Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  The documented dislike of Tommy opens up a Pandora’s box of myths. Poilu, the widely-used equivalent of Tommy in the French army, was ‘liked as little as British soldiers liked “Tommy” ’;403 bluets, a press invention, was not liked either.404 The French preferred to call themselves ‘les hommes’ or ‘les bonhommes’,405 though M. MacDonald, who enlisted with the French army in August 1914, refers constantly to ‘Jean Pitou’ as the preferred name.406 Olivier Leroy refers to bleu and bleusaille for a young soldier, but not bluet;407 more common terms were pioupiou and pitou. To rub it in there is evidence that the Russians disliked the term ‘steamroller’,408 and Australian soldiers became ‘sick of the word’ Anzac.409 Worst of all, ‘Tipperary’ was not sung incessantly. Fraser and Gibbons state that in deference to the Old Contemptibles, the first British army in Flanders and France, many of the New Army units did not sing it; and for the same reason it was not played at the St Barnabas pilgrimage to the Menin Gate in Ypres in 1925 – ‘if anyone had struck up the Old Contemptibles life-and-death song, many in that gathering would have looked away’.410 Major Bruce Taylor wrote in 1916 that ‘We practically never hear Tipperary’;411 there were plenty of parodies though, not all of them obscene. Even the society magazine The Lady responded to the composer Ethel Smyth’s statement that she wished that she had written it, with the comment that ‘it is not gay, it is not solemn, it is not inspiring, it is not ennobling’.412

  There were other general terms used by soldiers, which referred to the amount they had to carry: PBI (poor bloody infantry) is recorded by Brophy and Partridge, and Fraser and Gibbons give ‘trays’, ‘Christmas tree’, and ‘something to hang things on’. Fraser and Gibbons give ‘Kitch’ as the nickname for someone enlisting in one of the new armies. Partridge records the occasional use of ‘swaddy’, not connected to ‘squaddie’, and ‘Camel Corps’.413 ‘Bing boys’, a widely used term after 1916, referred to a show in London,414 and merged with the Canadians who called themselves the ‘Byng Boys’ after their respected commander General Julian Byng. There were in use a few imaginative references to marching – and to those soldiers destined to march. ‘Foot-slogger’ – ‘Foot slogging over Belgian ways’ was noted in the article The Route March, in the Fifth Gloucester Gazette415 – was originally ‘foot-wabler’ or foot-wobbler’ in Grose’s The Vulgar Tongue (1785), a term of contempt for the infantryman much used by the cavalry. Related names were ‘gravel-grinder’, and ‘mud-crusher’. There were similar terms in French and German, German terms being particularly graphic – Dreckfresser (mud-glutton), Kilometerfresser (kilometre-glutton), Fusslatscher (foot-shuffler), Lakenpatscher (mud-crusher). According to Partridge only the Germans were resigned to the term Kanonenfutter, ‘cannon-fodder’, but there are signs of it creeping across into English: George Barker writes ‘but after all we are only “cannon-fodder” ’,416 and Jonathan Lighter records the expression ‘fokker-fodder’.417

  As regards the question of when and by whom the terms ‘men’, ‘boys’ and ‘lads’ were used, there were no hard and fast rules. ‘Boys’ was chummy between soldiers, ‘men’ was common to officers when giving instructions, ‘lads’ used by civilians was patriotic and grateful; ‘boys’ was used by civilians when worried or protective, ‘men’ was for soldiers when attacking, ‘lads’ was for decent admirable young men. There were regional variations, and variations dependent on the field of text – journalism, official reports, letters from home, memorials – variations so vast that categorisation is probably worthless; but the following observations and inferences may be suggested.

  ‘Boys’ and ‘lads’ tend to invoke togetherness, association, and equality. In Wilfred Owen’s words ‘Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!’ in Dulce et Decorum Est, the use of ‘boys’ matches many other texts – Ian Hay in All In It, K (1) Carries On (1917) uses ‘boys’ throughout when one soldier is talking to other soldiers. In a De Reszke Cigarettes advertisement a lance corporal is quoted as saying ‘I shall recommend them to the boys’.418 ‘Our boys are splendid’ writes Harold McGill, noting a German prisoner holding a piece of bread ‘one of our boys had given him’.419

