Even where there was not direct contact, children picked up foreign terms: On 7 September 1917 The Cheltenham Looker-On stated that the British soldier ‘has an irresistible way with the children, who are growing up to speak a very quaint language. They live in an atmosphere of Tommy’s slang. Their parents use it. Their big French or Belgian brothers on leave make use of some of the phrases’. The war as a tool for language learning was formalised in the Hong Kong Education Department, whose publication War Stories in English and Chinese was designed for ‘Chinese boys who have been studying English for three to four years’. Setting out a series of short bilingual texts covering Edith Cavell, Capt Fryatt, Jack Cornwell, the Lusitania, with a familiar sense of outrage, the preface assured readers that ‘all statements regarding the war herein contained have been carefully checked, as it is not desired to fight Germany with her own weapons’,151 the moral precepts being reinforced as part of learning the language.
Using the war as a case-study for moral teaching lies at the heart of Elizabeth O’Neill’s Battles for Peace: the story of the Great War told for children. Written before the Armistice, O’Neill’s final sentence states ‘this, the last of all the wars, should be written down in history as the war for Peace’. Yet the book is loaded with condemnation of German attitudes, right up to the last pages,152 which castigate Germans for night air raids, Edith Cavell, the Lusitania, killing women and children. Quoting ‘an English statesman’ as saying ‘there must be no next time’, the clear message is stated that ‘this war is a war to end war’. The phrase ‘scrap of paper’ is reiterated, to remind child-readers of the cause of the war, but the key contrast brings together war and sport: ‘Only victory mattered. This is what the Germans believed and many of them said it … The only thing that matters, say the Germans, is to win’; in contrast, ‘Almost every other nation believed that the way in which you do things matters most. In games it is a good thing to win, but the great thing is to play hard and fairly.’ O’Neill’s moral precepts for governing rules of engagement were in tune with the wider thinking about how Britain fought the war, often described as ‘clean’ or ‘sportingly’. But her assessment of the Somme shows how children were exposed to propaganda: ‘The Germans … suggested that they [the Allies] had wasted their men as they [the Germans] had done at Verdun. This was not true. The Allied losses were small except in places where the desperate courage of the men, as at Delville Wood and Guillemont, led to prolonged struggles for some coveted position’.153 Edward Parrott’s The Children’s Story of the War engages ‘us’, with a slight delay from actual events, through its scores of parts gathered into ten volumes. There are distinct persons evident in the writing, the ‘I’ of the narrator – ‘I have told you in these pages of scores of heroic deeds’;154 the ‘we’ of the British, imperial and colonial armies, and the ‘you’ of the reader – ‘Thiepval, you will remember, was the one important point in the German second line which we had not yet taken’.155 This structure frames the language teaching which goes on through the text which embraces the pronunciation of foreign words and some etymology. Maurepas is pronounced ‘More-pah’;156 ‘poilu’ has a footnote: ‘Pwah-loo, French privates; so called because most of them had let their beards grow’.157 The end of the first volume includes a section on the organisation of the army, and a glossary of military terms. But through the narrative there are moral judgements made, as well as familiar references to sport as a moral paradigm. Parrott’s assessment of the execution of Capt Fryatt for attempting to ram a German submarine with his packet boat, was that ‘no fouler murder was ever committed’; he quotes the Prime Minister as saying ‘this was an atrocious crime against the law of nations and the usages of war’. ‘On the battlefield our soldiers grimly said, “We’ll make the Germans pay for this”.’ But within the same story Capt Müller of the Emden is described as ‘an exceptional German. Most of his fellow-countrymen have not the slightest notion of how to “play the game” ’.158 As there was no easy way to steer round the moral judgements as to the conduct of war together with those surrounding the reasons for the war, sport, its rules and manners, from a rather public school background, provided a way of trying to bring to children, and adults, some meaning to what was happening.
The family
One of the most enduring texts of the war is the caption to the poster published in 1915, ‘Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?’ It implies that being involved also meant being able to look back at the conflict – essentially surviving it – and being a father. While probably more sons than fathers served in the forces the concept of the family was at the core of the experience of the war.
