languages-and-first-world-war

[languages-and-first-world-war]

New blog site

Dear readers, we are moving to a new site, which will allow the possibility of published comments. The news site is 

https://languagesandthefirstworldwar.wordpress.com

We will be maintaining the tumblr site as an archive, but will be reposting some of the most useful and interesting blogs on the new site. 

Best wishes

LFWW

[languages-and-first-world-war]

The Ladies from Hell

Ladies from Hell

 The study of ‘war languages’, ‘war words’, ‘trench slang’, from the First World War – and clearly variant forms are a major part of the subject – occasionally leads the researcher into the area of folk-etymology and the mythology of language. Folk-etymology takes two forms, erroneous stories of etymology, and word forms that through change propose phenomenological meanings (such as ‘sparrow-grass’ or ‘alligator pears’, for asparagus and avocado pears). Current from Autumn 1914 were stories that the German soldiers confronted by kilted soldiers from Canada, England or Scotland were so terrified that they called them ‘ladies from Hell’ or ‘devils in skirts’.

 To date no documentation in German, in newspapers, letters, diaries, memoirs or anywhere else, supports this. It is entirely a story reported, and reported vigorously by Allied soldiers, via newspapers at the time, and in postwar memoirs. It can be found as the title of R. Douglas Pinkerton’s 1918 memoir of his time with the London Scottish; in A. Corcoran’s The Daredevil of the Army (1918, p. 139); Over There and Back, by Joseph S. Smith (1918, p. 192); Private Peat, by H. Peat (1917, p. 175). Soldiers repeatedly reported its use to the press, enjoying their reputation for engendering terror. ‘Devils in skirts’ is found significantly less frequently, for example in the Daily Record 30 April 1917, p.4., in an article titled ‘Praise of the Scot’, which proposed that the Scottish soldier ‘considered it a soft impeachment when the Huns defined him in the early days of the war as the Devil in skirts; but he kept his senses when, for for some unknown reason the German papers devoted much of their space proving, to their own satisfaction, that anything good that came out of England was of Scottish extraction’. Unfortunately what the German papers did not do was offer any evidence of German soldiers using the expression. In the British press ‘Ladies from Hell’ appeared in September 1914 (Dundee Courier, 28 September 1914, p.7), continued through the conflict - the Aberdeen Press and Journal 18 October 1915 (p.4) specifically states in an article on ‘War Words’ that ‘The Germans have a phrase for our Highlanders which means “Ladies from Hell”’ -and after the war (The Sphere, 4 January 1919, p.12: ‘“Ladies from Hell” the Germans called the kilted soldiers then, and the term was one which, from the Germans, carried the highest sort of compliment’). An interesting variation/reaction, from the Highland Light Infantry, was published in October 1918: the Evening Dispatch, 4 October 1918, p.2, reported that they were calling themselves ‘Harry Lauder’s Idiots’; ‘no German, however, has yet been brave enough to call them that’. A further suggestion was ‘Hell’s Latest Invention’. After doing a trawl through the British Newspaper Archive, my impression was that reports in Scottish newspapers were outnumbering those in newspapers from the rest of Britain; in reality fewer than a third of the reports were from Scottish papers.

 What did the soldiers specifically say about the term, and did their comments in any way focus more on the gender or the infernal aspect? Private Alick Moore of the Camerons, reported in the Aberdeen Evening Express, 25 December 1914, p.3, stated that ‘ … the Germans nicknamed us ‘the ladies from hell’. We looked as if we were relations of the devil sure enough, our kilts covered with mud, and a few weeks beard on our chins.’ Private Clifford Walker, serving with the Cameron Highlanders, whose letter to a relative in Leeds was reported in the Leeds Mercury, 14 July 1915, p.2, stated that ‘The French people in the villages nearly go daft when they hear the pipes and see us in our ‘frocks’, as they call them. A good many times I have been offered money and a pair of trousers for the kilt, but it is far warmer and helps to frighten Johnny German away’. An interesting use of ‘the’ rather than ‘my’ in ‘the kilt’, indicates its role as an abstract identifier rather than merely an article of personal clothing – each individual kilt is a metonym of ‘the kilt’. There are plenty of comments about bayonet charges, war cries and the Germans running away, but no remarks on the concept of gender.

 ‘Ladies from Hell’ has stuck. Fraser and Gibbons, in their seminal Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases (1925), define the term as ‘A name coined in the War by the German newspapers and adopted among the German troops on the Western Front’. This is confirmed by an early report from a soldier: Private John Trafford of the Gordon Highlanders (Dundee Courier, 18 September 1914, p.4) wrote that ‘the Gordons had some captured Germans with them, and the latter informed them that in Germany (NB) the Highlanders were called “the Ladies from Hell”’. Perhaps repeated hearsay made it stick faster, and allowed some elaborations: ‘A lady working among the troops’, as reported in the Western Mail (13 March 1915, p7), said ‘By the way I hear that the Germans call our kilted regiments “the ladies from Hell” (Hollenweiber, I suppose; it was told me in English)’. The levels of projection here are very clear – first the term, and then its ‘original’ version. The same German term was reported as being used by General Joffre, commander of the French Army, in the New Zealand Evening Post, 20 November 1915, p.11: on a hospital visit the general, on meeting a Scottish soldier, said ‘you are one of the men the Germens call “Hollenweiber”’. The actual German word would be Höllenweiber, which should be transcribed into English as ‘Hoellenweiber’. A word search on a site digitizing German language newspapers (http://anno.onb.ac.at/anno-suche#searchMode=simple&from=1) brings up no results, while another site digitizing newspapers Europe-wide (http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/newspapers/issue/3000113894506?hp=3&page=3&refine-query=%22ladies+from+hell%22&query=%22ladies+from+hell%22 ) provides only an article in French about Scottish troops during the First World War, from Le Figaro, 25 September 1939, p.3, which finishes thus:

 Lorsqu'en septembre 1914 ils chargèrent furieusement, devant les étangs d'Ermenonville, un regiment de fantassins allemands qui, tous, périrent noyés, ils gagnèrent un surnom : dans l'armée britannique, on ne les désigna plus que sous le sobriquet « The Ladies from Hell » — les dames de l'Enfer... —R. L.

 Specifically this notes that ‘in the British army, they were only designated under the nickname …’ The revival and enthusiastic use of the term during the Second World War shows that it clearly was reckoned successful.

 Other British articles bring a further nuance to the story: a brief note appended at the end of a story –

“The Ladies From Hell”

The German soldiers call the highlanders ‘Ladies from Hell’ because of their dress and their principle of no quarter to the enemy. – D.P.

Thus the ‘from hell’ notion derives from killing surrendering men.

 Other stories refer this back to a song from the Crimean War, ‘The Kilties in the Crimea’, written by John Lorimer of Paisley, in 1865; as reported in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner 9 November 1914, p.2, it runs:

 The Kilties are the lads for me,

They’re aye the foremost in a spree,

And when they’re in they’ll no’ come oot

Tho’ a’ the warld should turn aboot.

They’re no’ the lads will run awa’,

But feicht while they ha’e breath to draw;

Just tell them whaur they’ll meet the foe,

And shoulder to shoulder awa’ they go!

 Etc. The regiment portrayed is ‘the Royal forty-twa’ commanded by Sir Colin Campbell ‘wi’ his kilted clan’. The battle takes an interesting turn when:

 The kilties gaed to help the Turks,

Wi' a' their pistols, guns, and dirks.

But when the bagpipes ga'e a blaw

The Turkies fainted clean awa'.

Their lassies, too, and wives sae queer

They werena like our lassies here,

For they buckled up their e'en wi' clouts.

As if our kilties had been brutes.

 Islamic female dress it seems caught the attention in mid-battle. Later:

 The Russian General, when he saw

The kilties chase his men awa’

Cried oot, " Does ony mortal ken

Whether they're wild beasts or men ? "

Sir Colin cried, « Come here, my man,

And I will tell, for weel I can,

The kilted lads are just,'' he says,

" Our horsemen's wives in Sunday claes."

 Presumably the joke is that the Scots are so terrifying that the Russians are afraid even of Scottish women. The Aberdeen Weekly Journal repeated excerpts from the poem on 4 December 1914 (p.5), an indication that it was not altogether unknown. But it would be unwise to make a definite link between this poem and the appearance of the phrase; despite the use of the kilt in the British Army since the early eighteenth century, this phrase does not appear till 1914, making it more likely an invention, or less likely an adoption, of the New Armies rather than a term from the pre-1914 army .

 If we are to discuss this in terms of concepts of gender, as well as of terror, which the phrase proposes, we need also to take into account that women as well as men used the term. Should gender be discussed as part of the phenomenon? Yes, of course. The responsibility for the term, and thus raising the question of gender, is safely projected onto the enemy: projecting the responsibility for the issue onto the ‘other’ allows it to be discussed, ignored, challenged, whatever, but we cannot pretend that the issue is not raised. But there are two parts to the phrase: if the first part of ‘ladies from hell’ is a clear challenge to the soldiers’ gender, the second half of the phrase stares down any challenge to their masculine power. And being the second part of the phrase, since language is linear, it supersedes the first part, making the whole a celebration of the ability to engender terror, whatever the expectations of gender. Primarily a phrase for expressing the enjoyment of being able to create fear, it as part of the process proposes and then crushes any thoughts of effeminacy. No wonder they enjoyed it.

[languages-and-first-world-war]

Wipers or Vipers 2

Research into the origin and indeed the authenticity of ‘Vipers’ as a slang name for Ypres continues. There are a number of leads and possibilities: was it a mistake; a transcription of a slang German name for the place; a projection by Anglophones of a slang German name for the place; a name marking bitter feelings towards the place; or something else? The appearance of the term in the Publishers’ Circular in 1920 means that this merits a thorough investigation.

 Firstly, how did people feel about vipers at the time? There is ample evidence that actual vipers were treated as pests, to be killed.  ‘At North Park, Tedburn, recently, Mr W Coldridge killed a viper which measured 2ft 6in. in length. On being opened seven young ones were found inside, as well as a fully grown mouse. The viper is regarded as a very fine specimen’ (Western Times, 9 April 1915, p14).  ‘A large snake was found in a farmhouse at Southery Ferry one day last week, and a viper has been killed in the middle of Southery village’ (Thetford and Watton Times and People’s Journal, 20 February 1915, p4). But some documentation reveals some unsureness as to the identity of the animals: ‘Mr F. and his son on one day killed eleven vipers, two snakes, and one adder. On another occasion they destroyed eight vipers and two snakes’ (Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 30 April 1915, p5). 

 In this context it is easy to see how the epithet ‘viper’ would be applied to anyone hated, particularly if there was an element of deception involved: thus in Rome the Grand Master of the Freemasons described pacifism as ‘a viper which lay hidden, but whose head must be crushed’ (Dundee Evening Telegraph, 27 November 1917, p1). Turkey, in siding with the Central Powers ‘has acted like a viper to us her old friend and ally’ (Warwick and Warwickshire Advertiser, 13 March 1915, p5). The submarines that sank the Aboukir, the Hogue and the Cressy in September 1914 were described by René Milan as ‘submarine vipers’ (Vagabonds of the Sea, 1919, p48).

