Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  The difference in tone between ‘Boche’ and ‘Hun’ is easier to recognise than to define; ‘boche’ perhaps had some resonance with ‘bosh’, a derogatory term for margarine common from the late-nineteenth century (from its place of manufacture, Hertogenbosch in Holland), and ‘bosh’ meaning rubbish, but both terms were used to ridicule Germans. The fact that Germans hated ‘Boche’ but did not mind ‘Hun’ highlights the source of the words – ‘Boche’ as an external insult, and ‘Hun’ as a term that originated from within the German military experience.187 ‘Boche’ was temporary, while ‘Hun’ referenced a past, selective or inventive perhaps; thus from an Allied point of view ‘the Boche’ was redeemable, while ‘the Hun’ was not. ‘Hun’ implied a racial viewpoint, examined above, with its own discourse of physical and temperamental characteristics.

  Kaiser Wilhelm II in an address to German troops at Bremerhaven on 27 July 1900 declared: ’Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend, may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German’. The Iodine Chronicle December 1917188 extended this into ‘The Kaiser has said that he is a reincarnation of Attila the Hun’: the word was a gift to Allied propaganda. Any ethnological claim to descent189 was argued in articles such as ‘Are the Germans really Huns?’ in The Pow-Wow190 and the pamphlet Huns Ancient and Modern (1918). The term seemed ideal for use in August 1914 as German troops overran Belgium, but it took a few weeks to catch on in Britain. The earliest references in The Daily Mirror in September 1914 were to the ‘ancient Huns’ (1 and 3 September, p. 5), then to ‘German Huns’ and ‘modern Huns’ (4 and 5 September, pp. 12 and 1), and only from 11 September as ‘Huns’ alone (11 September, p. 1). Illustrating the wide enjoyment of puns191 the term ‘Germhuns’ was popular in 1914, and remained in use throughout the conflict. Comic Cuts (advertising itself as ‘The paper that tickles our Tommies’ and ‘The Soldiers’ Comic’ in 1917) first used ‘Germ-Huns’ in its 31 October 1914 issue, retaining the phrase beyond the introduction of ‘Huns’ in the 12 December issue. The tub-thumping John Bull, which advertised itself as ‘The Soldiers’ Friend’, had ‘Germhuns’, ‘Germhun papers’ and ‘that Germhun Bartholomew’,192 and ‘I hear that Germhunny is short of wool’,193 but also published a letter mentioning ‘a German Hun’;194 the paper was still using ‘Germhuns’ in September 1917: ‘he thinks like a Germhun’.195 John Bull used ‘Hun’ and ‘German’ throughout, but not ‘Boche’. ‘Germhuns’ was a populist journalists’ term, ignored by Fraser and Gibbons and by Brophy and Partridge, ‘not originally an army term’ according to the Miscellany writer in the Manchester Guardian in early 1915.196 The same article also claimed that the terms ‘Germ-Huns’ and ‘Germs’ were already out of date, noting also the use of ‘Gerboys’ by an officer in a comment on the youth of many German soldiers, and ‘canaries’, deriving from some soldiers’ experience of German soldiers primarily as prisoners in the barbed wire holding stations. ‘Germs’ was a soldiers’ term, widely used in Sgt Bernard Brookes’ diary, presumably both an abbreviation and a reference to disease:197 ‘This show had been occupied by the Germs and then by the French from whom we took over. The filth and stench was too awful for words, one of our batteries striking rather unlucky in coming across Germs buried just under the surface when they started digging their guns in’.198

  ‘Hun’ was used in the singular and plural, as an adjective, and as an impersonal or abstract – ‘I have not seen a complete Hun, but I have seen him in sections’,199 ‘Ready for the Huns’,200 ‘got all the Hun wire cut’,201 ‘the Hun lines’,202 ‘shells from the Hun’,203 ‘all the Hun killing we were enabled to do’,204 ‘the war against “the Hun” is over’.205 And like ‘Boche’, ‘Hun’ could be extended: ‘We wandered for a long time over Hunland’,206 ‘Hunnish barbarities’,207 the ‘Hun-bird’,208 and inevitably a pun, in ‘Hunny Moon’, a moonlit night for Zeppelins.209