  In describing comradeship Charles Edmonds writes ‘all things were bearable if one bore them “with the lads” ’.420 ‘Lads’ had a regional association – George Barker, writing about soldiers from the Manchester area,421 uses ‘lads’ and ‘laddies’, while Neil Tytler’s With Lancashire Lads and Field Guns in France (1922) was published in Manchester. ‘Our boys’ is common for describing group actions – ‘as I fell I heard our boys cheering’,422 ‘our boys had had a time getting across the canal’,423 ‘it was in the last stage of the battle that our boys cut in’.424 When an attack is being described ‘our men’ or ‘the men’ is more often used, giving more gravitas: ‘our men unflinchingly advanced across the open ground’,425 ‘Prompt to the second, our men go over the top in a grand assault’;426 but an ‘Armour-plated Hun ’plane … used to mow down our lads’,427 and ‘our lads was mown down’428 convey a sense of ownership and protection; the Realistic Travels company who published stereoview photographs throughout the war used ‘lads’ when describing dead British soldiers – ‘The lads who fell at Hooge’, ‘brave lads fallen in morning raid’. Cpl Shaw’s later words, that they were ‘losing men all the time’ and ‘the men were falling back in the trenches’, convey less sense of pity. The use of ‘lads’ for associative purposes – ‘Xmas hamper for khaki lads’429 – though looking blunt now, probably had some commercial success at the time.

  The choice of words at times seems at odds with the situation, men who had killed other men being called ‘boys’, boys of sixteen being expected to be ‘men’. Enid Bagnold, continually questioning the words she heard and used, wrote ‘I can’t think of them like the others do, as “the boys”; they seem to me full-grown men’.

  The sense of care and protection is evident in the use of ‘boys’ throughout in A Red Triangle Girl in France (she worked in YMCA establishments for US soldiers), and the vulnerability of the soldiers is expressed usually in the use of ‘boys’: for VADs Emma Duffin and Dora Walker all wounded soldiers were ‘boys’.430 This is carried on into post-war writing about visits to France and Flanders, where ‘boys’ embraces ‘men’, ‘husbands’ and ‘sons’: ‘we had our “iron rations”, as our boys had had,’431 ‘how the boys hated that!’432 ‘Boys’ conveyed loss more than did ‘men’ or ‘lads’: ‘the gloom came down again because the boys had gone that day’.433 The choice of words at times seems at odds with the situation, men who had killed other men being called ‘boys’, boys of sixteen being expected to be ‘men’. Enid Bagnold, continually questioning the words she heard and used, wrote ‘I can’t think of them like the others do, as “the boys”; they seem to me full-grown men’.434

  ‘Bhoys’, as transcribed from Irish accents,435 and from nineteenth-century American slang, was popular among soldiers; from postcards there seems to have been an association with performance rather than Irish culture, as the word appears in descriptions of groups of soldiers.

  As regards names between the Allies, these were variously predictable or imaginative. Partridge and Leroy note that the French called the English/British ‘Angliche’,436 but Partridge records they also had the word ‘anglaiser’, meaning ‘to steal’. In turn anglophones referred to their French allies as ‘parleyvoos’, ‘dee-donks’, ‘ohlalas’437 and of course ‘froggies’; Portuguese were ‘Tony’ and ‘pork and beans’, Italians ‘eyeties’. Partridge lists for French slang: for the Italians, ‘macaronis’ and ‘Taliens’; for Serbians ‘Serbos’ or ‘Dobros’ (from the Serbian for ‘good’); for Belgian soldiers ‘piotes’; for Greeks ‘Grecos’; for Russians ‘Ruskis’ and ‘Rousses’ (the English version ‘Ivan’ seems fairly tame); for Bulgarians ‘Bulbuls’ or ‘Bougres’. Olivier Leroy’s Glossary of French Slang (1924) includes ‘rosbif’ still for English, and ‘choucroutemane’ for German; ‘choucroute’ is sauerkraut, and ‘mane’ may be a French transcription of the English
‘men’. Piou-piou was a longstanding name used by French soldiers for themselves.

  FIGURE 3.6 Photograph of a group of soldiers in camp; the barrel is labelled ‘Quinine No. 11 B’Hoys’.

  Germans also had names for the individual parts of their services, not exactly corresponding to Tommy, Jack and George: Ernst for an artilleryman, Fritz for an infantryman, and Franz for an airman.438

  Sex and gender

  Gender culture around the period of the First World War idealised the position of the bachelor. Married men were popularly presented in music-hall songs and picture postcards as henpecked or disappointed, overloaded with the sudden arrival of babies, and seeing their free-roaming activities curtailed. An underlying misogyny framed women as potentially predatory, to be punished for impersonating WRENs, showing ‘swank’ and wanting to ‘get off with officers’;439 a postcard shows a soldier struggling with four women, with the caption ‘The Territorial: receiving the attack!’ The correspondence on war slang carried on in The Athenaeum post-war included the note that observation balloons had been called ‘maiden’s prayer’ or ‘maiden’s delight’.440

  Actual sexual activity at the Front involved extremely limited access to brothels, more access to French soft-porn postcards, innuendo in trench journals, and imaginably more macho talk than has been documented. Attempts to initiate sexual relations with local women ranged from variations on ‘Vous jig-a-jig avec me’, usually associated with men on the march passing women,441 to the more one-to-one ‘Vouli-vous promenade avec moi?’442 Sometimes soldiers struck lucky, but the constant movement of troops meant that most relationships were short and hurried. R. H. Mottram claimed that ‘the great ambition of most of the girls of the place [Bailleul] was to marry a “sergeant Nouvelle-Zélandais”; I do not know how many succeeded;’443 probably not as many as those who kept ‘a souvenir’, i.e. a soldier’s baby.444

  FIGURE 3.7 Postcard sent in July 1918.

