Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  119Postcard, On Active Service, 26 March 1916, author’s collection.

  120Letter, 25 April 1915, quoted in Doyle and Schäfer, Fritz and Tommy, p. 127.

  121Letter, On Active Service, 31 October 1917, author’s collection.

  122Quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 137.

  123Nobbs, Englishman, Kamerad!, p. 71.

  124Vivid War Weekly, 16 October 1915, pp. 162, 163.

  125Postcard, On Active Service, author’s collection.

  12615 September 1915, quoted in J. Wadsworth, Letters from the Trenches, (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2014), p. 27.

  127Postcard, On Active Service, 30 March 1918, author’s collection.

  128Postcard, 4 December 1918, author’s collection.

  129Letter, On Active Service, 27 April 1916, author’s collection.

  130Diary, 6 November 1914, http://www.bobbrookes.co.uk/DiaryCH2.htm accessed 21 December 2016.

  131Vansittart, John Masefield’s Letters, 15 May 1917, pp. 281–2.

  132Hull Daily Mail, 9 September 1914, p. 4.

  133Western Daily Press, 15 September 1914, p. 6.

  134Diary, George Williams, 30 April 1916, http://www.europeana1914–1918.eu/en/contributions/17242 accessed 7 October 2016.

  135Burnley Express, 24 July 1915, p. 9.

  136Daily Mail, 1 October 1919, p. 2.

  137J. Boraston, (ed.) Sir Douglas Haig’s Despatches, (December 1915–April 1919), (London; Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1919), 1917, p. 142.

  138Lt Col E. Cook, War Diary of the 1st Life Guards, 1914–15, (England, 1915), p. 109.

  139Hay, The First Hundred Thousand, p. 269.

  140Broadhead, Diary, 15 September 1916.

  141Mottram, A Personal Record, p. 36.

  142Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914–15, (Edinburgh London: William Blackwood & Sons, [1915] 1930), 1915 edn, p. 179. Kateluard.co.uk/category/kate-luards-diaries.co.uk accessed 30 January 2015.

  143A. Niceforo, Le Génie de l’Argot, (Paris, 1912), p. 245.

  144E. Partridge, ‘ “Slang”, Society for Pure English’, Tract LV, 1948, in The English Language: essays by linguists and men of letters 1858–1964, W. F. Bolton and D. Crystal, (eds), Vol. 2, 1969 edn, p. 188, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1940] 1969).

  145D. Jones, In Parenthesis, (London: Faber & Faber Ltd, [1937] 1969), p. 146.

  146Fussell, The Great War, 1977 edn, p. 176.

  147Spencer, War Letters, 28 January 1915, 16 February 1915.

  148Manchester Guardian, 13 January 1915, p. 5.

  149D. Jones, In Parenthesis, 1969 edn, pp. 67, 107.

  150S. De Loghe, The Straits Impregnable, (London: John Murray, 1917), p. 164.

  151In Walker and Declercq, Languages and the First World War: communicating, p. 203.

  152D. Jones, In Parenthesis, 1969 edn, p. 103.

  153Quoted in M. Arthur, We Will Remember Them, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2009), pp. 130, 157.

  154‘I have not seen him since and I am afraid he went under’, Burrage, War is War, 2010 edn, p. 114.

  155D. Walker, With the Lost Generation, (Hull: A. Brown & Sons Ltd, 1970), p. 33.

  156Major F. P. Crozier, quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 53; Brophy and Partridge also have ‘to get ’em’, in which ‘them’ refers to shaking fits (J. Brophy and E. Partridge, Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914–1918, (London: Eric Partridge Ltd, 1930), p. 127).

  157Jones, In Parenthesis, 1969 edn, p. 35.

  158Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail, 1969 edn, p. 135.

  159Fussell, The Great War, 1977 edn, p. 178.

  160I. Hay, All In It: K1 carries on, (Toronto: Briggs, 1917), p. 160.

  161E. R. Hepper, Captain E. Raymond Hepper’s Great War Diary 1916–19, (Kirkby Stephen: Hayloft Pub., 2011), 18 October 1917.

  162Crofts, Field Ambulance Sketches, p. 36.

  163G. B. Manwaring, If We Return, (London; New York: 1918), p. 79.

  164The Gasper, 8 January 1916.

  165Lighter, Slang of the AEF, p. 63.

  166Denham, Dardanelles, 1 May 1915.

  167Hewett, A Scholar’s Letters, p. 39.

  168‘Liveliness’ in this sense was first used in a letter from Admiral Lord Fisher to Winston Churchill, 8 November 1914, to describe fighting in the North Sea.

  169De L’Isle, Leaves from a V.A.D.’s Diary, p. 65.

  170G. Pulvertaft, Reminiscences of a V.A.D., (Great Britain: John Brunsdon, 2014), 29 October 1918.

