence of killing: quiet.

  Killing, dying, and the destruction of the body

  The core experience of the war, fighting, was couched in terms that both communicate and obfuscate. ‘We are fairly amongst the fighting now’ wrote a soldier in the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force to his family in Manchester,537 and ‘have had a cut at them this time’ wrote Guardsman Boorer in October 1914.538 At times combat could not be hidden or sanitised, and was described in terms of fury, rage, a total loss of control; ‘Seeing the wounded getting cut at by the German officers, the Scots Greys went mad’.539 Such behaviour was seen in the same terms as ‘atrocities’, which were, in the press, usually couched in terms of the animal or the loss of civilisation, the German perpetrators being described as ‘uncaged beasts’, ‘pitiless brutes’ acting with ‘unbridled savagery’ and ‘disgusting brutality’.540 Killing prisoners, by either side, though not described as an atrocity, carried the same associations: following the news of the German naval bombardment of British east coast towns 2nd Lt Arthur Stanley-Clarke wrote ‘we mean to take it out of the Germans the first opportunity we get and I am afraid the toll of prisoners will be small as the men are a bit savage’;541 Robert MacLeod wrote ‘Gas shell attack 5 to 6 a.m. Made me wild. Don’t want to take prisoners after this’.542 Or a terrifying pragmatism might take over: Coningsby Dawson describes a ‘chap here who’s typical of this spirit of treating war as an immensely sporting event … a short while ago he … captured three Germans; on the return journey across No Man’s Land something happened, and he lined up his prisoners and shot them’.543 Though Lancelot Spicer wrote that ‘they always say the further away from the front line that you get the more warlike you become’,544 retaliation changed men’s minds. There were many processes at work which facilitated the business of killing: the great range of many of the guns, the impersonalised killing nature of gas and mines, the depersonalising of men by blind discipline, or by uniform naming as ‘Fritz’ or ‘Tommy’,545 or by describing men as ‘rifles’ or ‘bayonets’. The death of comrades sparked a desire for revenge, though this conflicted with notions of sportsmanship; revenge was seen as ‘a state of mind very dear to the Teuton’,546 and thus un-English. However, the record shows frequent instances of revenge as an expressed motive; considering the Zeppelin raids on Britain, The Gasper editorial for 28 February 1916 realised that retaliation in kind would ‘give to the Germans the very victory that we mean to win’, but equally felt that too much scrupulousness in not using weapons considered as unacceptable put British soldiers under greater pressure. The writer felt that ‘we, who have to pay the price of this pusillanimous scrupulousness, are not quite so particular as to how we do it’. John Masefield, seeing at first hand the effect of gas and flame-throwers, wished for an escalation of weapons: ‘let her [America] invent the damnable & bloody machines that she alone can invent, & then let her make them by the hundred thousand, & let them be deadlier than hell …’.547 Charles Douie’s ‘anger and bitterness … against those who had wrought this destruction’ were so great that even 11 years on his anger ‘could find no expression in words’.548 Capt Charlie May’s diary records his reaction to the loss of a comrade: ‘We all feel wild to get at the beast and hope we may string him up on the wire … one day we’ll get at him with the bayonet. We’ll take our price then for Gresty and all the other hundred thousand Grestys slain as they were standing at their posts’.549 Though in the early part of the war gas had been seen as ‘such a filthy form of fighting’,550 pragmatism led to its adoption, though a comparable pragmatism allowed the retention of moral superiority by referring to it as ‘the accessory’, ‘bottles’, ‘rogers’, ‘rats’, ‘mice’, and ‘jackets’. Lancelot Spicer acknowledged that ‘retaliation is strong’, and shrugged it off with ‘mais c’est la guerre’.551

