Trench Talk E-Book

Peter Doyle

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 326

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The First World War largely directed the course of the twentieth century. Fought on three continents, the war saw 14 million killed and 34 million wounded. Its impact shaped the world we live in today, and the language of the trenches continues to live in the modern consciousness. One of the enduring myths of the First World War is that the experience of the trenches was not talked about. Yet dozens of words entered or became familiar in the English language as a direct result of the soldiers' experiences. This book looks at how the experience of the First World War changed the English language, adding words that were both in slang and standard military use, and modifying the usage and connotations of existing words and phrases. Illustrated with material from the authors' collections and photographs of the objects of the war, the book will look at how the words emerged into everyday language.

Leseprobe

For

Arthur Doyle (d.1962)

Frederick Walker (d. 1961)

William Black (d. 1915) and

Leonard Lightfoot (d. 1917)

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

A War of Words

Men in Khaki

At Home

In the Trenches

A War of ‘Things’

From ‘Stand To’ to ‘Stand Down’

‘Whizz-bangs’ and ‘Flaming Onions’

Over the Top

Behind the Lines

Officialese

Words at War

Afterword

Copyright

PREFACE

The First World War – or the Great War as it was known to the people who experienced it – largely directed the course of the twentieth century. Fought on three continents, the war saw 14 million killed and 34 million wounded, countless millions displaced and the ends and beginnings of several states. Its impact shaped the world we live in today, and the language of the trenches, the common speech of the participants, continues to live in the modern consciousness.

One of the enduring myths of the First World War is that the experience of the trenches was not talked about. Yet dozens of words entered or became familiar in the English language as a direct result of the soldiers’ experiences. This book examines the first- and second-hand experience of the First World War and how it changed standard English, adding words that were in both slang and standard military use, and modifying the usage and connotations of existing words and phrases. Several words became associated specifically with the propaganda or official language of the war, some were adopted as a result of operations in parts of the world far from Flanders, and some had only a short life as part of English. In contextualising and tracing the history of what these words meant to the men in the trenches the book presents the effect the war had on the English language.

Peter Doyle

Julian Walker

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to the Imperial War Museum and to the copyright holders for access to the original diaries, papers and letters of: J. Bremner, B. Britland, W. Egington, W.G. Green, C.P. Harris, R.J. Hartley, J.T. Lawton, C.P. Harris, P.S.V. Rouse, R.I. Smith, R. Stockman, J. Underwood and K.S. Wyatt. We thank Brightsolid and the British Library for permission to quote from the British Newspaper Archive. We thank Andy Robertshaw and Paul Reed for their advice, and particularly to Paul for kindly supplying the ‘Somme Knuts’ and ‘Bing Boys’ photographs; all other images are our own, apart from that of Jack Johnson, which is from the Library of Congress. We are grateful to Jo de Vries for her enthusiastic support.

INTRODUCTION

The First World War marked a change in the relationship between the British public and the military, as for the first time a large sector of the public became the military, specifically the army. During this period the language of the army was a melting pot of slang, officialese, jargon, invention, adoption and swearing, from all parts of the British Isles and the British Empire, from other languages (including those of enemy countries), from all classes and occupations, with some of its technical terms dating back to the Medieval period. All this was condensed, mixed, confused and mispronounced and brought back to a country whose sense of the ‘correct order of things’ was collapsing.

Written communication during this period was of paramount importance – in 1913 a small town could expect up to twelve postal deliveries per day, and in 1917 19,000 mailbags crossed the Channel daily. The war was discussed, reported and commented on in letters, newspapers, postcards, pastiches of field service postcards, poems, songs, sketches, trench papers, novels, official documents and diaries. But since spoken English is not the same as written English, how can we get to the actual words spoken? With the passing of time the English spoken during the war, at the front and away from it, has become progressively less accessible.

