There is very little documentation of ‘Kamerads’, developed from the word German soldiers used when surrendering, being used to describe German soldiers, but it worked as a lingua franca term, seen in an observation by Major H. Bidder in 1916, who heard a soldier explaining to a French woman that the enemy had been nearly wiped out in fighting, with the words ‘Kamerad napoo!’287 There was a clear model of using words from a foreign language to describe speakers of that language: the French use of ‘ya-yas’ for Germans,288 British and American soldiers using ‘parleyvoos’ for French people (which had been around for 100 years at least), and the German use of ‘tuhlömong’ and ‘ohlala’ for French soldiers.289 Occasional uses of ‘Hans’ for the abstract German soldier were most likely individual usages.290
FIGURE 3.3 The Gasper, edited by UPS Battalion soldiers, uses ‘parlez-vous’ rather than the more frequent soldiers’ ‘parley-voo’. 8 January 1916.
‘Boche’ and ‘Hun’ were not much revived in 1939, but ‘Jerry’, ‘squarehead’ and ‘kraut’ were; ‘Fritz’ was less common. Perhaps the first two had been too strongly linked to those who commanded and commented rather than those who fought and died. In post-war interviews, especially those made after 1945, it is very difficult to know whether the use of ‘Jerry’ is coloured by the more recent conflict. While there are dozens of markers of authenticity in these texts, there is also markedly less use of ‘Fritz’, and a notable absence of ‘Alleyman’, ‘Hun’ or ‘Boche’.291 This is not in any way to impute a lack of accuracy, but rather to highlight the way that the language of the conflict continued to develop and be influenced both by the Second World War and by a developing sense that ‘Boche’, ‘Hun’, ‘Fritz’, ‘Jerry’, and ‘Alleyman’ carried distinct connotations which emerged in memoir-writing, memory recall and story-telling. Neil Tytler’s apparent callousness is both conveyed and allowed by his almost exclusive use of ‘Hun’, particularly the abstract ‘the Hun’, while in the words of the veterans quoted in MacDonald’s They Called it Passchendaele there is a distancing from anger against the enemy in the widespread use of ‘Jerry’. It was a feeling that could be seen soon after the Armistice: ‘We no longer referred to them as Huns now that we were in Germany. Innate goodness of feeling prevented the use of that name, though indeed the German was never Bosche nor Hun to the rank and file, but always “Jacky” or “Jerry” or “Fritz.” We soon learned that the Germans greatly disliked the appellation of “Bosche,” which apparently was not absolutely meaningless but meant “ill-begotten” or something of the sort’.292
Austrian soldiers, if encountered, were called ‘Fritz’, or occasionally ‘Hans Wurst’, while Turkish soldiers were occasionally ‘Abdul’,293 but usually ‘Johnny’ or ‘Johnny Turk’, or ‘Jacko’.294 In a 1964 interview Anzac veteran Frank Brent used the term ‘Old Joe’, rhyming slang from ‘Joe Burke’ (Turk),295 while Aubrey Herbert recorded a New Zealand soldier receiving Turkish prisoners at Gallipoli with the words ‘Come in here, Turkey’;296 Turks called Allied soldiers ‘Johnny Kikrik’.297 ‘Johnny Turk’ was around before and after the war, and was the name of a racehorse up to 1954. Brophy and Partridge record the use of ‘burglars’ for Bulgars, and the King of Bulgaria was ‘Ferdy’,298 but a postcard with the caption ‘When you meet the Bulgars knock the “L” out of them’ serves as a clear indication of what they were usually called.
‘Tommy’ was the term most widely used by Germans soldiers to describe and address their British counterparts, though Fraser and Gibbons state that ‘the khakis’ was ‘the usual enemy name for the British troops, used colloquially among the Germans on the Western Front, in particular during the earlier months of the war’. The German trench slang dictionary 1000 Worte Front-Deutsch (1925) states that after ‘Tommy’ the main German epithet for British soldiers was Fussballindianer. The British were certainly obsessed with football – one of the army’s main problems arising between them and local farmers was access to land for playing football; Lancelot Spicer reported that ‘they object thoroughly to our playing on their grasslands. One old fellow told me that all the countryside around complained of the English Army, and that they would really rather have the Germans here than us’.299 For the French, the Germans were Boches, and for as long as they used the pickelhaube they were ‘Pointus’,300 and German artillerymen were referred to as Ernst, Otto and Michel; Partridge also notes Esnault recording ‘ya-yas’ as a French name for Germans. The Germans used der Ohlala and Tuhlömong for the French, a mix of humour and fear.301
How others speak
While it is fairly easy to imagine British soldiers having trouble speaking and understanding French when they arrived, it is more difficult to imagine the shock of those soldiers who did not realise that there would be people who could not understand English: ‘Oh love a duck, can’t the Froggies understand blinking English?’ was the response of an exasperated Kitchener’s Army man to ‘I not understand’.302 There was however, for many, an expectation of how foreign languages sounded, and during the war English pastiches of German, and to a lesser extent French, were widely disseminated. The main pathways for this were satirical postcards, magazines, cartoons and comics, for German, and Tommy French for French.