  The given characteristics of ‘the Hun’ can show how this epithet differed from others. Huns Ancient and Modern, while a heavy caricature, gives an idea of how some on the Home Front justified their distaste for Germany through historical views; as ‘cherish[ing] war not as an instrument of noble purposes, but for its own sake’, as ‘drown[ing] men at sea’ and believing ‘Frightfulness’ to be ‘a pleasant conception’.210 The Huns were ‘a set of inhuman monsters’211 and ‘a nation of sneaks’,212 ‘brutal’,213 ruled over by an emperor who was known by his subjects as ‘the All-Highest’.214 The sense of the term at the Front was formed less by outrage than by a sense of a military figure: there was an objectification – ‘a large fat Hun’215 – but ‘the Hun’ was not so much an individual person as an abstract figure, the enemy. On the Home Front any failure to work towards the war effort might merit being called a Hun: ‘The manufacturer [of overpriced matches] may be British, but he is a Hun’ claimed a writer for the Manchester Guardian.216 ‘I wish you to keep your eyes glued on the Huns at home’;217 ‘they had to fight against German Huns, British Huns, and Taunton Huns … these so-called Christian employers were so mean, so Hun-like …’.218

  The use of ‘Hun’ was widespread across all sections of society during the war,219 both among British officers and men, nurses,220 Canadian soldiers,221 civilians,222 civilian internees in Germany,223 and advertising copywriters.224 However, Fraser and Gibbons state that ‘the services did not adopt the name to any extent; except the Air Force, with whom it was the usual name for the enemy’. And the Manchester Guardian’s Miscellany writer for 13 January 1915 wrote ‘ “Huns” may look very pretty as a column heading; it does not belong to the slang of the trenches’. The word was very popular in the press in 1914, and remained more popular than ‘Boche’, ‘Fritz’ or ‘Jerry’, with no sense of a decrease in usage as the conflict went on. It was still in use in the Manchester Guardian in early 1919, along with the middle-brow tabloid magazine The Bystander, which had published Bruce Bairnsfather’s Ole’ Bill cartoons, and in John Bull, which referred in January 1919 to ‘the transport of Huns back to their own country’. Metaphorical use continued with the reactionary White Guards who took control in the German capital in January 1919 being described as ‘raging like Huns in Berlin’,225 and references as late as December 1919 to ‘Hun (or rather German) names of places in England’ in The Athenaeum.226

  Popular in 1914, and clearly picked up from French people, was ‘Alleyman’, with its variants ‘Ollerman’ and ‘Allerman’. Fraser and Gibbons state that this, and Fritz, gave way to ‘Jerry’, and Brophy and Partridge give ‘not much used after 1916’. In Charles Edmonds’ A Subaltern’s War the officer uses ‘Boche’, while the private uses ‘Alleyman’,227 with ‘Allemans’ being used to describe a group of prisoners.228 A soldier writing in thanks for a parcel (under a scheme whereby citizens with no immediate contact in the forces could support a serviceman), reads ‘Thanks very much for the parcel, it is very good of you Im sure … This place has not been visited by the Allemands…’. The soldier is writing in a polite style (‘Im sure’), and may be carefully avoiding slang, or may be indicating that even by July 1914 British soldiers were prepared to use French correctly when they wanted to. A variant of ‘Ten Brown Bottles’ published in The Comet (a troopship magazine) has ‘nine anxious Allemands’, the song also featuring ‘seven boss-eyed Bosches’, ‘six horrid Hunlets’, and ‘three “K”-owardly Komarads’.229

  Documentation of soldiers’ use of ‘Fritz’ is seen from the autumn of 1914 – German type-characters tended to be called Hans or Carl before the war. Again there are abstract usages, though the plural form, usually as ‘Fritzies’, is less common. Usually the usage was in the form of ‘Fritz sending his minenwerfer’,230 ‘Fritz’s efforts’,231 and ‘Fritz quiet’.232 Popular among junior officers and men, the name was used for Germans233 also by the French, though ‘Boche’ was much more common. ‘Fritzie’
as a noun was popular with Canadian and American troops, less so with British soldiers: ‘5 or ten tons of Fritzie’s bombs’.234 The word did not make a comfortable adjective – Frank Hawkings’ ‘the water has all gone into Fritz trenches’235 – or a plural: Ian Hay uses ‘Fritzes’236 but the usual plural was the impersonal ‘Fritz’. ‘A Fritz’ was a naval term for a German submarine, seen in an article by John Margerison for the Illustrated London News featuring ‘the Hun’, ‘the Fritz’ and ‘Fritz’;237 at Gallipoli it was the term for an aeroplane: ‘… as they passed over the Turkish lines they were attacked by a Fritz (Turkish or German aero-plane)’.238 ‘Fritz’ tended to be less vicious, more tiresome, ‘paying attention to our district again’,239 who ‘has made a mess of everywhere round here’;240 the lessening of the threat in the name is seen in its extension into ‘old Fritz’,241 ‘old man Fritz’,242 ‘cousin Fritz’,243 ‘Unser Fritz’,244 and even, for a Tyneside Irish soldier, ‘brother Fritz’;245 ‘Brother Boche’ was an occasional usage.246

