Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  One incident indicates how terms like ‘squarehead’ and ‘Boches du Nord’ mattered: in 1917 a young German officer stationed in Alsace (under German control since 1871, much to the resentment of its French-speaking inhabitants and France itself) ‘while instructing his men, insulted the French flag, and called Alsatian regiments “Wackes,” a nickname meaning “square-heads,” and frequently used by the people of Alsace–Lorraine in a jocular way, but hotly resented by them if used toward them by others.’117 The taking over of an insult name and its application as a group identity name, only for the use of insiders, is a familiar trope in slang; its use in this circumstance shows the power and sensitivity of slang.

  The casual positive and negative characterising of nations, cultures, skin colours, language groups, and so on was easily applied in wartime. The British were ‘a race of clean fighters and honest manhood’,118 German troops were told that Maori soldiers cooked their prisoners,119 VAD Emma Duffin ‘might work like a black all night’,120 ‘the Arab is not a cleanly creature’,121 ‘ “Chinks” going home’,122 ‘the two men [German prisoners] are obviously of the bestial type’,123 ‘a Slavonic-featured, black-bearded, sneaking-eyed face’,124 ‘it’s a pretty tall order for the French to put black Senegalese cannibals into Red Cross uniform’,125 it goes on and on. An internee from Leeds in the Ruhleben camp in Germany wrote home saying ‘we have formed an amateur dramatic society … A few days ago a variety entertainment was given here … New cinder paths are being made in camp by a gang of negroes, who are paid out of the relief funds’.126 But from within the camp there was documentation of the language of established racial segregation: ‘Mr Cohn’s remarks concerning our coloured compatriots appear to have caused a little resentment. It is only natural, however, that the children of Israel should not find favour with the descendants of Ham’.127 Early-war attempts to show racism being pragmatically laid aside in the Belgian army include a very staged photo for the British war press: ‘There is no time now for the “colour-bar,” and black and white fraternize freely in the titanic struggle against the German invader’,128 runs the caption. The War Office limited the involvement of the British West Indies Regiment primarily to support and labour duties in France, though their involvement in the fighting in Palestine produced two awards of the Military Medal, and the government’s reluctance to bring black soldiers from Africa to the Western Front was questioned in Parliament on 11 October 1916 with the words, ‘Why we should not employ more coloured troops I cannot understand. It is simply prejudice’.129 Robert Houston MP went on to read out a postcard claiming to be from an Englishman living in Switzerland: ‘The writing is in German character. I cannot read the communication as the language is so filthy that it is impossible for decent ears to hear it. But I will try to give you the contents without the adjectives, as I do not wish to shock the sensibilities of any hon. Members. “Sir, you suggest in the ‘Daily Mail’ of 25th September130 to bring millions of negro soldiers to overrun Europe and to slaughter decent white people. You are nothing but a so-and-so and a so-and-so to make such a vile proposal. What is wanted now is a call to the mob in London to rush the blooming House of Commons and to cut the blooming throats of all you so-and-so s of politicians who made the war and profit by it.” ’ Houston’s letter to the Daily Mail asked what would be the ‘moral’ and ‘physical’ effect [Houston’s italics] on Germany of putting ‘three millions of coloured troops … into the field’. Despite the successes of black troops in Africa in the first two years of the war, readers of the popular and provincial press in Britain in 1916 would be more likely to see the word ‘negro’ associated with news of lynchings in the United Sates, court reports in Britain, minstrel shows, the boxer Jack Johnson, and the raising of labour battalions overseas;131 the British West Indies Regiment was excluded in 1918 from a general pay rise on the grounds of their classification as ‘natives’.

