Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  ‘Sport’ also meant betting, and this indeed was common in the trenches;70 in 1914 the use of the word ‘sport’ to mean hunting typified another area of speech that showed class differences within English, as the metaphor of hunting was applied to combat. At its most direct this is seen in the phrase ‘boche-hunting’ or ‘potting the Hun’ or ‘Taube-shooting from French covers’;71 Neil Tytler’s 1922 memoir With Lancashire Lads makes no apology for treating war as anything other than ‘the employment to their fullest extent of the machinery of death already prepared’, but the simplicity and directness of the hunting analogy can still surprise: ‘Just after dawn and the hour after sunset are my happy hunting hours, which usually yield the best sport’72 (especially as on the same page he describes shooting partridges, with a dog, in no man’s land). A day spent shelling ‘Hunland’ is described as ‘a tiresome and difficult shoot’.73 But connecting this to metaphors of ‘cleansing’ and ‘vermin’, a newspaper reference to ‘ratting’ did not find favour with one soldier: ‘newspapers in the UK wrote of tremendous victories and killing Germans as a sport similar to ratting. We could laugh aloud at these reports, plagued by lice …’.74 The extended metaphor of hunting, the ‘bag’, allowed some distancing, and was often applied to taking prisoners rather than killing: Capt R. J. Trousdell described in his diary for 9 April 1917 ‘the total bag for the Corps about 3,000’,75 while the Dublin Daily Express reported on an officer who described the Germans (‘Huns’) as ‘the mad dogs of Europe’ with the headline ‘22 Germans bagged with an empty revolver’.76 But the term was also used of killing: Major Cowan of the Royal Engineers in 1917 described laying mines which would ‘make a decent bag’,77 and H. M. Stanford, a gun observer at the Somme, wrote ‘I believe I made a bag of about 20 Huns with one round’.78 ‘Up’ in the hunting sense of ‘disturbed into flight’79 was used too, but transferred from quarry to predator: the beaters’ cry of ‘Bird up!’ was carried over into the trenches, as ‘Minnie up!’,80 ‘Aeroplane up!’81 and the Canadian and American ‘Heinie up!’82

  Our language

  On 18 November 1921 The Times posted a note about the current issue of Notes and Queries, which continued a discussion about ‘Army Slang in the War’.83 One contributor had sent in a list of words which he described as ‘the most typical expressions of general Army slang as he heard it: Buckshee, lash-up, all cut, head-worker, hard skin, wangle, lit, talking wet, napoo, san-fairyann, the duration, soaked, stiff, touch-out, blighty, windy, click, cushy, win, jam on it, swinging the lead, oojar, scrounge, stunt, umpteen, wash-out, go west, cold feet, strafe, work your ticket, where are you working, soft job, some lad, issue, muck in, sweating, and the gear.’ The list has some rare inclusions (‘head-worker’, ‘hard skin’, ‘touch-out’, ‘soft job’), but where are ‘lousy’, ‘whizz-bang’ and ‘Fritz’? The concept of assessing the language of the war was present before November 1918, particularly a kind of ranking of importance or liking, no doubt influenced by what people found the most stimulating in their own environment. Generally these display few surprises but on 12 September 1915 the Manchester Guardian proposed that ‘the commonest words’ were ‘cushy, blikey, charpawnee, pozzy, rotey’; even allowing that ‘blikey’ may have been a typo, few commentators would have reckoned the last three words as ‘most common’. Post-war assessments include ‘J.E.E.’s statement that ‘gaspirator’, ‘knife-rests’, ‘concertina’, ‘elephant’, ‘baby elephant’, ‘baron’ [army commander] were ‘in daily use in France’;84 Brophy and Partridge’s assessment of ‘San Fairy Ann’ as ‘an extremely popular phrase’, and ‘shit’ as ‘very widely used for mud, and for shells and shelling’;85 E. B. Osborn’s claim that ‘napoo’ was ‘indispensable and inevitable’ and ‘to be heard a hundred times a day’;86 and De V. Payen-Payne’s note that ‘ “napoo” has become classic’.87 There was also awareness of change: the language collector Andrew Clark noted in his diary for 10 July 1918 that ‘A little while ago Na pooh was the great expression among the soldiers – it was Na pooh for everything. Recently “swinging the lead” has taken its place, as also a “cushy Blighty” as a popular slang-term for a slight wound.’