  171Dawson, Living Bayonets, p. 183.

  172Laugesen A, Glossary of Slang and Peculiar Terms in Use in the A.I.F. http://andc.anu.edu.au/australian-words/aif-slang/annotated-glossary accessed 6 February 2017.

  173Fraser and Gibbons.

  174Spicer, Letters from France, 12 and 20 February 1916.

  175Quoted in Vansittart, John Masefield’s Letters, 6 September 1916, p. 125.

  176Pulvertaft, Reminiscences, 29 October 1918, p. 84.

  177Brindle, France and Flanders, pp. 54–5.

  178Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, pp. 192–3.

  179G. Coppard, With a Machine Gun to Cambrai, (London: Papermac, [1979] 1986), 1986 edn, p. 108.

  180Burrage, War is War, 2010 edn, p. 107.

  181French, Sir J., 8th Dispatch to War Office, 15 June 1915.

  182Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, p. 150.

  183Spicer, Letters from France, 6 October 1915.

  184Gas not having been brought into use till several months after the retreat from Mons.

  185Sadly one of the fatalities caused on Armistice Day was a soldier who was in fact gassed in 1918 at Mons: Western Times, 29 November 1918, p. 5.

  186C. Edmonds, A Subaltern’s War, (London: Peter Davies, 1929), p. 136.

  187Mottram in A Personal Record speaks of ‘the utter inconsequence of infantry in modern warfare’, p. 43; The Pow-Wow 9 December 1914 editorial states ‘the present war being essentially an artillery war’.

  188G. Apollinaire, Letters to Madeleine: tender as memory, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, L. Campa, (ed.), (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010).

  189Crofts, Field Ambulance Sketches, p. 65.

  190A. Copping, Souls in Khaki, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1917), p. 118.

  191Doyle and Schäfer, Fritz and Tommy, p. 126.

  192Thirty Second News, November 1918, p. 5.

  193The Castironical, March 1916.

  194Thirty Second News, November 1918, p. 17.

  195Rabbi Stephen Wise, reported in The Times, 7 June 1918, p. 5.

  196Daily Express, 18 June 1918, p. 2.

  197Partridge, Words! Words! Words!, p. 157.

  198Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail, 1969 edn, pp. 94–5.

  199Quoted in Doyle and Schäfer, Fritz and Tommy, p. 75.

  200Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail, 1969 edn, p. 101.

  201Notes and Queries, 29 October 1921, p. 345.

  202War Budget, 30 March 1916, p. 195.

  203The Cornishman, 9 August 1915, p. 4.

  204In postcards, On Active Service, 4 November 1916, author’s collection.

  205Dawson, Living Bayonets, p. 183.

  206Yorkshire Evening Post, 16 October 1916, p. 5.

  207Williamson, The Patriot’s Progress, p. 167.

  208The Athenaeum, 7 November 1919, p. 1163; the AEF had ‘hobnail express’ for fast marching.

  209Lt R. Macleod, quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 65.

  210Yorkshire Evening Post, 16 October 1916, p. 5.

  211Muir, Observations of an Orderly, p. 222.

  212Partridge, Words! Words! Words!, pp. 181–207.

  213Notes and Queries, 1921, p. 342.

  214In MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 92.

  215The Fuze, October 1916, p. 5.

  216Notes and Queries, 1921, p. 384.

  217Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary, Vol. 2, 1918, p. 120.

  218Cook, War Diary, 26 Octob
er 1914.

  219The Story of an Epic Pilgrimage, (England: The British Legion, 1928), p. 98.

  220Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, p. 79.

  221Spicer, Letters from France, 9 November 1915.

  222Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail, 1969 edn, p. 136.

  223De Loghe, The Straits Impregnable, p. 159.

  224Cook, War Diary, 13/14 October 1914, p. 17.

  225Ibid., 25 August 1914.

  226Denham, Dardanelles, 25 February 1915.

  227War-Time Tips, p. 55.

  228General Birdwood claimed to have invented it in 1915; the Warwick and Warwickshire Advertiser, on 7 August 1915 (p. 8), stated that ‘Anzac appeared on Wednesday for the first time’.

  229Menin Gate Pilgrimage, (London: St Barnabas Society, 1927), p. 8.

  230Sunderland Daily Echo, 13 June 1917, p. 2.

  231Percy Bryant, (RFA gunner), Imperial War Museum interview, [sound recording, 1975].

  232H. McBride, The Emma-Gees, (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill Co., 1918), p. 62.

  233Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail, 1969 edn, p. 165.

  234Sunderland Daily Echo, 11 January 1915, p. 5.

  235H. Clapham, Mud and Khaki, (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1930), p. 36.

  236E. Partridge, Quarterly Review, (London: John Murray, 1931), Vol. 256, p. 356.