 ‘Viper’ was a straightforward term of abuse against the enemy: a Belgian citizen living in Britain, who took his own life at the beginning of the war, left a note describing the Kaiser as ‘that ferocious human viper of Germany.’ (Newcastle Journal, 2 August 1914, p8). ‘Kaiser-Americans’ were ‘A Nest of Vipers in the States’ (Nottingham Evening Post, 3 August 1915, p3). Following the sinking of the Lusitania, the Dublin Daily Express called for ‘the stamping out of the Prussian vipers or the effective removal of their fangs’ (10 May 1915, p4). German rage against Britain was exemplified in ‘torrents of abuse, floods of fantastic falsehoods, and an ineradicable conviction that the British people are a race of vipers, dastards, bloodsuckers, liars, thieves, murderers, and traitors!’ (Liverpool Echo, 17 January 1917, p3).

 British citizens could also be vipers: professional footballers who did not enlist were ‘traitors’ and ‘vipers’. (Manchester Evening News, 7 April 1915, p7). George Lansbury, the socialist politician, condemned the Pall Mall Gazette for describing ‘all those who advocate peace as “vipers”’ (Daily Herald, 3 July 1915, p3). Elsewhere pacifism was equally treated: The critics of Sir Douglas Haig were ‘The Vipers at Work’ – ‘he treated [their] viperous attacks with the contempt they deserved.’ (Globe, 17 December 1918, p2).

 Yet the term could also be employed for the animal’s attributes of sudden striking in effective places – in 1899 the Navy’s first turbine destroyer was HMS Viper, though the Navy soon abandoned the use of snake names for ships (though the Western Mail, 11 March 1915, p8, implied that there was a still an HMS Viper in use). Thus ‘viper’ as a term could have useful connotations; but during the war it was generally a negative epithet.

 As previously discussed, Ypres occupied a special place in British sentiment, typifying stubborn resistance, loyalty to an ideal, and the projection of these onto a place. But the Ypres League, the Ypres Times, Ypres Day, were post-war constructs. While there is a string tendency to interpret The Wipers Times as lightheartedness in the face of death, it can equally be read as cynical gallows humour, a shout of rage at the futility of the soldier’s situation: there is no love for Ypres in its pages. The patriotic bombast of The War Illustrated might announce that the ashes of Ypres were ‘impregnated with the spirit of Albion’s immortal glory’, but it was still ‘The Dead City’ (p1180, July 1915), a place that ‘smells of lilac and of death’ (S Macnaughtan, A Woman’s Diary of the War, 1915). Already by June 1915 people in Britain were aware that Ypres held a special place of fear for the soldier: David Lloyd George made a speech in Manchester on 3 June, in which he urged the need for greater efficiency in the manufacture of weaponry; particularly the labour force had to work where it was needed, not where it desired, just as was the case for soldiers – ‘The enlisted workman cannot choose his locality of action. He cannot say, “Well, I am quite prepared to fight at Neuve Chapelle, but I won’t fight at Festubert, and I am not going near the place they call ‘Wipers’”’ (The Times, 4 June 1915, p9).

 Looking again at the documentation we have for the use of ‘Vipers’ for the place-name, we have the following:

 Thanet Advertiser, 23 January 1915, p3, reporting a speech given by a vicar during an evening of talks: ‘Mr Tonks remarked that in connection with this town one was reminded of the optimistic humour of the British “Tommy”. For him, the pronunciation of the town is “Vipers”, and the spirit of lightheartedness revealed by such nick-names must surely assist our men in their struggle for victory.’

 The Middlesex Chronicle 26 June 1915, p3: ‘Private E. W. Smith, of Whitton, who writes, under date of June 13th, sends two verses composed by a member of his brigade, … He says “I know those at home are only too delighted to hear and know what ‘Tommy’ sings, even if it only light parody.”

Far far from Ypres (vipers) I long to be.

Where German snipers can’t pot at me.

Think of me crouching where the worms creep

Waiting for something to put me to sleep.

The Manchester Guardian, 29 December 1915, p7: ‘Frenchmen who call Ypres ‘Wipers’. This includes the statement: ‘The gallant army of France has for generations pioneered military progress, yet today the poilu is assimilating British ways and British methods in an extraordinary manner. He is even carrying it to the length of pronunciation. When the French soldier speaks of “Wipers” in the most natural manner imaginable as though he had never called it anything else and sings “Tipperary” as frequently as his own glorious anthem, we may be prepared for anything.’

Imagine how ‘Wipers’ would be pronounced in a French accent: it would probably depend whether the speaker were imitating spoken English, in which case it would be more like ‘ooïpers’, or speaking from the written form, more likely to be ‘vipers’ (as in ‘wagon-lits’).

 Evening Despatch, 14 February 1916, p1: a cartoon of German soldiers, with the caption ‘It is stated that German soldiers have a dread of being sent to the Ypres front [see Lloyd George’s speech above]. Some have committed suicide rather than face it. Soldiers’ chorus on being ordered to Ypres :-

O Faderland, my Faderland,

Thy face I never more shall see;

The Englishes at Vipers vos-

Dis is der place for me.

The Publishers’ Circular, 3 January 1920, p7: ‘Ypres, or “Vipers,” as Tommy called it, is a name which will long be remembered by the families of the men from all parts of the Empire who fought and died there. …’

 So we see a projection of the term as German pronunciation – critically, no slang name for Ypres in German has been found -, as a projected French pronunciation, one military and two civilian documentations of ‘Vipers’, one of the civilian usages being post-war. There is a possibility that any of the last three were mistakes or individual usages; it is likely that the two civilian usages were acquired from soldiers, the Publishers’ Circular one possibly being from a former soldier. There is also the residence documentation of Private E. W. Smith, Whitton, near Hounslow, now part of Greater London, but then a village to the west of London.

 A change of direction: also in the Globe, on 19 January 1916, p2, there appears this:

The “vipers” alluded to in a morning paper as circulating traitorous and disloyal leaflets and circulars must be a kind of pen-viper, as Mr. Sam Weller would say.’ What the writer is alluding to here is the by then centuries-old phenomenon in the London accent of the v/w merger, whereby ‘v’ was pronounced as ‘w’ and vice versa: Sam Weller in Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers is the most well-known exponent of this (“All good feelin’, sir—the wery best intentions, as the gen’l’m’n said ven he run away from his wife ‘cos she seemed unhappy with him”).

 There has been considerable argument over the authenticity of this transcribed accent. William Matthews in Cockney Past and Present ([1938] 1972) quotes B Smart (Walker Remodelled, 1836) as saying that it was outmoded in the 1830s, and that A W Tuer, author The Kawkneigh Awlminek  (1883), claimed that Weller was ‘exceptional in his pronunciation’ (p180); Ernest Weekley, born in 1865, claimed that though he had heard ‘weal’ for ‘veal’ and ‘wittles’ for ‘victuals’, he had never heard the reverse substitution of ‘v’ for ‘w’. Comedians such as Gus Elen were using the ‘w’ for ‘v’, as in ‘wery good’, well into the 1930s. Peter Wright quotes Henry Wyld as hearing people say ‘vild’ for ‘wild’ as a joky imitation of speech from about 1850 (Wright P, Cockney dialect and slang, London: Batsford, 1981, p137). Supposed to have died out in the nineteenth century, there were remnants of the accent still to be found in the south-east of England: George Bernard Shaw in a note to Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1900), wrote: “When I came to London in 1876, the Sam Weller dialect had passed away so completely that I should have given it up as a literary fiction if I had not discovered it surviving in a Middlesex village, and heard of it from an Essex one.” Note ‘in a Middlesex village’.

 Peter Trudgill in Investigations in Sociohistorical Linguistics (Cambridge, 2010, p65) offers the following: ‘Wakelin [1972: 95-6] writes that the Survey of English Dialects (SED) materials from the 1950s and 60s) show that “in parts of southern England, notably East Anglia and the south-east, initial and medial [v] may appear as [w]’. One of the examples given is ‘viper’. Thus, well into the twentieth century in parts of southeast England ‘viper’ was being pronounced as ‘wiper’.

 Now, going back into the nineteenth century, the example frequently given to show the use of this merger of sounds is ‘an old cockney conundrum’ (Wright, p137). This is to be found in Errors of Pronunciation, and Improper Expressions, Used frequently, and chiefly by The Inhabitants of London, published in 1817. On page 34 we find, under V:

 V, for W; and W, for V. This error is constantly committed by the vulgar. Veal and Vinegar are by them pronounced Weal and Winegar; whilst, Wine and Wind are sounded Vine and Vind. There is an old cockney conundrum which exemplifies this error:

Why is a pocket-handkerchief like a species of serpent? Answer – Because it’s a viper.

 So a) there is anecdotal evidence of the v/w merger surviving in the southeast of England into the twentieth century, often but not always as joke or performance;

b) its exemplary form appears in a joke which specifically mixes ‘wiper’ and ‘viper’;

c) the cockney/London/southeast England accent was recognised as the dominant accent of the British Army on the Western Front: much evidence supports this claim, from ‘Ole Bill to the large number of London street names used as trench names. As an example of how this was translated to the Home Front, the boys’ comic The Dreadnought marked its recognition of the importance of the war to its readers with the announcement, (29 August 1914) 25 days after the declaration of hostilities, that it would be printing a war story every week, followed on 3 October with the beginning of its first war serial, which is centred on the main character of ‘Bill Stubbs, the Cockney Hero’.  

 Thus it is possible that the use of ‘Vipers’ for ‘Ypres/Wipers’ was an application, self-conscious perhaps, of a vestigial phenomenon in the all important wartime London/southeast England accent.

 As a note here, an article in the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette 13 June 1917 (p2), not only indicated that the use of ‘Wipers’ was disappearing, but that it was seen as ‘uneducated’: ‘Now that there are more educated men in the ranks the pronunciation “Wipers” is dying out; in fact it is almost resented’. This is the reverse of what is implied by most of the evidence, that ‘Wipers’ was officers’ pronunciation, and had educated class connotations. ‘Educated’ men may have been more equipped to pronounce Ypres using the French pronunciation, but resentment was more likely to have been at civilians, and especially journalists, using the term.

 The three instances, the Thanet Advertiser of January 1915, the Middlesex Chronicle of June 1915, and the Publishers’ Circular of January 1920, are the most noteworthy. The first two document local SE England pronunciation – the Rev Tonks in Thanet may have heard it from a local soldier on leave or convalescing, and though this can never be more than conjecture, he does link it with the well-documented terms ‘Jack Johnson’ and ‘Black Maria’. Recently another instance has emerged in the Publishers’ Circular, in an article published on 25 September 1915 (p271) in a review of S Macnaughtan’s A Woman’s Diary of the War: ‘… relating experiences in Antwerp during the siege, Furnes, the first battle of Ypres – or “Vipers,” as our “Tommies” call it.’ Compare this with the 1920 text: ‘Ypres, or “Vipers,” as Tommy called it’. Close reading of Macnaughtan’s A Woman’s Diary of the War shows there is no instance throughout that book of the use of ‘Wipers’ or ‘Vipers’ or slang names for any Belgian or French towns, though she does self-consciously use slang terms, such as ‘it “bucked one,” as schoolboys say’ (p44) or ‘with “Jack Johnsons” still whizzing overhead’ (p46). So this use of ‘Vipers’ is clearly an inclusion by a Publisher’s Circular editor, quite possibly the same person using a close variation five years later. After reading through every issue of the Publisher’s Circular from August 1914 to July 1916, I think it is unlikely that the source for this usage will appear.

[languages-and-first-world-war]

Forgotten?

Today’s guest blog is from Joan Rees.

My mother’s father was a coalminer in Wheatley Hill in County Durham. He volunteered as a soldier in WW1. He needn’t have gone and my grandmother never forgave him for going off and leaving her with four young children: my mother, the fifth, was born early in 1916.

