Tommy (67 page)

Weapons had nicknames of their own. A Lazy Eliza was a long-range shell, probably destined for a distant battery, that rustled harmlessly overhead. But Pissing Jenny and Whistling Percy were shells from German 9-inch naval guns, and the Wipers Express was a heavy gun notably used at Second Ypres. A whiz-bang or a pip-squeak was the shell from a German 77-mm field gun, often fired at such close range that the whistle of the shell's arrival almost coincided with the sound of its explosion: Sidney Rogerson wrote of ‘the double-tap of a Hun 5.9 inch or the Whiz-Bang! of our eighteen pounders.' A Coal Box or a Jack Johnson was a heavy shell which burst with a cloud of black smoke. Five-nines and nine-twos were German 5.9- and 9.2-inch guns, the decimals generally omitted by those who had heard the brutes. Two German machine guns near Festubert were christened Quinque Jimmy and Blighty Albert. A rifle, when not a bundook or a shooting iron, might be a hipe, from NCOs' practice of mispronouncing words when giving orders to give extra snap, as in: ‘Order … hipe!' A bayonet could be a tin-opener, a toothpick or a pigsticker.

Soldiers often sang on the march. Unlike their German opponents or their French allies, as they tramped the pavé they had a marked aversion to overtly patriotic songs (though these had their place at concerts) and preferred a mixture of the mawkish and sentimental, the pop songs of the day, borrowed from music halls, and the obscene and irreverent. Captain Dunn believed that:

The French sometimes produced bands and colour parties just behind the lines to give a stirring welcome to troops coming out of the line. But as one British soldier wrote:

Such frivolity could offend the serious-minded. Captain Robert Dolby, captured when his regimental aid post was overrun by the Germans at First Ypres, heard, in his prison-camp, how:

It's a Long Way to Tipperary
was indeed a favourite throughout the war, with alternative words beginning, ‘It's the wrong way to tickle Mary … ', and ending rather worse. There was the supremely lugubrious
We are Fred Karno's Army,
its words readily adaptable to fit the names of many units, sung to the tune of
The Church's One Foundation:

We are Fred Karno's Army, the ragtime infantry,

We cannot shoot, we cannot fight, what bloody use are we?

And when we get to Berlin, the Kaiser he will say,

‘Hoch hoch! Mein Gott, what a bloody useless lot'

The ragtime infantry!

And there were endless variations on
Mademoiselle from Armentières.
One told how:

Three German officers crossed the line

Parlez-vous,

Three German officers crossed the line

Parlez-vous,

Three German officers crossed the line, fucked the women and drank the wine,

With an inky-pinky
parlez-vous …

Or perhaps singers preferred the more respectable:

Or then again there was the subversive:

With its variants like:

The ASC have a jolly fine time …

Some units preferred ‘Skiboo! Skiboo!' and concluded ‘Ski-bumpity-bump skiboo'.

Mademoiselle …
was popular partly because it allowed different voices to take up the lead down the ranks of a marching company, sometimes mimicking officers or NCOs. Thus a subaltern with a stammer and an officer's use of expletives might be gently sent up:

They c … c … came across a wayside inn,

Parlez-vous,

They c … c … came across a wayside inn

Parlez-vous,

They came across a wayside inn, and kicked the b … b … bally door right in,

Inky-pinky
parlez-vous …

Indeed, the best songs allowed for the natural inventiveness of their singers. George Coppard's battalion of the Queen's was particularly fond of one which opened with the confident solo:

The chorus riposted with gusto:

The solo then changed his mind:

This allowed the chorus, so often denied a legitimate expression of its dissent, to yell, with more feeling than metre:

‘Some of the songs we sang on the march gave vent to our private feelings,' wrote Frederick Hodges;

The king of all marching songs, rightly described in Francis and Day's song annual for 1917 as ‘The British Army's Battle Cry', was
Here we are! Here we are! Here we are again:

Here we are! Here we are! Here we are again!

There's Pat and Mac and Tommy and Jack and Joe,

When there's trouble brewing, when there's something doing,

Are we downhearted? No! Let ‘em all come!

Here we are! Here we are! Here we are again!

It could be sung in cheery insouciance or with gentle disapproval. The Welsh Guards' historian admits that when the battalion moved up to Loos:

And it could be flung in the teeth of the worst the war had to offer. A crippled battalion coming out of the line, its men muddied and filthy and its strength left on the battlefield, somehow braced up as it reached the village where it was billeted, and found courage to bark out the old words ‘Here we are! Here we are! Here we are again …'.

But despite the bawdiness and cynicism of much of what they sang, soldiers, perverse as ever, could sometimes sing so sentimentally that they moved others to tears. The Reverend Julian Bickersteth, looking out through the inverted V of his tent flap in a bivouac behind the Somme battlefront in September 1916, could see twenty men round a bright camp fire.

Welsh-recruited battalions often sang beautifully, and there is a heart-stopping account of a battalion moving up in the dark singing that most beautiful of hymn tunes,
Aberystwyth,
until the voices were lost in the sound of shellfire. The Welsh Guards choir came second in the male voice competition at the Welsh National Eisteddfod in 1918; but its finest hour had probably come earlier, as the regiment's historian, an eyewitness, remembered:

So what hope and faith moved this vast assemblage of the proud and the profane, the cynical and the contemptuous, that constituted the British army in France? The question is a complex one, all the more so because it is bound up in the role of the military chaplain, an individual who has generally had a poor press. Religion and those who championed it divided men's opinion, but there was a far more powerful spiritual undertow on the Western Front than we sometimes think. The Reverend Harold Davies was struck by the paradox inherent in a battery of artillery he visited. They were:

The Church of England was not simply England's established church, but was the religion given on attestation (sometimes with supreme cynicism) by the great majority of soldiers. It is important not to view the Church through the prism of the early twenty-first century, but to remember that a century ago it exercised a much more prominent role in national life, and that clergymen were comparatively well paid. Church attendance was substantially higher than it is now: in 1911, 98 per 1,000 of the population of England took Holy Communion in Church of England churches on Easter Sunday, a figure that had shrunk to 73 in 1939, 42 in 1973, and is now much lower. Perhaps most significantly for the men who went to war, three-quarters of children in England and Wales attended Sunday school in 1888, so that: ‘the religion of the average private soldier had been formed in the Sunday and day schools, not by adult worship in church'.
³⁰
Other Protestant sects had a very strong following in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and parts of England. And Roman Catholicism, for all the disadvantages under which it had laboured for so long, had a powerful hold on the southern counties of Ireland and footholds in England too.

In short, there was a wider sense of spirituality than is the case today. But increasingly it was expressed, not with any theologically-precise certainty, but with that generalised sense that encouraged one sergeant major to tell a padre: ‘to most men religion means nothing, except the notion that there was one above, a sense of duty to live cleanly, and a belief that there would be a reckoning sometime'.
³¹
Indeed, this tendency to move towards ‘a non-dogmatic affirmation of general kindliness and good fellowship' was precisely what the Liberal MP C. F. G. Masterman had identified in his 1909 book
The Condition of England.
Padre Julian Bickersteth was detailed to pass the night with a man due to be shot for desertion the following morning. The victim, from the poorest of the poor in London's East End, had lost his father young, been sent off by his mother ‘to do what he could for himself and was in prison by the time he was twenty: there was no sign of a conventional religious background. He gave ‘great heaving sobs' when Bickersteth explained what must happen at dawn. But he rallied after tea, bread and jam and a pipe of tobacco, and they sang together for three hours.