Written words are always mediated by their context; the setting down of words proposes a reader, even if the reader is the person writing. The diaries used by soldiers during the war are circumscribed by the tiny amount of space allowed (and by the official dictum that diaries were forbidden, in case they should fall into enemy hands), or when exercise books were used for journals, the blank page was likely to create the desire to ‘write well’, to make a meaningful comment or aspire to a literary standard. The nature of education in Edwardian England proposed a certain style of letter-writing; even letters from prisoner-of-war camps maintain a formula of information about the weather, reassurances of the health of the writer, and inducements of optimism, like the sentiments buried within the carefully constructed official phases of the field service postcard, doing away with all necessity of original thought. Junior officers, fresh out of public schools, and Other Ranks (ORs) soldiers had been brought up to carefully limit the expression of their feelings, or to adopt formulaic postures of phlegmatic reticence. ‘I must get. Cheero’, writes a subaltern at the end of a letter quoted in The Scotsman in July 1916, while John Buchan quotes one of the Grenfell brothers as saying, ‘I am bound to say I felt rather done’ after a raid; terms for being killed included ‘getting it’, ‘hopping it’; ‘getting ’em’ was understood as ‘being afraid’. Clearly death, fear and having to attack could be made less real by avoiding giving them names. Fear at the Front had to be suppressed (often by creating witty variations of the phrase ‘getting the wind up’), just as much as failure had to be hidden behind the euphemisms and false reporting which the press and the official bulletins served to the home audience. Diaries were written with the knowledge that they might be looked at later by loved ones, letters were sent by soldiers knowing that they would be examined by censors, and were written to reassure those at home, memoirs were composed for specific kinds of readers – to shock or to avoid shocking, with the desire either to not awaken old traumas or to do just that. Soldiers’ memories recorded by interviews might be even more circumspect, the recording process inducing its own sense of performance, and the fear that the speaker might have to justify words he could not retract; and these would be in any case edited by the filtering and altering process of recall. Novels of the war, while holding no punches in describing the destruction of the body, avoid swearing, while shame or embarrassment mean that the body’s involuntary reaction to fear is not discussed. The lack of a form of words other than the clinical or the literary to express the most extreme experiences of the front and the nature of the destruction of the body meant that for the most part a silence fell over the subject.

Against this there is the wit and invention of the concert party song and the trench newspaper, the clever banter of the catchphrase exchange, the survivor’s forced indifference, the occasional slips into half-remembered phrases from literature or the Bible, the savagely altered music hall song, the outpouring of verse, the ‘double-speak’ of the official bulletin and the unfounded optimism of press-reporting, or the all-too-rarely recorded robustness of obscenity. ‘Share this amongst you’, shouts the soldier with comic-book callousness, tossing a bomb into a dug-out, while another soldier on a burial party slips into lyricism as he notes ‘some seeming by their looks to have died very easy, others very hard’. It is as if the destructivity of the war had to be balanced by creativity in language.

But a study of the words of the war, though benefiting from a wealth of sources, can barely touch the core of the experience – the verbal witness of the destruction of the body as it happens. It is perhaps the inexpressibility of that core that makes the language of the period 1914–1918 so fascinating. It is as if the breakdown of language to adequately describe the physicality of the killing of so many thousands of young men is compensated for by a wealth of language for everything surrounding it. Both despite and because of the inexpressible pain and destruction, the Great War became a major phenomenon of verbal culture.

There are several small differences between the English of a hundred years ago and present English: parcels to a prisoner of war (PoW) ‘land’ rather than ‘arrive’, and he wishes he ‘was at home to give you a lift with the kiddies’; ‘I am going on fine’, or even ‘pulling on fine’, is used in place of ‘I am getting on fine’; a soldier in good health states he is ‘knocking about’ but asks for money from home as he is almost ‘spent up’; a gunner gets the order to ‘blarge off’ (fire some shells) while noting that ‘there is something coming off’ (going to happen); successful gunners ‘make good practice’; if there had not been confusion in defending a position ‘the Germans would never have got on’; something not good enough was ‘not up to snuff’; in November 1918 there is a ‘socialistic outbreak’ in Germany; the enemy’s leaders are ‘shot down’; boasting was ‘swank’. No doubt some of these were individual or dialect expressions, but all are part of the constant change in the language. Military terms also changed in the first two decades of the century, not only because of technical developments; in 1909 trenches had ‘banquettes’ and ‘bonnettes’ to protect them from a ‘cannonade’, all of these words disappearing quickly at the beginning of the war.

The throwing together of so many people in situations of such extreme novelty inevitably had an effect on how people communicated, but also served to separate those who fought from those who did not. The inventiveness of the Tommies’ use of language was a source of both amusement and friction, as those away from the fighting could not hope to understand the nuances of word and phrase that served as a bond for the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and supply and nursing staff.