  Fraser and Gibbons mention an extremely dubious etymology for ‘Jerry’, namely that ‘Fritz’ became ‘Fitz’, which suggested ‘Fitzgerald’, and so ‘Gerald’, ‘Gerry’ and thus ‘Jerry’. What was observed is that the ‘Irish Rifles, Dublins and Munsters’ used the term Jerry ‘in their slang’,247 and that in the book The Irish on the Somme by Michael MacDonagh (1917) ‘a Gerry’, ‘the Gerrys’, ‘a Gerry machine-gun’, and ‘Gerry’ as a form of address to Germans, are used repeatedly. Elsewhere the spelling ‘Gerry’ appears rarely.248 The general consensus is that ‘Jerry’ developed as a diminutive of ‘German’, fairly early on (Doyle and Schäfer give an example from September 1914, but in inverted commas – ‘if the “Jerries” could shoot’).249 It had the advantage of easy usage as name, singular, plural, adjective and abstract, though ‘the jerry’ is rare – ‘defend it in case the jerry attacks again’.250 The abstract usage is common – ‘Jerry began searching the wood with “heavies” ’.251 It also worked well with familiar usage – ‘I thought Old Jerry’s here’,252 ‘our friend Jerry’,253 indeed Brophy and Partridge describe the term as being ‘almost of affection’. They also give a ‘more fanciful, if improbable’ source in the supposed similarity between German helmets and chamberpots (‘jerry’ being a slang term for a chamberpot), but the term was in use long before the steel helmet was issued.

  Any demarcation of meaning or connotation between these terms is made more difficult by the way sources frequently use two or more of them apparently indiscriminately. ‘German’ was a more neutral and sometimes respectful term, but was often used alongside ‘Hun’. Emma Duffin had two German soldiers in her ward, known as ‘the old Bosch’ and ‘the little Hun’;254 Comic Cuts has in the same story ‘Germans’, ‘Germ-Huns’ and ‘Deutschers’;255 G. B. Manwaring in An Officer’s Letters (1918) uses ‘Hun’, along with ‘German’, ‘Fritz’, and ‘the Bosche’; Major M. Macleod uses ‘the Huns’ along with ‘the Germans’;256 Pte G. W. Broadhead uses ‘German’, ‘Hun’ and ‘Fritz’;257 The Listening Post uses ‘Huns’, ‘German’ and ‘Fritzie’;258 and the Sunday Post (30 June 1918, p. 8) has ‘the Jerry squareheads’. The inclusiveness with regard to names continued after the war, with ‘A Blow For Fritz … the tenderest part of Jerry’s anatomy’259 or ‘a Jerry steel helmet … removed by him from an offending Boche’.260

  There were other terms – ‘kraut’, ‘squarehead’, ‘Dutch’, ‘Prussian’, ‘Teuton’, ‘kamerad’ – which show how the soldiers’ language reflected what was of the most significance to them. Like the archetypal range of Inuit words for ‘snow’, words for the enemy reflected where the speaker came from, fashion and the value of using the current terms, the changing environment, the emotion of the moment. ‘Kraut’, more expected from the Second World War, was an American contribution, as in ‘… we just bet that Kraut was scared to death’,261 and ‘You can’t smash us, you sauer-krauters.’262 Lighter’s Slang of the AEF gives a range of spellings, ‘kraut’, ‘krout’, and ‘crout’, with the extensions ‘kraut-eater’, ‘krauthead’ and ‘sauerkraut’.

