Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  614Quoted in Vansittart, John Masefield’s Letters, 28 March 1915, p. 78.

  615MacDonald, They Called it Passchendaele, pp. 100, 108, 118, 123.

  616Holmes, Tommy, pp. 151, 265.

  617MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 170.

  618Pte J. Bowles, quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 181.

  6199th Royal Scots, Diary, p. 56.

  620Douie, The Weary Road, p. 105.

  621Quoted in Vansittart, John Masefield’s Letters, 18 March(?) 1915, p. 70.

  622Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, p. 227, though of course he survived.

  623Duffin, Diaries, p. 101.

  624Quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 105.

  625Quoted in Vansittart, John Masefield’s Letters, 27 March 1915.

  626Smith, Four Years on the Western Front, p. 170.

  627Coppard, With a Machine Gun to Cambrai, 1986 edn, p. 26.

  628Douie, The Weary Road, p. 200; Douie describes this as ‘in the parlance of the trenches’.

  629Lighter, Slang of the AEF, p. 82.

  630Portsmouth Evening News, 19 March 1915, p. 3.

  631Gill and Dallas, Unknown Army, p. 36.

  632Holmes, Tommy, pp. 400, 402.

  633From May 1915, ‘a British officer’ quoted in Wadsworth, Letters from the Trenches, p. 135.

  634Cpl A. Howard, quoted in Doyle and Schäfer, Fritz and Tommy, p. 229.

  635Diary, Capt C. May, 6 April 1916 http://www.express.co.uk/news/world-war-1/489831/Charlie-May-s-War-Secret-diary-WWI-officer accessed 27 December 2016.

  636A War Nurse’s Diary, 1918 edn, p. 56.

  637A. Smith, The Second Battlefield: women, modernism and the First World War, (Manchester: Manchester Unviersity Press, 2000), p. 33.

  638June 1917, officer’s letter quoted in Wadsworth, Letters from the Trenches, p. 122.

  639Quoted in Winter and Baggett, 1914–18, p. 169.

  640Ernest West, quoted in Wadsworth, Letters from the Trenches, p. 51.

  641Sgt Fairclough, quoted in ibid., p. 17.

  642Stanley Goodhead, quoted in ibid., p. 37.

  643Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail, 1969 edn.

  644Sgt Fairclough, quoted in Wadsworth, Letters from the Trenches, p. 18.

  645Sapper George Clayton, quoted in Arthur, We Will Remember Them, p. 173.

  646Public Opinion, 8 September 1916, p. 224; E. La Motte, The Backwash of War: the human wreckage of the battlefield as witnessed by an American hospital nurse, 1916; Stereoview photograph V18837, ‘Human Wreckage in No Man’s Land’, Keystone View Company, c.1917.

  647Burrage, War is War, 2010 edn, p. 81.

  648Holmes, A Yankee in the Trenches, p. 162.

  649Moran, Anatomy of Courage, 1987 edn, p. 62.

  650Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, p. 269.

  651Todman, The Great War, p. 20.

  652L. Napper, ‘The Battle of the Somme (1916)’, in M. Hammond and M. Williams (eds), British Silent Cinema and the Great War, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 35.

  653Edwin Wood, quoted in Wadsworth, Letters from the Trenches, p. xiii.

  654Tytler, With Lancashire Lads, p. 49.

  655Edmonds, A Subaltern’s War, p. 55.

  656Lt J. Glubb, quoted in Holmes, Tommy, p. 452.

  657J. Tarbot, Jerry Tarbot, the Living Unknown Soldier, (New York: Tyler Publishing Co., 1928), p. 58.

  658Vansittart, John Masefield’s Letters, 29 March 1917.

  659H. Stewart, From Mons to Loos, (Edinburgh; London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1916), p. 117.

  660Lancashire Evening Post, 3 March 1917, p. 2.

  661Western Gazette, 20 October 1916, p. 10.

  662Spencer, War Letters, 22 December 1914.

