Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  50Weekley, An Etymological Dictionary, col. 812.

  51Daily Mail, 7 January 1918, p. 2.

  52Dundee People’s Journal, 9 September 1916, p. 1.

  53Arbroath Herald, 29 November 1918, p. 7.

  54An ongoing subliminal sense of the language of justification can be seen in advertisements such as that for Tremol Treatment (Bad Legs Cured) Daily Express, 2 August 1918, p. 2, with its subheading ‘The Reason Why’.

  55Cassell, New English Dictionary, (London: Cassell, 1919).

  56Macmillan, A Modern Dictionary of the English Language, (London: Macmillan, 1922).

  57Blackie’s Compact Etymological Dictionary, c.1920.

  58War Budget, 17 February 1916, pp. 16–17.

  59The Sphere, 26 December 1914, p. 306.

  60A. Fell, letter to The Times, 20 April 1915, p. 11.

  61Commission instituée en vue de constater les actes commis par l’ennemi en violation du droit des gens.

  62The Times, 29 December 1914, p. 3.

  63A. Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-time: propaganda lies of the First World War, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928), Ch. 23.

  64The Pow-Wow, 25 November 1914, p. 3.

  65Burnley Express, 24 July 1915, p. 9.

  66Daily Mail, 1 October 1919, p. 2.

  67Letter sent On Active Service, author’s collection.

  68Sussex Agricultural Express, 1 October 1915, p. 5.

  691916, quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 145.

  70Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 18 August 1915, p. 3.

  71Daily Mirror, 27 March 1917, p. 10.

  72Fifth Gloucester Gazette, 12 March 1916.

  73Dundee Courier, 7 April 1915, p. 2.

  74Dublin Daily Express, 17 July 1915, p. 2.

  75The Growler, 1 January 1916, p. 9.

  76Both Brophy and Partridge, (The Long Trail, 1969 edn), and Fraser and Gibbons note this.

  77Crofts, Field Ambulance Sketches, p. 124.

  78The Daily Express, 10 February 1915, p. 5.

  79The War Illustrated, 15 January 1916, p. 519.

  80Daily Express, 5 October 1915, p. 2.

  81Western Mail, 11 November 1916, p. 6.

  82Dundee Courier, 27 June 1918, p. 2.

  83Birmingham Daily Mail, 9 May 1918, p. 2.

  84Western Mail, 6 April 1918, p. 4.

  85Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 11 November 1915, p. 3.

  86Western Times, 23 May 1916, p. 8.

  87Western Times, 24 April 1917, p. 6.

  88From E. P. Oppenheim, The Missing Delora, serialised in the Portsmouth Evening News, 15 October 1913, p. 1.

  89Yorkshire Post, 14 September 1914, p. 10.

  90Western Daily Press, 3 September 1914, p. 5.

  91Western Mail, 11 November 1916, p. 6.

  92Liverpool Daily Post, 13 June 1916, p. 5.

  93Dundee Courier, 20 August 1917, p. 2.

  94The Gasper, 28 February 1916, p. 2.

  95Partridge, Slang of the British Soldier, p. 52.

  96W. E. Collinson, Contemporary English: a personal speech record, (Leipzig; Berlin: G. B. Teubner, 1927), p. 102.

  97Vivid War Weekly, 16 October 1915, pp. 175–6.

  98Bovril was still in 1922 arguing its case against accusations of profiteering, (The Bystander, January 1920).

  99Birmingham Gazette, 1 December 1914, p. 4.

  100The Athenaeum, 1 August 1919, p. 695.

  101The Times, 28 January 1918, p. 5.

  102The Gasper, 28 February 1916, p. 2.

  103Vansittart, John Masefield’s Letters, p. 59, 8 March 1915.

  104De L’Isle, Leaves from a V.A.D.’s Diary, p. 90.

  105Daily Mirror, 27 March 1916, p. 10.

  106The Tatler, 17 January 1917, p. 72; The Times, 20 April 1918, p. 6.

  107De L’Isle, Leaves from a V.A.D.’s Diary, p. 60.

  108E. Showalter, quoted in D. Poynter, ‘A study of the psychological disorders of nurses and female V.A.D.s who served alongside the B.E.F. and Allied Forces during the First World War’, doctoral thesis, 2008, p. 34.

  109Quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 73.

  110Graves, R., Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, p. 153.

  111Burrage, War is War, 2010 edn, p. 107.

  112Quoted in Van Emden and Humphries, All Quiet on the Home Front, p. 19.

  113Margaret Darrow, quoted in N. Khan, Women’s Poetry of the First World War, (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988), p. 15.

  114The Era, 19 September 1917, p. 23.

  115Treves, Made in the Trenches, p. 152.

  116The Leadswinger, 16 October 1915, p. 3.

  117Punch, 14 April 1915, p. 281.

