Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  Attacks on civilians on home territory, particularly the naval attacks on the east coast, gave rise to terms such as Churchill’s famous epithet ‘baby-killers’, used in his letter to the mayor of Scarborough in December 1914, and used again in the War Budget description of a Zeppelin raid; its crew were ‘fire fiends’ and ultimately ‘victims of their own frightfulness’.58 This term became a rallying-cry, even a banner to encourage recruiting: the east-coast raiders ‘have undoubtedly done more to aid recruiting by their notorious frightfulness’ and earned ‘condemnation of wanton Frightfulness’,59 while the Zeppelins were seen as ‘out for murder, not warfare’.60 Atrocity reports in the press and in associated leaflets and booklets whipped up this portrayal of the German soldiers as unrestrained destroyers: German Atrocities in France, a translation of the official report of the French Commission,61 published by the Daily Chronicle in 1915, used the terms ‘uncaged beasts’, ‘unbridled savagery’, ‘pitiless brutes’ and ‘abominable atrocities’. This language of sensationalist journalism, though it skirts around using the word ‘rape’ (the Germans ‘gave themselves over to immorality and disgusting brutality … unhappy women were vilely ill-treated … violated’ (p. 13)), was reflected back in the story of Kate Hume, a teenage girl who fabricated the story of her sister’s death in Belgium. Allegedly Grace Hume, a nurse, had shot a German soldier while trying to rescue a wounded British soldier, had suffered mutilation, but managed to write a brief note before dying, the note being brought back by a supposed eye-witness.62 The text included ‘Hospital has been set on fire. Germans cruel. A man here had his head cut off. My right breast has been taken away’, most of which would be familiar to anyone reading atrocity stories in the press in late 1914. The detail of breast mutilation itself became a long-lasting trope, along with soldiers cutting off children’s hands. Arthur Ponsonby wrote in 1928:

  FIGURE 4.3 Reports of German atrocities in Belgium, and the shelling of English coastal towns, sparked a number of cottage industries producing pastiche iron crosses ‘celebrating’ the sites of conquest and the German mindset, using the word ‘Kultur’. The war established irony as a dominant rhetoric at all levels.

  An amazing instance of the way atrocity lies may still remain fixed in some people’s minds, and how an attempt may be made to propagate them even now, is afforded by a letter which appeared as recently as April 12, 1927, in the Evening Star, Dunedin, New Zealand. The writer, Mr. Gordon Catto, answering another correspondent on the subject of atrocities, wrote: ‘My wife, who in 1914–15 was a nurse in the Ramsgate General Hospital, England, actually nursed Belgian women and children refugees who were the victims of Hun rapacity and fiendishness, the women having had their breasts cut off and the children with their hands hacked off at the wrists.’63

  Notable is the way the form of words becomes a model – ‘had their breasts cut off/had his head cut off’ – adding to what Ponsonby proposed was a mythology of atrocity, and which depended largely on terms such as ‘the crucified Canadian’. There is a grey area where received and passed-on propaganda met public hysteria and sensationalist journalism, where outrage provoked equally strong reaction in text. Note how a language of triumphalism greeted victories over Zeppelin raids: the memorial in Cuffley to Capt W. Robinson, who was the first to shoot down an airship over Britain (3 September 1916), describes how he ‘sent it crashing to the ground as a flaming wreck’. As the casualty lists after the Somme devastated family after family a more sombre tone is noticeable. The memorial to the children killed by a bomb dropped on North Street School, Poplar, on 13 June 1917 carries no outright condemnation, but relentlessly repeats after their names the ages of the victims: Louise A. Acompara aged five years, Alfred E. Batt aged five years, Leonard C. Bareford aged five years; and so on for the ages of the eighteen children.

  As the Schlieffen Plan devolved into zero-tolerance of civilian action against the German army, the term Schrecklichkeit emerged to describe Germany’s ‘war of terror’ against civilians. A disputed term in German, it has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, with its first documentation being from January 1917. The quickly adopted English translation, frightfulness, was in use from the end of August 1914, but Brophy and Partridge propose that it was more a term used by the press and by officers than civilians and ‘other ranks’ soldiers. If the example in The Pow-Wow:

  The U.P.S. are quartered here.

  I feel as safe as safe can be,

  No Hunnish frightfulness I fear

  The U.P.S. are quartered here64

  is typical of officer usage it is no surprise that among other ranks it was quickly deemed ripe for satire.