  There were voices of reason in this world of racial claim and counter-claim. In 1915 the biologist Peter Chalmers Mitchell’s book Evolution and the War showed that the German claim for dominance through strength being ‘a natural process’ had nothing to do with Darwinian evolution, and that ‘racially the Germans are a mixture of three primal stocks, like every other nation in Europe’.132 Sadly, this, like the Manchester Guardian observation that ‘Europe is a hotchpotch of races, and none of us are very pure in our stock’, was unlikely to find favour with the average British citizen assailed with headlines like ‘Brute callousness of the Teuton Race’.133 Fears of racial domination might be no more than a bogey,134 but it was a widely used bogey. After the Armistice, and particularly its interpretation as the defeat of Germany’s attempt at world domination, the war was analysed again in terms of evolution and the ‘struggle for survival’ in Robert Munro’s booklet From Darwinism to Kaiserism (1919), which proposed that the German Weltpolitik was a misinterpretation of Darwinian natural selection in that ‘the absence of morality in the operations of the organic world was accepted by the German military authorities as a justification of their guilty conscience’.135 Munro gives an idea of historical war as ‘survival of the fittest’,136 whose outcomes might not produce ‘the progress of humanity’, while he implies that the recent war, a ‘carnival of bloodshed and misery’, was actually to do with ‘the British people and their Allies … fighting, not only in self-defence, but for the freedom of all nations, as well as the preservation of the landmarks of human civilisation’.137 But the rhetoric of race is constant throughout the text, and depressingly points forward to that of the 1930s.138

  The end of the war, and the demise of one episode of ‘racial domination’, brought a revival of the hopes for racial harmony that had been proposed in Roberts’ September 1914 letter: ‘This war at least ought to teach us, if not them, one lesson – namely, that civilisation is not the property of any one race or nation, but something after which all nations and races must strive’;139 ‘The English and the French must get rid of race-prejudice and pride. The Orientals must lay aside distrust and rancour’.140 But Japanese attempts to use the concept of racial equality to secure its status, to resolve migration problems between Japan, Britain and British Dominions, and the United States, and to assist in the securing of Japanese support for the League of Nations, failed on a number of grounds, primarily Britain and America’s rejection of the idea of universal racial equality.141

  For British people language and pseudo-science were conflicting bases for ideas of race; outside the bombast of propaganda, language made more sense than anthropometrics as a basis for racial division within Europe. When a group of prisoners from Bohemia and Moravia were questioned as to their feelings about their Russian captors ‘they replied, in a quite matter-of-course way: “We are brothers, and speak the same tongue; we are one people” ’.142 Though the unification of Flanders with the Netherlands, desired by many who had seen the Flemish language promoted by the German army of occupation,143 was not to happen after 1918, linguistic boundaries formed the basis for many of the new countries of Europe.

  Naming the enemy

  Cartoon characteristics gave soldiers and civilians a clear image of the enemy, which lasted for most of the war. Germans believed the British to be greedy, both personally and geopolitically, while the British believed the Germans, specifically the Prussians, to be militaristic and despotic. French cartoons frequently portrayed Germans as pigs, while the reverse view portrayed the French as peasants. Although the German visual cartoon view of the British soldier in 1914 was less Kipling’s Tommy Atkins and more an emaciated Flashman with lank hair and pillbox hat, the German High Command expressed reluctance early on to use pejorative terms against the British in the prosecution of the war, guided by article 22 of the Hague Convention of 1907 respecting the Wars and Customs of War on Land.144 No such thoughts inhibited the epithets Britons used of Germans.

  The various terms used of Germans in general and German soldiers in particular carried different implications, were used by different peopl
e, and at different times. The model proposed by Partridge – that ‘Boche’ was ‘used mainly by officers and journalists; fire-eating colonels preferred Hun; the Tommy said Fritz in 1914–15, Jerry (from Gerry – German) in 1916–18’145 – is too simple, and has been extended by researchers such as Doyle and Schäfer,146 looking rather at the intentions behind the use of ‘Hun’, ‘Boche/Bosche’, ‘Alleyman’, ‘Fritz’ and ‘Gerry’, as well as their respective time periods. Partridge proposed that both ‘Hun’ and ‘Bosche’ were uncommon after 1915,147 while Brophy and Partridge claim that after 1915 Fritz became ‘less frequent among private soldiers than “Jerry” ’.148

  Effectively all were used from 1914 onwards, and though individuals and journals had preferences (Punch for example liked ‘Teutons’ for older Germans in positions of power), the implications and inferences of the terms are clearer to see than generalisations on who used what, though it must be said that the Partridge model has created a powerful folk etymology of the terms. Fraser and Gibbons state that ‘Hun’ was expressive of anger against the Germans, that it ‘first came in as a generic name for a German through the newspapers, as an epithet of disgust’, but that it was not taken up by the services, other than the Air Force.