I don’t know why he went or even where – with a name like Tom Smith and no date of birth, you’re hard to trace, though there was a Tom Smith in the South Yorkshire Regiment. My guess would be that he responded to propaganda and was perhaps curious to know what the world was like away from the coalfields, for the probability is that, at best, he’d never been further from the village than Durham City, within walking distance, on Miners Gala Day.

Grandpa fought on the Somme. Somewhere I have his Somme medal... But he was wounded and his left shoulder and arm never worked properly afterwards and probably were painful, though I never heard him complain. He had been a check weighman before the war and, as such, had a significant job in checking the coal in the trolleys that came up from the pit and the extent to which this was mixed with stones and useless rubbish on which depended the wages of the men working at the coal face. He wasn’t capable of this when he came back but, instead, was given (no doubt out of the kindness of heart of the manager) the job of ‘knocker- upperer’, the man who went round with a stick, banging on the windows of miners to get them up on time for their shifts underground.

He was, of course, retired by the time I knew him but living still in Wheatley Hill in a rented, terraced house rather than in 1Miners’ Villas where my mother grew up with the Working Men’s Club as his social life and rather heavy drinking of the local brew as his solace. He was a silent figure who hardly ever said a word and never joined in conversations. Sometimes there were family get-togethers when my mother and her three sisters gossiped and argued, while their men folk went into the rarely used front parlour and played solo. Grandpa just went on sitting quietly and unsmiling in his corner.

When WW2 had started and my father was in the RAF as an intelligence officer and all the other maternal uncles, apart from one in the police force (and some aunts), were fighting in various parts of the world. I was intermittently left to stay with my grandparents when my mother went off to meet my father and, convinced as I was that Hitler and the German army’s main target would be my father, I wanted to know what it was like fighting a war. To the great irritation of Granny, I pestered my grandfather with questions about ‘his war’.

Grandpa never responded. He refused to say a word and sat behind a newspaper in the corner of the kitchen/ living room drawing on his pipe. If he had been out to the Club and come home slightly the worse for wear, he would respond to my pestering by singing ‘mademioselle from Armentieres who’s never been kissed for forty years’ though he never got any further than that – and Granny was always telling the pair of us to ‘have hush and leave it.’

Almost certainly he spent the whole of his life after he came home suffering from what we would now call ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ and probably he had some sort of war disability pension, but almost certainly no other help.

It’s only now, many years later, after much reading and looking at photographs and the work of war artists, that I can recognise, albeit not really comprehend, what my grandfather must have seen and experienced to effectively have placed a barrier between him and the world around him for the rest of his ‘life’. And yet, as a miner, habituated to the dangers of working underground and the all too frequent injuries and deaths, he must have been more familiar than many of his fellow tommies, with risk and with mortality.

Grandpa was hardly a ‘war hero’. His name is obviously not inscribed on any of the memorials erected in towns and villages countrywide to the fallen nor are his ‘exploits’- what ‘exploits? - celebrated in any way but there must have been hundreds of men just like him whose lives were effectively destroyed by ‘the war to end all wars’ and who never came back to savour a ‘land fit for heroes to live in,’ and, as we prepare to celebrate the centenary of WW1, I think that he and his fellows should be remembered sympathetically.

[languages-and-first-world-war]

Native American codetalkers in World War One

The use of Native American codetalkers, e.g. the Navajos, in World War Two by the US military is by now quite well known.  What is lesser known, although hardly a secret, is that the US military also employed codetalkers in World War One towards the very end of the conflict.   The use was successful enough that the United States tried it again in World War Two, this time on a much larger scale.

What exactly was codetalking?   In the case of the Native Americans, it was translating battlefield instructions, e.g. orders, from English into their own languages and conveying them by telephone, radio, etc., to another speaker of that language on the other end, who would then translate them back into English.  The “codes,” if you want to call them that, were essentially special words made up in the respective language that were needed on the battlefield.   The Choctaws for example, used “bad air” when they wanted to say “gas” and “scalp” when they wanted to say “casualties” because “gas” and “casualties” were words that did not necessarily exist in their own language.  Those Choctaws that knew the special vocabulary were codetalkers—those that didn’t were not.  Said another way, not every  Choctaw in World War One would have been a codetalker.

The abovementioned Choctaws are the most famous of the World War One  codetalkers.   As members of the 36th Division (made up on many Oklahoma-based Native American tribes), they first conducted operational  codetalking during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in France on 26-27 October 1918. The end result was the US capture from the Germans of an area called Forest Farm.  The Germans, who had the uncanny knack of knowing when the Americans would be attacking, were caught completely by surprise this time.

Further research has shown that the Cherokees codetalkers from the 30th Division (composed of many Native American tribes from the southeastern part of the United States) were actually used before the Choctaws—on 7-8 October 1918 in a successful assault against the German Hindenburg Line in France.   There are also reports and claims that the Comanche, Osage, and Sioux tribes also engaged in codetalking about this time.  Unfortunately, there is no “smoking gun” out there to prove any of these three beyond doubt. It is of course possible that further research will find that gun and will find other tribes as well who did World War One  codetalking.

Finally, the United States should be congratulated for bringing recognition to its codetalkers.  We have to ask why other nations have been reluctant to publicly reward  their own codetalkers.   While these other World War One combatants (except for Canada) did not have Native Americans of their own, they certainly must have seen the advantages of passing messages on the battlefield in an obscure language.   Many of the combatants, e.g., the British, had colonies of their own, with their choice of obscure tongues to utilize.  Yet only the Americans, it seems,  are recognizing their people.  At the time of the 100th Anniversary of World War One, it is time for other nations to be more forthcoming about the work of their codetalkers in this conflict.

Gregory J. Nedved is Vice President of the National Museum of Language in College Park, Maryland, and a historian for the US Department of Defense.  

[languages-and-first-world-war]

Wipers and Vipers

Marguerite Helmers has just sent our way a version of Wipers/Ypres/Ieper which extends the range of names of the place. The Publishers’ Circular for 3 January 1920 (page 7) carries an article about a description of the architecture of pre-war Ypres, headlined ‘Ypres as it was in 1913’: ‘Ypres, or “Vipers,” as Tommy called it, is a name which will long be remembered by the families of the men from all parts of the Empire who fought and died there. …’

 Problem: probably no anglicised place-name from the First World War is so well known as ‘Wipers’, largely now from The Wipers Times, the irony-laden trench journal edited by Fred Roberts and Jack Pearson of the Sherwood Foresters, which first appeared in February 1916 and ran under various names until December 1918. The Ypres Salient, a chunk of land which stuck out from the line of British trenches, became massively symbolic during the war, at great cost of life; an area which had to be held to show the British Army’s commitment. After the war its symbolic value survived, so many British, and Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, South African and Indian families having a perpetual connection to where sons, brothers, husbands and fathers lost their lives. It became ‘the Immortal Salient’, ‘Holy Ground’, or ‘Sacred Ypres’ - ‘What Verdun means to the French, Ypres means to us’, as Lord French said in the Ypres Times, October 1921. There was an Ypres League, founded in September 1920, which continued into the 1940s, and published the Ypres Times until late in the 1930s; it had international branches, and was involved pilgrimages which assisted many families to visit the graves and memorials of loved ones in Flanders.

But for those who were there perhaps the experience did not raise a smile, and maybe the famous irony of the Tommy sometimes gave way to more than grousing. The familiar response to ‘Remember Belgium’ was ‘How can I forget the place?’; Cyril Jose remembered ‘Our platoon officer 2/Lt. E.M.Gould led us yelling, ‘Remember Belgium, Remember the Lusitania.’ We yelled back, ‘**** Belgium and **** the Lusitania!’’[1]. For them ‘Vipers’ may have been a way of expressing their hatred for a place that meant the worst experience of their lives.

 Or it may have been a version of the name in use among a small group of former soldiers, or indeed a mistake. Verbal mistakes certainly had their place in the conflict. Fraser and Gibbons tell the story of two Australian officers at Gallipoli, who are suspicious of a major who joins them and advises them on a direction of firing. They ask him “are you fair Dinkum?”, and the reply ‘Yes, I’m Major Fair Dinkum” gives him away as a spy. The idea of the mistake as shibboleth is seen in A M Burrage’s anecdote (War is War, 1930) of being told by his sergeant to ‘shoot anyone who can’t properly pronounce the consonant ‘W’. At the Crossroads, in Treves F, Made in the Trenches, edited by Frederick Treves in 1916, ends with the spy revealing himself by his German word order – ‘the King’s messenger a lie tells’. But, in more creative soldiers’ slang, Morpheus, the god of sleep whose name is the root of morphine, provided ‘murphyised’, and ‘somewhere in France’ morphed into ‘summers in France’.

 There is another side-comment to this. ‘Viper’ is the Latinate version of the name of an animal known to speakers of Old English as a ‘nædre’, which by the Middle English period, had through metanalysis (shifting of the initial ‘n’ from the noun to the preceding definite article), become an ‘an eddyr’, or ‘a neddyr’ – in effect ‘a naddre’ became ‘an adder’, possibly via a ‘mistake’ in transcription. If mistakes can become language change (they can and do), then ‘Viper’ certainly has a claim to its place in the corpus of soldiers’ names for the town.

[1] http://www.pollingerltd.com/bookshop/martin_body/2nd-devons-somme.pdf

[languages-and-first-world-war]

War phraseology in children’s comics

 Children were involved in wartime language, and continued to be involved after November 1918, as some of the vocabulary of the war lingered, some of it remaining till the present.

 Charles Hamilton, writing as Frank Richards, introduced Greyfriars School, and the Billy Bunter stories, in the Magnet, in 1908, discussing topical items such as the suffragette movement, and during the war, conscientious objectors. In this issue of The Penny Popular, from January 1918, a ‘tyrannical new master’, Mr Slogger, is described by the boys as a ‘double-dyed Prussian’ and a ‘Hun’. The advertisement on page 9 serves as an indicator of how slender, and sometimes absent, the line was between children and soldiers.

It was the mid-1920s before children’s comics started to use the war as a backdrop for adventure stories, and postwar comics seemed to deliberately avoid references to the conflict. But wartime language cropped up occasionally beforehand. In Chips from 5 July 1919, there is hardly any recognisably distinct wartime language to be seen, though the heading to one joke ‘Peace at Last’ would have stood out from the page. But in this issue the very successful ‘camouflage’ appears twice, once clearly, and once camouflaged itself, in ‘Mi Kollum’ presented by the ‘Chips Orfis Boy’ in which a character ‘kamouflajes’ himself as a ‘kabbidge’.

We also see an adventure story involving industrial espionage, with a reference to the war, in which British-made shells had been ‘teaching the Hun a lesson’.

The Butterfly and Firefly of 17 September 1921 (with the usual racist caricatures, and an attempt to bypass Chaplin’s intellectual property rights) has the strapline ‘Merry and Bright’, which was around before the war, and through it, and a strip cartoon called ‘Buckshee Bunce, the barmy bard’. Percy MacPelman ‘the boy who forgot’, is walloped with an anchor (yes) by his father, and announces that he is ‘about fed up’. Slang is very evident in ‘The Exploits of Mary Power’ – there is a gang of ‘catspaws’, someone is ‘snaffled’, another gets ‘plugged by a bullet’, and one character is ‘what the Americans call a “snoop”’; but this story has is no clearly discernible wartime slang. However, on the back page, a strip cartoon ‘Percy Pickle the pavement artist’ ends with Percy successfully getting his girl – ‘Yes, Percy clicked again’.

