Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  I don’t think that people in England can realise what this is; I know they do not. Words cannot describe it, except as crime and infamy, and a stinking filth…

  Clearly language could work – and there were ways round the problem. In a letter sent to the Daily Mail and published on 26 November 1914, Pte W. Kirk, of the 1st Bedford Regiment, wrote that:

  I cannot describe what it is like out there, but you can guess by these figures. Our 1st Battalion has been in seven engagements, and reinforced three times with over 100 men each time. It started with 1,200, and has now got 400 and 3 officers left. The 2nd Battalion started with 1,200 and has 300 men and 3 officers left. Other regiments are worse off than us.

  This trope of describing the experience as something that cannot be described, and then offering a way to understand it, appears fairly early in the war. Though Kirk invites the reader to guess, his is a mathematical description, one of numbers of killed men, ultimately the purpose of the fighting.

  Examining terms such as ‘the indescribable’ in a verbal context reveals that many things were expressed as ‘inexpressible’ at this time. Death and grief are frequently ‘inexpressibly sad’,722 but also the index of a report is ‘inexpressibly tedious’,723 the ‘gentleness of heart’ of Christ is ‘inexpressible’,724 the silhouette of the latest Royal Worcester corsets is ‘inexpressibly smart’,725 Charlie Chaplin looks ‘inexpressible!’,726 and the ‘repulsiveness’ of the living conditions of men at the Front is ‘inexpressible’.727 War always has ‘inexpressible miseries and horrors’728 but the comfort of knowing oneself safe in the combat zone is also ‘inexpressible’.729 ‘Inexpressible’ clearly means something, the expression that one is not able to express something – it is less the failure of the language than the failure of the speaker.

  There emerges a distinction between indescribability in writing and describability in speech; possibly the presence of the living witness provided a reassurance that such appalling events could be survived.

  Arthur Marwick in The Deluge proposes that after the Battle of the Somme people at home were unable to know the ‘foul horror’ of trench warfare – ‘they saw the glory, but not the sordid filth of trench life’;730 he quotes ‘one young soldier’ as writing, ‘There are some things better left undescribed’.731 There emerges a distinction between indescribability in writing and describability in speech; possibly the presence of the living witness provided a reassurance that such appalling events could be survived. It is probable that among those soldiers who had left school at fourteen there existed a sense of how the written language should operate, and they were unequipped to match this to their experiences. But they were more comfortable with spoken English, even in such a subject. In a letter to ‘Arthur’ sent on 18 June 1916 T. Harold Watts writes:

  We wear our respirators because of the awfull smell of the dead. I’ll never get the sight out of my eyes, and it will be an everlasting nightmare. If I am spared to come home, I’ll be able to tell you all about it, but I cannot possibly write as words fail me. I can’t describe things.

  It is likely that there was a gender divide here; Marwick quotes another soldier as writing ‘Everyone out here considers it only fair to one’s womenkind to hush up the worst side of the war’,732 while Mabel Lethbridge in The Great War Interviews (recorded 1964) remarks on ‘soldiers’ strange lack of ability to communicate with us, to tell us what it was really like’.733 (see p. 257).

  In many cases memoir-writers state that an experience or a thing is indescribable, and then go on to describe it clearly, often with the proviso that this can be done only dispassionately. A. M. Burrage gives a good example of this in War is War:

  Stretcher-bearers were coming for the man who still lived: our job was to clear up the mess. We picked up unspeakable things with our hands, putting them into sandbags.… The only way to live out there was to turn one’s face against sentiment and regard human flesh merely as flesh.734