  237Taunton Courier, 18 Nov 1914, p. 1; Sheffield Weekly Telegraph, 16 June 1917, p. 3; Biggleswade Chronicle, 9 August 1918, p. 1; though the general proportion of ‘Ypres’ to ‘Wipers’ was about 50:1.

  238Nottingham Evening Post, 2 November 1914, p. 3; Birmingham Daily Post 24 December 1914, p. 3; Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 19 February 1915, p. 4.

  239Nottingham Evening Post, 14 November 1914, p. 2.

  240Ibid., 15 October 1914, p. 1.

  241Newcastle Journal, 26 April 1915, p. 6.

  242Berwickshire News, 14 March 1916, p. 5.

  243Yorkshire Evening Post, 16 February 1915, p. 3.

  244Ibid., 7 November 1914, p. 2.

  245Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 16 November 1914, p. 2.

  246Liverpool Echo, 11 February 1915, p. 4.

  247Aberdeen Journal, 24 August 1916, p. 4.

  248Birmingham Daily Post, 2 December 1914, p. 6.

  249Motherwell Times, 30 October 1914, p. 6.

  250Portsmouth Evening News, 6 July 1915, p. 2.

  251Mottram, Journey to the Western Front, p. 101.

  252http://1914–1918.invisionzone.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=217500 accessed 12 September 2016.

  253The Literary Digest, (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1918), 5 October 1918, p. 29.

  254Fraser and Gibbons, ‘The nickname of a big gun in action on the Arras sector in 1917’.

  255Ibid., ‘The nickname given to a Turkish big gun, and its shell, at the Dardanelles’.

  256Van Emden, Tommy’s War, p. 163.

  257C. MacArthur, A Bug’s-eye View of the War, (United States: privately published, 1919), p. 74.

  258Spencer, War Letters, 2 February 1915.

  259W. Merrill, A College Man in Khaki, (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), p. 227.

  260J. Kilpatrick, Atkins at War, as Told in His Own Letters, (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1914), p. 30.

  261Capt E. Gore-Booth, quoted in Noakes, Voices of Silence, p. xii.

  262Quoted in Doyle and Schäfer, Fritz and Tommy, p. 130.

  263M. R. Kelley, ‘But Kultur’s Nar-poo in the Trenches’, in Art In America, June 2014, New York. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/but-kulturs-nar-poo-in-the-trenches/ accessed 13 April 2017.

  264A. Marwick, The Deluge, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, [1965] 1991), 1991 edn, p. 33.

  265Grey Brigade, (Dorking: 1915), 18 September 1915.

  266The Kemmel Times, 3 July 1916.

  267Dublin Daily Express, 20 October 1917, p. 9.

  268Fall in, 25 December 1915, p. 22.

  269The Ghain Tuffieha Gazette, March 1917.

  270The Gasper, 28 February 1916.

  271Partridge, Slang of the British Soldier, p. 60.

  272John Bull, 9 January 1915, p. 3; Manchester Courier, 8 October 1914, p. 2; Sunderland Daily Echo, 23 September 1916, p. 3.

  273Hull Daily Mail, 25 March 1922, p. 1.

  274Malins, How I Filmed the War, p. 238.

  275The Story of an Epic Pilgrimage, p. 97.

  276Kilpatrick, Atkins at War, p. 29.

  277Partridge, Slang To-day and Yesterday, 1970, p. 263.

  278Dawson, Living Bayonets, p. 49.

  279The Athenaeum, 8 August 1919, p. 728.

  280Lighter’s documentation for ‘meat-grinder’ dates from 1967; frequently used of campaigns such as Verdun or The Somme, it appears to be a term used of, rather than during, the war. But ‘a French soldier’ quoted in Julien Bryan’s Ambulance 464 (1918, p. 152) describes the (mythological) German ‘corpse factory’ as employing ‘a big machine like a sausage grinder’.

  281All in Downing, Digger Dialects.

  282Smith, Four Years on the Western Front, p. 11.

  283Quoted in Van Emden, Tommy’s War, p. 157.

  284Quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 141.

  285J. Brophy, ‘After Fifty Years’, in J. Brophy and E. Partridge, (eds), The Daily Telegraph Dictionary of Tommies’ Songs and Slang, (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2008), p. 16.

  286Quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 188.

  287Brophy and Partridge, Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, p. 193.

  288E. Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, [1937] 1974), 1974 edn, p. 842.

  289Quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 118.

  290Advertisement in The Boot and Shoe Retailer, 11 September 1914, p. 2.

  291The War Illustrated, 10 June 1916, p. 397. The same trick is applied in a short story series in The Strafer November 1916, p. 7.

  292Yorkshire Evening Post, 8 April 1915, p. 4.

  293Derby Daily Telegraph, 2 August 1916, p. 3.

  294Newcastle Journal, 10 June 1915, p. 2.