The disappearance of war terms in the press, including children’s comics, went hand in hand with the surge in academic interest, the latter partly spurred by the awareness that urgent recording was needed to prevent the complete loss of such an imaginative wealth of phraseology. Evolutionary sorting, both reflecting and influencing the public’s abandonment of wartime terms, acted as a determinant of which terms would and would not survive.

[languages-and-first-world-war]

Auld Alliance

The melting pot of people with different languages, dialects and accents was one of the great linguistic opportunities of the First World War. In other circumstances it could have been a most extraordinary learning environment; as it was adversity and need forced people to communicate, and introduced them to sounds and ideas that were new, exotic or enlightening. Or tightened down existed barriers and prejudices.

 This passage from Aubrey Smith’s Four Years on the Western Front, published in 1922, shows a failing to communicate between two people using the same language:

  Presumably here were two people with very different accents, where the policeman could understand Smith, but not vice versa. The unintelligibility of Scottish English to southern English listeners was, despite the popularity of Harry Lauder, something of a music-hall joke at the time. But the contribution of the people of Scotland to the war mattered enormously; did it make some people wonder whether they might work a little harder to understand? This from a troopship magazine:

 Tongue in cheek perhaps, but also maybe striking a chord? This from a letter to The Times from ‘a private in France’ printed on 7 September 1917, offers a progressive Anglophone attitude to both Scots and French:

 ‘As soon as we get settled down I am going to take advantage of a unique opportunity of becoming a good French conversationalist. As it is I find that I can easily make myself understood, but the simple idiomatic phrases we use in English stump me when I try to turn them into decent French. The beauty of it is that very few people here can speak English – it being a small country town – so one has to rush boldly in. I walked into an estaminet the other day and found the proprietor struggling to understand some Gordons. I stepped into the breach and straightened out the tangle. Afterwards he said, “Je comprends bien les Anglais, et je comprends les soldats d’Irlande” (here he threw up both hands), “mais je ne comprends pas les Ecossais.” I told him that it was difficult for me to make them out at times and he was delighted.’

[languages-and-first-world-war]

Feed the guns

‘Feeding’ was a frequent trope used in war campaigns for war-savings. ‘Feed the guns and help to bring them down’ and ‘feed the guns with war bonds and help to end the war’ (both British 1918 posters) encouraged civilians to lend to the government, with the incentive that the money would go to create shells.

 Food featured large in British army slang, partially because it was monotonous, and often there was not much of it. Bully beef and biscuit (very hard), plum and apple jam, occasionally condensed milk, porridge (burgoo), and tea. Often soldiers had to put up with ‘a duck’s breakfast’ – a drink of water and a wash. During combat if a unit was bogged down waiting for reinforcements, the ‘iron rations’ [emergency rations] consumed, there might be even no water. Small wonder then that food terms are found in the words of the frontline soldiers.

 The term ‘iron rations’ was itself used to describe shells. Certainly physical resemblance to foodstuffs made the crossover of terms a natural development: 'pineapple', 'toffee-apple', and 'egg' were names of bombs, with larger shells being called ‘plum puddings’ and ‘sausages’, while foods were given the names of projectiles - 'dumdums' (beans), 'zeps in a cloud' (sausages in mashed potato) & 'hand grenades' (meatballs). Early in the war jam tins were used for making bombs for throwing. Long after such rudimentary applications had been superseded American forces were calling German grenades ‘jam pots’; despite an apparent difference in appearance Jonathan Lighter notes (Slang of the AEF) that this referred to ‘evidently the potato masher’. Lighter’s glossary also gives ‘pepperbox’ for the machine gun and ‘shrapnel’ for grape-nuts. American soldiers became so used to soup that the field kitchen was called a ‘soup-gun’, corresponding to the German Gulaschkannone.

 Similar terms may be found on both sides of no man’s land: ‘axel-grease’ and ‘Wagenschmiere’ were used to describe margarine, while ‘potato-masher’ and ‘Kartoffelstampfer’ were the slang terms for the German stick-grenade. In French ‘entonnoir’ was slang for a stomach and at the Front a shell-hole, ‘marmite’ was a cooking pot and a heavy shell, ‘saucisse’ an observation balloon as well as a sausage, and ‘cloche à melons’ was a cloche for assisting the growth of melons  - ‘helmet’ is implied for this in Partridge Words! Words! Words! (1933). 

According to Karl Bergmann in Wie der Feldgraue Spricht (1916) among the names for hand-grenades were ‘apples’ and ‘bananas’, and round French mines were called ‘Edamer Käse’ (edam cheese); and ‘wieder andere Minen sehen bei ihrem wackeligen fluge wie Wurste (Blutwurste) aus’ [other mines with their wiggly flight were called Wurst, or Blutwurst]. Bergmann gives also Knallbonbons for the fragments thrown from an exploding grenade ; Dechelette in L’Argot des Poilus (1918) has ‘bonbons’ as bombs carried by bombing planes. The French called their equivalent of bully beef ‘boîte à singe’ (tin of monkey-meat), the term also applied to a type of German shell.

Sausages featured heavily in Western Front iconography: two images here – one from The Switchboard, the Royal Engineers Signallers Regiment trench journal for September 1916, and the other from Punch’s Almanack for 1916, from a section parodying German humour.

 Dechelette gives the wonderful codeswitch term ‘Saucisseman, Observateur dans un saucisse’.

‘Flaming onions’ were incendiary projectiles used against Allied aircraft; it was assumed that they were connected with wires, thus referring to the string of onions idea, though in fact the phenomenon was produced by a set of flares fired more or less simultaneously from an anti-aircraft gun. On the Western Front the bayonet was variously known as ‘tooth-pick’, ‘le cure-dents’, and ‘Zahnstocker’; for Partridge ‘tin-opener’ corresponded to ‘Büchsenöffner’, and ‘tire-bouchon’ (corkscrew’), and the French also had ‘fourchette’ (’toasting-fork’, ‘Kröstentecher’) and ‘fourchette à escargots’ (’snail-fork).

The excellent http://151ril.com/content/history/culture/3 also offers 

le pruneau - bullet

le moulin-a-café - machine-gun

le saucisse - trench-mortarr bomb

le dragée, le praline & le pruneau - shell fragment

le pruneau - shrapnell ball

le boudin - short trench

le haricot - short curved trench

Roger O’Keeffe points out also the ‘butcher’s bill’; the OED dates this to 1881, but Partridge spots it earlier, at 1829 (A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English), though unfortunately with no 1914-18 citations; it has been used frequently in writing about the war, but if anyone knows of any wartime documentation of this it would be welcomed. 

‘Bombardier Fritz’ (English slang for ‘pommes de terre frites’) was no doubt a happy coincidence of sound, but a coinciding nevertheless. Imagination is fundamental to a lot of the verbal invention here, imagination of food as much as wordplay, as rationing led to a more restrictive supply of foodstuffs being sent to the troops from home. But within this lies a striking correlation between the materiel of war being sent over and the idea of food. Perhaps the terrible imbalance between the presence of high explosives and the absence of the comfort of food provoked the mind into metaphors.

 And though no metaphor for the guns ‘feeding’ their target came into common usage, there was a symbol of elemental nutrition that did emerge: a British howitzer in use on the Western Front between October 1914 and July 1916, and later one of the first tanks were both nicknamed ‘Mother’.

[languages-and-first-world-war]

Tourism to soldiering: a 1916 multilingual phrasebook

The earliest phrasebooks to appear during the First World War were, as might be expected, tourist phrasebooks, with either a military supplement, or a few military phrases added. It might be expected that as the war progressed the tourist phrases about where to buy hairbrushes or get a shirt laundered would give way to questions to ask a suspected spy, or requests for information about terrain, but this was not necessarily so: some books retained the tourist framework with military phrases, sometimes out-of-date, while prewar tourist phrasebooks still circulated.

The author of the book shown was Melik Serge David-Bey, born in Armenia in 1870, (he also used the name Serge d’Herminy, from 1924) who studied at the Sorbonne and published works in history and philology. For this series he was the author of La Langue Arabe en 30 leçons, a French-Arabic phrasebook (manuel de conversation), and three multilingual phrasebooks each of which gave corresponding phrases in four languages. He died in Paris in 1938.

Omissions and inclusions in the military text shown would seem to indicate that this was a pre-war text; though there are ‘tranchée/trench’, ‘obus/bomb’ and ‘baïonnette/bayonet’ there are no ‘avion/aeroplane’, ‘ballon dirigeable/balloon’, ‘tir de barrage/barrage’, or ‘gas/gas’. There is ‘timbalier/kettle-drummer’ and ‘fifre/ fifer’, and ‘shako/shako’, ‘cuirasse/cuirass’ and ‘l’épée/sword’, which indicate that this was descriptive of the French Army in the run-up to August 1914. 

The Catalogue general of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France gives the publication date as 1916, though unfortunately no date within that year. It may seem odd that at the time of the date-stamp shown there was commercial scope in France (the sale price is 1 Fr 50) for a book with a clearly Turkish author, though he may have had some cachet still from the other phrasebooks and courses in the series – his La Langue Arabe en 30 leçons was reprinted in 1957.

  Peter Doyle offered the following thoughts in interview:

 ‘What we know from examination of the book is that it was for sale during 1917, two years after the Gallipoli campaign, but there are strong indications that it was written before the war. The languages given, French, English, Turkish and Russian, would be appropriate for a period when all these were potential allies, namely before the declaration of war (though there was considerable tension between Turkey and Russia); Turkey was a potential ally of Britain until the two battleships being built in British shipyards, and paid for in large part by the Turkish people, were requisitioned by Churchill in August 1914, and Turkey had traditionally looked to France, conducting affairs in French in the Diplomatic Corps.

 The date stamp from 1917 would make the book relevant for the period of the Salonika campaign, which involved French, British and Russian forces, but not Turkish forces (there the enemy was Bulgaria). The other two multilingual phrasebooks in the series (Française-Anglaise-Serbe-Greque and Française-Anglaise-Italienne-Russe) would have been relevant to various times – Greece eventually entered the war in 1917, and both Italy and Serbia also served in Salonika – but this one seems more of a hang-over from earlier times.’

 What this seems to be then is a travellers’ phrasebook, written from the context of wealthy travel possibly designed for the Orient Express route, from a French linguistic perspective; the publication date of 1916 seems at odds with the content, but rendered the book relevant by bringing together the four languages in the context of the closing Gallipoli campaign and the development of the Salonika campaign, involving French and British forces from October 1915, and Russian forces, along with Serbian and Italian units, from summer 1916. The use of ‘Servia’ rather than ‘Serbia’, adopted in 1914, in the English column (p80/5) does not in itself propose a pre-1914 date, as there are several minor mistakes and outdated usages in the English: ‘the last novelties’ instead of ‘the latest novelties’, ‘they pinnts me’, ‘please to try on myself this pair’, and others familiar in style from cheap phrasebooks, including familiar errors such as  ‘Spain’ instead of ‘Sprain’, as well as outdated usages such as ‘cannoneer’ and ‘here is my cheque on your house’. Other anomalies include ‘Parlez plus doucement, s’il vous plait’ (p20/9), curiously translated as ‘speak more slowly, please’ rather than ‘speak more softly, please’, with the Turkish - Sizi an'namayorim – meaning ‘I don’t understand you’ (literally ‘I am not understanding you’). 