  On the other hand, there are plenty of references to a fellow feeling with someone who was doing the same job, but for a different commander. Arthur West wrote ‘for the Hun I feel nothing but a spirit of amiable fraternity that the poor man has to sit just like us and do all the horrible and useless things that we do’,552 and typical of a ‘quiet sector’ was that described by Edward Shears: ‘We discovered, to-day, what strangely friendly relations prevailed in our part of the line. Neither side was very securely entrenched, and the infantry on both had adopted the principle of “Live, and let live.” ’553 Compassion was by no means rare: ‘I know of several instances wherein our wounded have been treated kindly by the Turks’ – Pte Hough described this in sporting terms as ‘they have done nothing offside’;554 in January 1919 a Royal Army Medical Corps officer recalled a German observation balloon officer directing British stretcher-bearers in no man’s land, offering the comment ‘there are one or two decent Huns’.555

  Generally conversation in the trenches under a bombardment was pointless, as nothing could be heard; Brophy claimed that the troops sang little or not at all in the line or on the way there.556 A. M. Burrage remembered that under shelling he crouched, moaning ‘Oh, Christ, make it stop! Oh, Jesus, make it stop! It must stop because I can’t bear it any more! I can’t bear it!’557 Metaphorically artillery might talk, but this was very much journalese.558 The result of shelling was one of the most difficult experiences to suffer and to express: for Arthur West ‘seven men killed by a shell as soon as we got in the trench: beastly sight!’559

  Between periods of watching, waiting and being shelled were raids and hand-to-hand fighting; Aubrey Smith described fighting as a ‘chimozzle’ or a ‘scrap,’560 though a ‘shemozzle’ was also an attempted raid that turned into a mess.561 Being wounded in a fight meant the possibility of being carried back to safety, and even to Blighty if the wound was ‘a Blighty’ or ‘a Blighty one’:562 ‘really one gets almost to hope for a gentle wound’, wrote Lancelot Spicer.563 But also there was the chance of lying for days in no man’s land: Pte H. Baverstock was hit above the knee and lay waiting to die, but two stretcher-bearers reached him, giving him the opportunity to observe his wound, remembered as ‘a gaping hole with a terrific bulge on the opposite side’;564 the details of a wound might be easier to observe in others than oneself: Flora Sandes, hit alongside her comrades by a ‘shower of bombs’, wrote that one of the men ‘had his face split
from nose to chin’, but for herself the experience was ‘a feeling as though a house had fallen bodily on the top of me’.565 VAD Emma Duffin could not put into words a description of a wound, only her reaction to it: ‘I don’t think in my life I have seen a more horrible sight’.566 Other nurses were more able to put experiences and sights into words, though still more metaphorical than those of the soldier’s own words: one man ‘got an explosive bullet through his arm, smashing it up to rags above the elbow. He told me he got a man “to tie the torn muscles up” ’.567 The way that the metaphor ameliorates the business can be seen in the range of soldiers’ terms for wounds and being wounded. In Eric Partridge’s fictionalised account soldiers are ‘badly “smashed-up” ’, or have ‘got it in the neck’ – not necessarily meaning being wounded in the neck (Partridge puts both expressions in inverted commas);568 New Zealand soldiers ‘got smacked’;569 ‘I only got a tap in the back’ wrote Sgt Benjamin Cope570 – being ‘tapped’ and ‘pipped’ were recorded by Fraser and Gibbons, Brophy and Partridge, and Philip Gibbs.571 Wounds ranged from being fatal – for Eric Partridge this was a ‘daisy-pusher’572 – to Rifleman William Taffs’ reaction: ‘I felt pretty dicky at the time – I must have got a little gas in my lungs’.573 Wordplay allowed a wounded man to deal with his condition by belittling it; being operated on was ‘going to the pictures’,574 the state of being ill from a wound or war-related injury was ‘being knocked up’,575 or, in ‘The New Army Slang’, ‘washed out’.576 After the war a wounded soldier described himself to James Beck as ‘a crock’.577 There was too an avoidance of saying ‘flu’ – Dora M. Walker dealt with a colonel who asked to be directed to a hospital, saying ‘I’ve got “It” badly’.578

