Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  For many the hopes of an imminent armistice were balanced with imaginings of a war extending far into the future; Dormer in Mottram’s The Crime at Vanderlynden’s (1926) reckoned that the British Army would take 180 years to reach Berlin,9 Charles Edmonds wrote that ‘in 1917 the war seemed likely to go on for ever’.10 While Mabel Lethbridge, who had worked in a munitions factory, remembered in 1964 this feeling of ‘it can’t go on’;11 others, such as the French servicemen discussing ‘the old topic’ with John Masefield, agreed that it was more likely than not that the war would go on for a long time;12 Jack, writing home on 13 December 1915 expressed his approval of conscription, ‘then we might begin to think about the end then’.13 Trench journals, in typically caustic style, proposed that the war might stretch far into the future. Fall In reprinted a story from The Tatler on Christmas Day 1915 (p. 22) suggesting the war would still be in progress in 1956, though at a very much slower rate, with ‘grand old men, veterans from the long war – the only British manhood’ waiting for the results of ‘Germany’s turn to fire’; The Listening Post reckoned 1967 as ‘the limit of frightfulness’.14 Lt John Nettleton, after the Armistice, described it as ‘the war that had been going on since the beginning of time’,15 while Dan Todman notes that this sense of the war going on for ever is proposed in the way that Oh! What a Lovely War, the theatre production by Joan Littlewood, written by Charles Chilton in 1963, gives ‘no hint that the war itself ever came to a conclusion’.16

  When the fighting stopped on 11 November 1918 the reaction at the Front could not have been more different from the public reaction in the streets of Britain. In France and Flanders there was suspicion, resentment, but most of all bewilderment and a sense of weariness. Charles Douie described it as a curious switch of the noise balance – suddenly it was quiet at the Front while ‘the civil population remembers Armistice Day for the most part in terms of noise’.17 Journalist Webb Miller, reporting from the front line, noted that ‘the war just ended’, while Cpl R. Hume remarked that ‘you could stand up and not be shot’.18 Margaret Mercer, working with the French army, noted the same mix of anti-climax and awareness of the core of the situation – on ne se tue pas (the killing has stopped). The process of demobilisation was a source of massive resentment, leading to riots in some camps in 1919. In places a kind of verbal sorting was involved, described by Charles Douie,19 almost surreal in its application: he found himself waiting for the demobilisation train with two jockeys, who he realised were there because, as ‘students of form’, they had managed to be described as ‘students’, while a farm labourer, put down as ‘farm asst.’, found himself demobilised early as a chemist.

  The realisation that the Armistice meant the end of the war led to immediate calls for the abandoning of DORA, or at least for her to loosen up – an American journalist wrote ‘An Open Letter to Dear Dora’ in the Daily Mirror indicating that she had previously managed to bypass regulations by pretending to be Canadian.20 In a cartoon in Punch21 ‘1919’ is shown as a winged child carrying a sword marked ‘Liberty’ approaching ‘John Citizen’ who is tied up and being sat on by the elderly ‘Dora’ and a male ‘Bureaucracy’. DORA was still being used as a catch-all term for bureaucratic control at the end of the 1920s,22 and though the Act was due to expire at the end of hostilities, MPs were still asking, on 23 June 1921, when this would happen.23 The end of DORA appeared to slip past unnoticed: Arthur Nall-Cain MP asked on 23 November 1931 when the restrictions set out in DORA would be finally repealed, and was told by the Home Secretary that the last of the regulations set out in DORA had been repealed over ten years previously.24 Fraser and Gibbons’s 1925 comment on DORA is telling: the Act ‘gave the Government despotic powers over everybody and everything during the War’.25

  ‘Napoo’ was in many ways an ideal candidate for the iconic word of the war, the perennial shortage of anything except killing at the Front, the attempts to create something both new and homely in a foreign land, and the need to communicate surmounting barriers of language and hostility. Civilians and soldiers emerged from the darkness with the words ‘Guerre Fini! Boche napoo!’,26 but the word was to become napoo itself within a short time. ‘This year – to use a common language – motor touring in France to the south of Paris is narpoo’ appeared in The Times 25 March 1919, but the word was not seen there again until in a letter in 1932. It is not found in the Manchester Guardian after 1919, until Robert Kee’s 1965 review of Brophy and Partridge’s The Long Trail – Soldiers’ Songs and Slang 1914–18, which noted how ‘squiffy’ and ‘napoo’ were used as historically evocative markers in Oh! What a Lovely War. Odd occurrences include its use as a poignant message impressed into wet concrete in 192327 necessitating a translation, as a headline in 1926,28 and in 1932, again with an explanation that it meant ‘nothing doing’.29 Some terms persisted for a while – Pratt’s Tours advertised a trip to Lowestoft past where ‘a “Zep” was brought down in 1916’30 (note the use of inverted commas). But the review of Fraser and Gibbons’s book in 1925 in the Daily Mail described the whole subject as ‘Quaint War Slang’,31 and when some slang was revived in September 1939 it was described as ‘banter’.32