The Turkish is a phonetic form of the language written in Latin script, a form preceding the Attaturk reforms – and David’s obvious fluency in Arabic would have helped here - Arabic script still being in use throughout the Ottoman empire in 1916/17. There are differences from modern Turkish – Satchlérimi for Saçlarımı (p43/10); sidjak for sıcak (p43/1); so’ouk for soğuk (p43/2; gueureuchiriz for görüşürüz (p19/3); Pek éyi for Çok iyi (p19/5). The Russian is written phonetically.

  The wealth of non-military phrases could easily have been ignored while the useful ones would still be useful - while there would have been limited opportunities to use phrases such as ‘To the opera, I am so fond of music’, it was always going to be helpful to be able to say ‘the town – the little town – the houses’ and ‘Je ne vous comprends pas’. The publication and commercial availability of this book, with its notification of price increase, in 1916 and 1917 shows that any kind of multilingual phrasebook would be thought useful by somebody for somebody, though the near pristine condition of this copy is a strong indicator that it was never bought, or at least never used in service. But it shows the perception during the war of the value of being able to communicate in other languages.

Thanks to Sophie Higgs for observations on Turkish.

[languages-and-first-world-war]

Recent ‘plonks’

Pulling together a few recently noted incidences of ‘not “plonk”’.

 Brophy and Partridge in their The Long Trail, first published as such in 1965, gives the relevant entry as:

 Plink-Plonk: facetious for vin blanc (cf.). Variants were plinkety-plonk, blink-blonk.

The entry for vin blanc gives no further variants. In the earlier version of the glossary, printed in 1930 as Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, the entry has the same text.

Partridge’s own A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (edn printed 1974, 1st was 1936) gives ‘Plonk’ as 1. Mud. And 2. As ‘Pinky, cheap port, sold by the uart: Australian ; from ca. 1926. Prob. ex plink-plonk, q.v. – Hence, any kind of wine of no matter what quality : id. : from ca. 1930.

 Henry Williamson’s The Patriot’s Progress (1930) has in the narrative the words ‘plinketty-plonk, as vin blanc was called’ (p137). This continues a tradition of linguistic education, seen in the numerous glossaries and single entries that appeared in trench journals (see below, from The Gasper 8 January 1916).

 Of course, alcohol was of major importance (see The Pow-Wow 16 December 1914 – the signal reads ‘A merry Xmas’). 

For Williamson’s hero, John Bullock, ‘the hours spent in the estaminet’ were second in the list of ‘the thing[s] they lived for’ (pp132-3). But alcohol required a swift education too to be part of the group - Bullock arrives at the barracks as a man who ‘had tasted beer before’, but ‘drank two pints in the canteen, and felt less lonely’. By the final phase of the book Bullock is fully inducted into the world of alcohol (see William Kermode’s stunning lino-cut, p147) waking up in an estaminet and calling for ‘ong otre bottle de vang rooshe’.

But this leaves us with the lasting question, how was it possible that vin blanc did not become ‘plonk’? One possible answer is that ‘plonk’ was already in use, for mud – Partridge has ‘over the plonk’ for ‘over the top’ (Words! Words! Words!, 1933). This seems to have developed from the description of the sound of dud projectile landing in the mud, and developed further into ‘to plonk’ meaning ‘to shell’, though this was probably also influenced by the use of ‘to plank’, meaning to place down vigorously, dating from at least the mid-nineteenth century (Partridge). For the soldier, the sound ‘plonk’ meant that the shell, trench-mine, or whatever was not going to go off. The sound of projectiles was a matter of life and death (though not in the case of ‘whizz-bangs’, which travelled faster than the speed of sound); identifying an incoming or passing projectile by its sound gave you an idea of the urgency of taking evasive action. Identification and understanding the communication of identification was a matter of life and death; and while English is a language full of homophones, there seem to have been remarkably few around in the slang of the First World War. ‘Sausages’ were both projectiles and balloons, but this is the only example that comes to mind immediately of homophones where both examples described weapons.

 On the other hand there were other identifications of food and projectiles or weapons: ‘zeps in a cloud’ (sausages in mashed potato), toffee-apples, pineapples, eggs, plum-puddings ; I would suggest though that there is a distinction in the locus of these terms – ‘zeps in a cloud’, ‘bombardier Fritz’ and all the variants of ‘von Blink/plink-plonk’ etc, were estaminet or canteen terms, while the others were terms for the trenches. 

What does the referencing of food in trench-to-trench missiles tell us? Perhaps the shape initially referred to fantasies of food, but perhaps there was also an ironic view of ‘feeding’. The elusive ‘plonk’, especially if consumed in quantity, would have taken the soldier to a happy land of relief and lack of care, not totally unlike the relief he would have felt at hearing the plonk of the dud landing nearby.  

In passing, Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory writes (edn 1977 p 179) ‘The modern designation plonc for cheap wine of any colour, usually red now, derives from the troops’ way with the term vin blanc.’ Interesting that the wine colour has changed across the decades. Fussell offers no documentation, but specifically states that ‘plonc/plonk’ is modern, and that the designation derives from a method of word-changing, not a specified incident or incidents.

[languages-and-first-world-war]

Selling and the Somme

The battle of the Somme has acquired status as the great symbolic event of the First World War, synonymous with the concept of the lost generation, pointless slaughter, and disastrous wishful thinking, so much so that it is difficult now to understand how it was viewed in 1916. For a while the battle was viewed optimistically.  L D Spicer, having been part of the follow-up advance, wrote on 10 July ‘I am at the present moment feeling thoroughly cheerful and happy. In the first place THE show is I think being a success, a great success, I believe and hope. Not that it was not a success then, because it was, and has been all along so far.’[1] Seen in terms of the movement of men and supplies towards the Front it looked to be going smoothly two months after the start: John Masefield, working as a medic in France, wrote in a letter ‘All now seems to be working admirably towards victory; no more muddle, no more ignorance, no more pigheadedness, but all in avant avec les drapeaux.’[2] By 29 September The Times was still optimistic, using the headline ‘Great Gains At Small Cost’ (p6).

 In this context, and somehow despite graphic images seen by the number of people whose first major visual experience of the war had been the film of the battle, watched by millions in July and August, the Somme was through 1916 generally viewed as positive rather than negative, and definitely as a major event in the war; the film undoubtedly contributed to its achieving iconic status at the time. This has to be remembered as we look at a phenomenon that feels now rather uncomfortable, the commercial use of the word ‘Somme’.

 Three distinct kinds of use of the word ‘Somme’ for commercial purposes emerge: the use of the word as a context for advertising a product; the use of the word in the name of the product; and the use of the word as a pun for ‘some’. The first of these comprises a wide range of applications, from a casual mention of the word to a direct reference to the product being used or wanted at the Somme.

 1.     Contextual use

 These usages began to appear towards the end of September 1916, the Dundee Courier on 20 September carrying an advertisement for Keiller’s Marmalade (p3), with the headline ‘From Waterloo to the Somme’ and using the terms ‘big push’ and ‘great power’. A drawing at the top of French cavalry charging Scottish infantry is matched with one at the base of large artillery guns in action.

 A small ad in the Liverpool Echo, 3 November 1916 (p5), reads ‘Remember the Somme. Send our Boys some WILLIAMS’S “VELONA” TOFFEE’. This seems to combine a respectful reference to the battle with a reasonable kind of product that soldiers might want, or might be considered a fairly cynical sales pitch – there is no actual connection, and the pitch is just riding on emotional attachment to the Somme. Or should we understand an association between the Somme in particular and sending comforts to soldiers? People would hardly be forgetting the Somme at this time, so this appears to be more an appeal against negligence, an eye-catcher. Certainly fascination with the Somme was strong – a small ad in the Manchester Evening News on 18 November 1916 (p1) offered ‘Somme Souvenirs To Let for Window Display: terms: M279’.

 In December 1916 the Daily Mail[3] was publishing Christmas cards (‘Simple Christmas Cards’) which it was proposed were ‘in keeping with this year’s ideal of a simple Christmas’; made using images from the Daily Mail postcard series, these were ‘wonderful battle photographs from the Somme’. Series of postcards in 1917 sold as ‘“Somme Battle” Postcards’[4] reinforced the idea of the Somme as an out-of-the-ordinary battle, and carried a reference to the film ‘The Battle of the Somme’ which was seen by as many as 20 million people in 1916.

 The most widespread use though was the idea of the Somme as testimonial referent, by which advertisements quoted the use of the product at the Somme. A Bovril advert in the Aberdeen Evening Express on 28 December 1916 (p5) was modeled on a news story, with the headline ‘Carries Bovril to Wounded under Fire’ and the subheadline ‘How Chaplain led Rescue Party’ uses a report from the Montreal Gazette, beginning ‘Among the many heroic deeds which marked the Somme fighting in September …’. The model of the testimonial letter was used through the rest of the war, being employed for products as diverse as personal anti-shrapnel protection and Phosferine tonic medicine; a typical example is the advertisement for the Chemico Body Shield, advertised in the North Devon Journal on 23 August 1917 (p8), with a letter from ‘a Soldier’s Mother’, who writes ‘My edest boy is, I believe, at the Somme, and much under shell fire …’ Even without proof of the soldier’s location (he would legally have been able to give his location only as ‘somewhere in France’) the use of the word Somme could give some power to the advertiser’s pitch. Another body-shield advert, for the ‘Dayfield’ (Western Gazette, 30 March 1917 p6) quotes a mother saying her ‘ONLY Son’ had survived thanks to the body-shield; the letter ends with her saying ‘It happened on the Somme’.

 This use of the Somme continued after the war, with the Hull Daily Mail carrying an advert for Phosferine on 6 February 1919 (p5), in which Cpl H G Levett of the east Surrey Regiment writes approvingly of the product, mentioning names of places that many would recognise, Mons, Deville Wood, and ‘the Somme Push’.

 2.     Use of the word in the name of a product

 Available in November 1917 was a product called Somme Paste, offering ‘Relief and Cure of Sprains, Rheumatism, Neuritis, Stiff Joints, Backache, Sore Throats, Chest Colds, Toothache, etc. CHILBLAINS and FROSTBITE are UNKNOWN where Somme Paste has been applied.’ This product was advertised with intention for it to be bought and sent to serving personnel – ‘see that he gets one’ the advertisement urged. The advert shown in the Cambridge Independent Press on 2 November (p7)indicated that it could be bought from ‘FLANDERS, Chemist, Mill Road, Cambridge’.

 From May 1918 a number of tailors began to sell women’s coats using the name ‘Somme’; the Hull Daily Mail on 17 May (p3) advertised ‘Distinctive Raincoats. The “Somme” is by far the most popular for town or country wear’ (cost 3 guineas); a text box within the sentence carried the words ‘Trench Coat’. This gave way to ‘Practical Raincoats’ on 17 September 1918 (p3), the trench coat reference being abandoned, though the coat still had a belt and was double-breasted (cost 4 guineas). After the Armistice people could buy “The Somme”, a ‘Ladies’ Hydrotite Raincoat’, still clearly based on the trench coat model, with external pockets and cuff-straps (Dundee Courier 13 & 20 January 1919, p1), but by December there was a single-breasted large-cuffed coat marketed as “Somme”, which had abandoned the trench-coat design (Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 2 December 1919, p4).

 3.     Use as a pun on the word ‘some’

 Around the time of the first contextual uses, on 22 September 1916, in the Liverpool Echo (p3) the following appeared:

 ‘SOMmE PUSH. The BIG ADVANCE in the sales of Welco testifies to its flavour and quality’ 6½ d per ¼ lb tin’

 Welco was a brand of cocoa, often sent out to troops in France and Flanders, so could claim some tenuous connection.