  295The Bystander, 24 November 1915, p. xxiv.

  296War Budget, 1 June 1916, p. ii.

  297The Leadswinger, 4 September 1915, p. 1.

  298Coppard, With a Machine Gun to Cambrai, 1986 edn, p. 88.

  299De L’Isle, Leaves from a V.A.D.’s Diary, p. 27.

  300Pte J. Gray, ‘A linesman’s Gallipoli’, in W. Wood, In the Line of Battle, (London: Chapman & Hall, 1916), p. 49.

  301J. Agate, L. of C. (Lines of Communication), (London: Constable and Company, 1917), p. 102.

  302Notes and Queries, 29 October 1921, pp. 343–4.

  303Cairns Post, 12 March 1918, p. 7.

  304Yorkshire Evening Post, 25 August 1917, p. 4.

  305The Huns’ Handbook, (London: The Echo and Evening Chronicle, 1915), pp. 3, 46.

  306H. Buller, The Soldiers’ English–German Conversation Book, (London: T. Werner Laurie Ltd, 1915), p. 50.

  307Fifth Gloucester Gazette, 12 March 1916, p. 70.

  308The B.E.F. Times, 1 December 1916, p. 6.

  309In Treves, Made in the Trenches, p. 63.

  310Fifth Gloucester Gazette, February 1916, p. 63.

  311The Gasper, 28 February 1916, p. 4.

  312The Athenaeum, 1 August 1919, p. 695.

  313Brophy and Partridge, Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, pp. 16, 17.

  314Jones, In Parenthesis, 1969 edn, p. xii.

  315Omissi, Indian Voices, letter, J. N. Godbole, 18 March 1915.

  31616 October 1916, quoted in Wadsworth, Letters from the Trenches, p. 59.

  3171916, quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 164.

  318Douie, The Weary Road, p. 57.

  319RSM Harry Atkin Cheshire Regt https://davinaatkin.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/28th-july-1914/ accessed 6 February 2017.

  320Shoeing Smith C. H. Williams, 1916, quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 188.


  321G. Maxwell, in T. Cook, ‘Fighting words: Canadian soldiers’ slang and swearing in the Great War’, in War in History, (2013), Vol. 20 issue 3, p. 336.

  322Falkirk Herald, 14 March 1917, p. 3.

  323Birmingham Daily Post, 9 August 1915, p. 5.

  324Cpl George Mitchell, in S. Palmer and S. Wallis, A War in Words, (London: Pocket Books, [2003] 2004), 2004 edn, p. 123.

  325The Times, 15 August 1918, p. 3.

  326Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 11 March 1919, p. 3.

  327E. L. M. Burns, quoted in Cook, ‘Fighting Words’, p. 335.

  328MacDonald, Somme, pp. 143–4. One of the Church Lads Brigade is quoted as taking off his boots and socks after a march and saying ‘Those bloody fucking bastards’.

  329Burrage, War is War, 1930 edn, p. 35.

  330G. Goodchild, ‘The Sensitive Plant’, in Treves, Made in the Trenches, pp. 49, 50.

  331Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, p. 81.

  332Dawson, Living Bayonets, pp. 43–8.

  333Cook, ‘Fighting Words’, p. 326.

  334Ibid., p. 340.

  335Pte W. Ogilvie quoted in ibid., p. 340.

  336in 1914 G. B. Shaw noted that it was ‘a class word’: Hughes, G., Swearing, 1998, p. 187; E. L. M. Burns noted it as ‘the “bloody” of the English workingmen’ – Cook, ‘Fighting Words’, p. 335.

  337Douie, The Weary Road, p. 95.

  338Dawson, Living Bayonets, letters 20 June 1918, 22 August 1918.

  339McNair, A Pacifist at War, pp. xix, 48.

  340Duffin, Diaries, p. 91.

  341A Red Triangle Girl in France, (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), p. 125.

  342William James Newton, Imperial War Museum interview, [sound recording, 1975].

  343C. Savage, quoted in Cook, ‘Fighting Words’, p. 336.

  344MacDonald, Somme, p. 208.

  345A. Clark, Echoes of the Great War: the diary of the Reverend Andrew Clark, J. Munson (ed)., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1985] 1988), 1988 edn, 2 September 1916, p. 154.

  346Carry On: The Trotters’ Journal, New Year 1916, p. 3.

  347In Treves, Made in the Trenches, p. 196.

  348Barker, Agony’s Anguish, p. 11.

  349A. Hale, in Cook, ‘Fighting Words’, p. 342.

  350Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, p. 80.

  351J. Maclean, in Holmes, Tommy, p. 292.

  352Douie, The Weary Road, pp. 62, 63.

  353Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail, 1969 edn, pp. 20, 21.

  354Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, p. 206.

  355MacDonald, Somme, p. 143.