  Not just words, but sayings were subjected to assessment. The Iodine Chronicle, trench journal of the 1st Canadian Field Ambulance unit, in December 1915 printed a list of ‘ten hackneyed sayings’, which included ‘Any more for any more?’ (No. 1), ‘Say, I hear there’s a war on’ (No. 3), and ‘toot sweet’ (No. 8). Mottoes and catchphrases – ‘Gott strafe England’, ‘mort pour la patrie’, ‘are we downhearted’ – served as group identifying speech acts for different communities in the conflict, many of them securely fixed in the respective languages by their rhythmic pattern. In English certain phrases repeat the same phonic stress pattern: ‘Are we downhearted?’, ‘Brave little Belgium’, ‘ladies from hell’, ‘backs to the wall’, ‘over the top’, ‘Kitchener’s men’, ‘somewhere in France’, ‘lest we forget’. In fitting to common speech stress patterns these phrases were more likely to be repeated or fixed in the mind. Even an anglicised French phrase that for many commentators was one of the most common phrases of the war, ‘san fairy ann’, fits the model, as does ‘après la guerre’. The point should not be laboured too far, but with this in mind we should look to the slow vowels of ‘the Great War’, and its predecessor ‘the Great World War’, with additional vowel clusters, as giving immediate gravitas.

  Given that there were extremely limited ways for the men at the Front to express themselves (trench art, though creative and reactive, was made by limited numbers), language was the means by which people could interpret and give meaning to their war.

  ‘Napoo’ was certainly one of the most frequently documented terms of soldiers’ speech; ‘cushy’, ‘in the pink’, ‘scrounge’, ‘fag’, ‘bully’, ‘grousing’, ‘whizz-bang’, ‘lousy’, ‘fed up’, ‘san fairy ann’, ‘Fritz’, ‘windy’, ‘minnie’ (trench mortar), ‘strafe’, ‘Jerry’, ‘stunt’, ‘no man’s land’, ‘over the top’, ‘wash out’, and ‘Blighty’, together give a loose picture of the experience of the war, uncomfortable, frightening, dirty, unrewarding, and socially reassuring. Given that there were extremely limited ways for the men at the Front to express themselves (trench art, though creative and reactive, was made by limited numbers), language was the means by which people could interpret and give meaning to their war. The language that came to be recognised as that of the war was opportunistic, creative, exploitative, scavenging and ruthless: it pounced on the weakness of the politician’s phrase ‘a certain liveliness’, it blasted authority, even the authority of the overwhelming weapon, with withering scorn – ‘nail-scissors’ for the crossed swords on a general’s cap, ‘plum-pudding’ for a trench mortar bomb; it somehow suggested paternalism or shared culture while mocking – ‘makee learn’ (officer under instruction), ‘brass hats’ (senior officers); it shrugged off the foreign – ‘Rude Boys’ for Rue de Bois, ‘japan’ (pain), ‘compree’ – and was sentimental and frightened in the soldier’s hope for ‘a blighty wound’. The best of it instantly exploited what was happening – ‘Jack Johnson’ for a bomb giving off black smoke, within hours of the breaking of the story of the black heavyweight boxer’s arrest; and played with words – ‘saucebox’ for a tank serving with the Worcestershire Regiment – in a tradition of English wordplay dating back to Anglo-Saxon poetry.

