Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  If we think of the post-war silence as an act of self-censorship, a direct continuity from wartime becomes apparent. During the war a culture of control over communication stretched across Britain and the theatres of conflict. Troops knew their letters and postcards were being censored, the press knew that their access to the Front was controlled, and numerous amendments to the Defence of the Realm Act left people unsure of what they could legitimately say, while knowing that dissent was a punishable offence. The familiarity of the phrase ‘Somewhere in France’, and the fact that people were prepared to joke about it, the ubiquity of the Field Service Postcard, the constant use of clichés such as ‘in the pink’, ‘hoping this finds you as it leaves me’, shows how censorship, and particularly self-censorship, as acts of security and paternalist protection against distress, became mainstream. In this light the extension of this beyond the end of the war, to protect people against unpleasant truths, seems fairly straightforward.

  Also to be considered is the language of combat. The evidence clearly shows that swearing was in most environments at the Front more or less the norm. Evidence also indicates that for many soldiers this was not the norm for their home environments, that they had to learn to become accustomed to swearing. If swearing had become effectively the standard means of spoken expression for the frontline, how was this environment to be described and narrated without swearing? How could the soldier who had seen such extreme situations mediate them to sisters, mothers, aunts, children, neighbours when the primary means of expression was unavailable? In a domestic environment, where saying that ‘my mate was blown to buggery’ would cause a breakdown in communication, few soldiers were equipped to find words that would meaningfully convey the experience without offending. While the surge in graphic description in memoirs ten years after the conflict showed that there was a written language that could do this, during and immediately after the war few people wrote books or letters that matched the ‘war-porn’ of the late 1920s. There were exceptions of course: the letters of Guardsman Boorer, published as A Place Called Armageddon included a description of a captured trench with descriptions such as ‘dead men hanging over the trenches, blown almost inside out’;134 Masefield in March 1917 wrote home a description of a crater ‘with dirty water at the bottom, & German corpses and hands & skulls & books & rags all littered down the sides’.135 Generally the tone was more ‘concerning their actual killing exploits the men were absurdly reticent’ from Troddles in the Trenches by R. Andom, printed for Newnes’ Trench Library (1919), rather than ‘a Mills bomb would blow seven men to rags’ from Charles Edmonds’ A Subaltern’s War ten years later. Probably the most frequent description of the Front was that it defied description: it was ‘beyond description’,136 ‘utterly indescribable’.137

  Reticence, phlegm, sangfroid were recognised aspects of male self-control which developed through the nineteenth century, particularly through the public school educational system. In metaphors that appear now absurd – the battlefield as playing field – control was employed and no doubt felt particularly among officers – ‘nothing makes you feel madder than being fired at when doing a job that has to be done slowly and carefully, such as insulating the wire after baring the cable and joining the ends. A man who has been fouled at footer has the same feeling’, wrote C. W. Langley in Battery Flashes.138 Rudyard Kipling, devastated in private by the death of his son at the Front, mentioned his name in passing in one sentence in The Irish Guards in the Great War (1923). Sister J. Calder remembered seeing wounded soldiers whose limbs could have been saved with prompt treatment: ‘We felt terribly sorry for them but we had to try to not show our feelings, because it would never have done’.139 To what extent this reticence was reflected back to the self as bravery is hard to comprehend at this distance of time, but it is likely that the social parameters providing models for emotional response may have helped some people, as the suppression of emotions by silence did to varying extents manage to suppress those emotions. To pursue this further, a specific form of rhetoric that has been discussed earlier can be seen as continuing beyond the Armistice. The avoidance of mentioning something to make it less real was manifested in the number of ways of not saying ‘death’, ‘kill’, ‘die’, and so on, replacing them with ‘copping it’, ‘becoming a landowner in France’, ‘napooing’, and so on. One way to deal with the experience of suffering, of inflicting pain on others, and of witnessing death and injury on such a scale, so new and different for many men and women serving, was by removing it from speech entirely: just as speaking about it made it real, not speaking about it contained it, made it unreal. When Paul Bäumer’s father in All Quiet on the Western Front wants him to talk about his experiences Paul realises that ‘it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them’.140 This placatory silence suited the medical treatment of stress, particularly shellshock. Shellshock during the war was generally treated as a malingerers’ attempt to avoid service, despite the unavoidable nature of its effects, verbal as well as physical and mental – one soldier treated at Manchester had been buried by a shell explosion, and during treatment switched between Lancashire and West Country accents.141