Three terms stand out in the frequent descriptions of the foreign languages anglophone servicemen and women encountered, ‘jabber’, ‘babble’ and ‘chatter’; even when nurse Madge Sneyd-Kynnersley spoke French to wounded Belgian soldiers she wrote ‘I jabbered French to them’.303 VAD Emma Duffin’s Egyptian servant ‘chattered Arabic to me’,304 George Barker notes ‘the excited babble from the Gurkhas’,305 German soldiers ‘jabber’306 (‘I could hear them jabbering away’307), and ‘a Rochdale officer’ wakes up to hear a French woman ‘chattering away like a jackdaw’.308 All these imply fast speech which the listener cannot understand, but ‘jabber’ and ‘babble’ also imply foolishness and lack of control: significantly the shell-shocked soldiers in Sassoon’s ‘Repression of War Experience’ ‘jabber among the trees’.
Written pastiche German used a number of catchwords, changes to consonants, and specific words, particularly ‘hoch’, ‘vos’, and ‘mein Gott’, the use of ‘v’ for ‘w’ and ‘d’ for ‘th’ to imitate German speech sounds, the substitution of ‘k’ for ‘c’, and the reduction of tail-questions into ‘isn’t it’. Also there were cross-language puns, imitations of German syntax, and wordplay based on German names, often used with visual caricatures of Germans, to make fun of the German language, particularly its pronunciation of English. The popular press was a great user of pastiche German: in the Sheffield Evening Telegraph a brief article gives what became an archetype of supposed German deception, using British uniforms to ambush British troops, in which the Germans apparently shout ‘Nein, nein, leedle mistake; ve vos not Shermans; ve vos der Vilts’ [Wiltshires]; ‘The British then charged with the bayonet, and the Germans “Vilted” ’.309 A satirical poem ‘A German on Jutland’ begins: Ven we set out ter meet der foe, / Von Tirpitz – none are wiser – / He say you pring soom Pritish shell / As keepsake for der Kaiser’.310 Elsewhere an advertisement for Chairman Cigarettes has German soldiers surrendering, saying ‘Ve vos your brisoners, Kamerad, you give us Chairmans, isn’d it?’311 And at the end of the war the American trench journal Thirty Second News, November 1918, has a woman saying ‘Tings iss on der pum aind id?’ The advertisement for the Press Art School ‘Nein! Nein! I vill the Press Art School not join!’312 incorporates German syntax too. There is occasional use of this demonstration of how German works and how it is different from English, in trench journals313 and dramatisations,314 continuing the propaganda need to maintain the view that Germans were ridiculous – ‘I believe that if the Germans beat us and invaded England they would still be laughed at as ridiculous foreigners’.315 This was all part of a general tendency to patronise foreigners and foreign languages: in November 1914 Home Chat’s apparently pragmatic advice on the pronunciation of Przemysl, ‘most people think out a pronunciation for t
hemselves and say “Prizzymizzle – or whatever you call it” ’, masked a deep-seated combination of insularity and arrogance.316
Key words signifying pastiche German were ‘hoch’, recognisable from the soldier’s song ‘We are Fred Karno’s/King George’s army’, with the line ‘Hoch, hoch, mein Gott’;317 ‘Himmel’, used as a standard expression of surprise;318 and ‘vos’. ‘Vos’, or occasionally ‘vas’, was from the German was, the pronunciation of ‘w’ as a ‘v’ being familiar to thousands of anglophones from the large number of Germans working as waiters in Britain before the war. A cartoon in The Bystander has a Prussian Polish soldier talking to a Russian Polish soldier: ‘You gif me your flag und I gif you mine, and ven ve get back ve vos both decorated, ain’t it?’,319 where ‘vos’ is used for the verb ‘to be’, and incidentally the German has picked up some colloquial English. The syntax joke could be extended too so that it signified German speech without the need for ‘vos’ and so on: ‘Brother Bosche’s motto appears to be: “It is a fine morning. There is nothing in the trenches doing. We abundant ammunition have. Let us a little frightfulness into the town pump” ’,320 providing a speech-model for a century’s worth of caricature German military officers.