  In four years of incessant killing it was almost obligatory to find different ways of saying ‘he was hit’, ‘he died’ or ‘he was killed’: a soldier was ‘napooed’,579 or, for Bulgarian soldiers, ‘he has gone to Sofia’;580 in American slang men were ‘bounced off’, ‘bumped off’, ‘huffed’, ‘knocked off’;581 they were ‘knocked’,582 ‘popped off’,583 they ‘copped a packet’,584 they ‘went under’,585 ‘konked out’ or were ‘knocked out’,586 were ‘off it’,587 or, used everywhere, they had ‘gone west’; the dead were ‘pushing up daisies’, were ‘over the hill’,588 or ‘somewhere in France’.589 Commonplace expressions gave nobility – ‘so many old friends were taken from us’,590 and ‘The Manchester’s pet fell with his master’,591 but more cynically a French term was ‘to get your jaw smashed’.592

  The frequency and range of terms that mask killing using metaphors, jokes, simplifications, nonsense words, and officialese, are such that the simplicity of ‘Hun killing’593 can be all the more shocking. The directness Remarque uses in All Quiet on the Western Front, whether it be the description of stabbing a man – ‘I strike madly home, and feel only how the body suddenly convulses, then becomes limp, and collapses’594 – or the description of revenge/atrocity killings,595 show how language protects by communicating circumspectly. Examples of the range of ways that killing could be parcelled are: ‘men got sploshed’, ‘had a splosh at’, ‘put two of them over’, ‘scotched’,596 ‘I ‘anded ‘im a plum’,597 ‘let the daylight into them’,598 ‘ “get home” with the bayonet’,599 ‘they’ve done him in’,600 ‘our men did some execution among the Germans’,601 a bullet ‘found its billet’.602 Matthew Wright evaluates some of the most short and simple notes on comrades’ deaths as ‘by laconic New Zealand standards – amount[ing] to deep emotion’, just as ‘news back to families was couched so as to cushion the blow’.603 Of all the wartime situations where destructiveness was balanced with creativity, pain with care, this must be one of the most stark.

  To counter the interference of thought or emotion bayonet training was scripted. Men were taught to shout ‘in, out, on guard’ while charging and stabbing dummies,604 and Graves reported a young soldier ‘automatically’ shouting this while bayoneting a German soldier.605 It would be a mistake though to believe that killing was only ordered and mechanical, driven by revenge, hatred or need. Coningsby Dawson in the preface to With Lancashire Lads makes no apology for the idea of ‘slay and spare not’, adding that he was thankful that the war came at a time when he was ‘young and fit [and] thoroughly able to take part in it’. Sidney de Loghe describes the destruction of a Turkish gun team as, ‘There were no horses; there were no men. And many souls were speeding up to Allah’;606 for George Mitchell wanting to bayonet a Turk there is the disappointment of ‘I have not been lucky enough to catch one yet’;607 John Easton’s ‘Broadchalk’ in Three Personal Records of the War608 has men shooting ‘with yells of laughter and cheers’, describing them as firing ‘as one shoots at a fair’, reminiscent of the battle cries of 1914 (see p. 106). As the war dragged on, it became a business of relentless numbers of people killed and killing – ‘killing squareheads is all we think about’,609 and ‘we are killing a lot of Germans – considerably more than they are killing of us’.610