  Humour was undoubtedly a major part of this, but of necessity, much of it was gallows humour, the laughter of the survivor of disaster: ‘we saw the grim humour of it, and laughed and pulled ourselves together, thankful that we were still in the land of the living’.88 Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory begins by pitching the conflict as a massive irony, ‘a hideous embarrassment’ to prevailing moral thought. From the initial irony of the outbreak of the war itself at a time when people in Britain were expecting conflict in Ireland, to Philip Gibbs’ comments on the irony that all the creative processes of the nineteenth had found expression in destruc
tion,89 irony was the overwhelming structure of the war, leading up to the supreme irony of the first day of the Somme.90 The disillusion after November 1918, the silence of the veterans after the expenditure of so many words, the mistrust of the newspapers by those in the trenches who had read them to find out ‘who’s winning’,91 all added to an ambience of irony and cynicism, that characterised the verbal legacy of the war. Unknowing irony frames the utterances of chivalry, gallantry, sportsmanship, just as knowing irony frames the soldiers’ slang, and the literary understatement of the officers’ talk, the trench journal of the City of London Rifles, The Castironical. Eric Partridge proposed that the characteristics of Tommy slang were that, compared to the slang of ‘Poilu’ and ‘Jerry’, it was ‘the most direct, the most obvious and the best humoured’,92 and later that ‘irony or sarcasm, or a typically British understatement occurred in almost every third word or phrase’. Given the situation men found themselves in there was a choice between despair, gung-ho chivalry (‘Who’s afraid of a few dashed Huns?’ and ‘Tell them I died happy, loving them all’ – the last recorded words of Francis Grenfell, 191593), or irony and cynicism. The ‘ambience of mortal irony’94 locates the particular mindset of dark optimism that developed the throw-away lines ‘we’re winning’, or ‘thank God we’ve got a navy’; they evidence a sense of failure faced in the light of moral superiority, stared down using the only available means of expression, even in the use of ‘asquith’ for an unreliable match (from the Prime Minister’s catchphrase ‘wait and see’). Despite everything, the Brits believed they would muddle through, because they did, always had, and ultimately would, though slipping badly in the competition for the bragging rights after the American Expeditionary Force’s initials matched the phrase ‘After England Fails’. But this hardly touched the nation’s self-belief – ‘the war will go on until we have muddled through’, as the editorial of the trench journal The Pow-Wow put it in February 1916. If fear was ubiquitous, group dynamics meant that it was seldom admitted; even the class relationships and age differentials of the trench meant that it was essential for leadership that fear should be controlled: ‘For months … the fear I had that dominated my waking moments was not will I be afraid, but will I be able to control my fear. I was always afraid I would be afraid’.95 Charles Edmonds dealt with a seventeen-year-old in terror waiting to attack, by assuming his ‘martinet voice’, reassuring the boy, and saying ‘Come along, now, jump to it’; this restores his own spirits (and he remarks that he is only two years older than the boy). A few moments later during the attack he finds himself on the parapet, shouting ‘Come on lads, over the top’; ‘something in me that was cynical and cowardly looked down in a detached way at this capering little figure posing and shouting unrepeatable heroics at the men below’, as even fear and heroism become ironic. Later, having captured an empty German trench, he and a colleague squabble over a souvenir German helmet.96

  Partridge’s assessment of soldier slang is that it was a combination of apparent opposites – ‘tolerantly contemptuous’ to civilians and military superiors, or ‘with a bitterness that was usually ironical, sometimes even playful’.97 Philip Gibbs noted of black humour that ‘the more revolting it was, the more [people] shouted with laughter’;98 the strongest ironic statements matched these incongruities and apparent unmatchables – ‘permanent rest camp’, for a cemetery,99 ‘wooden overcoat’ for coffin,100 ‘you’re holding up duration’,101 ‘shock absorber’ for the observer, seated at the front of a plane.102

  Partridge also believed that one result of the war expressions becoming so widely disseminated was that there was a more direct speech in writing after the war, this being seen in the work of those who went through the war, and also those who ‘mixed freely with the survivors’.103 The movement of language from Front to Home, and vice versa, provoked the question of who created the terms, who took them up, and whether there was any sense of ownership. W. Courthorpe Forman, writing in Notes and Queries in 1918, stated that ‘many so-called “new” words are the individual slang of some particular schools, and, being often most expressive, have been eagerly snapped up and adopted by the Tommies who have heard them used’,104 while a writer to The Gazette of the 3rd London General Hospital criticised rhyming slang as lazy: ‘the New Army’s slang seems to me to be of a poorer mint, and its swift spread is regrettable’.105 It has generally been felt that the movement of slang was from the Front to the Home Front, along the lines described by Ward Muir – ‘the men go home [from the training camps and the various fronts] carrying to their native places slang which would never, in ordinary circumstances, have penetrated there’.106 This was to be posed as problematic when language suggestions came from the Home Front to the combat zone (‘Rosalie’, dismissed by Barbusse; The Cheltenham Chronicle’s suggestion of a new title for the Fifth Gloucester Gazette;107 Punch’s ‘Sammy’, which many American soldiers hated). Not all such terms were rejected by soldiers: Fraser and Gibbons note terms coming from newspapers, e.g. ‘mad minute’, ‘cuthbert’, and being taken up at the Front; Partridge felt that ‘Rosalie’ was successful in being taken up by French soldiers.108 Others, e.g. ‘do your damnedest’, and ‘Big Willlie’ and ‘Little Willie’, were invented by the press and taken up by civilians.109