 The relatively new use of the word ‘some’ as an intensifier, an import from American slang (though some claimed it had been adopted into American English from British English usage), provided an opportunity for punning in advertisements, a long-standing trope. The use of ‘Somme’ where ‘some’ might be expected caught the eye, was topical, and might even claim to be patriotic. In many cases it was highlighted with the use of inverted commas, which at the time were used to signify text that was foreign, slang, unusual, or humorous. Though these jokes look thin now, they were popular then – witness the number of wartime picture postcards with puns, and the sometimes quite callous wordplay documented in soldiers’ speech. Not many instances of this kind of usage appeared, but evidence of soldiers’ use indicates that this was shared between the Front and the Home Front.

 A precursor appears in an advertisement in the Durham Advertiser 7 July 1916, headlined ‘“The Great Push”’: Charlton’s sale of clothes was advertised with the words ‘The Great Offensive will begin at 9 o’clock Friday’. Difficult from the point of view of modern sensibilities, this is probably exceeded by a Boots advertisement from The War Budget, 5 October 1916 containing a pun on ‘Somme’.

Advertisement, The War Budget, 5 October 1916.

 Later in the year and on into 1917 usage of the Somme was employed for products that did not attempt to make a connection with the army. On 25 December 1916 in the Dundee Evening Telegraph (p4) an advertisement for Mackintosh’s Toffee (de luxe) used the slogan ‘Always having a big push. Somme Toffee!’ On 1 March 1917 there was an advertisement for ‘“Somme” wartime bargains in pianos at Crichtons’, (Western Daily Press p6); and again on 26 April 1917 Crichtons advertised in the same paper ‘“Somme” bargains in secondhands’ - note the use of inverted commas; but these are absent in an advertisement carried on 6 October 1917 in the Derbyshire Courier (p6) for Hoyland’s Pianos, organs and piano-players with the heading ‘Somme Sale’.

 On 4 May 1918 the Western Daily Press ran a column on their back page (p6) with the headline ‘Somme Liveliness’. This probably was slightly tongue in cheek – the phrase established in August 1914  and used in a press release by the War Office Bureau on 19 August was ‘a certain liveliness’ (see Sheffield Independent p5, Birmingham Daily Post p7, et al), a typical piece of British reticence, and which Ernest Weekley stated to be ‘likely to become a stock phrase’[5]; it was used by Lord Fisher in a note to Churchill in November 1914[6], and both ‘some liveliness’ and ‘a certain liveliness’ were used in 1916[7]. The apparent flippant tone in reporting military action at the Front, which involved the loss of British lives, sits at odds with the situation at the Front – Haig had issued his ‘backs to the wall’ special order only 23 days earlier.

 The superficial connection between some of the commercial products and the troops at the Front raises the question of whether and why we should be looking for some moral justification. No doubt the troops would have liked more cocoa, and toffee, and even pianos, but it is hard to see this use of the word ‘Somme’ being driven by much more than opportunism. An advertisement in the Newcastle Journal 5 October 1916 (p7) offers an example of a more morally justifiable use of the word in a fundraising notice for the YMCA Huts, which catches  the eye with the headline “Did you see the “Somme” film?’

 However, this may be too simple. Soldiers in France were using ‘Somme’ as a pun too, particularly in the double-layered pun ‘Somme-where in France’. Two postcards, one from 1916 showing a group of soldiers, and one from 1917 from a soldier, show this beyond doubt.

Possibly responding to soldier usage, the Dundee Evening Telegraph 28 February (p3) carried a column, ‘Day by Day’, of whimsical puns and jokes, beginning with the line: ‘A song for the front – “Sommewhere a Hun is whining’, a pun on the hymn ‘Somewhere a soul is pining’. The tension between the Front and the Home Front, and especially the home press, concerning the use of words (Fraser & Gibbons’ Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases gives several words which are designated as ‘coined by newspapers’) cannot have been eased by the Daily Mirror, which on 23 February 1917 (p6) printed a photograph with the headline ‘Jolly British Gunners “Somme-where” in France’, the image showing 8 gunners standing behind the barrel of a gun on which is chalked ‘SOMME GUN’. The caption below explains ‘The first word can be spelt with one “m” or two. Two describes the locality and one the men’s high opinion of the weapon’s capabilities.’ Perhaps the joke survived the explanation; probably not.

 A hundred years on, the Somme has an almost untouchable status in British mythology as the symbol for the pity of war; the word provokes associations – Captain Neville’s football, young men being ‘mown down’, the destruction of the Pals Battalions, mud. We have trouble matching the grim gallows humour of the First World War soldiers with how we view the battle now, but there is moral pressure to concede to them the absolute right of verbal interpretation by virtue of having experienced it at first hand. The apparently flippant or opportunistic use of the word ‘Somme’ by civilians who lived through the war sits less at ease with our current feelings about the battle, acquired through myth and passed on memory. A hundred years of memory and occasional use lie between, to be explored. As an example of how challenging this may be, the Hull Daily Mail of 24 July 1936 (p10) reported on a carnival that had been severely disrupted by rain:

 Another Carnival Wash-Out

An Event Which Should Have Been Water Polo

 A lot of water kept Hull and Grimsby apart last night – far more than the mile or two of Humber estuary.

The two ports had found another way [of] expressing their rivalry. They were to have played each other at motor-cycle football as the star attraction for Hull British Legion’s Carnival last night.

But weather that is going to make the 1936 British summer stand out in the nautical memory called the match off….

 Reminiscent of the Somme

 The carnival fair ground must have reminded ex-Servicemen stewards of Somme-where else. The mud brought parts of the fair to a standstill.

    [1] Letters from France, 1915-1918 / Lancelot Dykes Spicer. Robert York, 1979. Letter, 10 July 1916

[2] John Masefield’s Letters from the Front, 1915-17, 1984, ed Vansittart, P, London. Letter 31 August 1916

[3] Daily Mail 6 December 1916 p1

[4] Biggleswade Chronicle, 10 August 1917 p 3

[5] Weekley, E, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 1921

[6] Churchill Archive CHAR 13/28/34-35

[7] Reading Mercury, 1 July 1916, p2; Birmingham Mail, 9 September 1916, p2; Dundee Courier, 8 December 1916, p3

[languages-and-first-world-war]

Somme: present tense

The film ‘The Battle of the Somme’ was seen by a large proportion of the population of Britain in 1916. Labelled as ‘the Official War Office Picture’, and with subheadings ‘Actual Warfare Graphically Displayed’ and ‘The Talk Of The Trade Throughout The Land’ (Hull Daily Mail 21 August 1916), it was also heralded with the words ‘You must not fail to see this wonderful film’ (Liverpool Echo 24 August 1916). The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was quoted on adverts: ‘If the exhibition of this Picture all over the world does not end War, God help civilisation!’ (Liverpool Echo 28 August 1916).

 Lawrence Napper (lecture, QMUL, 2 February 2016) has stated that the film is ‘an invitation to recognition’, with the slow-moving camera directed at soldiers sitting eating or washing, or static while rows of soldiers walk past, or sit and wait. Inevitably, given the number of soldiers shown and the number of people watching the film, there would be an overlap of recognition, and inevitably some of those recognised would be casualties, their mourning relatives placed in the situation of seeing moving images of their dead loved ones for the first time, in public, without warning.

 A headline in the Nottingham Evening Post (10 October 1916) captures the moment of shock:

“It’s Jim, My Husband”

Startling Somme Film Incident

          A pathetic incident occurred yesterday afternoon at Droylsden Electric Theatre whilst the official war film,  “The Battle of the Somme,” was being shown.

          One of the scenes depicted the recovery of the wounded in “No Man’s Land,” and suddenly a woman in the audience jumped to her feet crying, “It’s Jim, my husband.”

           She was Mrs. Wilson, of 11 Lloyd-street, Droylsden, and she had previously received notice that her husband had been killed in action on July 6th, a day or two after the picture was taken. He was recognised as being one of the stretcher-bearers by many other people in the theatre, as he had been well known in the locality. He was the father of nine children.

  Suddenly the public becomes horribly personal, the widely experienced grief a singular event played out in focus, and then rippling outwards to others in the audience. There is no time to digest the situation, as the narrative of the film immediately pulls the attention away from the woman and her so real story and back to the filmic reality of the screen; the present moves on. The sequence of stretcher-bearers bringing back the wounded appears in Part 3 of the film, by which time the audience would have recognised both hope and fear in the potential recognition of friends, husbands, sons, brothers. The unfamiliarity of this audience situation matches the starkness of the filmed situation, the absence of comprehensible scenery, the presence of placards saying ‘King Street’ and ‘Firing Line’ making a mockery of the familiar – one sign with a name many would recognise from their own town, another pointing to a place where you try to kill people and people try to kill you. And yet these faces are so familiar, the soldier supporting the wounded enemy along the trench and smiling shyly in the way we used to do when faced with a camera, the wounded man on the stretcher turning to watch the camera as he is carried past. They do familiar things, beckon to a colleague off camera, do their tasks and walk away; the walking-wounded prisoners smile at being both walking-wounded and prisoners, while one wanders vaguely, his clothes torn to medieval rags. It is real and unreal, past, present and future thrown into a melting pot.

 How does language deal with this? We do not know whether Mrs Wilson left the theatre in shock or grief, or whether she was drawn to stay or return by the chance of seeing more of the moving image of her husband. It is extremely unlikely that she was able to see the image again other than at a public showing of the film. Did she gain any comfort from knowing that not only his name but his moving image would survive? Did the image overlay memories of their father for their nine children? All we know is her reaction, which indicates present tense immediacy – the ‘that is’ of image recognition. We say ‘that is me’ or ‘she is in this photo’, long after the time of the taking of the photograph; we conquer time not only through the image but also how we describe it. While we may not yet be able to match stretcher-bearer Jim Wilson’s name to the moving image (though with research it is entirely possible that we may), what we do know is that his name and the potential of matching it to a moving image live on.

[languages-and-first-world-war]

How did Gertie come to wear velvet?

The Anglicisation of placenames in France and Belgium raises the question of how these came about; the humour of the result is so good that it should, but often does not, lead us to look for the process of word-creation. There is little evidence for anyone saying or writing ‘let’s call this place Wipers’, so we are thrown back on internal or circumstantial pointers. Wipers is the most well-known Anglicisation, but the place was also called ‘Eeep’ and ‘Eeprees’; the first example comes from John Buchan writing in 1919, who said that ‘“Wipers” [was] not a name given by the British private soldier. He called it “Eeep.” “Wipers” was an officer’s name, gladly seized on by journalists and by civilians at home’. [St Barnabas Pilgrimage to the Menin Gate, 1927. p8]. Veteran RFA gunner (i.e. non-officer) Percy Bryant interviewed in 1975 pronounced it ‘Eeprees’ [IWM interviews 24862].

 Given that there was little contact between British soldiers and Flemish-speakers, the greater likelihood is that exposure to the name was through its French pronunciation, which would have come into English as ‘Eepre’, or reading the French or Flemish spelling (Ypres/Ieper), which would have given ‘Eepres’ or ‘Yeper’; the local Flemish pronunciation is more like ‘Eeper’. ‘Wipers’ seems to be a deliberate joke based on the first letter of the French spelling, while the standard English pronunciation, with a bit of knowledge as to how French pronunciation works, would have given Buchan’s proposed ‘other ranks’ version, ‘Eep’; with a bit less knowledge of French, but making a good attempt, this would easily come out as ‘Eeprees’. It is worth remembering here that there is plenty of evidence for British soldiers being prepared to have a go at French, and in many cases to set themselves to try to learn a bit: in a recorded dramatization In the Trenches directed by Major A E Rees in 1917, which has both authenticating and absurdly unrealistic aspects, cockney Private Reginald ‘Tippy’ Winter is spotted reading a French manual (of which there were several cheap versions printed, with pronunciation guides), though his chum Ginger claims he is doing it only to be able to speak to French girls. An Anglicisation such as Sally on the Loose (Sailly sur la Lys) depends on understanding ‘sur’ and ‘la’; not much, but at least some awareness of French.