  This, however, is after the conflict, and the great outpouring of graphic memoirs were published long after 1918. But the atrocity reports of 1914 had set out an acceptable language of horror, and from its publication in December 1916 Barbusse’s Under Fire provided to millions of readers of French and German the graphic language for understanding and describing the Western Front, accessible in English translation from June 1917 (an advertisement in the Manchester Guardian described it as ‘the book which all France and Germany have read, and all Britain is now reading’735) the potential of its language to provoke revulsion is seen in the pacifists’ comment to Sassoon to ‘do a Barbusse’.736 But this was an exception. The trope of inexpressibility and the failure of words surrounds the war, not just combat and being shelled or living in a trench dug-out, but all the facets of the war. Masefield wrote in The Old Front Line, ‘The tumult of these days and nights cannot be described or imagined’;737 elsewhere ‘Words fail me to express the admiration I feel …’;738 and VAD nurse Emma Duffin’s realisation that her words to the mother of a dying soldier were only ‘the futile words that one says because one must say something’.739

  it was not a failure of language, but a view that, for the individual, language, particularly written words, and the enormity of the experience were not matched.

  Fussell proposes that what was really happening here was not an inability but a choice, the choice not to describe, and that ‘unspeakable’ actually is a code for ‘nasty’,740 though a stronger word might be more appropriate. It is another instance of how putting experiences into words makes them real a second time, which was both generally avoided and was carefully used in the treatment of shellshock. Writing (and not saying) that war experiences were inexpressible was a deliberate description, a statement that the experiences could be understood only as being of such extremity that they stood beyond written words; it was not a failure of language, but a view that, for the individual, language, particularly written words, and the enormity of the experience were not matched.

  3 US AND THEM

  Race

  Nineteenth-century Europe saw the establishment of states from what had previously been smaller principalities, kingdoms, duchies, autonomous regions and city-states. The aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars saw the emergence of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1814, the Kingdom of Belgium in 1830, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in 1839. The establishment of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy to include the kingdom of Croatia–Slavonia was completed in 1868, the German state was established in 1871, and the final setting of Rome as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy took place in the same year. During the second half of the century anthropology and palaeontology were operating within an imperial and colonial framework to establish some kind of scientific rationale for how human beings saw each other as ‘us’ and ‘them’. Photography and anthropometrics allowed processes of data-gathering and measuring to be used to bolster arguments that the European states’ control of the world’s resources was both natural and inevitable. Race was established as a rational way of understanding and managing the world, and became an essential part of understanding the concepts of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the war in Europe.

  The determination of nation by ethnicity and language, as opposed to religion, became dominant in the late-nineteenth century1 and afforded opportunities for the creation of identities based on perceptions of anthropometrics closer to home and on ethnocentric views of historical migration. For France, the German invasion sparked off a re-affirmation of ‘a form of “national spirit” in the national language’, while for the German-speaking countries the ‘purification of the language’ was an aspect of the struggle for dominance.2 In this context words such as ‘Slav’ and ‘Hun’ were easily enlisted for the purposes of propaganda at all levels. Unravelling how these terms were used and understood, and how they were etymologised in terms of race history, gives a view of how the war was both rationalised racially and given a deeper emotional meaning. The area is complex, frequently contradictory, and its language operated
with several distinct intentions and embodied several interconnected perceptions. Involved are stories of identity, imperialism, pseudo-science, and the politics of survival.

  King George V’s speech after the Armistice embraced ‘the English-speaking race, dwelling upon the shores of all the oceans.’

  Language, as shown above, operated as a major determinant in the making of national identities, but several of the states involved in the Great War had many languages; France, with a strong national identity, had Occitan, Gallo and Breton speakers as well as standard French speakers, and the Belgian army had Flemish and French speakers; German Flamenpolitik attempted to create an ethno-linguistic connection between German and Flemish culture in Belgium; the Austro-Hungarian military had to manage twelve languages. Frequent references during the period to ‘language’ and ‘race’ together show how the perception of interdependence determined one idea of ‘race’. The preface to Olivier Leroy’s A Glossary of French Slang proposes that the study of slang might ‘throw an interesting light on the psychology of the French and English-speaking races’.3 L. B. Swift, quoted in the ‘Correspondence Course in Patriotism’,4 states ‘This record [of various “Anglo-Saxon” rights] is the peculiar and crowning glory of the English speaking race’, and King George V’s speech after the Armistice embraced ‘the English-speaking race, dwelling upon the shores of all the oceans’.5 In an article titled ‘The Empire’, in The War Illustrated Album De Luxe, 1915, Sir Gilbert Parker, MP wrote, ‘There is only one race throughout the British Empire’, indicating how the muddle of physiology, culture and language was ultimately at the service of political pragmatism.6