The First World War was the first conflict in the modern era in which a literate British civilian army read newspapers in the theatre of conflict (‘to know how the war was going’, as one trench newspaper put it), and the soldiers saw themselves as both readers and subject. As well as their deeds and circumstances, their language was of interest to the press, and newspapers at all levels reflected this. The Tamworth Herald, 15 May 1915, stated that ‘Active service slang [was] made up of an inextricable tangle of Indian, French, German, military slang and any other linguistic ingredient that comes within Tommies’ hearing.’ A spate of letters to the Manchester Guardian in August and September 1917 included one pointing to the words mush (guardroom), muckin (butter), chukkaro (youngster) and mallum the bat (understand) as examples of army slang from Hindi. The press was particularly interested in the use of nicknames by troops at the front, and the use of these inside inverted commas in newspapers shows the process of novelty expressions being introduced to the public: “‘Coal boxes” and “Jack Johnsons” are the picturesque names given to these shells by the British soldier’, wrote the Daily Express on 2 October 1914. The Daily Mirror on 19 November 1914 wrote under the headline ‘Irrepressible Humour’: ‘Our troops, always cheerfully ready to treat the grimmest terrors light-heartedly, have coined another name for the German shells. This particular nickname is for the particular type of shell which makes a noise like a prolonged sigh. And so “Sighing Sarah” is the new title’. And on 12 July 1915 the same newspaper reported on the use of the term ‘gaspipe cavalry’, a term referring to the newly formed Motor Machine Gun Corps (MMGC), equipped with motorcycles.

Reacting to newly acquired information, newspapers at the time could not be expected to know which terms were in general use, and which were limited to a small group or area, or period of time, or even an individual. ‘When they [the Guards] went “over the lid” as the slang phrase is for mounting the parapet for a charge …’ (the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 7 October 1916); ‘Our present billet is a big house only 600 yards from “sandbag street” or the firing line; everything has a nickname out here’ (Private P. Gilbert, Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, quoted in The Cornishman, 19 August 1915); neither of these terms, however, gained general acceptance. As the press was deliberately kept away from the Front, there was no way to check material and sources; the need to inform the readers at home meant an enthusiastic reporting of whatever information could be obtained. And some of the most inventive slang went entirely unreported until it was mentioned in memoirs years after the war – F.C. Hitchcock recorded that for the Leinster Regiment, 12in shells were known as ‘The Roscrea Mail’ after a local express train, no doubt from their sound and speed. However, a lot of the press interest was well-informed; the Daily Mirror, 8 June 1916, under the headline ‘Langwidge’ reported that while there were ‘two dialects that are beyond the comprehension of the civilian’ – army and navy slang – the navy could understand army slang, but not vice versa (perhaps deliberately, given that ‘soldier’ was navy slang for an inferior sailor in the ‘Senior Service’).

Tension between the home press and its readers in the trenches arose when civilian writers encroached on the territory of offering suggestions with regard to soldiers’ language, rather than just observing and documenting it. This clearly was a case of threat to ownership. On 12 April 1915 the 5th Gloucesters Gazette newspaper ran a brief article stating: ‘Our esteemed contemporary – The Cheltenham Chronicle – is a little disappointed with the title of our paper, and suggests the more ‘frightful’ title – e.g. “The Asphyxiator”. Surely the “Fifth GAZ-ette” is practically the same’. Behind the forgivable pun there is a clear implication about control. At the same time there was an awareness at the front that the words used there were being noted at home. ‘How insidious is Canadian slang,’ wrote the editor of Listening Post, the paper of the 7th Canadian Infantry Battalion on 10 July 1916: ‘The leader writers of even the more conservative London dailies are characterising the present Allied push as “Som(m)e Offensive”’. Behind the simple joke there is some satisfaction at the power of being imitated, although this is tempered by the put-down that follows: ‘Mercy Kamerad for the Atrocity’.

That a number of words that were specific to army life became part of common English was due not so much to newspaper interest, but because a huge civilian army had grown used to them, and retained their use after demobilisation. Thus ‘crummy’ and ‘lousy’, both to do with being infested with lice, became general terms of disgust; and according to Paul Fussell, ‘souvenir’ ousted ‘keepsake’, and terms such as ‘sector’, ‘rank and file’ and ‘trenchcoat’ quickly extended beyond the experience of Flanders. ‘Cushy’ and ‘bumf’ are still in use, while deviant machinery still experiences a ‘mad minute.’