  Fraser and Gibbons give ‘Alleyman’ along with ‘Fritz’ as ‘the usual army names for the enemy in the earlier days of the War’, giving way to ‘Jerry’; ‘Fritz’, though it certainly continued in use through to 1918, was after the first year gradually superseded by ‘Jerry’, according to Brophy and Partridge. Though ‘Fritz’, like ‘Jerry’, seems to be an attempt to personalise the enemy, it was no more to do with the individual than were the stereotyped names given to the male of any nation – Taffy, Jock, Ivan or Paddy; the glossary of war terms, ‘English Army Slang as used in the Great War’, in Notes and Queries in October 1921, included ‘Fritz’ as both ‘A German’ and ‘A German aeroplane, shell, or anything aggressive’. Bearing in mind that this glossary is of ‘army slang’, ‘Fritz’, ‘Jerry’ and ‘squarehead’ are given equal weight as ‘A German’ (‘Heinie’ is defined as ‘German (American word)’, implying potential use as an adjective as well as noun).

  ‘Boche’ and ‘Bosche’ excited those interested in language during and after the war, both in terms of origin and use. Fraser and Gibbons state that it was ‘taken up in England by the public in general and the Press’ – no mention there of the army – and go on to propose its development from Parisian slang about 1860 to general French use after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1; but it was not sufficiently widely used to feature in L’Éclipse’s Dictionnaire de L’Argot Parisien (1873). The word’s etymology was discussed endlessly. Brophy and Partridge’s view, derived from Dauzat, is that it emerged from the phrase tête de boche, in which boche was short for caboche, the whole phrase meaning an obstinate person. The Germans having a reputation in France for stubbornness, allemands, the standard French word for Germans, became allboches, shortened about 1900 to boches; propagandist posters revived the memory of allboches by employing the term Sale Boche (dirty boche). They note that fascination with the word can be gauged from the publication of R. Lestrange’s Petite Monographic du mot Boche (1918). A. Forbes Sieveking quotes from Albert Dauzat, writer of L’Argot de la Guerre (1918), to indicate the sense that ‘boche’ was essentially a racial term.149 An article in the Manchester Guardian notes also that in the Marseilles dialect the word ‘boche’ meant a ball.150 The allboches/sales boches pun features in English writing – the Manchester Guardian brought the phrase up again in February 1923, and John Masefield, enraged within the environment of the French frontline hospital, writes of ‘these sales Bosches who have done this devilry’ and ‘the sales Bosches have learned they cannot win’.151 Which raises the question of the spelling. Dauzat uses ‘boche’,152 as does Déchelette.153 Bosch (often spelled as ‘Bosche’) magnetos,154 familiar to motorcycle mechanics and riders, may have had an influence, for some soldiers’ diaries and letters show both forms in use by the same person: in his 1916 diary Pte G. W. Broadhead uses ‘boche’ on 26 September and ‘Bosche’ from 11 November; in A Scholar’s Letters from the Front (1918) Stephen Hewett uses ‘Bosches’ on p. 46 and ‘boches’ on p. 107; and Capt E. Raymond’s Great War Diary (2011) has ‘Bosche’ on 9 March 1916 and ‘Boche’ on 18 October 1917. Illustrated London News writers on 29 November 1915 (John Buchan) and 20 January 1917 use ‘Bosche’, while Lancelot Spicer uses ‘Boche’, and Lt-General Aylmer Hunter-Weston uses ‘Boches’;155 but ‘Bosches’ was also used156, as well as ‘Boshe’ and ‘Boshes’,157 and What’s the Dope, a post-1944 glossary of war terms, has ‘Bosche’ surviving into the Second World War. There seems to be no pattern to be deduced from this either in spelling or use of capitalisation,158 but it does fairly counter Brophy and Partridge’s claim that it was ‘practically never used by the “other ranks” who preferred Jerry’. Seeing that the term was in use by all ranks it is no surprise to see it used by well-known writers – John Buchan and Arnold Bennett used it in writing for the Illustrated London News,159 as ‘Boche’, though Robert Graves’s poem ‘A Dead Boche’ (1918) was clearly meant to challenge. Journalists, as many commentators note, used the term enthusiastically, though as early as July 1915 The Daily Mirror told its readers that the word was out of use, along with ‘Tommy’;160 John Bull was still using it in 1919 and a boys’ adventure story book published in 1936, Adventures at Greystones, used it to recall the environment of hate in the war. Not all papers used ‘Boche’ – the Daily Citizen, an ILP (Independent Labour Party) paper, avoided it, while using ‘Germhuns’ (13 February 1915) – and though the Manchester Guardian was still using it enthusiastically to the end of 1918 it does not appear in the paper after 1922. One example of how the use of the term spread socially is a report in the Sheffield Evening Telegraph in which boys who raid birds’ nests are described as ‘young Huns’ and ‘the budding Bosch’.161