  118Derby Daily Telegraph, 15 September 1916, p. 3.

  119L. Mugglestone, Pacifists, peace-plotters, and peacettes, [online] 16 May 2015. https://wordsinwartime.wordpress.com accessed 25 September 2016.

  120Evening Dispatch 21 May 1917, p. 3.

  121Daily Mirror, 5 June 1916, p. 5.

  122Aberdeen Journal, 28 March 1919, p. 6.

  123‘I’ll take my Susie for a ride / Upon the flapper bracket’ Chairman cigarettes advertisement, Hull Daily Mail, 26 March 1919, p. 6.

  124The Tatler, 28 February 1917, p. 271.

  125Bagnold, A Diary Without Dates.

  126Swinton, Twenty Years After, Vol. 3, p. 217.

  127Postcard, 9 December 1917, author’s collection.

  128De L’Isle, Leaves From a V.A.D.’s Diary, p. 21.

  129Punch, 16 May 1917, p. viii; 5 September 1917, p. viii; 5 December 1917, p. viii.

  130Tommy & Jack, 1916, p. 8.

  131Aberdeen Journal, 1 July 1922, p. 4.

  132H. Smith, Not So Quiet, ([1930] 1988), 1988 edn, p. 182.

  133Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail, 1969 edn, p. 155.

  134http://www.essexrecordofficeblog.co.uk/the-battle-babies-of-essex/ accessed 19 April 2016, http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/battle-babies/?utm_source=The%20National%20Archives&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6724312_FWW%20update%20February&dm_i=MAN,404IG,AD27MM,EGQQE,1 accessed 19 April 2016.

  135http://www.royalleicestershireregiment.org.uk/archive/journals/green-tiger–2015-spring-present/2015-autumn/592921 accessed 19 April 2016.

  136http://www.nancy.cc/2012/06/21/baby-girl-named-zeppelina/ accessed 8 September 2016.

  137The Lady, 29 October 1914, p. 639.

  138Aberdeen Evening Express, 19 August 1916, p. 1.

  139Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 29 October 1936, p. 6.

  140G. Whitworth, The Child’s ABC of the War, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1914).

  141Woman’s Weekly, 3 October 1914, p. 582; 7 November p. 718.

  142Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1960 edn, p. 93.

  143Douie, The Weary Road, p. 39.

  144Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 13 January 1915, p. 4.

  145Pte A. J. Abraham, quoted in Holmes, Tommy, p. 339.

  146See Gibson, Behind the Front, pp. 152, 156.

  147Folkestone Herald, 7 November 1914, p. 3.

  148P. Lotterie, Un village ardennois pendant les deux guerres mondiales, (privately published, 1981), p. 52, quoted in Bowd, ‘From Hatred to Hybridization, p. 199.

  149https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/impressions-airship-raids-over-london-schoolchildren#sthash.RHecNbj1.dpuf accessed 26 September 2016.

  150The Times, 10 December 1915, p. 11.

  151Hong Kong Education Department, War Stories, preface.

  152E. O’Neill, Battles for Peace: the story of the Great War told for children, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918), pp. 214.

  153Ibid., p. 143.

  154Parrott, The Children’s Story of the War, Vol. 2, p. 170.

  155Parrott, The Children’s Story of the War, Vol. 6, p. 102.

  156Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 100.

  157Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 170.

  158Ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 110–12.

  159Leeds Mercury, 2 July 1915, p. 4.

  160Manchester Courier, 1
5 August 1914, p. 6.

  161Burnley News, 18 September 1915, p. 5.

  162Dundee Courier, 9 September 1914, p. 2.

  163Luton News and Bedfordshire Chronicle, 8 February 1917, p. 4; the ‘give’ motif can be seen also on ‘tank-banks’ and on a German fund-raising medal of 1914 – Gold gab ich zur wehr Eisen nahm ich zur ehr (Gold I give for War, Iron I take for Honour).

  164Liverpool Echo, 10 August 1915, p. 8.

  165Fifth Gloucester Gazette, 12 March 1916.

  166Fifeshire Advertiser, 5 January 1918, p. 4.

  167Western Daily Press, 26 November 1915, p. 3.

  168Hendon and Finchley Times, 6 August 1915, p. 8.

  169Arbroath Herald, 9 August 1918, p. 3.

  170Unattributed, quoted in Wadsworth, Letters from the Trenches, p. 173.

  171Quoted in Arthur, We Will Remember Them, p. 178.

  172Postcard, On Active Service, 15 February 1917, author’s collection.

  173Postcard, On Active Service, 19 November 1918, author’s collection.

  174Quoted in Wadsworth, Letters from the Trenches, p. 20.

  175Postcard, On Active Service, 24 March 1917, author’s collection.

  176Postcard, On Active Service, 5 November 1917, author’s collection.

  177Postcard, On Active Service, 20 September 1916, author’s collection.