  In many cases shellshock was seen as an affront to manliness. Manliness here was seen as the condition of a truly integrated being, one in whom self-control was manifested in a controlled body and a controlled mind. Failure at self-composure was manifested in the moving body, one who could not keep still, facially or muscularly, symptoms then seen as typical of the outsider, racially or socially, the Jew, the criminal, the lunatic.142 Thus stillness, parade-ground physical control if necessary to the point of loss of consciousness, keeping one’s ground, not flinching, were all held out as examples of manliness, character, courage. The phrase ‘stiff upper lip’ implies not moving and, specifically, being seen not to speak. These ideals survived the war, and despite the slow change in some people’s view of shellshock during the conflict, notably Lord Moran, and The Times editorial on the day of the publication of the report still couched the subject in terms of strength and weakness as regards being able to ‘maintain command’ of oneself.143 During the war few doctors, notable exceptions being W. H. Rivers and Arthur Brock at Craiglockhart Hospital, used the possibilities of the verbal exploration of trauma; the norm was to not talk about the experience of shelling or combat. One of Rivers’ patients said ‘that it was obvious to him that memories such as those he had brought with him from the war could never be forgotten. Nevertheless, since he had been told by everyone that it was his duty to forget them he had done his utmost in this direction’.144

  As has been shown above, various linguistic and other markers signalled how people were thinking about the end of the war: the ‘change from khaki to mufti’, the abandonment of slang expressions, jokes about demobilisation. This move towards closure was seen also in cartoons celebrating the abandonment of the Defence of the Realm Act, together with the War Office’s stance of putting shellshock behind it in the Committee of Enquiry report of 1922; the words of war were being put away. The official closure on the unseen effects of war, particularly the word ‘shellshock’ itself, which had been only reluctantly tolerated,145 together with the onus on disabled soldiers to prove that their injuries had been caused by the war, sent out a message that the establishment ‘did not want to talk about it’. Advertisements caught this mood: one in the Pall Mall Gazette (8 May 1919) read: ‘So bury all those unpleasant memories in Dora’s waiting grave … and get your Austin Reed straw hat to signalise the event’, while another, for Kenilworth cigarettes, in Punch in April 1919 reads, ‘You’ve seen it through! You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to think about it. You just want to lean back and feel that the day you’ve been dreaming about since that first August of 1914 has come at long last’.146 In effect veterans were told not to talk about the war.

  Much discussed in study of First World War memoirs is the phe
nomenon of the ten years’ delay: why did so many memoirs appear ten years after the Armistice, and why did people wait? And how to interpret the graphic nature of much of the material? There was certainly some extremely graphic war-literature published and read before 1918: Henri Barbusse’s account of trench life, Le Feu (1916), translated as Under Fire (1917), was widely read on both sides of the Front, with a reviewer in the Manchester Guardian noting that generally ‘the “horrors of war” are taken for granted but … mercifully concealed.’ But the majority of the best-known novels and memoirs that verbally explored the body’s destruction were not published until 10 years after the Armistice: the translation of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929), Three Personal Records of the War (R. H. Mottram, John Easton, Eric Partridge, 1929), Charles Edmonds’ A Subaltern’s War (1929), Henry Williamson’s The Patriot’s Progress (1930), Helen Z. Smith’s Not So Quiet (1930), Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We (1930), A. M. Burrage’s War is War (1930), Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) are a few of over sixty books on the war that were published in these two years, provoking some complaint that the only story being told now was that of the horror of war.147 For Graves, Goodbye to All That was, as the title states, an attempt at closure, the 1929 text stating: ‘once this has been settled in my mind and written down and published it need never be thought about again’. The interim silence seemed to be as much about ‘holding on’ as ‘holding back’. But there appears to have been a consensus for a period of literary silence, broken after a decade with a tumult of descriptions of violent death. Herbert Reed, reviewing the translation of All Quiet on the Western Front in 1929, felt that what was happening was the mind ‘dismissing the debris of its emotional conflicts until it feels strong enough to deal with them’.148 By extension this could be applied to the nation’s collective mind, Fussell’s sense of a shift towards irony and a crisis in language, indicating that for the period 1918 to 1928 the mind and the means of expression together combined to shut the story down. While Fraser and Gibbons published their work on wartime slang in 1925, Brophy and Partridge’s more critical study was published in 1930, in the environment of the war memoir boom.