As regards Ypres though, there are two other important factors: the medieval Ypres Tower at Winchelsea, which Fraser & Gibbons (1925) point out, was always called the ‘Wipers Tower’ or ‘Wypers Tower’; and it is easy to underestimate the influence on this question of the Wipers Times. So, from the example of Ypres we see the joke version coming from officer-level wordplay based on the written/printed word, and the ‘have a go’ version coming from spoken language from the other ranks; but ‘Wipers’ was used so widely in the press (from November 1914) that it quickly spread throughout soldiers in training before they got to Flanders.

 A more clear etymology can be seen in the wonderfully dismissive change from Albert to ‘Bert’; in this case the French pronunciation of the town is nothing like the Anglicisation, lending weight to the proposal that this case derived from the written or printed word. The French Mouquet Ferme (Moo-cow Farm), Armentieres (Armentears), Ingouville (Inky Bill) and Auchonvillers (Ocean Villas) clearly are examples of Anglicisation from sound, as are the Flemish Wytschaete (White Sheet) and Dickebusch (Dickybush). But the Anglicisation of Bois Gernier as Boys Grenyer depends on spelling, as do Doignes (Dogs Knees), and Doingt (Doing It), the French pronunciation not resembling the Anglicised version. Godewaersvelde (Gertie wears velvet) is less clear, but the Flemish spoken version would have been fairly difficult for the untutored British soldier to unravel, so the Anglicisation here possibly comes via both paths. In any case the anglicised versions travelled along spoken paths with speed, and settled quickly to what sat comfortably in the various accents of the British Army as Hoop Lane (Houplines), Plugstreet (Ploegsteert) and the delightfully pragmatic Pop (Poperinghe). What remains is to see if there were variations emerging from the various accents and dialects within the British and Imperial forces: did similarities to names familiar to battalions before 1916 influence or provide variations on place-names?

[languages-and-first-world-war]

On 6 October 1915 Lancelot Dykes Spicer (Letters from France 1915-18) wrote: It does not seem to have been mentioned in the papers that we used gas, although I can’t see that there can be any harm in saying it as the Germans must know, many of them having died from it. 

Silence as weapon

From The Gasper 28 February 1916

A few weeks over a hundred years ago, the ‘editorial’ in The Gasper ran as follows:

Retaliation

“To do this (retaliate in kind for Zeppelin raids) is to give to the Germans the very victory that we mean to win.

“There could be no greater tragedy in the black tragedy of this time than that, when we have conquered the German people, we should be found to have moulded ourselves on the very model that we set out to break.

“This is not merely a War of Armies; it is a War of great ideals. It is a War in which on on one side there is an elevation of the right of Law and the obligation of plighted faith. On the other side there is the ideal that says no covenant (?), no humanity, no Law, no morality shall stand against the development of a people by brutal and iron power.” – (From a recent speech by Lord Buckmaster.)

It was several days since we had seen a paper, new or old. It was a fortnight since we had been out of the first line. The first paper we got hold of reports our august Lord Chancellor as telling some gullible gathering of well-meaning – and incidentally warm and well-fed – citizens that this is a War of great ideals! And by the butter-fingers of such maudlin praters as this is the helm of Empire held. No wonder the resolute Prussian forestalls us at every point in the game. He acts.

We should like to have Lord Buckmaster in the trenches for a week or so. Minnies and Ration Fatigues are an unrivalled tonic for blatherers. At the end of that week “great ideals” would occupy a very secondary position in his thoughts, and he would find that “the right of law” had far less power of “elevation” than a German mine. The man does not know what war is. If he were an infantry-man, shelled on and off for forty-nine days and going over the top on the fiftieth, he might talk less glibly of “when we have conquered the German people,” and be heartily thankful for any contra-Hague-Convention device that would go one further than poison gas and the flammenwerfer, and take a little of the burden off his shoulders. Not that we doubt for one moment our ability to lick Fritz to a frazzle in the fullness of time. We can and shall. But the business will be costly, and – well, it won’t be Lord Buckmaster who will face the machine-guns.

His uncomplimentary allusions to the wicked and unscrupulous Bosche we heartily endorse. We want to whack Fritz quite as much as Lord Buckmaster wants to see us do so. But we, who have to pay the price of this pusillanimous scrupulousness, are not quite so particular as to how we do it.

But we are, perhaps, doing Lord Buckmaster an injustice. In the speech we quote from he dealt merely with the question of bombing German towns by way of “getting our own back” or (the real object) teaching Fritz not to do it again. But the principle involved applies equally to the use of unsanctioned means of warfare against combatants. Civilian life against civilian life – an eye for an eye; forbidden methods of warfare (worse ones if possible) against forbidden methods – a tooth for a tooth! One of these days the Germans will try a new and more powerful gas on us. Then the Government will say, “Oh! We had the recipe for that, only we didn’t like to use it, because it was naughty.” There will be a local German success, hospitals full of agonised victims, a new gas-helmet; and the war will go on until we have muddled through.

We have just quoted the “not merely armies … great ideals” sentence to a Jock. He was a coarse, brutal fellow according to some standards, and if he addressed Lord Buckmaster the latter would probably call a couple of policemen. But he has fought from Mons till now. We asked his opinion. It was unprintable. So is our own, for that matter. This is only the shadow of it.

People who are not fighting are apt, in a fog of ethics about the war’s causes, course, and effects, to lose sight entirely of the war itself. For good reason (and equally if it were bad) we are in this war. Now there is just one aim and one necessity – to win it. The only important modification is that we must win with as little loss of life as possible to ourselves and our Allies. Quixotism is expensive – in lives. But not the lives of the Quixotes. Lord Buckmaster, arrayed in the white weskit of a blameless life (His pardon! the panoply of immutable legal majesty), and the other old women he speaks for, want us to fight under Hague rules. They place legality higher than the shortening of the war and the consequent saving of men. With unswerving integrity they are prepared to sacrifice other people’s lives on the altar of their conscience.

We don’t whine at the cost of seeing the business through. We merely object to fighting with one hand tied to some sanctimonious old frump’s apron-strings.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Several annotations could be made to this very loaded text: ‘It was several days since we had seen a paper, new or old’, ‘the other old women’, ‘a fog of ethics about the war’s causes, course, and effects’, and the soldier’s response being ‘unprintable’, all cry out for analysis. The main problem raised – whether a ‘good’ war justifies the use of ‘bad’ weapons - is still relevant and difficult to unravel, and while war is seen in moral terms it will always be with us.

The Gasper was, according to its masthead, ‘the unofficial organ of the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st (P.S. [Public Schools]) Royal Fusiliers’, and a confident level of articulateness and argument might be expected from its editors and contributors. By February 1916 the units had been in France for not that long – they had arrived in November 1915 - but the publication, still printed in Salisbury, was priced at ‘England, One Penny. France, 10c.-Deux Sous.’, an indication that they had become familiar with their surroundings; this particular writer had been in the Front Line and might plausibly have had experience of trench-mines, gas, flame-throwers and machine-guns.

Stanley Buckmaster, Lord Buckmaster, the subject of reproach, was at this time the Lord Chancellor. By no means a patrician legislator, his father had been an agricultural labourer who grew to become a chemistry teacher at Imperial College, while his daughter Margaret was a tireless campaigner for social reform. As Liberal Lord Chancellor in Asquith’s coalition government he was recognised as a campaigning voice in Parliament, with a ‘reputation for personal integrity’ (Dictionary of National Biography); the term ‘sanctimonious old frump’ is rather harsh. However, his statement in the House of Commons, 12 November 1914, that he was prepared to block criticism which ‘might destroy public confidence in the government which at this time is charged with conduct of the war, or might in any way weaken the confidence of the people in the administration of affairs’ (Hansard 5C, 58.129) proposes a viewpoint that is on the one hand pragmatic and on the other excessively authoritarian. Being part of the government meant supporting the war, if necessary at a cost to freedom of expression, but equally clearly Buckmaster’s view of how the war should be fought was part of what made the pursuance of the war itself defensible.

The notion of the ‘good war’ has been at the heart of war discourse in the Judaeo-Christian West for well over a thousand years. If a war is ‘good’, in the sense that the necessary defeat of evil can be accomplished by no other means, then judgements as to what is or is not morally defensible are suspended; the greater good allows the lesser evil. However, much of the argument for declaring war on Germany in 1914 and pursuing the war depended on its being ‘a war of ideals’, the proposition being that Britain would not succumb to supposedly German ‘barbarism’, especially the use of Schrecklichkeit, usually translated as ‘frightfulness’, which involved atrocities against civilian populations (referred to here in the policy of air raids on civilian areas). However, the editor of The Gasper points out that this attitude puts the ‘good’ army at a disadvantage – of not being able to outdo supposedly morally indefensible weapons, with the deployment of a ‘contra-Hague-Convention device that would go one further than poison gas and the flammenwerfer [flame-thrower]’.

Buckmaster is invited to experience the trenches in the hope that this would turn him from being a ‘maudlin prater’ to a pragmatist. But words are important here too. Specifically Buckmaster’s words are shown to a ‘Jock’, whose response is ‘unprintable’, and thus inaccessible. Both gas and flame-thrower were rendered linguistically distant to the Allied troops using them: gas used as a weapon by the Allies was at first known as ‘the accessory’, operated by ‘special companies’; later slang named the canisters it was launched in as ‘dodgers’. In contrast, German use of gas gave rise to a wealth of terms in which the word ‘gas’ is present: being ‘gassed’, ‘gasmask’, ‘gassed at Mons’, ‘gassed’ meaning drunk, ‘poison gas’, ‘mustard gas’, ‘gaspirator’. While British soldiers regularly documented with the word ‘gas’ the experience of the weapon being used against them, they seldom mentioned using it themselves as a weapon. The use of flame-throwers, also known as ‘liquid fire’, was seldom, if ever, mentioned. However, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, ‘When the German Flammenwerfer appeared it was considered essential both in France and in England to design weapons of this class at once; in England the question of their employment was reserved, but it was felt that the soldiers who were exposed to flame attack should, for reasons of moral, be made aware that similar devices were available on their own side’.* That is, they existed as words, if not as objects. The search for slang terms referring to flamethrowers has so far yielded nothing. Were they too frightening? Was this case of the experience being ‘indescribable’, a word so often used by those trying to write about the experience of the trenches? The only description of Allied use of flamethrowers I have seen comes in the anti-war novel of 1930, Not So Quiet … by Evadne Price writing as Helen Z Smith, in which the narrator mentally castigates her patriotically campaigning mother: ‘Oh yes. I remember your letter … “I hear we’ve started to use liquid fire, too. That will teach those Germans. I hope we use lots and lots of it.” … You were delighted to think some German mother’s son was going to have the skin stripped from his poor face by liquid fire …’ (Smith 1988: 95) Price/Smith’s graphic description echoes the style of Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu of 1915, which set the model for graphic war description as anti-war campaigning tool, which Siegfried Sassoon was urged to follow by pacifists in 1917 (R Graves, Goodbye to All That, Ch24).