Less well known is the way terms crossed over no-man’s-land. Germans and British used the same terms for the German stick-grenade – a potato-masher – both sides had a shell called a ‘Black Maria’, and both sides called an aeroplane a ‘Taube’. The Germans had their own versions of French which developed in similar and divergent ways from the English adaptations, and the adoption into English of a few terms, like ‘cashimbo’, would seem to indicate the possibility of conversations about language between soldier and prisoner. Experiences common to European armies at the time – poor food and the logistics of transport – provide, not surprisingly, similar terms for poor quality butter or margarine: ‘axlegrease’ and ‘wagenschmiere’ (wagongrease). The extended ‘alternative abbreviations’ of English, such as Rob All My Comrades (RAMC, Royal Army Medical Corps) or Rotten Fiddling About (RFA, Royal Field Artillery), had counterparts in the German ‘Fährt Alles Kaput’ (Everything goes kaput) for FAK (Freiwilliges Automobil Korps, the Volunteer Automobile Corps), or ‘Mord-gesellschaft Klub’ (Murder Company Club) for MGK (Maschinen-Gewehr Kompagnie or Machine-gun Company).

The commonality of language indicates a similarity of experience which goes some way to explain the rarely documented incidences of fraternisation, the more frequent ‘live-and-let-live’ situations, including shooting at attackers’ legs rather than torsos, and the outrage at the killing of wounded soldiers by a retreating enemy. Even English and German officialese had corresponding terms, such as ‘according to plan’ and ‘plängemass’, both of which were used euphemistically to gloss over the confusion of retreat. The separation of Germans into a distinct ‘race’, expressed at home, was heard less at the front, where attitudes towards the enemy included respect for humane behaviour towards wounded soldiers.

Alongside the traditional British incompetence with foreign languages, schoolboy French was found to be especially useless; C.W. Langley found himself with little opportunity to talk about ‘La plume de ma tant’. In this situation an inspired Franglais took over, with such terms as ‘narpoo’, ‘hissy’ and ‘sanfaryan’. Puns were aimed at German self-assurance: a notice hung on the barbed wire with the words Gott Mitt Uns (‘God with us’, the motto on German belt-buckles) provoked the scribbled reply ‘Don’t Swank! We’ve got mittens too!’ (in Battery Flashes, C.W. Langley, 1916).

On 31 March 1915 The Times ran a short article beginning: ‘The French language is being enriched by a number of words which are coming into current use by way of the trenches. The soldiers bring them into vogue, and the public gets to know them from the letters which are published in the newspapers and joyfully adopts them.’ The list included poilu, boche and marmite (a saucepan, adapted to mean a ‘heavy shell’). The Manchester Guardian, 9 March 1918, reported on some German army slang, not giving the German terms, but stating that the identity tag was known as ‘ticket to Heaven’, the bayonet as ‘cheese knife’, and the rifle as ‘betrothed’. In March 1919, with hostilities ended, The Times felt able to turn a patronisingly appreciative eye on German trench slang, noting that ‘one interesting feature is … that all of it is indigenous – Teutonic to the last syllable; it is characteristic of the race that it should be so.’

While many words entered mainstream English via the exposure of enlisted and conscripted men to the language of the Regular Army, other terms faded; from Hindi the words ‘pukka’ and ‘chit’ survived demobilisation, while ‘barrow wallah’ and ‘choter wallah’ (big and small man or thing, respectively) did not. French military terms, such as ‘personnel’ and ‘matériel’, soon lost their inverted commas, while the ‘moral’ of the troops was definitively replaced by ‘morale’.

On occasion newspapers went into details regarding the variants of troops’ slang. On 17 August 1915 the Daily Mirror ran an article on Lord Kitchener: ‘The new armies adore him and there is not a soldier in the ranks who does not speak of him as “Kitch” or “Our Kitchy”. The synonym “K of K” is unknown to Army speech’. ‘Old K of K’ was exactly the term used by C.W. Langley in Battery Flashes in 1916. Civilians attempted to join in: Our Kitch was a song composed by Mrs Frances Browne (‘of Pearments House, Balcombe, Surrey’). The Daily Mirror helpfully pointed out in its report that ‘Our Kitch’ was ‘Tommy’s nickname for Lord Kitchener’; this has not been found in soldiers’ diaries – ‘Lord K’ was more likely. There were naturally divergent views on these points: the Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 28 August 1915, stated that ‘the man in the street has never, so far as I know, had a nickname for Lord Kitchener, though he invariably spoke of Lord Roberts as “Bobs”’.