  Semi-scripted battle cries attempted to excite soldiers to kill, but did not always work: ‘Our platoon officer 2/Lt. E.M.Gould led us yelling, “Remember Belgium, Remember the Lusitania.” We yelled back, “**** Belgium and **** the Lusitania!” ’611 In Gallipoli different mentalities and attitudes showed in the opposing battle cries: Aubrey Herbert noted that while the Turks cried ‘Allah!’, New Zealand soldiers cried ‘Eggs is cooked!’, a phrase picked up from barracks in Egypt.612 One sergeant at Gallipoli used old army slang, ‘Imshi!’, the Arabic for ‘Go!’, to encourage his men over the parapet.613 Cynical or improbable, these words of killing can be contrasted with the words of dying. Aubrey Herbert again noted the word ‘Allah’ used by dying Turkish soldiers, while on the Western Front men, and boys, called on, maybe for, their mothers. Masefield wrote of a French man he met who had wandered over the Marne battlefield where ‘perhaps for miles there was a sort of moan of Maman, Maman, from hundreds and thousands of dying men’.614 Lynn MacDonald’s interviewees for They Called it Passchendaele (1978) records several soldiers, British and German, whose last words were ‘mutti’, ‘mum’, or ‘mother’;615 Holmes records similar instances.616 As death was seldom painless, the ‘shrieking and groaning’ of dying men was common in no man’s land,617 often articulated in the common language of the Front – ‘men go to their deaths with curses on their lips’.618 Capt Bell died with the words ‘Oh – damn’,619 Charles Douie recorded a hit man shouting ‘Christ, my God!’,620 and Masefield watched a wounded French soldier look at his wife, ‘and said “Maigre”, which means excrement, and died’.621 Most human perhaps are Graves’s observation ‘I’ve been hit’,622 Emma Duffin’s ward Courage, who says ‘Oh sister, dear, I am dying’,623 and Pte Nixon’s ‘I heard Tommy Winkler go “Ah!” he was my mate – and he was gone – just like that’.624 Masefield met a French soldier who had seen two instances of men singing as they died, one after being shot in the head.625

  The fatalism that grew through the course of the war (soldiers stopped going to church parade as ‘we were becoming fatalists’)626 was expressed in terms of a system that would determine life or death – a bullet would have ‘your bloody number on it’,627 your ‘number was up’,628 or you would ‘lose your number’.629 If the randomness was brutal and could not be fought against, the Portsmouth Evening News recognised the way soldiers’ language faced down this brutality with their own as ‘the dauntless spirit with which our soldiers face death’, in the phrases ‘to be put in a bag’ and ‘to be scuppered’.630

  Many of the men of the new armies from urban centres (30 per cent of all industrial workers had enlisted by January 1916,631 before conscription) would have seen industrial accidents; the rapid escalation of weaponry in the war of attrition from autumn 1914 quickly taught men the effects of industrial warfare on the body. Shock at what shrapnel and shelling did shows in the descriptions by young officers, not normally exposed to this kind of thing; the possibility of carrying on perhaps depended on bland description, peop
le managing to accept what they saw without the cushioning assistance of metaphors. Cyril Helm wrote of the effects of a shrapnel shell on a young gunner subaltern in October 1914: ‘The poor fellow was brought in to me absolutely riddled. He lay in my arms until he died, shrieking in agony’; Ernest Shephard wrote after a heavy bombardment in July 1915, ‘One man, Pte Woods, was found in 8 pieces, while others were ghastly sights, stomachs blown open, some headless, limbs off, etc.’632 Kate Luard, working as a nurse, wrote in her diary for 15 December 1914, that she had spoken to a stretcher bearer who had carried a man who ‘had his face blown off by an explosive bullet’, and a month later was able to write herself of treating ‘One man with part of his stomach blown away and his right thigh smashed’. The introduction of poison gas brought the need to find ways of describing its effects: ‘the noise of the poor devils trying to breathe was sufficient to direct us … The effect of gas is to fill the lungs with a watery frothy matter which gradually increases and rises till it fills the whole lungs and comes to the mouth; then they die’.633 The spatial nature of the trench led to a high proportion of head-wounds: ‘Sangster had half his head blown away and died an hour later;’634 but the whole body was vulnerable: ‘Gresty – a lad who was a sergeant of mine – was the worst, his body full of gaping holes’.635 Some nurses managed to deal with this with professional enthusiasm: the writer of A War Nurse’s Diary wrote of ‘an officer … with huge wounds in his abdomen, while his intestines were absolutely riddled with shot. The surgeons cut out twelve feet of entrails, and he made an excellent recovery!’636 For Angela Smith nurse Eleanora Pemberton’s dispassionate description of the absence of parts of the body, with the substitution of a number for the soldier’s name, ‘provides her with the power to express the horror with authenticity’.637 Supposedly restrained accounts from commanding officers to bereaved families show, if not the reality, at least the expectation of a population becoming by 1917 inured to the nature of death at the Front, its degrees of mercy, even desirability: ‘your brother was shot through the head with a bullet … his death appears to have been instantaneous’.638