  ‘Squarehead’ was a generic term for Scandinavian and German sailors before it was applied to German soldiers; in America it had been for decades applied disparagingly to Swedish migrants. A story reported in the Liverpool Echo refers to a longstanding animosity between British and German sailors, the latter referred to as ‘square-heads’,263 while a brief article in the Portsmouth Evening News opens the category still wider: ‘At sea the term “Squarehead” is indiscriminately applied to Scandinavian mariners, Swedes, Norwegians and Finns. A German, when he does occur, which is not often, is “Dutchy”. Cf “Deutscher” ’.264 It seems to have come to the fore in 1915: ‘ “Boche”, as a name for the German soldier, is out of date now with “Tommy”, I am told. His description is apt: the Huns he now always refers to as “squareheads”. You know those German haircuts’.265 The usage was as a noun: ‘The “squareheads” have been very busy’;266 ‘Give the “squareheads” a few good English volleys’;267 and occasionally as an adjective too: ‘Some “squareheads” submarines had gone to intercept us’.268 It is a puzzling term, capable of expressing a range of feelings depending on the context: contempt in ‘… the business of putting lead in square-heads’269 and ‘squareheads (Tommies’ nickname for the Germans in the lagers [prisons])’;270 or humour, when a soldier captures two Germans with the words ‘Come along you big square-headed gents, or you’ll be late for the theatre’.271 The anthropometric aspect of these, removing all but the physical characteristics, allows distancing and brutally racist perception. It is rare to find the term in memoirs other than as a racial description, but the press seemed to like its contempt and simplistic viewpoint. The Newcastle Evening Chronicle used the headline ‘The Durhams’ Scrap with the “Square-heads” ’ even though the letter from the soldier quoted does not use the word.272 ‘Dutchy’, above, would be an anglicisation of ‘Deutscher’; Partridge in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English gives ‘Dutchman: a German; “any North European seaman except a Finn”: nautical colloquial …’. The 32nd News American trench journal uses ‘Dutch’ to mean ‘German’.273

  ‘Prussian’ was a more serious term, including within Germany. The rise of the military in the Prussian state, and later the entire German state as it became dominated by Prussia, led to the idea internationally of Prussians as militaristic automatons, subservient to their ruler. This was underlined by reports of the supposedly more decent soldiers from Saxony or Bavaria disliking Prussians, a distinction that spread through the British army and served as a low-level moral boost;274 for British propaganda writers any historical evidence of animosity on the part of other Germans towards Prussians, such as Goethe’s ‘The Prussian is cruel by birth; civilisation will make him ferocious’275 was a godsend. The press enjoyed using ‘Prussian’, which both expressed their views of the ruling circle’s bombast and the Kaiser’s manners during earlier visits to Britain, and conveniently allowed the geographical locating of the enemy far away from the British royal family’s German antecedents. Probably the first negative epithets to be applied to the Germans, early on there were ‘The Prussians’, ‘The Prussian wolf’ and ‘Prussia’s Iron Hell’.276 The use of the word in the press increased tenfold on the outbreak of war, and extended into ‘Prussianism’,277 ‘Prussianisation’,278 and the wonderful ‘People don’t shove quite so selfishly, don’t scowl at each other so Prussianly’.279 For the troops, awareness of the level of training and resilience among the Prussian Guard meant that the word had fewer connotations of humour, though Boyd Cable’s story ‘The Blighty Squad’ has a cheerful wounded soldier say to a sentry ‘We’re the blinkin’ Prussian Guards’.280

  ‘Teuton’ and ‘Teutonic’ carried ideas of medieval knightly thoroughness and brutality, and was popular in the press; old German men in clubs were Teutons,281 as were the archetypal British-hating internment camp doctors (‘the hatred of the English had sunk deep into the heart of the Teuton
’),282 and obsessively efficient wiring parties in no man’s land ‘patrol with Teutonic thoroughness’283 – ‘Teutonic efficiency’ and ‘Teutonic thoroughness’ are frequently found in memoirs. The ‘Teuton’ was primarily a soldier: ‘in spite of all we say about the Teuton, he is taking his punishment well, and we’ve got a big job on our hands’.284 The term also symbolised the, to the British, German lack of any sense of humour: ‘the celebrated “Hymn of Hate” and various other popular Teutonic melodies’; or if there was a sense of humour, it was essentially medieval: ‘A few have endeavoured to be humorous, after the ponderous manner of the Teuton, which nearly always suggests the jester’s bladder suspended by a string from the end of a stick’.285 However, parallel to this was a capacity for indicating knightly nobility: Crofts describes a wounded German soldier, sixteen years old, who had been lying in no man’s land; as he meets ‘the curious gaze of his enemies … his face was the ageless face of a Teutonic hero’.286