  Throughout the war there had been comments in the press suggesting that army slang should be used by soldiers and not the general populace, particularly not those in positions of power;33 but there are also suggestions that in the third year of the war slang was no longer as exciting or uplifting as it had been: ‘the new Whitehall officialdom is far sunk in the generally adopted colloquialisms of Canada and the States’.34 The press and its readership was getting tired of war slang,35 with comments that it had been less beneficial to the language than at first proposed. This turning against the association with the military culture, albeit a citizen–military culture, marks perhaps a beginning of the return to the normalisation of the army’s place in the peacetime state, to be cheered or avoided as circumstances demanded. Commercial users of language, the advertising profession, were less inhibited, retaining many expressions into the early twenties, or using ‘from ‘khaki to mufti’ as a way of getting the best of both worlds. Burberry advertised ‘Mufti kit’ in January 1919,36 while Moss Bros headed their Bystander advertisement on 3 September 1919, ‘1914–1919 Khaki to Mufti’.

  As the locus of war slang slipped away from France and Flanders the reason for the use of anglicised place names quickly disappeared. Those with particular or fond memories, Pop (Poperinghe, site of Toc H, the all-ranks rest centre),37 Wipers and Plugstreet,38 survived longer than the rest, but soon acquired the inverted commas or bracketed references to their actual names that indicated a move away from the forefront of public consciousness. The Michelin Guide to the Battlefields – Ypres and the Battle of Ypres, published in 1920, mentions none of the three slang place names. This distancing can also be seen happening in the press less than a year after the Armistice, with ‘Wipers’, seldom previously appearing in inverted commas, appearing thus in a letter to the Manchester Guardian, 21 September 1919.

  The press evidence indicates that in the case of ‘Plugstreet’, less than a year after the Armistice, where the text is not primarily directed at veterans, inverted commas and explanations are used; where veterans are the expected audience no inverted commas are used, till the mid-1920s, after which there is a gradual shift to using inverted commas or brackets with explanations, indicating that the term has lost familiarity. Inverted commas tend to be omitted after the late 1920s only when the expected audience is veterans. Later, in the 1930s, explanations were usually deemed necessary: the Manchester Guardian 10 May 1936 has ‘Ploegsteert (the Plugstreet of the war days)’, and the publication The Great War – I was there (1938–9) has, for example, ‘Plugstreet’ twice (Section 8, p. 299), but also on the same page, ‘Ploegsteert’. The Lancashire Evening Post has ‘WAR MEMORIES REVIVED – Ploegsteert, or Plug-street as our Tommies renamed it’,39 and ‘it was in the muddy trenches of “Plugstreet Wood” that Old Bill first saw the light of day’;40 but the Plug
street War Memorial was conventionally known as such. The sheer number of soldiers who fought near Ypres and Ploegsteert, and later the number of soldiers buried there, meant that the names Wipers and Plugstreet were perpetuated through the 1920s and 30s, even being proposed as models for language change after September 1939; ‘wherever the scene may be we shall have the same corruption of foreign place names. “Wipers” and “Plugstreet” must again become reconciled to such comments as “San fairey ann” …’.41 After the Second World War an explanation was necessary: ‘in a short space of time we were in the front line at Ploegsteert (known to all the troops as Plugstreet)’;42 ‘we were holding the line at Ploegsteert, familiarly known to the troops as “Plugstreet”.’43

  The Ypres Times, a veterans’ journal, seems to have avoided using wartime anglicisations, and certainly sticks to ‘Ypres’;44 a comment in a letter from a veteran following a 1922 visit to Ypres starkly delineates the changing identity of the place as it moved on from being a graveyard to a site of commerce and entertainment – apparently abandoning the identity of ‘Holy Ground’ it was ‘Not our Ypres’.45 Despite the massive numbers of personnel who were at the Salient, by 1925 it was felt that the connection between the actual name and the slang name had to be made explicit: ‘Between 1914 and 1915 almost every soldier in the British Army fought at Ypres (“Wipers”)’.46 Memoirs retained the place names, an indication perhaps of veterans as the expected readership, but inverted commas functioned as an inclusive gesture to readers who had not been ‘out’: Holmes has ‘ “Wipers” hadn’t been any garden of roses,’47 Aubrey Smith has ‘Ploegsteert, commonly called “Plug Street” ’,48 and R. H. Mottram has ‘Pop’ in his A Personal Record.49 Reviews of books and films retained Plugstreet and Wipers, usually without explanation, but more frequently with inverted commas as time passed: Plugstreet in a book review in The Scotsman September 1919; Wipers in a film title or subtitle in The Times, including documentary films of visits by the Prince of Wales, 1925; ‘Plugstreet’ in a book review in the Manchester Guardian 27 March 1929; ‘Plugstreet’ in a review of Churchill’s Thoughts and Adventures in The Times 10 November 1932. The anglicised place names of France and Flanders were enthusiastically collected by post-war scholars of war slang as indicators of the supposed irrepressible spirit of the Tommies, seeing them as creative slang, slightly disparaging to the French. Through the later 1920s they became familiar to readers of war memoirs. But hoteliers and tour guides in the areas of the former battlefields, speaking more to relatives and friends than veterans, had little use for them.

  Some slang changes were more obvious than others: the Illustrated London News used inverted commas on the caption to a photograph of ‘ “Enemy” War Graves’ on 26 April 1919 to signify a change in attitude; the familiar note on postcards home, ‘Somewhere in France’, disappeared almost completely (the demise of its variants was celebrated by Eric Partridge in 193350), until it was suddenly revived in 1939. Selective lexicography gave official sanction to some terms but not others – ‘Beachcomber’ looked in vain for ‘doings’, ‘binge’ and ‘oojah’ in the supplement to the latest edition of the Chambers Dictionary,51 though all three were to feature in Fraser and Gibbons. For some the abandonment of war-slang terms was deliberate, driven by a need to mark the end of an experience to be set aside or a respect for the dead. On 27 October 1919 the Sheffield Evening Telegraph (p. 6) began an article on the inclusion of army slang in Cassell’s latest edition of its English dictionary with:

  Will the war words which have passed into the dictionary live? It is a question raised by an observant ex-soldier, who says he handed in his army language on the day he surrendered his kit to the quartermaster’s store. It no longer gives him any mental relief to use the comic words of the Army.

  If he is weary at the end of the day’s work, he does not say he is fed up, but simply and more truthfully, ‘I am tired.’

  This is followed by several examples of words to be abandoned by this soldier, including ‘char’, ‘umpteen’ and ‘Blighty’. Canadian soldiers were encouraged to abandon swearing at the end of the war, with formalised ‘purity pledges’ being given to officers and NCOs in one division.52 G. K. Chesterton wrote in the Illustrated London News 14 December 1918:

  Surely it might be suggested that the rapid transference of the terms of the Great War to the General Election is a little lacking in dignity, and even in decency. It was really ridiculous enough when party politicians used the terms of war in times of peace. It was absurd even then when comfortable candidates and vote-pullers should talk perpetually about raising the banner and routing the enemy, about storming the breach and breaking the battle-line. It was bad enough when it was said quite hastily and heavily, by political hacks who had never raised anything but taxes and never broken anything but promises. It is intolerable that these things should be said in the very presence of real things; that politicians should talk thus about losing their seats to men who have lost their legs and arms; that they should decorate their sham fight with the tattered colours of the genuine fight. It is intolerable that some wealthy person when he has consented to accept a post and a salary should announce with a beaming smile that he has decided ‘to go over the top’. Doubtless he desires to be on the top, but not in the sense of going over it. It is intolerable that some oligarchal official, having shuffled and equivocated from the Front Bench for half-an-hour at Question Time, should describe himself as having been ‘under fire’. Everyone knows that such fire is merely fireworks. These things are not only matters of public dignity but of private tragedy; and we do not want charlatans plucking their flowers of rhetoric from the garlands on the graves of the dead.

  Chesterton’s observations on what would now be seen as non-pc language mark a moral suppression of language use, but also raise a question of ownership: if it was not appropriate for non-veterans to use these terms, was it ‘appropriate’ for veterans to do so? If the soldier gained ‘mental relief’ from war slang during the conflict, what might be lost or gained by abandoning its use after the Armistice? And how did this suppression of war slang, in which the country had been encouraged to participate, sit with the rise of the language of commemoration?

  The sacred and the remembered: places and names

  As early as 1915 the awareness that people would want to go to the battlefields was being discussed in the public domain. Battlefield tourism has a long history in Europe, and there was little new in the cartoon published in The Bystander on 24 February 1915, entitled ‘In Europe – some day’, with its images of relic/souvenir sellers and veterans showing parties of ‘sightseers’ around a landscape through which rows of charabancs convey visitors while two young lovers sit on a gun, in an echo of exactly what was to happen a few years after the war. In ‘What We Find In The German Trenches’ a post-war French farmer is imagined fencing off a crater, ‘erect[ing] a tea-house … not forgetting the ticket-office. He might … make a huge collection of Boche mementoes, and sell them to the visiting public’.53 Souvenir-hunting by civilians was recorded in 1914,54 and in March 1915 Thomas Cook’s announced that they would not be running battlefield tours until the cessation of hostilities,55 though Michelin began to publish their guides to the battlefields in 1917. Among the reasons why people wanted to visit the battlefields was ‘morbid curiosity’, the assessment of A. J. Norval’s 1936 report on tourism,56 with a description of people ‘rushing to the scene of war’ implying an unseemly haste, typical of one stream of criticism of tourism during the post-war period; Norval felt that ‘never has the atmosphere been more saturated with morbidity than during the first decade after the war’. However, an opposing view was that people should go as quickly as possible ‘for tomorrow it will be gone’.57 ‘Morbid curiosity’ was the term used in a criticism of ‘battlefield tours’ in an article in October 1914, which castigated ‘souvenir hunters’ as ‘little better than looters’.58 In a rerun of the reporting of war, battlefield tours were described as a ‘continental invasion’ by
the Dundee Courier in May 1920.59 The arguments over civilians going to the battlefields continued decades after its end. Different views of the reason to go to France and Flanders as a pilgrim emerged: to see a marked grave, to walk in the path of a lost loved one, to be in an associated place if no grave was known, to marvel at the battlefields and see the ruination of the landscape, or just to try to get some idea of what it was like. Given the thousands of picture postcards of ruins sent home by soldiers, the Gothic appeal of the ruin drew many, including ‘hundreds of Belgians’ who went to see ‘how badly Ypres is ruined’,60 almost following the instructions of the German sign at Péronne, Nicht ärgern, nur wundern. When President Wilson went to Ypres in June 1919 the Western Daily Press headlined the story with ‘Beauty of the Ruins’.61

  The lexical parameters were set for a Christian ecclesiastical model for the bereaved particularly, and the survivors generally, to conduct their emotions, perceptions and actions after the war.

  It seems likely that the wartime process of Flanders becoming ‘sacred’ through acts of sacrifice generated the idea of post-war pilgrimage. Areas where there had been large loss of life became sacred in the public mind: ‘SOIL SACRED TO THE BRAVE AUSTRALIANS’ was the headline of an article about Gallipoli in the Liverpool Daily Post, 4 November 1915,62 while the Aberdeen Evening Express headed an article ‘Somme’s Sacred Ground’63 on 29 July 1916. Journalists were making ‘a pilgrimage to the front’ already in 1917,64 and the Maharajah of Patiala made ‘a special pilgrimage to the spot where his troopers fought finely in 1914’.65 Newspapers began to talk about Ypres being consecrated around the same time that wartime memoirs and collections of letters began to use the idea:66 on 29 April 1916 the Daily Record (Lanarkshire) mentioned ‘the lines around Ypres already consecrated by British valour’,67 while on 8 September 1916 the Leeds Mercury wrote that ‘the whole neighbourhood of Ypres is sacred ground to the British Army and the British nation’.68 Combined with the employment of the word ‘sacrifice’, as in ‘THE GREAT SACRIFICE. HOW A HULL HERO DIED’,69 the lexical parameters were set for a Christian ecclesiastical model for the bereaved particularly, and the survivors generally, to conduct their emotions, perceptions and actions after the war. Beatrix Brice wrote of the Ypres salient that ‘the earth on which we stand is literally the very substance of man’s sacrifice’,70 the bodies of the soldiers transubstantiated into the land they fought on and for; Rowland Fielding was outraged by the thought of an American sightseer spitting and ‘saturat[ing] the ground that has been soaked with the blood of our soldiers’.71