An important aspect of how family relationships were affected linguistically by the war is seen in the use of the word ‘give’. People ‘gave their lives’, but more specifically parents, and especially mothers, ‘gave’ their sons. This took a number of forms, ‘giving sons to the army’ (or to ‘the services’, or occasionally to ‘the king’), ‘giving sons to fight’, or just ‘giving’; the tense of the verb may be significant. ‘Bramley Family Give Four Sons’ is the headline of an article about a family with sons in the Army and Navy,159 while the Manchester Courier reported on a family with seven sons serving: ‘the mother, Mrs Cundell, is naturally proud to give her sons for their country’s service’.160 ‘Mrs Dyson … has given her four sons to the army’ begins an article in the Burnley News.161 Not only families were involved – countries and towns ‘gave’ their sons, in a familial pattern: ‘Dundee and Forfar Give Their Sons’ stated a headline in the Dundee Courier.162 The term was used for raising money to pay for the war, in advertisements which quoted the Chancellor of the Exchequer: ‘Shall it ever be said that we were willing to give our sons, but we were not willing to give our money?’163
Employers were even put in a dubious position of ‘giving’ their employees: Lord Derby sent a letter to a recruiting meeting in Ormskirk suggesting that ‘farmers [should] give their sons and labourers up to join the army’.164 A writer in the Fifth Gloucester Gazette put the concept as: ‘Some parents give their sons without / A murmur to the war’. 165 Difficulties arose as people examined the nature of the giving: in an article about the danger of alcoholism in the army, a mother is reported as saying ‘I gave my son’s body for the King, but not his soul!’166 The presence of the past tense tends to indicate a deeper loss: ‘Gave Her Sons’ is the headline of an article about a French mother with three sons dead and the survivor a prisoner,167 a widow ‘gave her son for King and Country’,168 ‘Mrs Roberts gave four of her sons to the army. One son … was killed early in the war, and another son … is missing’.169
Sybil Morrison, described as a pacifist and ambulance driver, wrote after the war: ‘there was this attitude, “I have given my son”, which always upset me – because nobody has the right to “give” somebody else and I think on the whole they did go willingly’.
‘Giving’ meant something distinct if the ‘given’ person was killed: sacrifice, permanence, a present absence, compared to the sense of ‘loan, with risk’ for those who hoped, believed, assumed their sons would return. ‘Giving your son to the army’ could thus become ‘giving your son’. ‘A hardy veteran of the mine who had given his son for his country’s sake’ is typical of this term.170 Sybil Morrison, described as a pacifist and ambulance driver, wrote after the war: ‘there was this attitude, “I have given my son”, which always upset me – because nobody has the right to “give” somebody else and I think on the whole they did go willingly’.171
Family letters and above all postcards from the Front tend to use a language that tries to affirm stability – ‘Dear Dad, am going on alright’, ‘Dear Bro + Sis, Hoping you are both well as this PC leaves me in the pink’, ‘Dear Nell, Coming home in a day or two’, ‘Dear Mother, Will you please send 1 doz Gillette razor blades’, ‘Hope Father and George are working’. Often a soldier’s letter to an older child reads like an exchange between equals: ‘Dear Gwen, I received your letter and
fags and was very pleased with them. I was glad to here (sic) you and Mum and Bert were quite well as I am the same in the best of health. The weather seems to be on the shift and nobody will be sorry to have it a little warmer. Good luck, your loving Dad’.172 More uncomfortable to modern readers is correspondence between the child and the father in the forces, letters and cards which only rarely refer to combat. ‘Dear Daughter, Received both your very welcome letters today, glad you are all first class, I am in the pink …’, the string of clichés being relieved by the obvious and heartfelt ‘I have nothing much to write about, only that I hope to be home with you both and all soon’.173 This is more typical than when George Fairclough wrote home on 18 December 1914 with a message for his daughter: ‘Tell Olive that Father Christmas will come next year for certain – he had to go to Germany this year as there are a lot of little girls who have no Daddy’.174 In postcards or letters from father to child rare references to the war tend to maintain a cheerful tone: ‘Jackie, Here are some German prisoners the French have captured. I often see them here. These lot look pleased they are captured. How are you going on? Being a good lad I hope!! Love Father’.175 Endearments might make the war seem all but forgotten: ‘My dear Rabbit, I have sent all the others a card so I had better send you one to avoid a row. How are your rabbits going on I am jolly anxious to see them’.176 Awareness of the importance of obligations, despite the war, is evident in: ‘Dear Olive, Just a line to say I am well hopeing (sic) you all are the same I should have sent what you asked for but we are having it rough now. Dad’.177 Correspondence with a child allowed an adult to be momentarily somewhere else. Perhaps 2nd Lt Arthur Lamb’s standard use of ‘mummy’ (‘My goodness mummy dear, the cold!’178) in letters home referred to a reassuring memory of earlier years. Some normality could be suggested by sending postcards for a collection: ‘One could spend a long time here as there are so many places of interest. I am just starting a series of 11 cards so look out for them. Love, Dad’,179 ‘Dear Katie, Another card for your album. We have now left the fighting zone’.180 Incidental tourism and its postcards allowed almost a semblance of holiday, the novelty of the foreign lifting the spirits of both sender and reader: ‘Dear Ma, I have just had a feed of snails, not so bad. Arthur’.181
In the interest of reassuring the people back home, the possibility of never returning was less referred to, and the more shocking when it appears: an American postcard showing a doughboy on the step of a train, holding up a child, the caption beneath reading ‘The Last Kiss From Papa?’ (the message reads ‘I hope I won’t see this time’); or a British cartoon postcard of a family seeing off the soldier father at the station, with a tactless child saying ‘I’ll look fer yer name in the casualty lists.’ In a community so brutalised by war that the notification of death had come through to humour, this equals any of the cynicism of the Front.