  Brothels provided a quicker resolution, but often the weariness and age of the sex-workers combined with the disappointment of the environment to put many young men off;445 Makepeace quotes Frank Richards being in a group of three who walked out of a brothel and 48 hours later ‘each one of us had picked up with a respectable bit of goods’.446 The fear of venereal disease, and the punishment for acquiring, and more specifically hiding it, helped to confuse many young men; Winnie McClare wrote home to Canada that ‘the worst of London is the girls that run around the streets there … it is an awfull temtation when they act like that. An awfull lot of fellow that go to London come back in bad shape and are sent to the V.D. hospitals’.447 The brutalising of sex, like the brutalising effect of swearing, gave a blunted view of sex, occasionally prudish (‘short arm’ for penis), but more often expressed in terms such as ‘jig-a-jig’ or ‘a bit of dick’.448

  A different view is that proposed by the idea that brothels were tolerated as fulfilling a necessary function for married men,449 sexual activity seen as no more than physical: Graves reported censoring a lance corporal’s letter in which the man wrote to his wife that the ‘French girls were nice to sleep with, so she mustn’t worry on his account, but that he far preferred sleeping with her’.450 The view that sex was an undesirable necessity is reflected in the name given to brothels – maisons tolérées – not least its being in French, continuing the anglophone tradition of using French to avoid speaking directly about sex. There were, according to Ellen La Motte,451 several women who stayed in unoccupied Flanders as sex-workers; Williamson’s description of prostitutes as ‘proper little pushers’ refers to women pushing prams.452 Behind the teasing of Pte Tippy in In The Trenches for learning French ‘to speak to the French girls’, which makes him a ‘bad lad’, there is a complex and competitive attitude to sex.453

  Semi-erotic French postcards depended on the visual, while English ones depended more on verbal titillation, of the familiar seaside postcard type. French postcards, hand-tinted and studio photographs in enhanced colours, showing French soldiers improbably in full uniform engaging with women in complicated underwear, were available to British soldiers, and were occasionally sent home. ‘How does this suit you my dear?’ was the message from George to Mrs Dawson, presumably his wife, the photograph showing a woman in underwear sitting on a wall with her legs over the shoulders of a man in French uniform, he facing away from, but looking up at her. Another shows a man in British uniform about to embrace a woman in underclothes; ‘If you love me prove me it’, is the message in what was probably not the copywriter’s first language. The same team had a slightly better result with ‘It is the moment to sign the alliance’. Many British postcards display the gap between the reality of sex during wartime and the desire, innuendo and visual puns framing misogynist fantasies as jokes or infantilism, the billeting officer asking a female householder ‘how many can you take?’, or the dog looking up a female police officer’s skirt with the caption ‘under police protection’. Alongside the bravado there is a wistfulness in the message on the back of the card showing a French soldier (with helmet) rushing eagerly towards an enthusiastically undressed young woman: ‘Well old dear, This makes him smile somewhat. Roll on when I get treated like it. Cheer up. Life is gay.’ Significantly, few of these cards show postmarks, so their survival in England indicates that they were probably sent in envelopes, perhaps to avoid embarrassment. There was certainly a fear of being found dead in possession of pornographic material, as the soldier’s effects were sent home when possible; Horace Stanley tells of burning the porn collection of a recently killed young officer as an act of generosity to the family.456

  The unhinging of the demarcation between the terms ‘boys’ and ‘men’ can be read as part of a broader loosening of parameters, beyond the familiar images of men in drag in soldiers’ concert parties. Shellshock, creating hysteria (this period being the first time that ‘hysteria’ was applied to men), was seen as ‘unmanning’ men, blasting them into female territory; hysteria itself was, according to Karl Bonhoeffer, as presented in Shellshock and Other Neuropsychiatric Problems ‘a female affair antebellum’,454 indicating the effect of the war in breaking down the barrier between men and women. As the war drained countries of working-age men, and women took their places in the visible service industries, the assumption by women of male dress and activities was widely expressed as ‘women becoming men’. The sexually provocative magazine Fun carried a brief letter on Christmas Day 1915, headlined, ‘The Changing of Sexes’: ‘It is a notable thing of late that girls are becoming more masculine and fellows more feminine’. The article goes on to imply that changes of costume, as women took jobs such as drivers or window-cleaners, were linked to physical changes in gender dominance within relationships.455