  Dan Todman’s study of the changing attitudes to the war in The Great War (2005) notes how the BBC television series The Great War in the 1960s catalysed a great outpouring of reminiscence from people who were moving into old age.149 He notes that a request for information brought tens of thousands of responses, with the implication that this period might mark the end of the silence. A new context of respect and amazement, in what Todman describes as ‘an interaction between younger Britons and their grandparents about what they had done in the war’,150 perhaps echoing the poster caption, created a new frame for telling. This sense of being brought back into the mainstream should be considered as contextualising the horrific evidence related to researchers such as Lynn MacDonald; reminiscences such as those in They Called it Passchendaele rival and exceed the worst to be found in the memoirs of 1929 to 1931.151 Todman points out that Martin Middlebrook’s research for his project on the Somme involved taking notes during interviews rather than voice-recording veterans, to avoid them ‘declaiming’,152 raising again the question of different kinds of mediation. All telling of the war is mediated in different ways, but in these cases people were speaking rather than writing – we should note that the wording used in the statement is not ‘he never wrote about it’, but ‘he never talked about it’, or ‘he never spoke about it’.

  Returning to the period of the war, on considering the different theatres of war and the varying degrees to which forces personnel acquired local terms, a kind of cultural pragmatism becomes apparent. France and Egypt were culturally closer to Britain, through reasons of association or empire, than the Eastern Mediterranean or Greece. The term ‘Mesopolonica’ summed up the way that the average Briton did not know where these places were, and did not much care. In Macedonia troops hardly picked up any of the local language; Capt J. R. Wilson of the RFC, stationed in Salonika, used no local words in his diary, but on moving to Egypt used ‘backsheesh’, ‘garry’ (Anglo-Indian word for a carriage) and ‘Gyppies’.153 The environment generated the words, and once the environment changed, the language changed. Typical of the act of remembering the war were lapses into silence, the ‘vacant look’ characterised by absence of communication. Absence and silence, cenotaphs and archway memorials with central open spaces, over time became the defining manifestation of the aftermath of the war, as the ‘empty space in the centre’ became the lasting motif of memorialising the war. The end of the extreme and very different wartime environment quite naturally led to a loss of language, the immediate and most appropriate means of expression being removed. For example, ‘napoo’, reckoned by many to be the most common slang expression of the war, disappeared fairly quickly after 1918. The loss of language would have reinforced the idea that the stories of that language might equally be abandoned.

  Looking again at the poster, the implication is that this conversation would go on between generations, that those who fought would tell their children, as a way of keeping alive the importance of the war. But did people actually want to hear? While relatives needed details of time and place in order to make meaning out of their loss, did they want to know that the bodies of their uncles or brothers, fathers and husbands had been blown apart or lain rotting until only their clothes were recognisable? W. H. Rivers noted the ‘natural tendency to repress, being in my experience almost universally fostered by … relatives and friends’.154 As Paul Fussell pointed out, ‘the real reason is that soldiers have discovered that no one is very interested in the bad news that they have to report’.155 We might have a prurient interest in ‘war-porn’, but it is, as the wealth of published material shows, well suited to writing if not speech. If, as Fussell suggests, the question is one of rhetoric and manners rather than language, we can find that we accept as literature material that is too shocking for us to be told face to face, or, even more so, to read in a letter.