Given that the press was deliberately kept away from the frontline, or only given access to sanitised or safe areas, it was inevitable that the public’s need to know, especially the need to know why their men were going and not coming back, would drive the embellishment of what few facts were obtainable, with most of these coming from letters or reports from wounded soldiers. Soldiers at the front often did not recognise the public’s view of the war derived from newspapers’ reporting: the Morning Rire, the trench newspaper of the 2nd Irish Guards, carried an article in its second issue entitled ‘What We Learnt in London’:

That all the trenches are concreted.

That most of the dug-outs have pianos.

That there are no Hun snipers.

That all the publishers want to take 2nd Lieutenant Lynch into partnership.

The last entry here perhaps alludes to the role of literature in the culture of the war (assuming Lynch was an aspiring writer), a subject that has been extensively studied, with Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) providing a dominant framework for understanding the war through its poetry and prose which has lasted for two generations.

With the extraordinary outpouring of work by Sassoon, Graves, Owen, Thomas, Sorley, Gurney, Rosenberg, Brooke and others, and with the involvement of major novelists including Buchan, Chesterton, Conan Doyle, Belloc, Galsworthy, Wells, and Bennett in the propaganda campaign, it is inevitable that the conflict should have come to be seen as a ‘literary war’. Certainly the ‘new armies’ comprised large numbers of literate middle-class men, many educated in grammar schools, so that reading among frontline troops was for the first time a common and acceptable activity. Buchan’s fast-moving (both in terms of plot and location) Richard Hannay novels were particularly popular with the troops; Newnes’ Trench Library, clearly aimed at soldiers, published works by William Le Queux, H. de Vere Stacpoole and Edgar Wallace; and Rudyard Kipling was a national hero. Soldiers were no strangers to writing: the Expeditionary Force Canteens and the huts of the Church Army, YMCA and other charitable organisations offered notebooks, pens, ink and pencils. But theirs was also a world without radio or sound movies, so that public entertainment was still largely based on the performed word. Some 1,500 concert party groups operated in the rest areas, new song lyrics were sent from Britain to the ‘gaffs’ (temporary theatres – though the word also meant a ‘raid’), making up alternative lyrics was a common pastime, and trench papers were happy to publish poems and lyrics ranging from the sentimental to the robust. As well as readers, the soldiers were performers and makers too, and repeated references in trench papers indicate the importance of concert party performances. The 5th Gloucesters Gazette in September 1915 reported on a performance at ‘the Empire’, Plugstreet (Ploegsteert, Belgium); Item No.9, “‘When Little Willie Comes” – Kay and Kayenne’s performance went off without a jamb, and many of the audience were seen to wipe the tears from their eyes with 4 by 2.’ Between stints of guard duty at Steenwerck on 15 September 1918, Private (Pte) Fred Walker wrote to his best girl Ada: ‘With regard to the songs there is no need to hurry with them as we shall not be able to have any concerts until we get in somewhat different surroundings to these.’

Certainly there was no shortage of invention among the troops. Australian use of language was noted for its robust cycnicism, German for its gallows humour, while British trench newspapers such as The Wipers Times are still genuinely witty, funny and inventive – the 5th Gloucesters Gazette, 5 May 1915, contains a brief notice for a ‘House property – airy Chateau in Northern France … suitable to Strike Leader or Conchologist desirous of studying shells of every variety’. This conveys the resentment towards those seen as obstructing the war effort in a play on the word ‘conch/conscientious objector’. The third issue of The Morning Rire, the paper of the 2nd Irish Guards, offered advertisements for ‘Brigardine – look like a brigadier for two pence’.

The satirical adapting of military terms was often tolerated by the authorities, aware that an amount of slack which allowed the soldier to ‘grouse’ (complain) was good for morale. Answer and reply at a meeting between groups of marching soldiers (one side singing ‘Bugger’ and the other side singing ‘The Worcestershires’ to the tune of Colonel Bogie, quoted by Brophy) echoed the challenge and response of the sentry; trench papers readily printed alphabets and explanations of abbreviations mocking various parts of the army.