5 OWNING THE LANGUAGE
Class
In one of his essays on the slang of the armies of 1914 to 1918 in Words! Words! Words! Eric Partridge proposes that internal influence within a language would be ‘always much stronger in a live and lively language than any external, i.e. virtually foreign, influences can be .… The mixing of the classes is more potent than the mixing of the nations’.1 Clearly slang moved up and down the social scale in English during the war, particularly at the Front, but the influence of class on wartime language was more than just a case of working-class soldiers learning a little public school slang and officers learning the slang of the factory and the street; and Partridge believed that the ‘educated’ classes gained far more from the contact, in terms of vivid language, than the uneducated, who picked up little more than some journalese and officialese.2 However, following Jean Aitchison’s proposal that sub-dominant groups adopt the language of dominant groups,3 the adoption of working class slang by the upper classes during the war indicates that the upper classes at some level recognised the working classes as socially dominant during this period, though cause and effect here may be difficult to unravel.
Like any profession, the Army has developed its own jargon, and still carries a general rank differentiation, between officers, holding commissions, and ‘other ranks’, denoting privates, guardsmen, troopers, gunners, riflemen, etc.; within the Army the term ‘other ranks’ carried, and carries, no sense of disrespect. But the use of ‘other’ in this verbal classification carried a risk of confusion, seen in a letter to the Manchester Guardian in which a former soldier remembered receiving notification of the impending arrival at an RAF HQ of ‘300 pigeons and 3 other ranks’.4 A sense of social distinction was present in the term ‘temporary gentleman’ for the New Armies raised from 1914.5 A. J. Dawson in the preface to A “Temporary Gentleman” in France writes that the German army claimed to have killed off all the British officers in France in 1914, and that no more were available;6 certainly the more strongly visible designations of rank, later abandoned, did lead to a disproportionate number of British officers being killed in the early months of the war. The British Army did immediately set about training officers from among those who had had some experience in Officers’ Training Corps (OTC) in public schools and universities, along with ‘members of a University’ and ‘other Young Men of good general education’,7 and later built up Officer Cadet Battalions. The resulting officers were 2nd lieutenants, or ‘temporary officers’, temporary as they had enlisted not permanently, but according to the recruitment forms ‘for a period of three years or until the war is concluded’.8 The ‘gentlemanly’ status of previous officers led to these new officers being ‘temporary gentlemen’, a term that provoked some derision and perhaps some pride; Dawson’s largely fictional main character (who gets promotion from lance corporal to 2nd lieutenant in December 1914), previously a South London estate agent, uses the term ‘temporary gentleman’ frequently in his letters home, without any sense of this being a derogatory term. There was even a possibility of apparent social improvement – William Cushing, Temporary 2nd Lieutenant, arrived for his medical examination to be told by the Medical Officer that ‘we’, i.e. officers and gentlemen, ‘do not suffer from such defects [as hammer toes]’.9 However, formal publications always reminded readers that many elevations were only temporary: The War Dragon, the regimental magazine of the East Kent Regiment, recorded ‘2nd-Lieut. (temp. Lieut.) W. A. MacFadyen to be Lieut., with precedence from 8th January, 1916.’10 Though the exigencies of combat levelled the playing field, and as Stephen Graham wrote, ‘the uniform of the King, whilst it enlarges and increases some, making “men” into “temporary gentlemen,” does narrow and straiten others, making “gentlemen” to be temporarily “men” ’,11 there were problems of adjustment post-war; a popular post-war comedy exploring this situation, The Temporary Gentleman, was subtitled ‘A study in wartime snobbery’,12 and Brophy and Partridge labelled the term ‘snob journalese’.13 Emma Duffin turned the concept round, noting that she had a patient who was a ‘gentleman ranker’.14
Recognition of the camaraderie of the trenches and the positive effects of the mingling of social classes was reflected in the decision by the Imperial War Graves Commission to lay aside rank in ensuring that uniform grave-stones were used for all ranks of service personnel in war cemeteries around the world, thus creating a long-lasting image of the First World War of equality in death; this was supported in a House of Commons debate, 17 December 1919, by a former officer, Trevelyan Thomson MP, who said ‘we desired that if we fell we should be buried together under one general system and in one comradeship of death.… I think it would do much to undo the value of the comradeship that was cemented by the War if afterwards we had a considerable distinction made, measured by the wealth of those who remain behind rather than by the service given overseas’.15 It was a long way from the beginning of the war, when the war diary of the 1st Life Guards could record on 30 October 1914: ‘Missing – Captain Lord Hugh Grosvenor, Captain E. D. F. Kelly, Lieutenant Hon. Gerald Ward, Lieutenant J. Close-Brooks, 100 rank and file.’16 But de
ath in the war did not by any means indicate an end to the language of social stratification in the business of commemoration: the flowers carried by mourners past the Cenotaph and the grave of the Unknown Warrior in 1920 ‘were brought by men and women, old and young, principally of the humbler working class, many of whom must have travelled from the farthest parts of London’.17
Words and The First World War Page 30