  178Quoted in Doyle and Schäfer, Fritz and Tommy, p. 113.

  179Postcard, On Active Service, 15 July 1917, author’s collection.

  180Postcard, On Active Service, ‘Somewhere-on-Sea’, 15 December 1915, author’s collection.

  181Postcard, On Active Service, 28 November 1917, author’s collection.

  5 Owning the Language

  1Partridge, Words! Words! Words!, p. 167.

  2Partridge, Slang of the British Soldier, p. 50.

  3J. Aitchison, The Language Web, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 15.

  4Manchester Guardian, 19 December 1919, p. 5.

  5The counterpart to the ‘temporary gentleman’, was the ‘gentleman ranker’, the title of a play current in November 1914 (East Ham Echo).

  6Dawson, A “Temporary Gentleman”, p. 8.

  7War Office recruiting advertisement, 10 August 1914.

  8Recruiting advertisement, ‘A Call To Arms’, 8 August 1914.

  9Quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 29.

  10The War Dragon, September 1916.

  11Graham, A Private in the Guards, p. 347.

  12The Era, 11 June 1919, p. 13.

  13Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail, 1969 edn, p. 153.

  14Duffin, Diaries, p. 72.

  15http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1919/dec/17/imperial-war-graves-commission#S5CV0123P0_19191217_HOC_411 accessed 5 December 2016.

  16Cook, War Diary, p. 57.

  17Aberdeen Press and Journal, 13 November 1920, p. 5.

  18Winter and Baggett, 1914–18, p. 212.

  19C. Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, 1983, in Gill and Dallas, Unknown Army, p. 39.

  20War Budget, 24 February 1916, p. 36.

  21Marwick, The Deluge, 1991 edn, p. 62.

  22Ibid., p. 63.

  23From Field Post Office, 19 February 1917, author’s collection.

  24Bilbrough, Diary, 13 October 1915.

  25Bagnold, Diary Without Dates, Ch. 3.

  26Ilford Recorder, 6 November 1914, p. 5.

  27Spicer, Letters from France, p. xi.

  28Hewett, A Scholar’s Letters, pp. 18, 17, 19.

  29Western Mail, 10 August 1914, p. 2.

  30Doyle, Kitchener’s Mob, p. 93.

  31F. Stanley, History of the 89th Brigade 1914–1918, (Liverpool: Daily Post, 1919), p. 8.

  32Yorkshire Evening Post, 1 September 1914, p. 2.

  33Birmingham Mail, 19 December 1914, p. 6.

  34http://www.ww1hull.org.uk/index.php/hull-in-ww1/hull-pals-batallion accessed 5 December 2016.

  35L. Milner, Leeds Pals, (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books, [1991] 1998), 1998 edn, p. 42.

  36Yorkshire Evening Post, 10 September 1914, p. 3.

  37Ibid., 16 September 1914, p. 3.

  38Ibid., 22 September 1914, p. 3.

  39Ibid., 26 September 1914, p. 3.

  40Milner, Leeds Pals, p. 42.

  41Postcard, On Active Service, 4 August 1914, author’s collection. The card shows an officer embracing a woman, and was sent to the soldier’s wife, in a fashionable part of Eastbourne.

  42Graham, A Private in the Guards, p. 192.

  43Cambria Daily Leader, 30 May 1916, p. 2.

  449th Royal Scots, Diary, p. 11.

  45Glamorgan Gazette, 9 April 1915, p. 3.

  46Vansittart, John Masefield’s Letters, 3 March 1915, 24 September 1916.

  47E. Blunden, Undertones of War, (London: Folio Society, [1928] 1991), 1991 edn, p. 70.

  48Spicer, Letters from France, 7 November 1915.

  49Army Club cigarettes advertisement, The Sketch, 29 March 1916, p. 23.

  50Hay, The First Hundred Thousand, p. 261.

  51Both in Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail.

  52Daily Express, 18 June 1918, p. 2.

  53Brophy and Partridge, Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, p. 18.

  54Birmingham Daily Post, 24 October 1918, p. 4.

  55Unidentified German soldier, quoted in Doyle and Schäfer, Fritz and Tommy, p. 107.

  56Cook, War Diary, p. 21.

  57Dawson, A “Temporary Gentleman”, p. 185.

  58Lord Northcliffe writing in the Weekly Dispatch, reported by the Ballymena Observer, 17 March 1916, p. 3.

  59War-Time Tips, Chapter VI ‘The Rules of War’, pp. 70, 72.

  60A War Nurse’s Diary, (1918), p. 59.

  61The Tatler, 3 January 1917, p. 23.

  62Osborn, The Muse in Arms, p. vii.

  63Pte R. Lawrence, 1 September 1917, quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 196.

  64H. O’Neill, The Royal Fusiliers in the Great War, (London: Heinemann, 1922), in Doyle, Kitchener’s Mob, pp. 124, 125.