  But one nation might have two races, as the War Gossip writer in the Yorkshire Evening Post explained ‘… Belgium was divided into two races, the Flemish and the Walloons, different in language, in faith, in manner of life, and I knew that they hated each other heartily’.7 Czechs, within the Austro-Hungarian army, were suspected of disloyalty,8 and their language became a marker for suspicion, as seen in an interview with some Czech-speaking PoWs in Russia: ‘we are brothers [with the Russians], and speak the same tongue; we are one people’.9 Equally, racial difference is marked by the inability to speak a language. Richard Fogarty shows how a particular kind of French was used to create a demarcation of Senegalese soldiers in the French army in Europe,10 while a VAD nurse at the Front noted of Senegalese soldiers that they ‘could not even speak French’;11 significantly pilgrims in France in 1928 noted that an Algerian trader bargained ‘in perfect French’12. For black or Indian soldiers racial difference might be highlighted by parodies of accent, such as a Sikh soldier’s ‘gib him plent ob dat’.13 VAD nurse Adèle De L’Isle, strongly aware of accents and languages, notes of a Senegalese soldier in her care that he not only speaks French, but ‘he speaks fluent French’.14 In this context it is noticeable that the slang of the black troops in the American Expeditionary Force, where it differed from that of the white soldiers, was not collected, and as Jonathan Lighter points out, what was represented was governed by conventions of the pastiche black accents of the minstrel show, with the occasional ‘man’ thrown in.15 For the United States the position of black soldiers continued to be an issue without resolution: while in captivity behind German lines some white American soldiers were brought before a camera and ‘in order to humiliate [them] still further they were photographed standing between six negroes’,16 the black PoWs’ views not being recorded. The Canadian authorities also had reservations about ‘accepting negroes for military service’.17 Graves, in a few sentences, shows the attitude of white Europeans to the non-white troops in France: a French woman describes them as ‘animaux’, for the British they are ‘semi-civilised’, and for the Germans their presence at the Front is ‘one of the chief Allied atrocities’.18

  FIGURE 3.1 Multilingual postcard used by the Austro-Hungarian army, allowing the sender to say only ‘I am well and everything is fine’; the nine outer boxes warn, probably with no irony intended, that no other message can be sent.

  For America the problem of a vast number of citizens from German family backgrounds led to the invention of ‘hyphenated Germans’: ‘fourteen million hyphenated German-Americans hoped all things and believed all things good about the statesmen of their fatherland’19. Early on the term was shortened: Wilhelm II had ‘German hyphenated hirelings’ in America’,20 and ‘hyphenated’, ‘hyphenates’, and even ‘hyphens’ alone carried the accusation of disloyalty: ‘Hyphenated German views’,21 ‘Dooley on the hyphenates’ and ‘German hyphenated fellow-citizens’,22 ‘hyphenated agents of German propaganda’,23 the various forms spread outwards to further objects of political condemnation: Theodore Roosevelt’s views of Sinn Fein made a link with ‘pro-Germanism’ in America – he ‘denounced the hyphenated’,24 but, commenting on the German names in the American army in 1918, New York World stated ‘Hyphens may be found here and there in this country, but in France the American Army is American’.25

  Anglophile Jews in America were indignant about any view of the German–Jewish press being linked to the Anglo-Jewish press, The Times’ correspondent stating that ‘the small band of German Jews who seem to have intimate relations with the German Embassy is clearly unable to keep their race in line’.26 The relation between support for the Allies and family or community history was a continuing tension, expressed in the British press in terms of race: ‘Italians, Germans, “squareheads”, and all the rest of them find each his own little racial community’.27 Across the border in Canada there was another issue, that of the French–Canadian community, ‘the French–Canadians as a people, or “race” (as they term themselves)’, though Armstrong was clear in stating that she was following French–Canadian use of the term, and not proposing any anthropological significance for it.28 Many of the French–Canadians were not interested in supporting a ‘British’ war; long after the war Armstrong’s analysis of the situation in 1915 retained the French–Canadian use of ‘race’: ‘in times of racial conflict the animosity displayed towards English-speaking Canada is extended to Britain as well’.29