Some of the wordplay with German was typical of puns crossing languages – General von Kluck was regularly ‘old one o’clock’; ‘Kamarade, gib mit vater; ze Englisch vos not bullies!’ ‘What’s he on about Bill?’ ‘Oh, chuck him a can of “bully” ’.321 Much of this depended on a knowledge of German. The manipulation of German, and of German rendering of English, while being noticeable, was not by any means universal or necessarily satirical. Gilbert Nobbs writing of his time as a PoW transcribes German, in a passage carrying no signs of humour, thus: ‘Ze English zey have been firing ze long-range guns here, big guns. Zay carry twenty-seven miles. Ve moved dis hospital two times – yah’.322 Readers of magazines like Punch had been exposed to this kind of transcription before the war: in 1912 Punch carried two cartoons with German-speakers, a German visitor saying ‘Vaitor, I speak der English not moch. Vill you der nodis exblain’, and a ‘Teutonic bandsman’ saying ‘Ja, dis time I blay faster und finish first’.323
One area where this mattered was in the detection of spies. Spy-panic was at its height at the beginning of the war and gradually died away, but there are instances of language anomalies, almost shibboleths, being used to catch spies. Fraser and Gibbons tell the story of two Australian officers at Gallipoli, who are suspicious of a major who joins them and advises them on a direction of firing. They ask him ‘are you fair Dinkum?’, and the reply ‘Yes, I’m Major Fair Dinkum’ gives him away as a spy.324 A. M. Burrage is told by his sergeant to ‘shoot anyone who can’t properly pronounce the consonant “W” ’,325 while At the Crossroads ends with the spy revealing himself by his German word order – ‘the King’s messenger a lie tells’.326
French transcriptions of German overlap with English transcriptions. The ‘Hoch, hoch’ is there (‘Hoch … Hoch … c’est un morceau de roi’),327 ‘kamerad’ is usually ‘kamarat’,328 ‘mein Gott’ becomes ‘Mein goot!’ while ‘nicht gut’ remains as is (Le Mouchoir 25 October 1916, p. 4), and ‘kaput’ becomes, in an English translation of a French report, ‘capout’.329
While German in both French and English was rendered to create comic effect, there was some care taken to avoid this happening in the transcription of French in English, by avoiding excessive transcription. A poem in the Northern Mudguard uses ‘z’ in place of ‘th’, and this, with the occasional ‘Engleesh’ and ‘t’ink’ (for ‘think’) suffices to portray a French person speaking English.330 A rhyme for Chairman Cigarettes has the French character say ‘who ees zis Chairman zat I see. He takes ze cake, And I vill one more Chairman take.’331 This is described as being in ‘pidgin’ French, yet he says ‘Oui, oui, you bet’, speaking not ‘pidgin’ French, but standard French and colloquial English, with minimal French markers, apart from the ‘v’ in ‘vill’. More typical is the February 1918 quoting of a French liaison officer, which is in standard English – ‘Are we all here? Yes, and we shall stay here’.332 Markers of French accents in the transcription of words spoken by poilus were noticeably absent in British newspapers during wartime, and the only identifiable French accent in cartoons in Punch for the first six months of 1917 is that of a civilian.