  Sunlight Soap offered a counter to frightfulness, naïvely perhaps, in ‘cheerfulness’; in several 1915 advertisements the nation was invited to ‘take its cue from the Navy’: ‘Cheerfulness is uplifting. Frightfulness is a Millstone round the neck. Cheerfulness will overcome Frightfulness. Etc.’, and inevitably ‘Sunlight users are always cheerful’.65 Even after the war the Daily Mail was proposing that ‘Tommy’ had won by being cheerful, and that the General Strike (‘this war against the nation’) could be overcome ‘by smiling’.66 The tone was revived in the propaganda of national optimism that characterised much of the public information output of the Second World War.

  A lower level of outrage was expressed at those who were seen as an enemy within, those liable to be seen as damaging the supposed unity of the state in wartime. Strikers, shirkers and profiteers, as well as ‘conchies’, ‘peace-bleaters’, ‘cuthberts’ and even the apparently harmless ‘knuts’ (well-dressed young men) were at various times and in a wide range of forums vilified as unpatriotic; a soldier named Jack wrote to his sweetheart Floss on 13 December 1915: ‘I see they are rounding the young men up now & serve them right if they love the country they are so proud of let them come out and fight for it’.67

  Soldiers were understandably envious of those engaged in supposedly safe munitions work (the number of deaths from explosions was not high, but the threat was there, and some of the materials left a legacy of disease, radium in particular). In the circumstances of the 1915 shell crisis there was some pragmatic justification in this, and in the resentment felt against strikers. In verses by Sgt F. Walters of the Sussex Regiment, published in the Sussex Agricultural Express the ‘men of Mother England’ are told ‘Don’t feed the German papers with your strikes’, showing an awareness of strikes’ propaganda value to the enemy.68 Rifleman H. V. Shawyer related how the mention of the word ‘strike’ alone turned a bar conversation between soldiers and munitions workers into a fight instantaneously: ‘That one word had the same effect on the military as would a red rag to a bull’.69 In a letter published in the Sheffield Evening Telegraph Driver George Hubbard RFA wrote ‘for God’s sake and for all our sakes tell your mates and friends not to strike’.70 This was followed by a letter from Pte W. Storey of the Royal Engineers in which he pleaded with former colleagues in Sheffield ‘to forget about union regulations … We have not time to say what we are or what we want to do, or if our union will allow it.’ The same letter highlighted the types of men who had not yet enlisted: ‘There are many “knuts” and “shirkers” who have not yet fallen in, so I say to them “Hurry up, and get a move on”.’ Shirking could affect not just the shirker himself – the Daily Mirror reported that ‘any employer who is convicted of giving work to a shirker’ could be prosecuted.71

  Shirkers, slackers and conscientious objectors seem at times to have overlapped; in a poem in the Fifth Gloucester Gazette the writer attacks any male ‘in mufti’, particularly ‘ “pip-squeaks” inclined to “poodle-fake” ’.72 This poem is followed by another aimed at ‘The “Conscientious” Shirker’, who belongs to ‘the Army Corps of cranks’. ‘Peace-cranks and Shirkers, Look!’ shouted the headline on the front page of the Daily Sketch on 26 January 1916, above an image of Serbian soldiers captured by the Austrian army. ‘Cranks’ was widely used: ‘The I.L.P. conference at Norwich has been called a c
onference of cranks’ claimed the Dundee Courier,73 while the Dublin Daily Express, quoting the Evening Standard, labelled them as if they were zoological specimens undergoing taxonomy: ‘too retiring to wish publicity; fears unpleasantness; poisonous, but not dangerous’.74 ‘Cranks’ being insufficiently specific, they were more often ‘peace-cranks’, though once in context, the shorter form was common: The Growler headlined an article ‘Intern Them! Father Bernard Vaughan on Peace Cranks’, quoting the speaker as saying “The crank who dares to suggest our coming to terms with the enemy …”.75