During the last year of the war the various specialised slangs in use at the front merged, and this was particularly the case as the slang of ORs was taken up by junior officers and nursing staff. ‘The mixings of the classes is more potent than the mixing of the nations’, wrote Eric Partridge in Words, Words, Words (1931); gradually the quotation marks that had appeared round ‘coal boxes’ or ‘Jack Johnsons’ had been abandoned as these terms became commonly recognised, but perhaps there was a conscious or subconscious association with the troops in adopting some of their terms. Helen Z. Smith in her semi-autobiographical novel Not So Quiet … (1930) notes how her posh mother had picked up soldiers’ terms in leafy Wimbledon: “‘What will Mrs Evans-Mawnington say … to my daughter taking a cushy job in England?” How well up in war-slang is Mother’. And in August 1918 the Manchester Guardian, reporting on how Robert Harcourt’s ‘Report on the Luxury Tax’, presented in Parliament, had included the expressions ‘a tidy bit of money in it’, ‘be a sport about it’, ‘all that twaddle’, ‘wangle it’, ‘wads of it’ and ‘we should hate not to have said it first’, commented that it was ‘remarkable for the amount of slang – or at least that experimental and tentative English which borders on slang.’ Eric Partridge noticed change happening similarly in French, where urban slang was being taken up by soldiers from the countryside. In all three armies, he observed, the influence of the Regular Army on slang was less than that of the civilian city. A writer to The Times in January 1915 proposed that ‘the majority of colloquialisms used by soldiers have a Cockney origin’. All slangs harked back to civilian life, Partridge proposed, and all ‘tended to materialise the spiritual and brutalise the material’.

During the course of the war some new slang replaced old army slang – Franglais became more common in France and Belgium than Anglicised Hindi or Arabic, and words derived from earlier conflicts were lost as the experiences were overlaid: ‘being Stellenbosched’ was replaced by ‘dégommé’ – being relieved of one’s command – which quickly developed into ‘coming ungummed’, or eventually ‘coming unstuck’. But the ultimate test was the sound and feel of the words, ensuring the survival of the earlier ‘wallah’, ‘pukka’, ‘cushy’, ‘bint’ and ‘buckshee’, as well as the newer ‘napoo’, ‘sanfaryan’ and ‘Bombardier Fritz’.

There was by the end of the war a sense that something had been created, that the English language had been changed and spread, and that this should be noted. The Cheltenham Looker-On, 7 September 1917, stated that ‘children in Belgium and France live in an atmosphere of Tommy’s slang … Their parents use it. Their big French or Belgian brothers on leave make use of some of the phrases.’ And the Derby Daily Telegraph, 23 October 1917, implied that respect should be given to trench language as part of the nation’s debt to its servicemen and women: ‘Some of the expressions cited may strike the reader as extravagant and even foolish, but the collector who proposes to print a “War Vocabulary” must not be fastidious. He must deal with Mr Atkins’ phrases, comic and otherwise, just as he finds them.’

A WAR OF WORDS

Isolationist, and dependant upon its navy for defence, Britain had been aloof from European politics for decades. Though close links with Germany had been mooted in the early years of King Edward VII’s reign, the King himself rejected the idea of a triple alliance of the three major European nations, turning instead to France with the Entente Cordiale of 1904. Although Kaiser Wilhelm II was a cousin of King George V, there was little in the way of family warmth expressed in his direction; instead, the British press was generally antagonistic towards Germany, depicting stereotypical representations of swaggering, sabre-rattling, Prussian militarists – stereotypes that became strongly entrenched. Suspicious of German intentions, the British Government took exception to the Kaiser’s desire to build an effective navy, and pre-war there was much scare-mongering over possible German invasion plans and antagonism directed across the North Sea by the new British tabloid press. William Le Queux’s fictional tale, The Invasion of 1910 (1906), serialised in the Daily Mail, set the tone for a ‘war of words’, of propaganda and counter-propaganda intended to discredit the enemy and to sponsor recruitment.

The invasion of Belgium in August 1914, in contravention of the Treaty of London (1839) guaranteeing Belgian borders, led to an upsurge in condemnation of Germany, though before the war few people would have had knowledge of what became known as ‘Plucky Little Belgium’. The invasion resulted in a focused propaganda campaign that ultimately saw the British Government sponsor an inquiry into ‘Alleged German Outrages’ in Belgium, under a former Ambassador to the United States, James Bryce. The Bryce Report would concentrate on the ‘attrocities’, and would help fuel further antagonism towards the Germans, which was intensified by the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania in 1915.