  65Mottram, Journey to the Western Front, p. 23.

  66Sunderland Daily Echo, 20 November 1914, p. 1.

  67Douie, The Weary Road, p. 117.

  68Daily Express, 6 October 1915, p. 5.

  69Chasseaud, Rats Alley, p. 135.

  70James Kilpatrick in Atkins at War, p. 37, states that ‘the British Army, indeed, is an army of sportsmen’, meaning betting men.

  71War Budget, 3 February 1916, p. 381; 16 March 1916, p. 130; 6 April 1916, p. 228.

  72Tytler, With Lancashire Lads, p. 177.

  73Ibid., p. 77.

  74Cpl H. Diffey, quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 160.

  75Quoted in ibid., p. 201.

  76Dublin Daily Express, 16 August 1916, p. 3.

  77Quoted in MacDonald, Voices and Images, 1991 edn, p. 212.

  78Quoted in Holmes, Tommy, p. 413.

  79Masefield wrote ‘I put up a rabbit in our old lines, & any number of partridges’: Vansittart, John Masefield’s Letters, p. 229, 26 March 1917.

  80Williamson, The Patriot’s Progress, p. 113.

  81The Attack [sound dramatisation].

  82Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail, 1969 edn, p. 108.

  83The Times, 18 November 1921, p. 5.

  84The Athenaeum, 15 August 1919, p. 759.

  85Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail.

  86Illustrated London News, 4 January 1919, p. 6.

  87Notes and Queries, November 1918, p. 307.

  88Wood, In the Line of Battle, p. 47.

  89Fussell, The Great War, 1977 edn, p. 8.

  90Ibid., p. 12.

  91LCpl Abraham, quoted in Arthur, We Will Remember Them, p. 19.

  92Partridge, Slang of the British Soldier, p. 49.

  93J. Buchan, Francis and Riversdale Grenfell, (Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1920), p. 233.

  94Fussell, The Great War, 1977 edn, p. 4.

  95A Canadian Su
baltern – Billy’s letters home, 1917, p. 105.

  96Edmonds, A Subaltern’s War, pp. 66, 72, 78.

  97Partridge, Slang of the British Soldier, p. 49.

  98Quoted in Fussell, The Great War, 1977 edn, p. 8.

  99Lighter, Slang of the AEF, p. 86.

  100Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail, 1969 edn.

  101Jones, In Parenthesis, 1969 edn, p. 42.

  102Fraser and Gibbons.

  103Partridge, Words! Words! Words!, p. 207.

  104Notes and Queries, December 1918, p. 333.

  105Manchester Guardian, 8 June 1917, p. 3; an example of the assessment of change in language as decadence, which was largely reversed by the public interest in and support for new slang during the war.

  106Quoted in Yorkshire Evening Post, 17 August 1917, p. 4.

  107Fifth Gloucester Gazette, 5 May 1915.

  108Partridge, Words! Words! Words!, p. 163.

  109Fraser and Gibbons; Brophy and Partridge, The Long Trail.

  110The Athenaeum, 1 August 1919, p. 694.

  111Ibid., 29 August 1919, p. 822.

  112Yorkshire Evening Post, 16 October 1916, p. 5.

  6 Letting Go

  1Chelmsford Chronicle, 4 September 1914, p. 2.

  2Quoted in Doyle and Schäfer, Fritz and Tommy, p. 53.

  3Spicer, Letters from France.

  4Daily Mirror, 2 March 1915, p. 7; Dundee Evening Telegraph, 9 March 1916, p. 4; Nottingham Evening Post, 3 January 1918, p. 3.

  5The OED gives 1841 as the first documentation of this sense of ‘on’ as ‘arranged; going to happen or to be carried through to completion’. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on’ was No. 3 on The Iodine Chronicle’s list of hackneyed phrases, 20 December 1915 http://eco.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.8_06748_4/1?r=0&s=1 accessed 17 October 2016.

  6http://www.europeana1914–1918.eu/en/contributions/17242 accessed 7 October 2016.

  7‘ “They’re having a hell of a time”, said a Lieutenant, “but they mean to finish the job” ’ The Scotsman, 13 October 1917, p. 7.

  8Letter, 15 September 1918, author’s collection.

  9R. H. Mottram, The Spanish Farm Trilogy, Vol. 3, p. 690, (London: Chatto & Windus, [1926] 1928).

  10Edmonds, A Subaltern’s War, p. 113.

  11The Great War Interviews.

  12Quoted in Vansittart, John Masefield’s Letters, p. 148, 24 September 1916.

  13Letter, On Active Service, author’s collection.

  14The Listening Post, 10 August 1917.

  15Quoted in Arthur, We Will Remember Them, p. 56.

  16Todman, The Great War, p. 64.