  ‘Conchies’, ‘peace-cranks’ and ‘pasty-faces’ came in for a hard time, more from civilians than from some soldiers, who saw at first hand the work of organisations such as the Friends’ Ambulance Unit (Quakers), who carried out relief work in Flanders. The Quakers were so identified with pacifism that the term ‘quaker’ was applied to any conscientious objector, Quaker or not.76 But in combat stress lines emerged verbally – John Crofts noted the term ‘conchies’ being used by soldiers to describe their own comrades surrendering.77 Politicians promoting a negotiated end to the war were called ‘peace-bleaters’.78 Soldiers’ views of conscientious objectors, and the terms employed, act as markers of individual or group mentality, the reason of the individual and the sway of the group. The Grey Brigade, the camp journal of a number of territorial regiments, including the London Scottish, the Kensingtons, the Queen’s Westminsters, and the Civil Service regiment, carried an article on 26 June 1915 asking questions about the nature of Quakers’ pacifism in time of war, but finishes with a surprisingly generous text:

  The world needs no assurance that Quakers are not cowards, however. It is sometimes harder to clench one’s teeth and turn away, than to deal the blow which would send the hated enemy staggering to the ground.

  The Friends stand for a principle which may be regarded, universally at any rate, as an untried adventure. To leave the righting of wrongs to the conscience of the wrong-doer, and to the hand of God has sometimes been a satisfactory solution of a difficulty. As far as we can see at present armed evil must be met by armed good, and we are leaving it to another generation to try the experiment of unarmed righteousness.

  But one thing is certain – they are brave men.

  This was strong writing at a time when conscientious objectors were being physically attacked without much public sympathy; the same journal carried a report on ‘peace cranks’ on 2 October that year. The War Illustrated carried a photograph of Canadian soldiers ‘executing’ a banner seized from a ‘peace meeting’ in London, labelled ‘ “Glad rag” trophies of the “Canada crowd” ’.79 Another party of Canadian soldiers rushed the platform at a meeting of the Union of Democratic Control on 29 December 1915 at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon, London; this was reported the following day in the Daily Express as ‘Utter rout of the pro-Germans’ (p. 2). The link between pro-peace activists and the enemy was repeated in the press through the war: ‘Peace Cranks’ New Plot’,80 ‘Peace Cranks Routed – ILP Meeting stopped by Patriots’,81 ‘It must have been very galling to peace cranks and friends of Germany … to hear the ringing declaration of the chairman that Labour meant to get on with the war’.82 In 1918 the perceived danger of a negotiated peace meant that peace activists were seen as the ‘Pacifist Peril’,83 reporting a meeting at which Lord Beresford questioned the source of pacifists’ income, implying that they might be funded from Germany, and that ‘an enemy in our midst was more dangerous than one at the front’.

  The Fifth Gloucester Gazette 15 June 1915 carried a spoof advertisement for an ‘airy chateau in Northern France’ ‘suitable to Strike Leader or to Conchologist desirous of studying shells of every variety’. The extended joke includes references to gas supplies laid on, pollarded trees, etc. developing the ‘conchie/conchologist/shell’ pattern. Wordplay though often collapsed into name-calling, such as that in the Western Mail where an alphabet poem gives ‘ink-slinging’ as ‘pacifists’ delight’ and calls C.O.s ‘jelly-fish’84 (this curious term appears again in the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette where the ‘peace-party’ are described as ‘cosmopolitan jellyfish’85), or the Western Times headlined a short article ‘Bishop of Liverpool and the Pasty-Faces’, in which the bishop suggested that ‘such people … should leave the country’.86

  The use of ‘pasty-face’ linked conscientious objectors physically to the enemy; pale skin was proposed as a German physical characteristic, seen in Hindenburg himself: Major-General Alfred Turner, having twice met the Field-Marshall, described him as ‘a tall, stout, typical Hun, with a big, square, box-like head and pasty face …’.87 This supposed characteristic was around before the war: ‘He was a German, with a large pasty face and a small moustache’.88 A further link was that, like Germans, they wore glasses (the idea that Germans wore glasses was so fixed that it became a nationwide in-joke, ‘Through German Spectacles’ being used as a column heading from September 191489). It was widely believed that unlike German soldiers, few British soldiers wore spectacles: ‘the majority of German officers probably wear glasses. In the British Army, however, spectacles are as rare as beards’.90 Though this was originally proposed as being down to some British recruits being rejected on grounds of poor eyesight, while German doctors prescribed glasses to make recruits more efficient, this was quickly taken up as evidence of poor German physique, and thus as a physiological link with British pacifists whose glasses became almost a badge of identity. At a peace-activist meeting the ILP politician F. W. Jowett ‘glinted through his spectacles’,91 and though a group of pacifists on a labour-fatigue were described by Arthur Conan Doyle as ‘working with a will’ they were still ‘half-mad cranks … neurotic and largely bespectacled’.92