Britain had long held on to its position as the only major European power not to depend upon conscription for its armed forces. The onset of war drew men to the colours, which peaked in August 1914, after the setbacks suffered by the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) at Mons. Highly charged recruiting posters issued by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, and the actions of some women in handing out white feathers to those at home led to the pressure on the workforce.

SERBIA

The country where the first shots of the war were fired underwent a name change, as ‘Servia’ was felt to have negative connotations of servility, inappropriate for an ally. The Times used ‘Servia’ in August and September 1914, introducing ‘Serbia’ on 21 September; this soon became the dominant form in The Times, with ‘Servia’ occurring only eleven times in 1915 and five times in 1916.

PRUSSIA

In British eyes ‘Prussia’ came to mean the effective, soulless militarism that threatened to destroy European culture. The ‘junkers’ class, the old nobility of Prussia and eastern Germany, was particularly blamed for dominating military and international policy in the region, notably after the success of the war with Austria in 1865–66, while Prussian internal policy from this time included universal conscription and rigorous training of the army. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 had left a lasting distrust and fear of what quickly came to be known as ‘Prussian militarism’ throughout Europe, but especially in France.

Thus ‘Prussian’ by 1914 was placed to take on all that was feared and abhorred in the German military. For the Daily Express ‘Atrocity was part of “the war as the Prussian wages it”’ (22 August 1914); the Kaiser was ‘the Prussian drill-sergeant’ (24 July 1915); and the German Army was supposed to have a ‘Prussian Guard’, consisting of ‘giants’ (31 August 1914). ‘Prussian militarism’, compared to Britain’s ‘basic peaceful decency’, was supposedly the cause of the war; as late as November 1915 the Depot Review was stating in ‘An Open Letter to the Kaiser’ that ‘It is the glory of Britain that she was not prepared for the war. It is the glory of Britain that she is preparing for war.’

There was, however, an awareness that ‘Prussia’ did not mean the same as ‘Germany’; a German living in London was quoted in the Daily Mirror, 12 January 1915, as saying ‘South Germany is not Prussianised. South Germany will always hate Prussia’.

I suddenly thought of Prussian Guardsmen, burly and brutal, and bursting bombs, and hand-to-hand struggles with cold steel.

(Charles Edmonds (Lieutenant C. E. Carrington), A Subaltern’s War, 1929)

KULTUR

‘Kultur’ was a concept of German, and particularly Prussian, supremacy in arts, customs, conventions, laws and other high ideals of western civilisation. Central to these ideals were the reliance upon discipline, obedience and military power, with an autocratic head – the Kaiser, Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia. With the influence of Prussian Kultur being felt in the opening campaigns of the war, it was not surprising that the Allied propagandists quickly siezed upon the idea, and depicted half-crazed, jack-booted madmen striding across Europe, all ‘For Kultur’.

KULTUR

The Hun he is a simple man

They kultur him in plant

He’ll crucify you if he can

And strafe you if he can’t

(The Listening Post, paper of 7th Canadian Infantry Battalion, 10 July 1915)

‘Fur Kultur’: propaganda ‘iron crosses’ issued in Britain, and listing the names of Belgian cities featured in atrocity stories.

K is for Kultur, Kronprinz also Kaiser, whose fatuous schemes have made every Bosche wiser.

(C.M. Truman and J. Leslie, The Ypres Alphabet, c.1915)

There are whole ranges of ‘Minor Horrors of War’ … The minor poets, the pamphlets of the professors, the people who write to the papers about ‘Kultur’ … the half hysterical ladies who offer white feathers to youths whose hearts are breaking because medical officer after medical officer has refused them the desire of their young lives to serve their county.

(A.E. Shipley, The Minor Horrors of War, 1915)

STRAFE

To ‘strafe’, from the German for ‘punish’, was a much-repeated slogan throughout the war, and an example of a German phrase that was quickly assimilated into British speech, usually tinged with irony. Derived from the German slogan ‘Gott Strafe England’, it was adapted for a variety of situations. A ‘strafe’ in the frontline was an attack or bombardment; elsewhere ‘to strafe’ was to argue, chastise or generally punish.