  As with many colloquial terms during the war, ‘Boche’ was pushed into several kinds of use. The standard plural, as in ‘we are only ten yards from the Boches’162 and ‘a dozen of the Bosches’163 implies a standard singular, but ‘a Boche’ is seldom used. More common is the plural form without ‘s’, as in ‘the Boche have been good’,164 ‘murderous fire from the Boche’,165 ‘Pilken Ridge, recently in the hands of the Boche’,166 or ‘the Boche started “crumping” on our left’.167 This partly merges into an abstract usage: ‘The hatred of the Boche is much more pronounced’168 or ‘War is cruel and the Boche is bloodthirsty’.169 Equally the term is used as an adjective, as in ‘a Boche dugout’170 or ‘a Boche aeroplane’.171 Some bombs were also called ‘boches’,172 while rarely the term was used as an abstract name, like Fritz: ‘Boche is “hating” us this afternoon’.173 An extension of the word into a verb exists as ‘the Bosching of Austria’, a cartoon in Punch 10 July 1918, in the sense of exerting threatening pressure.

  FIGURE 3.2 French civilian propaganda: a huge number of postcards published in France, with captions in French and English, showed photos of destruction on French territory, often explicitly blamed on ‘the Boches’.

  Certainly the French, with more history both of the term and of an antagonistic relationship with Germany, had no qualms about using the word, and it must have been easily recognised by any English-speaking soldier on arrival in France. A 1914 article in The Times states that the term is ‘on the lips of every man, woman and child in the country’.174 French postcards used the term frequently (‘jeunes “boches” prisonniers’ for example). It was naturally used in French-speaking Belgium, a British soldier being warned by a Belgian woman in Sevry on 10 November 1918 with the single word ‘Boche’,175 and was the standard term used in Tommy French conversations with local people in Flanders and Northern France, the Armistice being marked with widespread exchanges of ‘Guerre finie – Boche napoo!’176 Some American soldiers had trouble with ‘Boche’: ‘They may be “Boches” to the French and the British, but the Huns … will never be anything bu
t “Bushes” to Uncle Sam’s doughboys. It was too hard to get the proper pronunciation of “Boches”. ’177

  German attitudes to the word were extremely negative; as a footnote to the curious story of the nail-filled wooden statue of Hindenburg, the Manchester Guardian writer states that while Germans did not mind being called Huns, ‘all through the war the German rank and file became furious when they were called Boches’.178 Germans seem to have been sensitive to the terms used to describe them: an early German–English soldiers’ phrasebook equipped soldiers to say ‘We are no barbarians, as people often say in France and in Belgium’.179

  An early German–English soldiers’ phrasebook equipped soldiers to say ‘We are no barbarians, as people often say in France and in Belgium’.

  During the post-war occupation of Germany continued use of ‘boche’ fuelled resentment; the Manchester Guardian noted that the French use of the word in official documents would create ‘a bitterness of feeling that will not easily be effaced’.180 Divisions between French citizens from the occupied and free zones were exacerbated by the use of the word to describe those who had lived under German rule, with a French man being fined and required to pay damages for calling a French–Alsatian ‘Boche’, ‘even if not preceded by the wartime “dirty” ’.181 In Paris itself there was a civil prosecution on 1 April 1919 when Mlle Dorziat was awarded £880 in damages against Mlle Blanche Toutain, who had called her a ‘Boche’, the defendant having to pay for the judgement to be publicised in ten French and British newspapers. The power of the word post-war is seen in the report that the French Academy were proposing to include it in the Academy Dictionary of the French Language, while omitting ‘poilu’.182 In post-war Britain the term caused fewer problems. The Times referred to how the occupied Belgians had managed to carry out ‘Boche-baiting’,183 and a murder committed with a ‘ “Boche” knife’ was reported in July 1921;184 The Ypres Times, a veterans’ newspaper, had no problems about publishing the word,185 and Rudyard Kipling felt able to say ‘the Boche learned nothing from the last war’, in 1933.186