  663Vivian Stevens, letter On Active Service, 3 April 1916, author’s collection.

  664Kilpatrick, Atkins at War, p. 53.

  665Capt O. Flowers, quoted in MacDonald, Somme, p. 220.

  666E. W. Perogoe (NCO), Hastings and St Leonards Observer, 10 July 1915, p. 6.

  667D. Fallon, The Big Fight, (London: Cassell & Co., 1918), p. 148.

  668Vansittart, John Masefield’s Letters, 12 March 1915, p. 65.

  669Douie, The Weary Road, p. 128.

  670Cpl F. Kelling, quoted in Van Emden, Tommy’s War, p. 159.

  671Cpl W. Hartley, quoted in the Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 18 August 1915, p. 3.

  672R. Tobin, The Great War Interviews, recorded 1963–4, [BBC television programme], http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p01tbj6p accessed 7 February 2017.

  673Cpl G. Mitchell, quoted in Palmer and Wallis, A War in Words, 2004 edn, pp. 128–9.

  674Omissi, Indian Voices, letter, unnamed wounded Punjabi Rajput soldier, 29 January 1915.

  675Punch, 24 January 1917, p. ix.

  676Lancashire Evening Post, 3 March 1917, p. 2.

  677Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail, 1969 edn.

  678A. J. Dawson, A “Temporary Gentleman” in France, (London: Cassell, 1917), p. 173–4.

  679Graham, A Private in the Guards, p. 8.

  680‘Cheeriboy’s Warisms’, in Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal, 20 September 1918, p. 5.

  681The Gasper, 8 January 1916, p. 2.

  682Grantham Journal, 2 November 1918, p. 7.

  683Lancashire Daily Post, 7 March 1919, p. 5.

  684Western Times, 7 March 1919, p. 12.

  685Lancashire Daily Post, 8 March 1919, p. 2.

  686Essex Newsman, 8 March 1919, p. 1.

  687Derby Daily Telegraph, 16 April 1919, p. 3.

  688Yorkshire Evening Post, 6 November 1918, p. 4.

  689Sunderland Daily Echo, 17 April 1920, p. 6.

  690Manchester Guardian, 13 February 1930.

  691Letter to The Times, 11 March 1982.

  692J. Winter, The Experience of World War I, (Oxford: Equinox, 1988), p. 159.

  693Todman, The Great War, pp. 336, 114.

  694Amalgamated Engineering Union quoted in B. Waites, A Class Society at War, (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), p. 72.

  695Ibid., p. 73.

  696War-time Tips, p. 44.

  697Burrage, War is War, 2010 edn, p. 96.

  698Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, p. 161.

  699Holmes, Tommy, p. 414.

  700Driver Frank Woodhouse, May 1916, quoted in Wadsworth, Letters from the Trenches, p. 27.

  701Tobin, The Great War Interviews.

  702Rees, In the Trenches, [sound dramatisation].

  703Postcard, 18 August 1918, author’s collection.

  704Moran, Anatomy of Courage, 1987 edn, p. 75.

  705Quoted in Holmes, Tommy, p. 336.

  706MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 183.

  707Hay, The First Hundred Thousand, p. 36.

  708Lighter, Slang of the AEF, p. 64.

  709General Routine Order No. 1796, Gill and Dallas, Unknown Army, p. 42.

  710MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 183.

  711Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, p. 250.

  712Edmonds, A Subaltern’s War, pp. 41, 63, 133.

  713Moran, Anatomy of Courage, 1987 edn, pp. 127, 139.

  714Postcard, On Active Service, 26 July 1917, author’s collection.

  715E. M. Arthur Rhind, 25 April 1915, in Wright, Shattered Glory.

  716M. Brown, diary, 9 August 1915 in Smith, The Second Battlefield, p. 37.

  717P. Nash, letter, 16 November 1917, quoted in D. F. Jenkins, Paul Nash, The Elements, (London: Scala, 2010), p. 58.

