While ‘other ranks’ suffered from shellshock or were diagnosed as ‘hysterics’, officers suffered neurasthenia.
The linguistic distinction between officers and men sat alongside other distinctions: separate hospitals, the context of comfortable foreign travel for soldiers’ phrasebooks, and the awareness that men, not officers, were ‘Tommies’. While ‘other ranks’ suffered from shell shock or were diagnosed as ‘hysterics’, officers suffered neurasthenia.18 The docility with which British soldiers accepted this, compared to the supposedly undisciplined Australians, or the allegedly brainwashed Germans, puzzled many contemporary observers; C. E. W. Bean put it down to the majority of private soldiers believing themselves to be ‘inferior, socially and mentally, to their officers’.19 This perhaps made possible a joke such as that in the War Budget in which disabled soldiers retraining as shoemakers are said to be ‘entering the “upper” class’.20
Awareness of class was a given in pre-war British society. The middle classes were able to afford day-servants, railway carriages were labelled in three classes, and public houses, schools, churches, and places of entertainment were all segregated according to the economic status of their clientele. Wealth and deference were visible in the towns, and the wealthy and titled in the countryside enjoyed a dominance that was not distant from feudal;21 Marwick’s assessment shows the imbalance, 80 per cent of the population being working class, with an income less than a quarter of that of the salaried class.22 Indicators of assumptions of superiority and privilege appear all through the incidental documentation of the period: an envelope from the Front, addressed simply to ‘Messrs Harrods, London SW’;23 Ethel Bilbrough’s diary entry, ‘we met an extremely poor and common man, but excitement and danger make everyone equal’;24 VAD Enid Bagnold wretchedly realising that her English is practically incomprehensible to working-class soldiers.25
Awareness of class was a given in pre-war British society. The middle classes were able to afford day-servants, railway carriages were labelled in three classes, and public houses, schools, churches, and places of entertainment were all segregated according to the economic status of their clientele. Wealth and deference were visible in the towns, and the wealthy and titled in the countryside enjoyed a dominance that was not distant from feudal; Marwick’s assessment shows the imbalance, 80 per cent of the population being working class, with an income less than a quarter of that of the salaried class.
All of this was manifested in the first months of the war. When Britain was managing the distribution and accommodation of Belgian refugees care was taken to match the social status of guest and host – ‘Everything is now being put in order for the reception of Ilford’s visitors, who are all of the superior artisan class’.26 Lancelot Spicer talks about enlisting in a ‘public schools battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, the ranks of which were drawn from one’s social contemporaries’.27 ‘We are in a Division of some fame, and a fine Battalion we are, full of the better-class men. It is the “first city of Birmingham Battalion”, once half made up of gentlemen, and still full of clerks and educated folk’, wrote Stephen Hewett in February 1916, noting that the officers in his company mess were all ‘gentlemen’, and later ‘the officers happen to be gentlemen, which robs the life out here of the only terrors it ever had for me’.28 The idea that fear of dealing with people outside one’s own class could be worse than fear of the trenches was not a huge exaggeration. The same threat provided a strong theme in recruitment in 1914/15, in the creation of the Pals Battalions, and the sense of welcoming men into an environment they could trust, before sending them to kill and be killed. The social make-up of Kitchener’s citizen armies ranged widely, from adventurers to former soldiers, shop-workers, factory hands and clerks, as ‘all the recruiting offices are besieged by young and able-bodied men, many of them of the prosperous middle class’.29 By the end of August 1914 prominent citizens were finding a role for themselves in recruiting locally, raising money to clothe and equip local young men, and wanting some recognition for their work in the identification of these units as locally created. Other groups came together via workplaces or clubs, such as the 10th (Stockbrokers) Battalion (1,000 men), who were in effect the first of the Pals Battalions.30 The key idea in the success of the recruitment drive from the end of August was that men should be serving alongside people they felt comfortable with; Lord Derby’s letter to the Daily Post on 27 August 1914 proposed that men would be willing to enlist ‘if they felt assured that they would be able to serve with their friends and not be put in a battalion with unknown men as their companions’; the concept ‘amongst friends’ is repeated in the next sentence, but more bluntly F. C. Stanley reported the Liverpool Post’s observation that the day’s recruiting on 31 August 1914 had made up the full number in an hour, with ‘no undesirables’.31 With woollen khaki in short supply, local access to cloth enhanced the ability of recruiting committees to supply their own battalions, at the same time increasing the sense of identity, often bolstered by badges, uniform designs, hats, which in turn supported the idea that units could be made up to suit any area, profession, class or interest. Battalion names such as the Artists’ Rifles, the Arts and Crafts Battalion, the Church Lads Brigade, or Grimsby Chums indicate people enlisting together; Hull had a Commercials Battalion, a Tradesmen’s Battalion, a Sportsmen’s Battalion, and by the end of 1914 a fourth battalion with no specific identification, known as the Hull T’Others. Class was the key to recruiting: ‘surely Leeds can furnish with ease from its offices and warehouses the thousand young fellows, all of the middle-class, that are required for a battalion’;32 ‘I am sure there are many hundreds of middle class young married men (twenty-five to thirty-five years), earning from £2OO to £4OO per year … who are most anxious to join Kitchener’s Army’.33 ‘Middle class’, ‘better class’, ‘friends’, all indicated people looking over their shoulders nervously at those worse off, while ‘tradesmen’ looked up – the Hull ‘Tradesman’ Pals were mostly manual workers;34 there was recruiting in Leeds in September 1914 for two ‘Workers Pals Battalions’, but recruitment was slow and the Workers Battalions were rather overshadowed by the ‘Leeds Pals’, officially the ‘City of Leeds Battalion of Businessmen’.35 While the Leeds Pals were undergoing their medicals on 10 September ‘60 young men of the artisan class enrolled their names’ for the ‘new workers’ “Pals” battalions’.36 The recruits were mostly from manual trades, with a few clerks; by the following evening 400 men had come forward. By 15 September recruitment for the Workers Pals had fallen to around 60 a day,37 making a total of about 1,200 by 18 September, half the number desired. On 22 September the Yorkshire Evening Post expressed the hope of Leeds sending 13,000 soldiers to the army, including ‘1,200 Leeds “Pals” Battalion, 2,500 Leeds Workers’ Battalions’.38 On 26 September recruitment for the Leeds Workers’ ‘Pals’ Battalions was closed, 1,200 short of the hoped for number.39 It seems likely that the preferential recruitment of the battalion of businessmen in Leeds, excluding artisans and manual workers, led to increased class tension, compounded by a huge crowd at the railway station, cheering the Leeds Pals as they went off to training.40
Education was one of the signifiers of class status, and it continued to be manifested during the war, with the UPS Battalions’ trench journals decorated with literary and classical allusions and Latin quotations; Latin aphorisms were regular sights on the pages of The Pow-Wow, and Dum spiro spero (while I breathe I hope) was not out of place in an officer’s postcard home.41 Literary ambition became apparent on thousands of pages of trench journals, and something of a joke, according to the Morning Rire (2nd Irish Guards), whose ‘What We learnt in London’ column included: ‘That all the publishers want to take 2nd Lieutenant Lynch into partnership’. But a huge gulf in both education and speech between officers and men became apparent to Stephen Graham:
I found that no one knew anything of literature. Our national glories of the word were naught to my mates. They were deaf to the songs which should
thrill and inspire. Shakespeare was a mere name. Tennyson and Browning and Keats were unknown. If you quoted to them from Keats you must explain that a man called Keats wrote it. If the soldiers opened the books they could not grasp what the poems were about. Our prized language when used in a noble way was like a foreign tongue. If you spoke to them in normal correct English they did not quite understand and you had to re-express yourself in halting working man’s English, full of ‘you see’ and ‘it’s like this’ and expletives and vulgarisms, or the working man would be rather offended at the way you spoke and imitate you in a drawl when your back was turned.42
The men responded by imitating officers’ accents – still known as ‘talking Rupert’.
This raises questions about the social locus from which so many memoirs and contemporary collections of letters were written. Christopher Dowling, in 1980 Keeper of Education and Publications at the Imperial War Museum, starts his preface to George Coppard’s With a Machine Gun to Cambrai ([1968] 1986) with: ‘Of the scores of military reminiscences of the First World War, almost all are the work of officers or of men, who, though serving in the ranks, by education and upbringing belonged to the officer class’; the back cover blurb describes it as ‘almost unique in that it was written by a private soldier’.