Noticeable too in the quotation from Price is the idea of ‘teaching’ the Germans, an echo of the sentiment in the attack on Buckmaster, that he was concerned ‘merely with the question of bombing German towns by way of “getting our own back” or (the real object) teaching Fritz not to do it again’. Much popular sentiment on both sides verbalised the war as ‘punishment’, retribution against the invasion of a neutral state on the one side, and outrage at the imperial involvement of colonial forces that created a ‘world’ war, engendering the phrase ‘Gott strafe England’ – God punish England. ‘Remember Belgium’ remained a semi-official war-cry throughout the conflict. In such simple terms could the war be morally justified.

While gas as a weapon was developed and deployed by the British Army there seems to have been some reluctance to use flame-throwers. In June 1916 the British Army did indeed have “the recipe for that” and did use it – four large flamethrowers, each weighing two tons, set in a forward trench 50 metres from the German lines, each with a range of 80 metres.** But two of them were destroyed by shelling before use, and there were no further attempts after 1916 to use more. The raid on Zeebrugge in 1918 also involved the Royal Naval Air Service Experimental Party using portable flame-throwers in support of the Royal Marine and naval landing parties, but it seems that British forces did not use similar weapons at the Front.

Throughout documentation of the use of the English language at the Front it is easy to be fascinated by the development from ‘Hun’ to ‘Jerry’, via ‘Fritz’, ‘boche’, ‘alleyman’, ‘squarehead’ and so on. But also there is repeated avoidance of naming the enemy; British soldiers often preferred to say ‘he’, ‘the other fellow’, ‘they’, following the model that if giving something a name makes it real, that reality can be deconstructed by removing its name. English euphemisms are celebrated, not just for picturesque terms like ‘gone west’, but for the rather awkward ‘passing on’. The range of terms to do with the German use of gas maintained that substance’s reality, and proclaimed its barbarism; silence about British use of the same stuff allowed a morally reassuring imbalance; the use of the term ‘the accessory’, while purportedly maintaining secrecy for the purpose of surprise (though Graves maintained that this was ineffective), simultaneously allowed avoidance of recognition that the British Army was preparing to use the same weapon. The aspects of the use of portable flame-throwers that are frequently mentioned are that they were liable to self-combust, that an identified user was immediately the target of concentrated rifle-fire, and that those who used them were seldom taken prisoner. As a weapon to use and to face, the flamethrower was a massively dangerous thing, and any step to neutralise it was welcome, including removing it from verbal discourse.

Buckmaster’s argument that Britain was fighting a war of ideals used words as a weapon, but, both deliberately and through the experience of the soldiers, the selective use and the omission of words allowed both the moral and the military campaign to be sustained. As important as maintaining the use of ‘barbarism’, ‘frightfulness’ and ‘atrocity’ was the policy of not giving words to those weapons that would equip the soldiers to ‘see the business through’.

  http://www.theodora.com/encyclopedia/f/flamethrowers.html * accessed 23 March 2016

http://www.firstworldwar.com/weaponry/flamethrowers.htm ** accessed 23 March 2016

According to the second website quoted above ‘During the war the Germans launched in excess of 650 flamethrower attacks; no numbers exist for British or French attacks.’

[languages-and-first-world-war]

Words become things become effects, far away

Listening to the BBC Radio programme on Saturday morning (9 April), World War One: the Cultural Front, I was very taken with the poem by Apollinaire Peu de Chose that begins ‘How many do you reckon we killed?’ The line

Chaque fois que tu dis feu le mot se change en acier qui éclate là-bas?

Each time you say Fire! the word becomes steel that explodes far off *

 carries two strong ideas: initially the point that in wartime words as instructions or orders become massively manifested as material of destruction, a making followed by and integrally linked to an unmaking; but also the concept of ‘far off’. Apollinaire says in the poem ‘It’s weird it doesn’t affect us’, but then eight lines later ‘Take cover’, as it most certainly does. What doesn’t affect ‘us’ is what happens as a result of the French shell, for the gunners are not affected by this; but then they are affected as their own gun is spotted and becomes a target, a target for German gunners whom they know as little as they could know the German victims of their own shelling.

 To what extent did this unknowing, the anonymity of enemy gunner/enemy target contribute to the notion of ‘the war’ as an entity itself? There is a perception now, and was then, that there were at least three entities involved - us, them, and the war. ‘I wish the war would stop’ is stated repeatedly, not ‘I wish we would stop the war’; it implies the rolling identity of an event that has its own volition. ‘We’ are not the war – ‘the war’ is itself.

 A hypothesis then: the distancing power of some of the weapons in use facilitated a perception that the guns did the damage, not the people firing them. While rifles and were specific person-to-person weapons, artillery could fire projectiles several miles, sometimes dozens of miles, distances at which it was impossible to personalise the people working the guns. Artillery was directed at positions and activity rather than individuals, and big guns had an identity that seemed to swallow that of the men who operated them: for John Masefield, writing home on 25 September 1916 ‘The soixante-quinze took up the challenge’ of the ‘enemy shells’, while for Corporal Shaw (Voices and Images of the Great War, Macdonald L, 1991: 155) ‘two big twelve-inch Naval guns came out on a track … manned by Royal Marines. … these two guns blasted off.’ It is the guns, not the gunners, that send the shells towards their target. Except that Apollinaire points out the human agency that originates the process. 

 Generally one gets the impression that outside of raids and incidences of hand-to-hand fighting in no-man’s-land, the perception was that there were weapons which were seen as specifically directed, such as trench-mortars and sniper-rifles, whose users were seen as bearing individual responsibility, and thus subject to deliberate retribution; ‘they’d send over Minniewerfers just for about five or ten minutes, then we’d reply’ wrote Corporal C R Russell in 1916 (ibid. 130), or the description by Llewellyn Wyn Griffith of a British trench mortar attack in Richard Holmes’ Tommy (2005: 370) which brings the response, in English, ‘You Bloody Welsh Murderers’. Situations of retribution seem to motivate the inclusion of the soldier operating a machine-gun: Corporal W H Shaw (Macdonald L, 1991: 155-6) writing about a German counter-attack in July 1916 states ‘You just felt “You’ve given it to us, now we’re going to give it to you,” and you were taking delight in mowing them down. Our machine-gunners had a whale of a time with those Lewis machine-guns.’ Richard Holmes (2005: 371) quotes an incident in Robert Graves’ Goodbye To All That, where a soldier looking to take revenge on a surrendering German who identifies himself as ‘Minenwerfer man’, addresses him as ‘just the man I’ve been looking for’. Retribution was deliberate and specific, where the operator was perceived as aiming at individuals.

 But the sweep of the night-time machine-gun was effectively arbitrary, aimed at place (crossing points in supply trenches were frequently described as ‘taped’); and German machine-guns used in the early days of the Battle of the Somme were just that, not machine-gunners: ‘The machine-guns were levelled and they were mowing the top of the trenches’ (Corporal Shaw, in Macdonald L, 1991: 156).

 For anyone anywhere in the target zone, metal seemed to come out of the air, almost of its own accord. The report of the guns being fired is less noted than the sound of the shell in transit, unless someone was situated close to a gun going off. Description of the sound of guns being fired – thunderclap, blasting off, ‘pop’ for trench-mortars, bang, and from a distance, rumbling - tends on the whole to be less specific than the description of the shell in flight and its impact on landing. There are of course exceptions – ‘Wagger’, the writer of Battery Flashes (1916) attempts to describe the sound of a six-inch howitzer: ‘put your head into a large empty tin jug and shout “TOOMBB” as loudly and sepulchrally as possible’. But even this is less successful than his description of the shell ‘tearing overhead with the sound of a trolly running down a jetty’ (p137). This is from an artillery man; for infantry soldiers describing shells in movement and landing there was a wide range of terms in use, clearly based on the desire to find a metaphor for the action and the sound - shrieking, screaming, howling, twittering, whinnying, whizzing, swish, followed by crump, thud, plonk, plop or crash.

 The impersonality of distant fighting was major factor in the difference of the First World War from previous conflicts. The act of pulling a chain could cause multiple deaths far away that the gunner would never know about, any more than he would have little knowledge that a shell was heading his way until it arrived, and would have no knowledge of the person who directed it. Beside the personalising names for the enemy, ‘Tommy’ and ‘Fritz’, there were equally impersonalising names, ‘the Bosche’, ‘Englander’ or ‘Toulemong’. Shooting people who could be seen at a distance was perhaps easier if the relevant part of the mind could be numbed linguistically by calling it ‘Hun-hunting’ or ‘bagging a couple of Huns’. Hunting or sporting terminology appears frequently: for example ‘Down an embankment to the left were two dismounted German troopers in a field, dodging about like rabbits, while a few aged French Territorials took pot-shots at them from every direction;’ (The War the Infantry Knew, J C Dunn, 1938/2004: 42), or ‘One morning just at daybreak Wilshin saw a party of fifty men advancing to a previously registered spot and scored 21’ (With Lancashire Lads and Field Guns in France, Neil Tytler, 1922: 177).

 But it would too simple to say that this implies that seeing the enemy as individuals led to the development of ‘quiet sectors’ or unwillingness to engage the enemy. Personalising had contrasting manifestations, from the revenge motivation seen above to the notion of remorse seen in the words of Private Harry Fellowes (Macdonald 1991: 106). He wrote in 1915 of ‘a report that the German General in charge of the area had said that his machine-gunners had refused to fire another shot. They were so filled with bitter remorse and guilt at the corpses at Loos that they refused to fire another shot. I do believe this.’ Compared to long-range guns, gas and shrapnel, the combat in the air seemed antiquated in its personalness, gladiatorial and almost sporting, what ex-pilot Norman Macmillan described in 1963 as ‘a difficult game’ (BBC The Great War Interviews, No 13). But the perception seems to be an ambivalent one, combining both personal and impersonal: ‘During the fighting there was undoubtedly a sense of chivalry in the air. We did not feel we were shooting at men, we did not want to kill men, we were really trying to shoot down the machines. … it was a case of ‘our machine is better than yours and let’s down yours’ almost like a game of nine-pins, a game of skill, a game in which we pitted ourselves against them and they pitted themselves against us, each to prove the other the better man.’ Bearing in mind of course that this interview was given at a distance of nearly 50 fifty years after the event, the description of the enemy embraces both man and machine: ‘I dived down and shot that fellow and went on past him down below’ and ‘we were only able to bring down two of the German aircraft’. But there could be no avoiding the knowledge that a plane going down in flames meant a person going down in flames.

 Before the horrified awareness of the effect of mechanised warfare became widespread an equally terrible naivety was possible. This is from the anonymously published A War Nurse’s Diary (Macmillan, 1918); the nurse in question has just escaped from the fall of Antwerp:

 The Major looked down at me and said, “Would you like to have a shot at the Boches?” and I said “Rather!” “All right. Put some wool in your ears, take hold of that string when I give the word and pull smartly!” I have often wondered where that shell landed and with what result.

* The French text poses this as a question

[languages-and-first-world-war]

Further to ‘Silence as Weapon’

From Voices and Images of the Great War Lyn Macdonald, (1988), 1991 edn p219

Private Reg Lawrence, 3rd South African Infantry Battalion, South African Brigade, Rouen, 15 July 1917:

‘We ended our training with a spirited attack on dummy trenches in which we used bayonet, rifle, bomb, gas, smoke screen, boots, teeth and fists. Poison gas, aeroplanes, liquid fire, mines, barbed wire, man traps were used by the opposition. We won!’

 Note that ‘we’ used ‘gas’, while ‘the opposition’ used ‘poison gas’.