Tommy (66 page)

I
t was an irreverent and blasphemous army, with the conversation of soldiers larded with what David Jones termed ‘the efficacious word … above any other … considered adequate to ease outraged susceptibilities'.
¹
Frederic Manning, in the first edition of his book
Her Privates We,
rendered the word as ‘muckin', but, in the second edition, was allowed to unveil it fully. Corporal Hamley of 7/King's Shropshire Light Infantry, in reserve behind the Somme battlefield, is not wholly content with one of his signallers, Private Weeper Smart:

The parish priest of the Belgian village of Dickebush was frankly puzzled by it all. ‘I have looked it up phonetically in my little English dictionary
(fahke),'
he wrote.

And for all this, American oaths were a novelty even to the British. Eric Hiscock's comrades in 26/Royal Fusiliers were shocked to hear the Germans called ‘cocksucking mother-fuckers' by the new arrivals: ‘no one … had heard such expressions before, nor knew what they meant'.
⁴

Coarse language, no great surprise to men from hard, working-class backgrounds, was a shock to those from more sheltered upbringings. Rory Baynes remembered that at his prep school ‘a boy called Quin was beaten with a slipper for using bad language. The depraved boy was heard to say “damn”. ‘
⁵
An officer noted how he found himself in serious trouble with his fiancée for using the same word when he missed a shot at golf. Officers might, however, legitimately allow themselves to use ‘bally' in public. When the popular Captain Gussy Collins, wearing his trademark monocle and carrying a cane, saw his old company of 25/London making for its objective at Messines, he shouted cheerily: ‘Haven't you captured the bally place yet?'
⁶
But for some men serving in the ranks swearing was not least amongst the crosses that they had to bear. Alfred Hale, conscripted in April 1916, endured a perfunctory medical examination ‘wearing literally nothing but my coat and walking shoes' and then went to draw his uniform at the tailor's store.

He later lamented that: ‘One got so very wearied of hearing everything being described as f-cking this and f-cking that, the very word, with its original indecent meaning, being at length a mere stupid and meaningless vulgarity.'
⁸

In one sense an army is defined by its language. Stephen Graham thought that once a man ‘begins to use the army's language without wishing it he has ceased to be an individual soldier, he has become
soldiery'.
⁹
Henri Barbusse wrote of how the speech of his own army, ‘made of a mixture of workshop and barrack slang, and patois, seasoned with a few newly-coined words, binds us, like a sauce, to the compact mass of men who … have emptied France to concentrate in the North-East'.
¹⁰
The British army was linked by its oaths, its nicknames, its deliberate mispronunciations and its practice of calling acquaintances of the same rank ‘chum' – cartoons in Australian trench journals rendering it ‘choom' in evident testimony to the abundance of northerners. A long-eared chum was a mule and a long-faced chum a horse, as Richard Chant of the 5th Dragoon Guards reflected in a poem:

But a long-haired chum was altogether different, a woman. Food-itself snap, scoff or scran – had a myriad of descriptions which rival the art of modern menu-writers. When Sidney Rogerson woke up on his first night out of the line Private Parkin told him with delight that lunch was ‘stewed beef and sixty-pounders, sir, and deaf'uns and custard'.
¹²
A ‘sixty pounder' was a big suet dumpling, and a ‘deaf'un' a tinned fig. Indeed the whole business could be unutterably confusing, and when delivered in a variety of accents we should not be surprised that young Huntley Gordon admitted that it was ‘sometimes difficult for me to make out what a man is saying'. If other-rank English confused officers, the reverse was also true. A machine-gun sergeant, directed to take his men to ‘Oom-bare-con' (the village of Humbercamps, just south of Arras), acknowledged the order, and then, when out of earshot, asked his men what it meant: ‘Whereupon from the back of the section rose the irreverent voice of Pte Archbold. “He said Oom-bare-con; but you, poor ignorant perisher, probably call it Humber camps”.'
¹³

Signalese, the language once peculiar to signallers, seeped into the army as a whole. There was a phonetic alphabet, to prevent misunderstandings over the telephone. And so trench mortar, abbreviated to TM, was Toc Emma. There was as yet no twenty-four-hour clock, and so pm was Pip Emma and am was Ac Emma. Officers and men used the alphabet in everyday speech to emphasise their warrior status. To an habitué the ‘Deputy Assistant Adjutant General, General Staff Officers 1st, 2nd and 3rd Grades, and Acting Assistant Quartermaster General' were ‘Don Ac Ac Gees, Esses O 1, 2 and 3; Ac Ac Q Emma Gee.'
¹⁴
A trench-mortar battery, TMB, was a Toc Emma Beer; an Observation Post, OP, was an O Pip; and a machine gun, MG, was Emma Gee
tout court.

To call the Germans the Alleyman (a corruption of the French
allemand)
or Ypres Wipers implied an early arrival at the front, and the use of such words by newcomers would earn the forcefully-expressed disapproval of old hands. Place names were shamelessly mispronounced. Monchy Breton was Monkey Britain; Auchonvillers, Ocean Villas; Bailleul, Baloo; Biefvillers, Beef Villas; La Quinque Rue inevitably La Kinky Rue; Sailly la Bourse, Sally Booze; Wytschaete, White Sheet; Ploegsteert Wood, Plug Street Wood and Albert was rendered with English pronunciation and a good hard ‘t'. Mouquet Farm, that evil spot on the Somme, was Mucky Farm or Moo-Cow Farm. Where local names were lacking, invention was at hand: three advance dressing stations in the Ypres salient were christened with the mock-Flemish names of Bandaginghem, Dozinghem and Mendinghem – the latter two still have Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemeteries named after them.