  718Omissi, Indian Voices, letter, Dilawar Chand, 28 December 1917.

  719J. H. Benn, quoted in Doyle and Schäfer, Fritz and Tommy, p. 215.

  720Cpl H. White, letter in The Boot and Shoe Retailer, 4 December 1914, p. 30.

  721Omissi, Indian Voices, letter, Luddar Singh, 1 July 1915.

  722Birmingham Mail, 15 January 1915, p. 3.

  723Birmingham Daily Post, 3 February 1915, p. 6.

  724Derry Journal, 9 July 1915, p.
2.

  725Cheshire Observer, 16 October 1915, p. 8.

  726Hull Daily Mail, 21 May 1915, p. 3.

  727The Observer, 21 January 1917, p. 6.

  728Ibid., 15 November 1914, p. 8.

  729Manchester Guardian, 19 November 1914, p. 12.

  730Marwick, The Deluge, 1991 edn, p. 175.

  731J. Hendrie, n.d., Letters of a Durisdeer Soldier, (Edinburgh: 1917), p. 84, quoted in Marwick, The Deluge, p. 189.

  732L. Housman, War Letters of Fallen Englishmen, (London: Victor Gollancz, 1930), p. 30, quoted in Marwick, The Deluge, 1991 edn, p. 189.

  733The Great War Interviews, recorded 1964, [BBC television programme], http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p01tbj6p accessed 7 February 2017.

  734Burrage, War is War, 2010 edn, p. 67.

  735Manchester Guardian, 17 September 1917, p. 3.

  736Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, p. 269.

  737Quoted in Vansittart, John Masefield’s Letters, p. 294.

  738Field Marshall D. Haig, quoted in Doyle and Schäfer, Fritz and Tommy, p. 222.

  739Duffin, Diaries, p. 100.

  740Fussell, The Great War, 1977 edn, p. 170.

  3 Us and Them

  1E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 133.

  2O. Roynette, in C. Declercq and J. Walker, Languages and the First World War: representation and memory, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 22–3.

  3O. Leroy, A Glossary of French Slang, (London: Harrap & Co., [1922] 1924), 1924 edn, p. 5.

  4Published by the National Security League, NY City, 1918.

  5Speech given 20 November 1918.

  6The War Illustrated Album De Luxe, 1915, Vol. 1, p. 57.

  7Yorkshire Evening Post, 19 August 1914, p. 2.

  8T. Scheer, ‘Habsburg languages at war: “The linguistic confusion at the Tower of Babel couldn’t have been much worse” ’, in Walker and Declercq, Languages and the First World War: communicating, pp. 62–78.

  9Daily Express, 10 February 1915, p. 5.

  10Fogarty in Walker and Declercq, Languages and the First World War: communicating, pp. 44–61.

  11A War Nurse’s Diary, 1918, p. 57.

  12The Story of an Epic Pilgrimage, p. 103.

  13Picture Fun, 25 December 1914, pp. 4–5.

  14De L’Isle, Leaves from a V.A.D.’s Diary, p. 35.

  15Lighter, Slang of the AEF, p. 8.

  16Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 9 March 1918, p. 7.

  17Ibid., 7 August 1914, p. 3.

  18Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, p. 193.

  19Daily Record (Lanarkshire), 23 August 1915, p. 4.

  20Hull Daily Mail, 10 June 1915, p. 4.

  21Newcastle Journal, 2 February 1917, p. 5.

  22Dublin Daily Express, 31 August 1917, p. 3.

  23Dundee Evening Telegraph, 7 November 1917, p. 1.

  24Aberdeen Evening Express, 27 May 1918, p. 3.

  25Yorkshire Evening Post, 9 April 1918, p. 4.

  26The Times, 2 September 1914, p. 7.

  27Liverpool Daily Post, 10 February 1916, p. 8.

  28E. Armstrong, The Crisis of Quebec, (New York: Columia University Press, 1937), Foreword, p. ix.