‘GOTT STRAFE ENGLAND!’

[God punish England!] German propaganda slogan, used on postage stamps, pin badges, even coal briquettes.

WANTED, Etc.

The name of a good maker-up of a ‘Bucking-up’ Pill to be taken before ‘Strafe’ time.

The Trench Times (Trench newspaper), May 1916

‘Gott Strafe England’ German propaganda postage stamps: the Gott pictured is clearly Nordic.

WE WILL BE HAPPY ONCE AGAIN NEVER MIND

Dear Auntie,

I write you just a few lines to say i’m still alive and well although we are having it very stiff for fritzi straffs us every morning for we are in a very dangerious plaice … but I was one of the lucky ones to escape. On Sunday he was quite busy as he straffed us both left and right but he did not kill so many he knocked the houses about. Some day we will be advancing to Blighty for leave has started again and I hope it the same as on this card the sun shining and the sea calm.

I remain yours Sincerely C.L. Landon

(Message on a silk postcard from a soldier, 4 April 1917)

‘DER TAG’

Much in evidence in the early part of the war was the phrase ‘Der Tag’ – The Day, which was taken to mean the moment when Germany could finally get to grips with Britain following the Kaiser’s build up of his armed forces.

DER TAG

EMPEROR:

(Intently) This. THE DAY to which we have so often drunk draws near.

EMPEROR:

The Day! To the Day!

(All salute The Day with their swords)

But when?

OFFICER:

Now if she wants it.

EMPEROR:

There is no road to Britain – until our neighbours are subdued. Then, for us, there will be no roads that do not lead to Britain.

(J.M. Barrie, Der Tag, or The Tragic Man, 1914)

‘SCRAP OF PAPER’

The ‘Scrap of Paper’ was the Treaty of London that guaranteed the sovereignty of Belgium in 1839, and to which Prussia, Britain, France and other nations had put their signatures. The German disregard for this treaty was to be a cause célèbre that was used tirelessly in propaganda and recruitment posters in Britain during the early part of the war. The origin of the phrase relates to an interview between Sir E. Goschen, British Ambassador to Germany, and the German Chancellor, von Bethmann-Hollweg, in 1914: ‘I found the Chancellor very agitated. His Excellency at once began a harangue, which lasted for about twenty minutes. He said that the steps taken by His Majesty’s Government was terrible to a degree; just for a word – ‘neutrality,’ a word which in war time had so often been disregarded – just for a scrap of paper Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation who desired nothing better than to be friends with her.’ The term ‘Scrap of Paper’ also became known as ‘The Broken Pledge’, and was widely used in propaganda.

THE KAISER: ‘BIG WILLIE’

The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, was widely blamed for the war and his posturing was mercilessly lampooned and parodied in the press. Belgian attitudes towards the Kaiser were typified by the actions of a group of refugees in Ilford, East London; they rounded off their Christmas in 1914 with a performance described to the Ilford Guardian as ‘Making the funeral with the Kaiser from Germany’. The Daily Express, who had called the Kaiser ‘The Mad Dog of Europe’ on 4 August 1914, no doubt took some satisfaction in being able to report ‘the Mad Dog Is Muzzled At Last’ on 11 November 1918. In line with the customary distinction between trench language and the terms used by the home press, British soldiers hardly ever referred to him as anything but ‘the kaiser’.

‘Big and Little Willie’: the Kaiser and his son were lampooned mercilessly.

The difficulty that George V and Willhelm II were first cousins was neatly circumvented by the King, who said to F.D. Roosevelt on 29 July 1918, ‘You know I have a number of relations in Germany, but I can tell you frankly that in all my life I have never seen a German gentleman.’ The relationship beween the Kaiser and his son was the topic of much ridicule. Newspaper cartoons regularly referred to ‘Big Willie’ (the Kaiser) and ‘Little Willie’ (Crown Prince Willhelm), who was Commander of the German Fourth Army, and were merciless in portraying them as fools. In October, ‘Littlest Willie’ began to appear in cartoons – this was another Prince Willhelm, who was twelve years old by this stage. On 8 June 1916, the Daily Mirror reported that in America there was a nickname for the Kaiser – Hunzollern, a play on the Imperial family name of Hohenzollern.

ATROCITY