Slang too carried class labels, regardless of rank; the Swansea Cambria Daily Leader noted that ‘class slang of all kinds is interesting to most people … none is more so than that common to officers and men of the Fleet’.43 But small comments indicate class associations: a private writing the 9th Royal Scots Active Service Diary for 13 to 15 April 1915 wrote about stumbling over a railway in the dark, ‘that put (in vulgar phrase) the tin hat on it’;44 the Glamorgan Gazette created a glossary from ‘the letter of a sailor on board His Majesty’s ship Caroline’:45 some examples – ‘Stripey’ for sergeant of marines, ‘grub-spoiler’ for cook, ‘crusher’ for ship’s policeman, ‘oily’ for engineer – indicate that this was coming from a rating rather than an officer. Curiously this glossary does contain the word ‘matloes’, from the French, but generally officers and educated men slipped French into their writing, and presumably their speech, more naturally; typical of Masefield’s letters home are ‘My friend has gone to dejeuner’ and ‘often a plusiers reprises till the cart would shog to one side’.46 Tommy French was often identified as specifically not officer slang: Edmund Blunden stated that ‘Ocean Villas’ was the form of Auchonvilliers used by ‘my batman and a large number of his cronies’,47 and Lancelot Spicer writes home, ‘That was meant to be the idea – Compree, as Tommy says when he thinks he’s speaking French’.48
If speaking French properly was seen as typical of the officer class, then certain slang expressions or speech mannerisms were seen as ‘officer slang’. Some of this might still be recognisable as upper class slang – ‘Hang it all’, used by the Officers’ Training Corps cadet,49 or the P. G. Wodehouse style of ‘just as the working party comes in and gets under cover, she [‘Minnie’ – Minenwerfer, the trench mortar] lets slip one of her disgusting bombs, and undoes the work of about four hours. It was a joke at first, but we are getting fed up now. That’s the worst of the Bosche. He starts by being playful; but if not suppressed at once, he gets rough; and that, of course, spoils all the harmony of the proceedings’.50 There were playful uses of French and German – ‘degommy’ for dégommé (sacked, of officers), ‘der tag’ for anything much desired. There was the slumming use of street slang – for example The Gasper, used as the title of the UPS Battalions’ magazine. Old Army slang was taken forwards – ‘stellenbosched’ (sent home in disgrace), from the Boer war, and ‘mufti’; terms from officers’ tasks, such as ‘comic cuts’ for memoranda, and ‘propaganda’ for rumours, were noted as officer slang terms.51 Brophy and Partridge also note ‘battle bowler’, ‘stopping a blast’ (being shouted at), ‘as you were’ and ‘jump to it’ as officer slang. Officer slang could be part of a studied ease, almost a decadence: the Daily Express in June 1918 reported on convalescing officers relaxing at the seaside, their ‘indolence … almost epicurean; their slang is subtle super-slang’.52
A particularly difficult aspect of the war is the way that so many people writing at the time, especially those who had been through the public school system, seemed to try to apply the moral rules of sport to warfare.