  We cannot know how many, and in what terms, conversations took place in the interwar years between veterans in British Legion bars; commemoration of the more positive aspects of the war were clearly visible, but we do not know whether or for how long after 1918 there was a sharing of reminiscences similar to those which emerged in the 1960s and 70s. We do have the testimony of veterans such as John Brophy, who wrote in 1965: ‘for the men who survived it, it became in retrospect an experience to be thrust out of memory most of the time, an experience impossible for the mind to digest, and, for many, tolerable only when some of the less distressing events were selected for recall and dressed up with sentimental emotions’.156

  Post-war study

  Wartime word-collecting and glossaries had served purposes of popularisation of and identification with soldier culture, with certain related specific roles, such as Lorenzo Smith’s Lingo of No Man’s Land (1918), intended for recruitment support. Post-war collecting attempted to find a way to preserve the camaraderie of the Front, to retain some of the creative culture of the war.157 In providing a locus for pooled information, it devolved into competitiveness in some cases, as it showed possibility of becoming an area for academic as well as martial reputation. For Brophy and Partridge it provided second-phase ironical enjoyment, just as language itself had done at first hand for many soldiers during the conflict.

  In the last year of the war academics began to take a greater interest in slang; Dauzat’s L’Argot de la Guerre was published in Paris, Ernest Weekley’s Daily Mail article appeared in January, and the Bodleian Library acquired a manuscript glossary of trench slang compiled by a Royal Field Artillery soldier.158 Discussion of war slang appeared in the pages of Notes and Queries in the same month as the Armistice, with Archibald Sparke’s article ‘War Slang: Regimental Nicknames’.159 Sparke rather invited reaction by beginning ‘Quite a large number of new words have come into common use �
��’; R. C. Temple, who had called for a compilation of war slang, responded with further information on Hindi words in Sparke’s list showing that they were by no means new to the British Army.160 The January 1919 issue brought further correspondence widening Sparke’s definition of ‘scrounge’, and the March issue brought one comment that Sparke’s list was ‘good, but there are two words at least from which he has not extracted the full service meaning’, and another that ‘fed up’ was from the Boer War,161 to which Sparke in the June 1919 issue responded ‘J.R.H. is perhaps correct in his impression …’ (followed by citations from 1904 and 1900 which would seem to indicate that there was no ‘perhaps’ about it).162 The correspondence at that point moved over to the pages of The Athenaeum, with an article by Ernest Baker enthusing at change and the range of new words in the language, including newly invented scientific terms for explosives – ‘ballistite’, ‘triona’, and ‘filite’; officialese – ‘embus’, ‘liaison officer’; military terms – ‘depth-charge’, ‘star-shell’ (likened to the Anglo-Saxon ‘war-gear’ and ‘heath-stepper’); and, new medical terms such as ‘coagulen’ and ‘hypnoid’.163 Baker continued in the 11 July issue, pointing out that many of the words ‘classed as vulgarisms or slang’ – ‘dud’ and ‘stunt’ for example – were not new, but suddenly apt; Baker roved enjoyably over the whole field, taking up ‘Dora’ and ‘Anzac’, ‘conchy’ and ‘cuthbert’, ‘in dock’ and ‘buckshee’, ‘strafe’, ‘Fritz’ and ‘umteen’.164 The first respondent, a week later, was the novelist and soldier Boyd Cable, whose corrections were in turn modified the following week by Henry Bush,165 and the correspondence became a weekly series of modifications and additions involving among others Eric Verney, Frederick Nettleingham, author of Tommy’s Tunes, and Archibald Sparke. Claim and counter-claim had been succeeded by a more generous attitude by November 1919 – ‘I am happy to oblige Mr Nettleinghame’, wrote H. Lonsdale166 – when Eric Verney surveyed the correspondence as having produced 288 words and phrases, of which 100 were ‘definitely war slang’, 65 ‘definitely pre-war slang’, 62 ‘Old Army slang’ (of which 15 were ‘of Indian etymology’), 11 ‘American and Colonial’, and 50 ‘period of origin doubtful’.167