Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  More of a challenge was finding the language for the regular occurrence of the body being blown to pieces. For many soldiers this disintegration was a deep fear, despite the fact that death would be instantaneous; Sgt Paul Dubrulle in the French army wrote ‘To die from a bullet seems to be nothing; parts of our being remain intact; but to be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is a fear that flesh cannot support and which is fundamentally the great suffering of bombardment’.639 The terms used often employ ‘blow’, the explosive reference also conveying the lightness, the slightness, of the human form: ‘blown to pieces’,640 ‘blew the man and horse to pieces’,641 ‘blown to atoms’,642 ‘blown to buggery’;643 or ‘men and horses were splintered to ribbons’.644 More brutally, men might become ‘raw meat’,645 ‘human wreckage’,646 ‘a mess of human wreckage’,647 they might ‘be demolished’,648 or just ‘splashed’.649

  What, apart from the need to bear witness, was seen as the purpose of graphic description? Referring to the use of this kind of writing in Henri Barbusse’s widely read Le Feu, translated as Under Fire when it was published in Britain in 1917, Sassoon was urged to ‘do a Barbusse’ for pacifist purposes,650 but there is little evidence of people being shocked by descriptions of the destruction of the body to an extent that urged them to agitate for an end to the war. The post-war story became more complex, particularly during the boom in war memoirs 1928–32; for Dan Todman, the success of All Quiet on the Western Front provoked both a rush to ‘capitalise on Remarque’s success’, particularly his use of horrific description, but also a reaction by those who felt that it was painting an unbalanced picture of the experience of the war.651 Bearing in mind the factual portrayal of death in the 1916 film The Battle of the Somme, still the British film most watched in cinemas, there is an uncomfortable possibility that in words as well as in film, presentations of realistic death fascinated; for Lawrence Napper652 ‘it is clear that the depiction of death was an attraction’ in the film; why should it not be in words? While the desire to read it was distinct from the need for the writing of it, both served therapeutic purposes.

  Death and the destruction of the body led to another trope, the need to find ways of describing the destroyed body and the reaction to it. Familiar images are related, the dead man’s hand or leg sticking out of the trench: ‘they would shake its hand: “Alright mate?” ’,653 or ‘the men using [a dead German soldier]’s feet to hang their water bottles on’.654 But in this language people became things; Charles Edmonds describes the contents of a shell crater as ‘two curious things. They were muddy grey in colour – clothes and boots and faces’.655 What survives of men’s bodies mingles with the uniforms that will survive them, as ‘chips of bone and rags of clothing. The rest is putrid grey matter’.656 Reaction to this assault on the senses focuses on smell. The smell of corpses envelops the environment: ‘This was the battlefield of stenches, of caked blood, of dirty bandages, lice, rats, eternal mud, and the smell of rotting corpses’.657 ‘We wear our respirators because of the awfull smell of the dead’, wrote T. Harold Watts in a letter home, posted on 18 June 1915. Masefield wrote of French soldiers describing as ‘camemberty’ corpses that had become unfrozen in a spring thaw.658 For one supply officer ‘the whole atmosphere [of Vailly] was tainted with the odour of burning and the disgusting smell of putrefying flesh’.659 Notable is the change post-war, in which these same remnants of flesh that had previously been ‘a shocking compost of clay, bodies and rags’,660 become ‘the very substance of man’s sacrifice’ (see p. 275), and soldiers’ remains are generally referred to as ‘bodies’, whatever their condition, or the amount that survived.

  Despite the fall in attendance of church parades there was a strong cultural model for the environment of the Front, which appears regularly. ‘A Veritable Hell’ was the headline used for an article about the Italian front in October 1916;661 after his first stint in the front line in December 1914 Wilbert Spencer wrote home ‘I wonder how many people realise what hell the trenches can be’;662 the Front was ‘a perfect inferno of guns’,663 ‘hell with the lid off’,664 ‘hell let loose’,665 ‘Hell on earth’,666 ‘hell in the clouds’,667 ‘damned hellish misery’,668 ‘a hell of machine-gun fire’,669 ‘nerve-wracking hell’.670 It was extended to ‘a raging inferno’,671 ‘an inferno, real damnation’ and ‘the slaughterhouse’,672 where the enemy were ‘fiends incarnate’, ‘a lot of mad devils’ and ‘satanic’.673 A wounded Indian soldier wrote home that ‘this is not war. It is the ending of the world’,674 a common Hindu metaphor for the war; a gentlemen’s outfitters’ advertisement claimed it would not be profiteering ‘during Armageddon’.675 And within the great hell there were micro-hells, an area of no man’s land so emptied of anything that it was known as ‘Sahara’;676 and not one but several ‘Hell-fire Corners’.677