A particularly difficult aspect of the war is the way that so many people writing at the time, especially those who had been through the public school system, seemed to try to apply the moral rules of sport to warfare: fight fair, as you would play fair, according to rules; be decent to the surrendering enemy; be chivalrous in victory and uncomplaining in defeat. How much of this actually took place is difficult to know – no doubt sometimes it was the case, and it was a useful myth. As Brophy and Partridge put it, ‘decent men cloaked the nature of war on every possible occasion with their own, quite irrelevant, sentiment and unkindliness’.53 It was not just officer-speak: ‘Jerry is no sportsman’, wrote a Birmingham soldier to his parents;54 and, at least early in the conflict, British sportsmanship was recognised by the Germans: ‘The English act and behave like proper sportsmen’.55 ‘Sportsman’ and ‘gentleman’ closely overlapped, part of the recognised expectations of behaviour of the upper-middle classes in both Britain and Germany – in October 1914 it was deemed acceptable to leave a wounded comrade ‘in the hands of the Saxons who are known to be gentlemen’.56 Generally though, the distinction was clear:
Given half a chance, the natural inclination of our men is to wage war as they would play cricket—like sportsmen. You’ve only to indicate to them that this or that is a rule of the game—of any game—and they’re on it at once. And if you indicated nothing, of their own choice they’d always play roughly fair and avoid the dirty trick by instinct. But the Boche washes all that out. Generosity and decency strike him as simply foolishness. And you cannot possibly treat him as a sportsman, because he’ll do you down at every turn if you do.57
Occasionally there appears a sense that, especially early on in the conflict, this was some kind of game, employing the language of the fairground: one nurse in November 1914 was given the opportunity to fire a large gun: ‘The Major looked down at me and said, “Would you like to have a shot at the Boches?” and I said “Rather!” ’
It is not easy at this distance to take these terms with the gravity that applied to them at the time: a report in March 1916 tells the story of a French battery destroying a hidden German battery and the German artillery taking revenge by destroying a French village. Clearly the motives and the deliberated revenge are imagined, but the process is given as ‘one that reveals the callous and unsporting side of the detestable character of the Hun’.58 But how seriously in 1915 did people take some of the advice in War-Time Tips: ‘It is not “etiquette” for a soldier to try to shoot the commander of a force unless he unnecessarily exposes himself to fire. It is permissible to try to take him prisoner, however.’ ‘If, by any chance, your company or detachment should be forced to surrender, you must not discard your arms and slip away. It is against the rules.’59 Occasionally there appears a sense that, especially early on in the conflict, this was some kind of game, employing the language of the fairground: one nurse in November 1914 was given the opportunity to fire a large gun: ‘The Major looked down at me and said, “Would you like to have a shot at the Boches?” and I said “Rather!” ’60 Even as late as 1917 The Tatler was running a regular series of group photographs of officers with the headline ‘Engaged in “The Great Adventure” ’.61
Despite the change of attitude at the Front, particularly in 1918, when fear turned to grim pragmatism, sportsmanship was still being put out as moral propaganda: E. B. Osborn wrote in his preface to an anthology of poetry, The Muse in Arms (1918), ‘The Germans, and even our Allies, cannot understand why this stout old nation persists in thinking of war as sport; they do not know that sportsmanship is our new homely name, derived from a racial predilection for comparing great things to
small, for the chevalerie of the Middle Ages’.62 Synonymous with ‘being a sportsman’ was ‘playing the game’: ‘The Germans have played the game in that they have buried many of our men here’.63 The imagery continued post-war: General Plumer’s speech in Torquay, reported in the Daily Mail 6 May 1919, praised the Allied forces, who had ‘played together for the side’.
‘Sport’ meant different things to different people. The Sportsmen’s Battalion raised in September 1914 was one for ‘upper and middle class men, physically fit, and able to shoot and ride’; applicants were assessed on their ability to ‘shoot, ride, and walk well’.64 After some debate over the question of whether professional football should continue, a Footballers’ Battalion was formed, comprising professional players and fans. But these sportsmen were overshadowed by the obsession for playing football at the Front. British soldiers were perceived as being football mad: there was the term Fussballinadianer used by the Germans, and liaison officers were driven distracted trying to borrow land from French farmers for what they called ‘le foolball’.65 Bavarian soldiers in 1914 were described as being ‘puzzled’ by the British soldiers’ use of football cries: in a bizarre episode ‘the Germans were shot and bayoneted to such cries as “On the ball,” “Mark your man,” and “Here’s for goal” ’.66 Charles Douie recorded a football match being relocated outside Albert to escape shelling: ‘The game was terminated, without definite result, owing to a battery opening fire with shrapnel. This disregard of the decencies on the part of the German Army was the subject of much unfavourable comment’.67 Yet a captured German officer suggested that his own soldiers might have picked up the habit of playing football behind the trenches from seeing British soldiers in the distance doing the same thing.68 A curious footnote to this is the fact that out of the 10,000 names given to trenches on the Allied side of the Front, only two referenced football grounds, Aston Trench and Villa Trench;69 perhaps a kind of truce was in operation.
Words and The First World War Page 31