Given the environment of transcribing the sounds of other languages it is not surprising that the written corpus should transcribe the multiple accents of English, as ‘Stratford-atte-Bowe mingles west tribe modulated high and low’;333 Aubrey Smith waiting for his troopship at Southampton found soldiers from all parts of the British Isles creating ‘a regular babel of heathen tongues … the variety of dialects was most disconcerting’.334 Kipling and Wells had brought this into mainstream literature, and works by Kipling had cemented its role in transcribing the speech of soldiers. While it is rare to find colonial accents transcribed, memoirs and diaries contain a wealth of transcribed accents from within the British Isles. Scottish and cockney accents feature most frequently, though the London accent ranged over much of the urban and rural south. Transcription of Scottish accents as well as written dialect ranged from the simple ‘wee scrap of paper’ in a postcard featuring a Scottish soldier, to Ian Hay’s ‘There’s no Chumney-stalks in Gairmany’ ‘Maybe no; but there’s wundmulls. See the wundmull there – on yon wee knowe!’ ‘That’s a pit-heid!’335 Adèle De L’Isle, working as a VAD, transcribed ‘Jock’s speech as ‘I’m ta dry the noo, but I’ll clane ’em if she’ll come an’ do the “spitten” part’.336 Scottish newspapers naturally were happy to publish Scots dialect texts, especially if they highlighted the Scottish soldier’s experience in France: ‘I reeze the sowans an’ seerup, the kebbuk an’ the scones, / An’ Bawbie hearkens, blushin’ at ma “mercis” an’ “tray-bons” ’;337 but this is altogether distinct from the accent transcribed in ‘oh, we did’na expec’ them back at all; they went hame the Seterday with their deescharrge – medically unfeet. Dinna ken what they’ll do either, as they did’na luk as if they’d a bawbee atwixt them’.338
The Scottish accent had a reputation for impenetrability, never mind that there were several Scottish accents. Aubrey Smith tells of a policeman who ‘shouted out a lot of nonsense in broad Scotch …: honestly I could not understand a word …’.339 Charles Douie tells of being stuck in a shell hole with his company commander: ‘Suddenly two Highlanders fell on top of us, and proceeded to engage each other in conversation, apparently of a humorous character, but virtually unintelligible.’340 For at least one French estaminet-keeper the same problem arose: ‘a private in France’ wrote that ‘I walked into an estaminet the other day and found the proprietor struggling to understand some Gordons. I stepped into the breach and straightened out the tangle. Afterwards he said, “Je comprends bien les Anglais, et je comprends les soldats d’Irlande” (here he threw up both hands), “mais je ne comprends pas les Ecossais.” I told him that it was difficult for me to make them out at times and he was delighted’.341 The troopship magazine The Comet carried the usual ‘Things we want to know’ column including ‘If a few lessons in Scotch would not be acceptable to enable the Englishman on board to understand some of their friends from north ‘o the Tweed. And … failing this, an interpreter may be appointed.’342 Pronunciation difficulties led to renaming of trenches: Peter Chassaud reports that in the La Biselle sector the 51st Highland Division marked their taking over of trenches from the French by renaming them, and when English troops took over from Scots they also renamed them; in both instances the reason given was that the earlier names were hard to pronounce.343 Douie recalls teasing a Highland major by mispronouncing Sauchiehall Street as ‘Saucy Hall Street’, the major subsequently requiring alcoholic support.344
Variations of cockney and the London and south England urban accent dominate transcriptions of British soldier slang, as they dominate advertisements featuring soldiers, recorded dramatisations, post-war films and the wider personificat
ions of ‘Tommy’ saying ‘Gorblimey’, ‘Arf a mo, Kaiser’, or ‘ ’eave ‘arf a brick at ’im’. In a cartoon postcard a child with a paper hat and wooden sword is called home with ‘Hi, Kitchener! Yer muvver wants yer!’; or from Scoops by Harry Greenwall: ‘It was like this ‘ere. Yer see we came along together, neither ‘im nor me knowing where we was going. Nobbler, as perky as you please, asks an orficer…’.345 Adèle De L’Isle describes a wounded cockney soldier called Snowball: ‘His coster language was often difficult to understand. His ideal was his “Muvver.” “She’s a brick, she is. Many a fick ear she’s give me when she’s caught me aplying shove-‘a’ny, an’ she ain’t no bigger’n you, leastwys, not in ‘ight, but roun’, oo lor! She’d mike four o’ yer” ’.346 ‘Ullo! Wot’s wrong now Tom? Wot’s run up agin yer this time? … Cawn’t you hear me a callin’ yer? …’ appears in Fall In.347 Greenwall describes the cockney accent as having a ‘twang’, and it is the accent which tends to be most energetically transcribed.
Less frequently occurring are transcriptions of Irish accents and speech patterns, such as Malins’ ‘Shure, sor, and it’s gas shells the dirty swine are sending over’,348 Emma Duffin’s ‘his mother was after dyin’ and ‘Sure you have till humour him, the cratur’,349 or ‘he had a stick uv dynamite in his pocket whin wan uv thim ran over him’.350 Kipling, continuing his enthusiasm for the pre-war soldier’s accent, transcribes accents of soldiers in his The Irish Guards in the Great War: ‘ ’Twas like a football scrum. Every one was somebody, ye’ll understand’,351 is most likely a middle-class voice given the reference to rugby, to be compared with the words of a soldier whose false teeth had been broken in an attack: ‘I’ve been to him [the doctor], Sorr, and it’s little sympathy I got. He just gave me a pill and chased me away, Sorr’.352 An exchange reported in The Bystander includes some Tommy French: ‘Do you mean to tell me that you … have lost your rifle?’ ‘Mais wee, sorr, napoo.’353
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