Old India hands expected the French to understand them when they began to ‘sling the bat'. Frank Richards, loose in Rouen with his comrades Billy and Stevens in August 1914, saw how the former:

Wallah – person – had words added to define a man's trade, from Vickers-gun wallah for the machine-gun officer to shit-wallah for the sanitary corporal. A rifle became a
bundook
and a bed a
charpoy,
and knife, fork and spoon were
jury, chummage
and
conter.
Roti – bread – became
rooty,
and so the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal, awarded for eating army bread for twenty-one years in an aura of undetected crime was the Rooty Gong. Men were enjoined to put some
jildi
in it, or to get something done on the
jildi,
from the Hindustani for ‘to hurry'. An order might have to be carried out
ekdum,
at once. A madman might be
doolally
or have the
doolally
tap (from the hospital at Deolali near Bombay, and the Hindustani for fever), or be
piache
or even stone
piache. Khush
was pleasant in Hindi, and from it came cushy. Soldiers going up the line invariably asked the troops they were relieving what things were like up there. ‘Cushy, mate, cushy' was a reply as common as it was inaccurate.

A wound serious enough to procure freedom from future frontline service was a cushy blighty, or more commonly a blighty one. Blighty was perhaps a corruption of the Hindi
bilāyatī,
a foreign country, the Arabic
beladi,
my own country, or the Urdu
belait,
strange or foreign. John Brophy and Eric Partridge described it as meaning much more than home, but ‘a sort of faerie, a paradise which he could faintly remember, a sort of never-never land'. Blighty was a place described in song:

And it was an adjective too, describing not simply ‘things English and homelike' but anything that was generally very good, as in: ‘This is real Blighty butter.'
¹⁶
The two staples of French
estaminet
life, white wine and chips,
vin blanc
and
pommes frites,
were Point Blanc and Pomfritz, good examples of the linguistic blurring that produced Franglais. Soldiers' Franglais included two of the war's most characteristic words: San Fairy Ann (with its close relatives San Fairy and San Fairy Anna), came from
ça ne fait rien –
it doesn't matter. And for the use of ‘napoo', from
il n'y en a plus,
there is no more, let us listen to Arthur Smith of the Coldstream Guards:

Walter Guinness reported that a trench was fittingly called Napoo Avenue because it had been destroyed three times in six days. Then there was the jig-a-jig, for making love, and the descriptive zig-zag for being drunk. The latter led to the following badinage between a British soldier and a French girl.

Franglais joined bat to produce mongey wallah – monger from manger, thus cook.

Nicknames abounded too. Officers often retained ones awarded at Sandhurst or staff college (Archimedes Edmonds, Apple-pie Allenby-The Bull came later – Wombat Howard-Vyse, Putty Pulteney and Sally Hume) or were awarded them on first joining their units. Frank Dunham's company commander, Captain A. R. E. Watts, was Nellie to the troops because of ‘his girlish face and swanky ways'. An officer in the Gloucesters ‘from his first appearance on parade until he left the regiment twenty years later was known as “Agony”.'
¹⁹
Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Western was universally Hunter-Bunter, and Rawlinson was so well aware of his abbreviation Rawly that he kept a pet boar of the same name. Plumer was affectionately Daddy to his troops but Drip, because of a long-running sinus problem, to irreverent subalterns. There was a long tradition of nicknames that accompanied certain surnames. These were sometimes logical, like Dusty Miller, Spud Murphy, Spokey Wheeler or Chalky White. Historians in the ranks might have known that the original Charley Peace was a nineteenth-century burglar, and that Tom King had been a notorious highwayman. The connection between Fanny Fields and Lottie Collins and the music-hall singers of the same name would have been clear, as would Brigham Young from the Mormon leader. But what of Daisy Bell, Knocker White, Pincher Martin, Rattler Morgan and Smoky Holmes?

A commanding officer or company commander, even if in his twenties, was the Old Man, and a regimental sergeant major was the reg'mental. The quartermaster, commissioned from the ranks and often the former regimental sergeant major of his battalion, was spoken of as the quarter bloke by soldiers and quarters by officers. But as Henry Williamson's character Philip Madison discovered, a new subaltern addressing a senior quartermaster to his face as ‘quarters' was likely to have his vocabulary quickly and helpfully broadened. Newly-promoted second lieutenants were ‘one-pip wonders', and officers more generally might be defined by the stars they sported on cuff or shoulder:

To his servant an officer was simply ‘my bloke'. The company quartermaster sergeant could, like his superior at battalion headquarters, be known within the company as the quarter bloke. He might, from his rank of colour sergeant, be termed the colour bloke or colour bundle.
²⁰
Or, from the commodity he so often dispensed, he might be called the soup-dragon. Sergeant was more rarely abbreviated to ‘sarge' than novelists would have us believe: the contraction ‘sarn't' was far more common, both up and down the chain of command. Corporals were ‘full screws' and lance corporals ‘lance jacks'. The rank of lance private did not feature in
King's Regulations,
but old hands granted it, in mock despair, to new arrivals.