  The proposed peace conference in Stockholm (1917) offered more material for critics of the peace movement. Not unlike the ‘he called me German and other rude names’ sideswipe, a rare insult suggested that someone might ‘go to Stockholm’, while newspapers expressed their disdain for the project with articles such as ‘Stockholm Again’, which referred to the ‘Stockholm palaver’.93

  Pacifists aside, for the men at the Front there were many whose absence or apparent lack of input into the war effort were an affront; these included staff officers, conscientious objectors, munitions workers, ‘blighters’ (‘A man who stays in Blightie when he ought to be at the Front’),94 military instructors, and ‘cuthberts’. Cuthberts were not just people who had landed in government jobs at home or staff jobs behind the lines, they were people who had deliberately sought these out through influence or excuses, to avoid going to the Front, and then took life easy. Partridge95 describes a cuthbert as ‘a slacker’, a ‘funk-hole’ as a government office, indicating the degree of resentment felt. Fraser and Gibbons state that the name was coined by an Evening News cartoonist, ‘Poy’, who pictured cuthberts as frightened rabbits, presumably always living in fear of being called up, which explains why the term included ‘men who deliberately avoided military service, Conscientious objectors, etc.’ rather than just those who had managed to bag a safe desk job. Collinson describes them as ‘limpets desirous of sticking to their government office or funk-holes’.96 ‘The Slacker’ was the subject of a short story in the Vivid War Weekly, who only gets to woo the girl of his dreams (‘Kiddie’) by enlisting and becoming ‘a man – a hero of heroes’.97

  Profiteers caused lasting resentment98 – Ernest Weekley in his Etymological Dictionary of 1921 turned his scorn on them in his entry for ‘profit’: ‘ “Profiteer” was coined, on “privateer”, to describe those who levied blackmail on the nation’s necessity by exacting inordinate prices for their commodities or labour’. To show that the phenomenon was not merely experienced in Britain he gives also the German Kriegsgewinnler. But there was a question as to the correct form of the word – ‘profiteer’ here described a person, but should that be the form for what that person does? The Lancashire Evening Post addressed this question on 9 August 1919 under the headline:

  Not In The Di
ctionary

  Sir Frederick Banbury’s complaint that the new measure against ‘profiteering’ is directed against a deed without a name is hardly one of the more serious objections to it. I believe, though, that he is right in claiming that the word is not to be found in the dictionaries. The credit for inventing it belongs, I fancy, to the ‘New Age,’ [New Age magazine, February 1916] which applied it not to its present use, but to the operation of selling for any profit at all in a general indictment of the capitalist system. ‘Profiting’ would, perhaps, have met the case here, though ‘profiteering’ undoubtedly sounds more opprobrious. This method of suggesting odium by slipping in another syllable is not common in English. In Italian it is quite frequent. There are all sorts of philological puzzles suggested by the new word. Is a man who profiteers a profiteer? Or must he be called a profiteerer? The new term has come to stay, notwithstanding Sir Frederick’s linguistic purism. I cherish a copy of Hansard in which the President of the Board of Education is credited with saying that children must be given the best education by which they are capable of ‘profiteering’.

  Was there some underlying need to have the ‘–eer’ suffix fixed for verb or noun forms? If so, the earlier adoption of the verb ‘commandeer’, from the Dutch,99 with ‘pigeoneer’ (American English, ‘pigeon-handler’) and ‘munitioneer’100 did not help. Weekley dated ‘hoarder’ to 1916 (it was much older, but became widely used in this year), but this was considerably less descriptive than its German counterpart Hamstertante (hamster-aunt).101 Least dangerous, but among the most exasperating for those with jobs involving extreme pressure and fear, were those who talked. A hard-hitting editorial in The Gasper attacks ‘blatherers’ like Lord Buckmaster, then Lord Chancellor,102 while John Masefield, base hospital orderly and later poet laureate and a sensitive writer of children’s books, was driven to distraction by those who philosophised on the war, especially G. L. Dickenson, whose tract The War and a Way Out (1915) suggested a possible resolution, an idealistic one perhaps. Masefield’s view was ‘God deliver me from talkers’.103