  Failure

  The mythology of the experience of soldiering proposes that soldiers should be allowed to grumble. A. J. Dawson proposed that it was a ‘very English’ trait: ‘So long as there’s a little intermittent grousing going on you can be quite sure of two things—that there’s nothing wrong and that the men are in good spirits and content. If there’s no grousing, it means one of two things—either that the men are angered about something, in which case they will be unusually silent, or that we are up against real difficulties and hardships involving real suffering, in which case there will be a lot of chaffing and joke-cracking and apparent merriment’.678 Stephen Graham felt that grousing was ‘damp anger and will never ignite to action, never flame out in mutiny’.679 Grousing was an army tradition, one which had been engrained in army language since the 1880s, and which Partridge believed dated back earlier to the Crimea and the Indian Uprising. ‘Grousing’ was thus seen in a positive light ‘only excusable in a soldier, for it’s his privilege, and though he grouses he never shirks’.680 Grousing was a self-administered control, a prophylactic against being a soldier, not against doing what a soldier had to do. When The Gasper had ‘a grouse to air’ it was not against lack of supplies or discipline, or anything to do with the pursuance of the war, but against letters from home asking how many Germans the recipient had killed.681

  Though grousing was seen as a safety-valve against a breakdown in discipline, major difficulties did arise, and required a renegotiation of language. ‘Mutiny’ was what happened in Russia, Germany or Austria; it did not happen to allies on whom you were totally dependent, even the French. ‘Riots’ and ‘disturbances’ happened, but were explainable, if not excusable, on the grounds that they were about the living conditions of ‘our boys’ (and the Etaples incidents were ultimately blamed on the MPs and the ‘canaries’); during the war ‘mutiny’ existed only as a potential, for example in the form of words used to prosecute and fine Sylvia Pankhurst in November 1918, for ‘attempting to cause mutiny, sedition or dissatisfaction’.682 The actions at Etaples and Boulogne in September 1917 and at Le Havre in December 1918 were conspicuously under-reported, though major disturbances which took place on home territory could not be ignored. In March 1919 Canadian soldiers at Kinmel Camp, near Rhyl, awaiting demobilisation rioted, resulting in the deaths of five men, with injuries to a further twenty-one683 – newspaper reports gave varying figures for the casualties. The activities here were reported as ‘disturbances’,684 ‘Camp Riot’,685 and ‘Rioting’.686 The Lancashire Daily Post reported that, according to the camp commandant Col M. A. Colquhun, one man had ‘raised the red flag in an attempt to introduce Bolshevism’, while the Western Times reported that ‘a cry, “Come on Bolsheviks” was raised by Canadian soldiers, said to be Russian’. Yet the headlines for the Western Times article include the innocuous sounding ‘Canadian Troops Get Out of Hand’.

  The Derby Daily Telegraph reported that when the offenders were brought to court martial ‘the charges were mutiny and failure to suppress mutiny’.687 It appears that ‘mutiny’ could be used when suppressing and punishing this kind of action, but there was an effort not to raise the imp
ortance of protest while it was happening by giving it the title of ‘mutiny’. But at the same time such a loaded term could be treated light-heartedly: in November 1918 the Yorkshire Evening Post reported the story of a Canadian battalion mascot that had been sold for beer-money, provoking a strike by some of the men. The article reports: ‘It caused the only mutiny in the story of the battalion’.688 Mild though this might be, this incident did involve an action taken against authority; in ‘Another Camp Riot’, an article in the Sunderland Daily Echo reported on fighting between black soldiers and white soldiers awaiting travel to America and the Caribbean, following an outbreak of insults and retaliation, which had been largely controlled by fellow-soldiers.689 The newspaper reported that ‘nothing very serious happened’, though the word ‘riot’ was used, just at it had been for the incident at Kinmel Camp.

  Over the past hundred years some debate has taken place, not explicitly, as to whether the incidents at Etaples in September 1917 should be called ‘mutinies’, ‘riots’ or ‘disturbances’; in this case protests about an arrest in the training camp led to a fight with military police, an accidental death, a large-scale breakout from the camp, drunkenness, fighting, a court martial and one execution. In 1930 the Manchester Guardian carried an article about ‘The Mutiny at Etaples’,690 while in 1982 Lt Col C. E. Carrington had no hesitation in referring to ‘the Etaples mutiny’.691 For Jay Winter the incident ‘that has been described as a mutiny was nothing of the sort’, and it is ‘stretching the term considerably to call this set of events a mutiny at all’;692 for Dan Todman in his discussion of the 1986 BBC production of The Monocled Mutineer, based on the events, the word ‘mutiny’ appears both within quotation marks and with none.693

  While strikers during the war were seen as working against the war effort, and were deeply resented by soldiers, terms of mutiny were not applied to them, nor to striking workers after the war. For these situations metaphors of conflict were applied: one union compared an employers’ federation pamphlet to ‘the most dangerous of the poison gases used in the late war’,694 while Lloyd George’s secretary Philip Kerr called for ‘a manifestation of the trench spirit’ in requiring trades unions to accept lower pay.695 ‘Mutiny’ seems to have been a taboo word, something that could not exist within the British forces: its seriousness was debased in the Navy, where the word was used as a slang term for rum or grog.