  there persisted during and after the war, matching the wartime enthusiasm for soldiers’ slang, the idea that ‘real slang’ came from, and belonged to, the soldier in the field, and that it was more authentic the closer it was to the combat zone.

  But there persisted during and after the war, matching the wartime enthusiasm for soldiers’ slang, the idea that ‘real slang’ came from, and belonged to, the soldier in the field, and that it was more authentic the closer it was to the combat zone. ‘A.H.B.’ in the correspondence column of The Athenaeum wrote: ‘May I ask Dr Baker [Ernest Baker, who had initiated the discussion in May 1919] to allow the soldier’s undoubted right to be “fed up”? He has been so and has said he was so in those same words, as far back as my memory of army life extends, a period of some twenty years, and doubtless he had been so for many years before that. The civilian is welcome to take the soldier’s words and make them his own; but if he does, then it may be well to remind him at the beginning of this new era that though these words may be slang they are none the less of proud origin, that it was the soldier who coined the expression “to get a move on” as well as that of “to carry on” and that he does both in spite of numerous and legitimate “grouses” …’.110 No matter that the claims for both terms are unsustainable, the claim is that the soldier, by virtue of originating the term, has rights of association. Further on in the same correspondence Frederick Nettleinghame, the respected compiler of Tommy’s Tunes, wrote that he did not believe it was possible to distinguish between soldier slang and civilian slang, purely because the vast majority of the soldiers essentially were civilians; and through the process of coming into contact with and using terms previously avoided as vulgar, the civilian soldiers had given these terms ‘ “tone” and so helped in the addition of four hundred odd words and phrases to the common speech of the people’.111 But it was not all so simple: ‘bus’ as a term for an aeroplane, was originally RAF slang, then picked up by civilians, seen by airman as hackneyed, and then as bad form. An article in the Yorkshire Evening Post claimed that ‘soldiers’ slang has readily been adopted in the munitions factories’, citing ‘Hill 60’ for a rock bun, ‘doorsteps’ as teacakes, and ‘submarines’ as sausage-rolls, though these may not have been widespread.112

  6 LETTING GO

  Losing the language of war

  The end of the war was discussed from the moment it began, as enlisting men were told that employers ‘will keep their places open till the war is over’.1 The familiar phrase ‘over by Christmas’ did not vanish at the end of 1914, but carried over into 1915. ‘I expect to be home for Christmas’, wrote Pte W. Astbury in 1914,2 but on 3 December 1915 L. D. Spicer wrote home ‘I only wish your rumour, which is said to emanate
from the War Office were really the truth, and that the war were really going to be over by Christmas’.3 Unlike wars at the end of the twentieth century, the conflict was formed in discourse as an event, with a beginning and end: ‘There’s a war on’ stated newspapers4 regularly, emphasising this start-happen-stop aspect;5 and at the Front soldiers described shelling in the same way – ‘bombardment on for 1 hour’, wrote George Williams of the E. Yorks Regiment in his diary on 27 July 1916.6 And while journalists, strategists and song-writers cried ‘on to Berlin’, to become more familiar in a later war, the men at the Front couched this sentiment in the rather less jubilant ‘finish the job’.7 Mostly they wished for it to be ‘over’: ‘My brother Arthur is quite well and safe at present I hope he will remain so till this terrible war is over which I hope and trust won’t be long’, wrote Charlie while ‘On Active Service’, to Miss Bessie Camp on 30 October 1917. The two views are combined in a letter home from Rifleman Fred Walker in which he writes ‘let’s hope that this job will soon be over’.8