With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

Underwood & Underwood phot.
Billets in the field: the British soldier and his peasant hosts.

It says much for the tact of our army in the field that it has wielded the wide powers conferred on it with the utmost loyalty by the French, vis-à-vis the civilian population, without any friction. In all the towns and villages of our zone of occupation you will see printed notices signed by “Le Général Commandant la —— Armée Anglaise,” or “Le Capitaine A.P.M.” (Assistant Provost-Marshal), with directions for the closing of cafés and estaminets at a fixed time, and the hour by which the civilian population must be indoors. In most places the sale of spirits to the British Army is absolutely prohibited. If an estaminet offends in any way against these regulations, the British authorities have power to close it—a power that is often exercised. There is no direct intercourse between the British military authorities and the civilian population, however. The French officiers de liaison attached to the different armies and corps and the Mayors act as go-betweens. Things work very smoothly by this arrangement, which removes the disagreeable possibility of our military authorities having to exercise direct pressure on the French civilians. Billeting and requisitioning are worked on similar lines, and there is a Claims Commission which, in consultation with the French, deals with the redemption of requisitioning receipts and claims for indemnity for damages, etc.

The rank and file of our army that went to Mons knew practically only two words of French, apart from Wee wee and Nong, French words familiar to every Britisher since the days of Boney, and those were souvenir and bong. The British Army increased its French vocabulary by these two words in the course of its triumphal progress from the sea coast to the interior through villages en fête, where the peasants loaded the troops with good things of every description, asking only in return a badge as a souvenir. That is why most of our men went into action badgeless, and the giving away of badges had to be prohibited. That is why to-day, when you see a man with the initials of his regiment written in faded ink on his cap in default of a badge, you may know almost to a certainty that that man went through the great retreat.

The British Army has improved its acquaintance with the French tongue since those early days of the war. It has, indeed, contrived a kind of lingua franca as a vehicle of speech between itself and its hosts in the billets. The vocabulary is small, being in the main restricted to articles of food and drink. Grammar is a negligible quality, and the accent varies from the clipped speech of North Britain to the broad burr of the West of England. The French being reputed a race which sets great store by politeness, sivvoo-play is freely tacked on to all sentences in conversation with the natives. The difficulties of the modification of the definite article are simply abridged by prefixing to the substantive doo (du). Thus, milk is doolay, bread doopong, water doolo, wine doovang. Jam, indispensable adjunct to all meals of our army in the field, has, as every schoolboy knows, no exact equivalent in French, for the simple reason that the French seldom eat jam except in the form of a kind of fruit jelly which they call confiture. But the British soldier never hesitated. The army slang for jam is, I believe, poz or pozzie, so jam became doopoz, and was speedily recognized by the natives under that form.

The peasants on their side have fallen into a kind of pigeon French, accompanied by a good deal of simple gesture, which, even with the most elementary vocabulary, is extremely easy to understand. As the population of the region of France abutting on the Belgian frontier speaks Flemish as well as French, the peasants in some parts of our line are able to draw on Flemish (which has many words resembling English) to supplement their vocabulary in talking with les solgaires, as they call them. The children, with childhood’s ready ear for languages, pick up English from our men extraordinarily fast. The ragged urchins who sell the London newspapers at G.H.Q. (General Headquarters) every evening have gathered quite a lot of English one way and another, though, I must say, some of their expressions savour very strongly of “our army in Flanders.”

Our men, too, are very quick about French. On Sunday afternoons in the villages in the rear you may see Mr. Atkins going for a quiet stroll with his host in billets, some gnarled old peasant, and carrying on quite an animated conversation with him about the crops and what not. The mess orderlies at G.H.Q. are wonderful. On market-days they are to be seen in the Grand’ Place, baskets on their arms, haggling away as fluently as may be in French with the old women selling butter and eggs and fish and fruit.

Our army in the field has a fine sweeping way with the pronunciation of the names of places in its zone of occupation. Wipers and Plug Street are classical and well-known examples of the phonetic adaptation of such names. In many cases a place, as pronounced by our men, is instantly recognized when seen in print, a fine tribute to the correctness of their phonetics. Often their pronunciation is a very close imitation of what the name of the place sounds like in the mouth of a Flemish boor. “Wipers” is astoundingly near the Flemish pronunciation of Ypres. In the same way Gertie-wears-velvet is an almost perfect phonetic rendering of Godewaersvelde, and easy to remember at that. I have amused myself by keeping a little list of the pronunciation by our army of some of the names familiar to them in our zone of operations:

Armentières	Arm-in-tears.
Haverskerque	Haversack.
Reninghelst	Running Hold.
Festubert	Fest-Hubert.
Etaples	Eatables.
Lumbres	Lumbers.
Hinges	(As in English).
Vieux Berquin	Viooks Berkwinn.
Potijze, or Potyze	Pottidjy.
Wytschæte	White Sheet.
Cuinchy	Quinchey.
Hazebrouck	Azebrook.
Beuvry	Bouvry (as in Bouverie Street).
Haltebast	Hell-and-Blast.

The amusing thing is that the whole army has adopted this nomenclature. You will hear Staff officers who know French well speaking of “Arm-in-tears” and “White Sheet.” With the Expeditionary Force it is “the thing” to do as the army does.

There is no doubt that our men were very uncomfortable both in the trenches and out during the long wet winter in Flanders. Even after a dry spell in the summer a heavy shower sufficed to turn the roads and paths and communication trenches about the firing-line into regular quagmires. But the warm air of a perfect summer, when the sun is never long absent, puts a different complexion on everything. The quagmires dry up, the hot sunshine evaporates the moisture in sodden garments, and the exquisite garb in which summer clothes these Flanders flats, so gloomy and repelling in winter, quickly restores depressed spirits.