  29Ibid., pp. 90, 91.

  30Peterhead Sentinel, 25 January 1902, p. 5.

  31Birmingham Daily Post, 30 September 1914, p. 8.

  32Derry Journal, 5 August 1914, p. 6.

  33Sunderland Daily Echo, 10 May 1902, p. 3.

  34Western Times, 15 June 1901, p. 2.

  35South Wales Daily News, 6 June 1900, p. 4.

  36Bexhill on Sea Observer, 24 October 1908, p. 16.

  37Manchester Courier, 1 December 1906, p. 10.

  38Dundee Courier, 25 June 1914, p. 4.

  39Rochdale Observer, 26 September 1914, p. 4.

  40Coventry Evening Telegraph, 5 September 1914, p. 2.

  41Manchester Courier, 1 September 1914, p. 4, 17 August 1914, p. 4.

  42Newcastle Journal, 30 September 1914, p. 8.

  43Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 11 November 1918, p. 2.

  44Speech given by King George V, 20 Nov 1918.

  45Omissi, Indian Voices, letter, J. N. Godbole, 18 March 1915.

  46Ibid., letter, Isat Singh, 1 May 1915.

  47P. Stanley ‘ “He was black, he was a White man, and a dinkum Aussie”: race and empire in revisiting the Anzac legend’, in Das, Race, Empire, p. 220.

  48Omissi, Indian Voices, letter, Dunjibhoy Chinoy, mid-July 1915.

  49Ypres Times, July 1922, p. 106.

  50The Times, 11 September 1914, p. 7.

  51Vivid War Weekly, 16 October 1915, p. 167.

  52R. Stumpf, War, Mutiny and Revolution in the German Navy, trans. D. Horn, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,1967), p. 51.

  53Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 8 October 1917, p. 5.

  54Jones, ‘Imperial captivities’, p. 178.

  55See William Barnes for the nineteenth-century move to substitute Latin-based words with Old English-based words.

  56C. Dawson, letter, 14 February 1912, quoted in M. Russell, Piltdown Man, (Stroud: Tempus, 2003), p. 149.

  57The Times 5 September 1914, p. 10.

  58Ibid., 14 September 1914, p. 3.

  59C. Sarolea, How Belgium Saved Europe, (London: William Heinemann, 1915), p. 196.

  60MacDonald, Somme, p. 185.

  61The Times, 3 September 1914, p. 8.

  62Manwaring, If we Return, p. 23.

  63Melbourne Bulletin, 6 April 1916, p. 7.

  64J. Beck, (US Solicitor General), speech, Savoy Hotel, 28 November 1918, Diary of Armistice Days, p. 38.

  65Le Naour J-Y, 1998, ‘Les désillusions de la libération d’après le contrôle postal civile de Lille (octobre 1918–mars 1919)’, in Revue du Nord, tome LXXX, Vol. 325 (April–June), quoted in G. Bowd, ‘From Hatred to Hybridization: the German language in occupied France, 1914–1918’, in Walker and Declercq, Languages and the First World War: communicating, p. 204.

  66C. Calwell, Experiences of a Dug-Out 1914–1918, (Constable & Co., 1920), p. 20.

  67In Vansittart, John Masefield’s Letters, 2 April 1915.

  68In Treves, Made in the Trenches, p. 158.

  69The Story of an Epic Pilgrimage, p. 65.

  70Evening Despatch, 12 October 1915, p. 3.

  71S. Hedin, With the German Armies in the West, trans. De Walterstorff, (London: John Lane, 1915), p. 30.

  72Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 16 January 1918, p. 2.

  73Folkestone Herald, 2 May 1917, p. 7.

  74Sunday Post (Lanarkshire), 1 December 1918, p. 2.

  75Derby Daily Telegraph, 30 December 1918, p. 3.

  76Western Daily Press, 17 December 1918, p. 4.

  77The Times, 7 September 1914, p. 9.

  78Pan-Germanism, R. Usher, in advertisement in The Times, 15 September 1914, p. 12.