  Descriptions of fear used terms that parcelled it as the contrary to bravado – ‘funk’, a term originally used for smoke, being extended to ‘funk-hole’, either a crater to shelter in, or a safe desk job, away from the fighting; or ‘getting the wind up’, with its range of extensions; or simply ‘nerves’. The popular view was that ‘out of a hundred men, five are generally cowards, ninety-five are ordinary individuals, and one is rashly brave’,696 rather than the potential for cowardice and bravery being present in almost all; A. M. Burrage’s view was that ‘most of us were cowards … but there are as many shades of cowardice as there are shades of a primary colour’.697 Soldiers’ comments indicated that group mentality and reaction to quickly-changing circumstances could change men instantly – despite the famous ‘ladies from hell’ epithet, Graves’s anti-Scottish adjutant reckoned that ‘the Jocks … charge like hell – both ways’.698 Combat naturally provoked extreme fear, inexpressible fear – Richard Holmes describes the men in retreat as ‘broken’; the gunner who saw these men ‘throwing away their rifles as they ran … wholly demoralised’ described them as ‘calling out to us as they passed that Jerry was through and it was all over’.699 For one soldier admitting to having to give up a position could be wrapped up with the picturesque term ‘flitting’,700 which avoided the admission of defeat. Richard Tobin, interviewed in the 1960s described the feeling of going over the top as ‘fear has left you – it’s terror’,701 while ‘Tippy’ in the sound dramatisation In the Trenches describes the feeling after his act of heroism as ‘I’m all of a tremble – it’s a rotten cowardly feeling’.702 Anticipation surely terrified many, in waves, from being conscripted to waiting to go over: one soldier sending a postcard home from Folkestone wrote ‘Feel very much upset at leaving you all but will try to cheer up for all your sakes’.703

  And in truth not all soldiers were reliable, competent, or capable of controlling their fear. Moran, usually sympathetic to the soldier’s position, described the Trench Mortar Company or the Machine Gun Corps as where a battalion would ‘send its rubbish’,704 Cpl George Ashurst described men selected for a working party as ‘duds’,705 Capt Slack described how ‘it was getting on in the war [1916] when we were getting very poor material out’,706 and Ian Hay has Capt Blaikie ‘weeding out … shysters’.707 The age-old link between armies and criminals showed in a commonality of slang: the army terms for a lock-up, ‘clink’, ‘chokey’, ‘jug’, all originated as criminal slang, and there was a widely held view that the criminal world had provided the army with much of its slang.

  The ultimate military crime, desertion, was ‘going over the hill’, or ‘going over the hump’,708 perversions of ‘going over the top’. The punishment for desertion was ‘to suffer death by being shot’, for ‘misbehaving before the enemy in such a manner as to show cowardice’.709 MacDonald’s interviewee, Capt C. S. Slack, charged with carrying out such an order, wanted to know nothing about the execution, and wrote to the soldier’s mother that he had been ‘killed in action’.710 Graves claimed that ‘executions were frequent in France’; in May 1915 he found evidence for around twenty executions, but noted that a few days later these were denied in Parliament.711 Fraser and Gibbons record the phrases ‘on the pegs’ and ‘up for the long jump’ for ‘awaiting court martial’; ‘up for the long jump’ sounds more ominous in the circumstances.

  While many memoir writers mention fear in code words – ‘windy’, ‘funk’, ‘nerves’ – few refer to fear as openly as Charles Edmonds, writing in 1929: ‘Now the cold fear clutched at the bowels of men’, ‘a tremendous sense of realisation came over me – I hardly know if it were fear or excitement’, ‘I thought the human spirit could endure no longer postponement of the terror’.712 Lord Moran notes both the exhilaration of achievement and survival – ‘ “A” company had an officer and thirty-eight men, but their tails were up, the effect of going over the top was apparent, they were well pleased with themselves’, but probably is reserving judgement in ‘Quite a number of our men appear to consider it necessary to accompany them [three prisoners] across no man’s land …’.713 No doubt a sense of pragmatism tempered actions in no man’s land, and this was after a successful trench raid. A general attitude in favour of keeping or getting away from the Front is seen in the hope of getting a Blighty, and the opportunist advice to a friend in hospital – ‘Don’t forget to swing the lead and stop there’.714 While ‘swinging the lead’, ‘scrimshanking’ and ‘working your ticket’, all terms for avoiding dangerous or onerous activity, were presumably widespread, the difference between sensible self-preservation and cowardice might be simply a question of ‘getting away with it’, a term Fraser and Gibbons include in their glossary of Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases.

  One of the greatest areas of failure related to language was the sense that language itself was simply not up to the job of describing the experience of the war. This can be approached in a number of ways. Language clearly did not fail, since there are several frighteningly graphic descriptions of fighting and its aftermath, but there are probably as many expressions of these being indescribable:

  I cannot describe the sights I saw715

  The whole thing is too ghastly to write about716

  It is unspeakable717

  Great God, what do you expect one to say? Great God, what am I to say?718

  It is an impossibility for me to describe all that happened719

  No one can imagine what it is like, only those who have been through it720

  Bodies were lying on bodies like stones in heaps (which no words can be found to describe or relate)721r />
  The penultimate of these propose that no words ever could create the image of the scene for those who had never been present, but the final quote creates an image, and goes on to deny the possibility of creating an image. It is as though the whole concept of the function of language is disrupted, but perhaps not destroyed. John Masefield, in a letter to his wife on 9 March 1915, wrote: