Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  Post-war language confirmed this model with visits to the battlefields, particularly Ypres (as Lord French said, ‘What Verdun means to the French, Ypres means to us’72), being irrevocably presented as pilgrimages to holy ground, consecrated ground or sacred ground.73 The expectations of the pilgrimage were extended into expectations of the behaviour of pilgrims, as visitors to the Grange Tunnel under Vimy Ridge saw a notice which asked them not to leave graffiti: ‘these walls are sacred to the memory of those who inscribed them during the occupation of the war. Please omit yours’.74 A due state of mind was mandatory, Kipling writing to The Times in December 1919 requiring that the places visited be not ‘overrun with levity’.75 The wrong sort of person being there provoked a sense of sacrilege: ‘sacrilege at the idea of our battlefields being visited by a tourist’, the view of the Aberdeen Weekly Journal,76 invoked the sense of both expectation and possession. Guidebooks to the battlefields castigated signs of commerciality: Beatrix Brice wrote of Hill 60 in the Ypres Salient, ‘this hill of heroic memory is now desecrated … by horrible erections of booths and shanties’,77 posing a Biblical contrast between the sacred and commerce. The difficulty was that there was a financial incentive for making the battlefields available and safe to visitors, which inevitably sanitised them, making the visitors tourists rather than pilgrims to sites of devastation. Postcard packs showed tidied up versions of the trenches, with rows of neat sandbags and clean duckboards, while visitors to Vimy Ridge in 1928 found ‘machine guns and trench mortars have been mounted in little concrete emplacements on the actual spots in which they were employed by the rival armies’.78 Comparison between tourism and pilgrimage provoked ideas of status: David Lloyd makes the point that sacrifice and the sense of obligation to the dead privileged the bereaved and the veteran,79 but equally this would privilege certain emotions and states of mind over others. Activities too could be judged by this yardstick: the Illustrated London News in January 1919 showed a picture of some well-dressed people having a picnic in a former dug-out in France: ‘the roads traversing the former battlefields of France to-day swarm with motors bringing parties of sightseers to visit the scenes of fighting. Among them are some who view the sights with more serious eyes’.80 Inevitably questions of class and vulgarity, or worse, arose in some critics’ objections: for Rowland Fielding it was ‘horrifying to see this sacred ground desecrated’ by military sightseers in December, made worse by the prospect of ‘the cheap tripper let loose’.81 How long would it go on? Charles Douie wrote in 1928 that ‘the time must come when the travellers are seen no more’,82 but the use of ‘must’ indicates a wish as much as a prediction. Super-quick tours trivialised the experience, though a Manchester Guardian article pointed out that ‘there is something sound in the notion that one can see the battlefields in a day; the repetition would give no new tone, but intrinsically the same impression’.83 To counter any of this the archaic language of the Church sermon was employed to bring in the gravitas of established religion: The Daily Telegraph stated that Ypres was ‘a shrine at which to chasten pride and cast out all thoughts but those of pure service to humanity’;84 for Ethel Richardson the soldiers’ sacrifices ‘will … find at last in God’s good time, their due and meet reward’;85 the caption to the photograph of pilgrims tracing a name from the Lone Pine Cemetery in Gallipoli describes this as a ‘carven name’.86 Unsurprisingly, many veterans were avoiding such trips; during the war soldiers had discussed returning after hostilities, but ‘it was the common verdict of the man in the mud-hole that, once “out of it,” Wipers and he could be best of friends – at a distance’.87 For another veteran, W. G. Shepherd, the experience was too much: ‘I would not go to that place [Plugstreet] again, or to any other place where I have seen battle, except by force … For young men who were in the war of all the lonely places on earth the loneliest and the awfullest, the place of all places on earth not to go, is a battlefield where they have been in war.’88

  If the business of the pilgrimage privileged the bereaved as much as or more than the veteran, the bereaved woman, mother, sweetheart or widow, was privileged within this group. Ian Hay wrote that those with graves to visit were ‘pilgrims proper’,89 and the Northern Whig described the women as the ‘Pilgrim Mothers’.90 David Lloyd proposes that there was an underlying assumption of the special role of women to mourn the dead,91 and the 1928 British Legion book underlined their gender with the term ‘pilgrimess’.92

  Much of the discourse of the pilgrimage continued or revived that of the war. Returning to wartime sites often provoked feelings of time loops such as that experienced by R. H. Mottram while reporting on the 1928 pilgrimage in Ypres; watching from a first-floor window he ‘could not feel easy where I sat, fifty paces from the Menin Gate, with my back to the German guns’.93 More obviously The Salvation Army and the YMCA facilitated the pilgrimages, as they had assisted soldiers during the war; the title of The Ypres Times, the magazine of the Ypres League, echoed the Wipers Times and the Ypres Times and Tombstones Journal (trench journal published by the Royal Marines from 1916). The 1928 pilgrimage showed clear verbal echoes of the war, the organisation of the event echoing army organisation, with Party leaders, Deputy Party Leaders, Accommodation Officers, Transport Officers, and the pilgrims divided into ‘parties’ and ‘companies’.94 This created the parameters for the re-use of wartime language: The Yorkshire Post reported a pilgrim in an estaminet ordering drinks with the words ‘Toot sweet, and the tooter the sweeter … not spoiled by the fact that the waiter understood wartime “French” ’;95 the Prince of Wales ‘wore mufti’;96 a homage trench journal, The Pilgrim, was published for the 1928 pilgrimage; pilgrims gave each other nicknames;97 ‘Are We Downhearted’ was shouted and responded to by different groups;98 the pilgrims ate ‘iron rations’.99 The large number of pilgrims facilitated this, but it was not new: in the book on the earlier pilgrimage to Salonika pilgrims are ‘reported present and correct by bedtime’.100

  The separation between those who had been at the Front and those who had not, up till November 1918, continued after the war, particularly implicit in some of the language emanating from the experience of the pilgrimages. The motive for many veterans visiting was to re-experience some of the ‘comradeship’ felt during the war, the aim of the Ypres League being to maintain the comradeship of the war experience.101 Nostalgia for the wartime landscape, even though at the time some felt they were in ‘these dead countries’,102 was easy to construct at a safe distance in time from the war, but there was an awareness of difference: ‘what there is paints in very false colours the Ypres of war’, wrote Beatrix Brice in 1929.103 Rowland Fielding was feeling nostalgia as early as 3 February 1919: ‘the better kind of men who have lived in [the trenches] will look back upon them hereafter with something like affection’.104 The sense of disappointment with change, felt by many, was often expressed in terms of ownership: as Ypres began to be rebuilt it became ‘Not My Ypres’105 (in the January 1922 issue it was ‘Not “Our” Ypres’, p. 15); ‘Our War, the War that seems the special possession of those of who are growing middle-aged …’.106 Perhaps the parameters for this mentality had been established casually much earlier on: in a letter home to Canada sent on 9 October 1916 Armine Norris wrote, ‘Just set your mind, Mother, on meeting me in England, say next September, (apres la guerre, of course) and then we’ll see together the places I have told you of but could not name, and I’ll show you some of our battlefields’.107

  Wartime reality clashed with memory of events so extreme that they were, of necessity, more real than the everyday of post-war life. ‘Remember’ and ‘forget’ were words often encountered during the war: ‘Remember’ or ‘Remember me’, frequent mottoes on silk postcards; ‘Lest we forget’ badges, available via the Navy and Army Magazine, 20 March 1915; ‘Remember Belgium’, ‘Remember the Lusitania’, as battle cries. Commemorating the dead after the war relied much on the concepts of knowing people who had served, and preventing the forgetting of them, seen in statements suc
h as ‘a soldier of the Great War known to God’, ‘the Unknown Warrior’, ‘lest we forget’,108 ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them’, ‘The Not Forgotten Association’.109 The ‘necessary art of forgetting’110 together with the obligation to remember, in order to give meaning to the sacrifice and the grief, necessitated the constant interplay of remembering and forgetting. Essential to this was the role of the name: the individual’s name took on massive significance during the war since the army and the circumstances, as John Brophy saw it, ‘rarely allowed a private soldier to be an individual’.111 Indeed the name was the only point at which the army sanctioned the existence of the individual private soldier, who was often otherwise denoted without reference to the human: ‘At the end, I told them I had asked for 95,000 fresh rifles’;112 French temporary graves for unnamed soldiers identified the soldier as ‘Nr de la Baionnette’. The importance of the name is seen in the ‘dog-tag’ identity disc, introduced in the British Army in 1907, in the daily publishing of casualty lists and rolls of honour from September 1914, in the determination to mark soldiers’ graves, however temporary, with a name, in the superstition against mentioning dead comrades’ names,113 and in the constant reiteration of the name in In Memoriam newspaper columns. The idea of the name featured in the mythology of the bullet ‘having your name on it’, in the disgrace of ‘losing your name’ (being charged or noted for punishment), and in the extensive culture of naming guns, weapons and shells.

  Post-war the name took on even greater national significance, in the phrase ‘Their name liveth for evermore’, in the King’s injunction, again in archaic language, ‘See to it, ye that come after, that their names be not forgotten’, and in the seemingly endless names, embracing individuality and uniformity in death, on the great memorials to the missing and the cemeteries in France and Flanders. In Britain every city, town, village, school and institution marked its own communal loss with a memorial bearing the names of its fallen, and in the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle 100,000 names were placed in a steel chest; Henry Benson, writing about memorials in the Western Morning News creates a hypnotic repetition of the word ‘names’: ‘Loos (20,700 names), Le Touret (13,480 names), Vis-en-Artois (9,893 names), Pozières (14,707 names), Arras (35,000 names), and Thiepval (72,000 names)’.114 The Admiralty and the War Office issued well over a million memorial plaques and scrolls with the names of soldiers and nurses who died in or as a result of the conflict; the plaque showed the individual’s full name, even when for some this was a single name, such as ‘Abdulla’, ‘Gama’ or ‘Nadar’. Every combatant’s name was also recorded on the rim of his or her British War Medal, a total of 6.5 million medals. Individual acts of remembrance included a bereaved mother in Salonika tracing the name of her loved one from a memorial,115 and an elderly Scottish woman who was reported kissing her grandson’s name on the war memorial at King’s Cross Station,116 pilgrims in Gallipoli ‘[writing] down names and [taking] photographs of the headstones to bring comfort to the many who had not been able to accompany them’,117 while dedications of war memorials and remembrance services included reading the names of the war dead throughout the 1920s.118

  For Jay Winter the reiteration of the name, either through publicly reading or privately touching the name on the memorial, combined both forgetting and remembering;119 the reverential enshrining of the name allowed a distancing to take place, allowing people to move on while still maintaining contact with the dead.

  Silence

  ‘Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?’ asks the child in the poster. The father does not look at the child, or engage in conversation, but looks out at us almost in the way that later came to be known as the ‘thousand-yard stare’. The poster itself had an existence after the war, as the Imperial War Museum website points out:

  This British recruiting poster was produced in 1915 and has since become infamous for its use of emotional blackmail to urge men to enlist with the British Army. Produced by the London printers Johnson Riddle & Co., it was conceived from the director Arthur Gunn’s own feelings of guilt at having not volunteered himself. Seeing the persuasive potential of a child’s awkward questions to a shirking father in peacetime, Gunn commissioned a poster picturing such a scene. Although Gunn joined with the Westminster Volunteers shortly after the poster’s publication, the poster became the source of much bitter trench humour on the Western Front. Such was the resentment towards it in post-war Britain that its creator, Savile Lumley, a children’s book illustrator, is said to have disowned it.120

  If the poster’s implication at the time was that the father should enlist, in order to be able to answer the question, in the post-1918 world it becomes, ‘Having been there, what should I tell them?’ And indeed, ‘what experience should I protect them from?’ The poster text projects into the future, asking from there a question about the past; this manipulation of time invites further manipulation: if, as the Imperial War Museum states, the poster was the source of bitter humour, and thus being thought about by soldiers, it would presumably have challenged those soldiers in the trenches to consider, at the time, how they would mediate their experience in the future.

  ‘He was in the war, but he never spoke about it’. An unwillingness to talk about the war, expressed in this familiar sentence, sums up its horror, stoicism, and inexplicability. As the culture of the war then and since has been so much a verbal culture, this absence of words needs to be considered. Was the silence engendered by the soldiers themselves, was there pressure on them to remain silent, or was there a drift into leaving it all behind? And was it indeed as widespread an experience as later generations have believed? Diane Athill, born in 1917, summed up the experience as, ‘Killing certainly did affect the minds of those exposed to it by the First World War. It shocked most of them into silence. Many of the men who survived the fighting never spoke of it. And I think it had the same effect on most of those the men returned to. It was too dreadful. They shut down on it’.121 The phenomenon was observed by Graves early in the war while training at Wrexham in 1915; of two wounded officers who survived the retreat from Mons he writes, ‘Neither would talk much of his experiences’.122 But there is a wealth of evidence for people who did talk. Matthew Wright’s Shattered Glory, about the experiences of the New Zealand forces, begins with ‘Joe Gasparich never tired of discussing Gallipoli with my grandfather’;123 Lancelot Spicer wrote home, ‘I’ll be able to tell you a lot more about that [the bombing of Le Touquet] when I do come on leave – afraid the censor might object at present’;124 Sybil Morrison remembered that though the wounded men did not want to talk about their experiences, it did come out – she says ‘I think we had a lot of information first-hand’;125 Hallie Miles in December 1914 got from a relative on leave details of the soldiers’ despair at being unable to help wounded comrades lying in no man’s land.126 When she was a child Barbara Rosser’s father told her a lot about conditions in the trenches,127 but others realised they might have to wait: Florence Cottle wrote to her husband that a neighbour’s brother-in-law had told her some things that were ‘terrible … I know I shall never hear anything from you, at least not until long after the war’.128 For others, finding out what the war had been like came through other pathways, the post-war visits to France and Flanders129 and the war-discourse that blossomed in the cinema.

  Erich Maria Remarque wrote of home in All Quiet on the Western Front (1929): ‘I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world’.

  There were certainly a variety of reasons for veterans not to speak about the experience of the war. Much of it had been boring, or repetitive routine tasks, with a lot of waiting, looking, dozing, or wasting time. As well as being painful and terrifying, a vast amount of it was boring and apparently pointless. There was also the huge gap between the Front and the Home Front, illustrated by much of what has gone before. For Robert Graves ‘home was awful because you were with people who didn’t understand what this was all about’:
130 in particular he noted that the level of noise at the Front was incommunicable. Cpl J. Bemner writes in his diary, three days after his return from England to the Front: ‘I am beginning to feel all right again after leave’ (6 August 1915).131 A poem, ‘On Leave’, in the Depot Review No.5, begins:

  I wanter get back from the war news

  I wanter get back to the Hun;

  I wanter retreat from the chaps in the street

  ‘Oo know how the war should be won…

  Erich Maria Remarque wrote of home in All Quiet on the Western Front (1929): ‘I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world’.132 Those who had not been at the Front could not possibly understand what it was like, and ‘talked a foreign language’.133 It was in a sense pointless to try to communicate this environment because it was so alien, so particular, and so vividly experienced by those who had been there, so impossible for those who had not, to realise.