  79Stumpf, War, Mutiny and Revolution, 1967 edn, p. 106.

  80Quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 52.

  81Newcastle Journal, 10 June 1915, p. 2. The suggestion that they were ‘taking in one another’s washing’ is hopefully a journalistic metaphor.

  82Yorkshire Post, 24 July 1915, p. 8.

  83J. Dunn, The War the Infantry Knew, (London: Abacus, [1938] 2004), p. 113.

  84Illustrated London News, 9 January 1915, p. 50.

  85Lord Northcliffe, (see under Harmsworth), At The War, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916), p. 198.

  86Har Dayal, Forty-four months in Germany and Turkey, (London: P. S. King & Son, 1920), p. 29. Germans were also ‘the unspeakable Hun’, John Bull, 10 June 1916, p. 18.

  87Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary, Vol. 2, 1918, pp. 43, 140, 252.

  88Har Dayal, Forty-four months, pp. 31, 32.

  89Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary, Vol. 2, 1918, p. 258.

  90J. H. Brittain, quoted in Rochdale Observer, 4 December 1915, p. 7.

  91The Times, 16 September 19, p. 9.

  92Daily Gazette for
Middlesbrough, 23 September 1915, p. 5.

  93R. Long, Colours of War, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), p. 152.

  94Dundee Evening Telegraph, 9 October 1912, p. 1.

  95‘A Scottish soldier’, letter to Berwickshire News and General Advertiser, 23 May 1916, p. 4.

  96Sussex Agricultural Express, 20 April 1917, p. 4.

  97Dundee Evening Telegraph, 25 October 1918, p. 5.

  98Banbury Advertiser, 6 May 1915, p. 5.

  99Mottram, A Personal Record, p. 102.

  100‘La guerre actuelle est la lutte des Welsches contre les Boches.’ Dauzat, L’Argot de la Guerre, 1918 edn, p. 59. For Dauzat ‘Boche’ implied ‘not just a people, a race, with the pejorative nuance with which the mob views “the other”, enemy or not’.

  101J. Grimm and W. Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1922).

  102Reprinted in Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 26 June 1916.

  103In J. Röhl, Wilhelm II: into the abyss of war and exile 1900–1941, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 933.

  104Ibid., p. 921.

  105In Röhl, Wilhelm II: into the abyss, p. 922.

  106Stumpf, War, Mutiny and Revolution, 1967 edn, p. 263.

  107C. Koller, ‘Representing Otherness: African, Indian, and European soldiers’ letters and memoirs’, in Das, Race, Empire, p. 129.

  108In Röhl, Wilhelm II: into the abyss, p. 1129.

  109From the work of Cesare Lombroso and Carl Mittermaier.

  110MacDonald, Under the French Flag, 1917, p. 157.

  111Fraser and Gibbons.

  112Yorkshire Post, 31 May 1917, p. 4.

  113Chester Chronicle, 25 December 1915, p. 2.

  114Sevenoaks Chronicle, 7 August 1914, p. 5.

  115Northcliffe, At the War, p. 198.

  116B. Millman, Polarity, Patriotism and Dissent in Great War Canada, 1914–19, (Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2016), p. 53.

  117Evening Dispatch, 22 August 1917, p. 4.

  118In the Hands of the Huns, p. 12.

  119Wright, Shattered Glory, p. 20.

  120Duffin, Diaries, p. 94.

  121The Kit-bag, August 1918, p. 63.

  122Dundee Courier, 24 October 1919, p. 5.

  123Weekly Despatch, 17 January 1915, p. 1.

  124G. Yerta, Six Women and the Invasion, (London: Macmillan & Co., 1917), p. 106.

  125Herbert, Mons, Anzac, and Kut, 1919 edn, p. 120.

  126Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 19 May 1915, p. 5.

  127Ruhleben Camp Magazine, August 1916, p. 22.

  128War Budget, 27 September 1914, p. 27.