  A verbal regendering of the male appeared as a compliment given by Germans to kilted Allied soldiers, from Scotland, Canada or England – ‘Ladies from Hell’ appears repeatedly in memoirs, as the title of R. Douglas Pinkerton’s 1918 memoir of his time with the London Scottish, in A. Corcoran’s The Daredevil of the Army (1918, p. 139), in Over There and Back, by Joseph S. Smith (1918, p. 192), and in Private Peat, by H. Peat (1917, p. 175). Soldiers repeatedly reported its use to the press, enjoying their reputation for engendering terror, but significantly there is no documentation in German of its use. ‘A lady working among the troops’, as reported in the Western Mail (13 March 1915, p. 7), offered the actual German word Höllenweiber, but added ‘I suppose; it was told me in English’. The responsibility for the term was thus projected onto the enemy. The first part of ‘ladies from hell’ faces the question of gender raised by the kilt, but the second half of the phrase stares down challenges to the soldiers’ masculine power. It is noticeable that the term was enthusiastically taken up again in the Second World War.

  In the opposite direction a cartoon in The Bystander (3 April 1918) shows a female bus conductor giving a female window-cleaner a light, cigarette to cigarette, their figures androgynously attractive, before a fainting elderly woman. ‘
Oh, my grandmother’, runs the caption, ‘In her time girls would be girls: but now girls will be men.’ Taken with the passionate female gendering of weapons – Rosalie and Laura, die Braut des Soldaten and Dicke Berthe, ‘Mother’ and ‘Granny’ (see p. 199) – in a male-monopolised environment of killing, we see the war dismantling the language of stable gender patterns.

  The Pall Mall Gazette published this court report, 14 June 1916:

  Man in Woman’s Clothing

  At Highgate Police Court this morning, fashionably dressed in a long blue navy coat, with college cap and veil, and white kid gloves, Frederick Wright, aged twenty-two, a valet, was brought up on remand charged with being an idle and disorderly person, clad in female attire, with giving a false description when registered as a lodger, and with being a deserter. Defendant lodged in the house of a Belgian lady, and gave the name of Katherine Woodhouse. The Bench ordered him to be handed over to a military escort.

  In contrast to the formal terminology of the charge and the coded ‘handed over to a military escort’, with its hidden promise of retribution and correction, the details of Wright’s clothing stand out as the ‘real story’: the colours, and the assessment as ‘fashionable’. Note also the syntactic differences in the two lists, the charges being merely repetitive. Wright made no compromise in his presentation in court, despite being on remand, and for both him and the journalist, his presentation as female was arresting, as he both appears in court, and is previously charged with being, ‘clad in female attire’.

  Being so problematic, any relationship between men and women was surrounded by codes. Brophy and Partridge report the term ‘square-pushing’ for men accompanying nannies on walks with a pram (see Williamson above), while naval slang had the wonderfully bizarre ‘poodle-faking’ for walking out with a young woman, possibly based on the idea that the young man would be a substitute for a poodle. A postcard to a corporal in the BEF from ‘Gadget’ gives what might be a coded homosexual message: ‘have picked up a dear little chicken so hopes of having a go time’.457 A discourse of infantilism was manifested in a culture of ‘cute infants’ picture postcards, in which the war was defused by portraying soldiers and sweethearts as fat rosy-cheeked children, sexualised nevertheless; they are simultaneously infants and adults, female genitalia provocatively hidden by towels, or in one postcard blanked out by an imagined censor. ‘Can you see the spot?’ asks a boy-adult holding a ladder and looking up the dress of a girl-adult at the top of the ladder and holding a telescope; the text of the card, sent On Active Service, is in French and English. Occasional survivors from the war are items of correspondence or other communications which continue this into baby-talk. VAD Grace Pulvertaft’s notebook for 12 July 1916 shows a cartoon drawn by a wounded soldier with a naked Mabel Lucie Attwell type girl holding a towel in front of her, the names of the ‘ “5 teasers” of Roberts Ward’ and the caption ‘Oh! Did-ems did-ems do it?’; even within the pseudo-mother/child relationship of the hospital ward it is discomfiting, as much as the baby-talk of the private letter going from or to the Front. A letter sent in June 1917 disconcertingly uses baby-talk when talking about combat: ‘… all my dearest love to you darling & heaps of kisses from your dear little treasure who says daddy’s gone to fight the naughty shermans & she wont love em’.458 Earlier the same letter states that ‘poor Harry Saville … was shot on the 10th and died of his wounds on the 15th…’.