  The term ‘martial races’ reputedly developed from the assessment of the Indian uprising in 1857, but by 1914 it was being used in the press and political speeches considerably more widely; it was shorthand for the recruitment of unemployed young men from economically depressed areas of Britain – Scottish Highlanders were a martial race30 and Lloyd George’s recruiting speeches pointed out that the Welsh were ‘one of the most martial little races of Great Britain’;31 for Irish MP John Redmond ‘the Irish are now, as always, a martial race’.32 The Jews were probably not a martial race,33 though ready to fight for their adopted country,34 nor, during the South African war could the Boers be allowed to be thought of as a martial race, though to explain the lack of British military progress they were ‘a brave and an indomitable race, if not a martial race, a foe in every way worthy to confront British troops’.35 The Hunan were a martial race,36 and the Japanese and Chinese were martial races.37 In the summer of the outbreak of war Britain’s allies the Servians (still ‘Servians’ rather than ‘Serbians’ at that date, though the change happened quickly) were a martial race,38 and the French were ‘the most martial race in Europe’.39 The Germans were naturally a martial race.40 But the British, though ready to rise to the occasion, needed to be seen as non-belligerent; so, while Earl Beaconsfield believed ‘ours is a martial race’,41 Lloyd George believed that the English ‘have ceased in the ordinary sense of the term to be a very martial race’.42 It is not easy to make sense of this: the general idea is that some ‘races’ appear to be quicker to take up arms, a potential which can be realised by a ‘non-martial race’, i.e. England, whose defence against any criticism of being non-martial lies in her history of warfare. By the Armistice victory was seen as partly due to ‘the martial races of India’:43 ‘her soldiers sustained in many theatres of war, and under conditions the most diverse and exacting, the martial traditions of their race’.44 A letter from Se
nior Assistant Surgeon J. N. Godbole to a friend in Poona indicates that in his experience at least Indian soldiers in England experienced a different kind of language from that which they had heard at home: ‘The people … are pleased to see us … We do not hear the words ‘damn’ and ‘bloody’ at all frequently, as in India. But this only applies to those who have not seen India’.45 Though measures had been taken to ensure that morale among Indian soldiers was not affected by overt racism (‘the King has given a strict order that no trouble be given to any black man in hospital’46), and frequent temporary close relationships born of adversity sprang up between for example Anzacs and Indian soldiers,47 long-term linguistic markers and patterns remained: Dhunjibhoy Chinoy used the English word ‘natives’ to describe Indians in a letter written in Parsi,48 and an article in the Ypres Times recalls a Pathan officer named Mir Dast, being called ‘Mere Dust’ and then ‘Sheer Mud’ ‘by his British friends’.49

  For Herbert Johnson writing in the sensationalist Vivid War Weekly the contest was thus between ‘a nation of sneaks’ and ‘white men.’

  Alongside all this was a sense that the ‘white race’ depended on solidarity, a concept that was used by German politicians to condemn Britain’s use of non-European troops. Thus Prince Bülow, as reported in The Times, accused Britain of ‘high treason against the white race’.50 ‘The white man’, with connotations of fair play, duty, missionary zeal, muscular Christianity and the bringing of civilisation was a slightly different concept, possibly based on obligation rather than fear, though nevertheless justifying imperialism; applied to the conflict this bolstered accusations of ‘unfair’ weapons such as poison gas, tactics such as fake surrenders, and the bombing of civilians. For Herbert Johnson writing in the sensationalist Vivid War Weekly the contest was thus between ‘a nation of sneaks’ and ‘white men’.51