Our army in the field has managed to scrape together a whole vocabulary of trench slang. It is a strange medley of English, French, and German. That immortal phrase “Gott strafe England” has given to trench slang “strafing” as a substantive, and “to straf” as a verb. As you have probably already gathered from reading soldiers’ letters in the newspapers, to be “strafed” is to be bombarded by the enemy—in short, to suffer in any way at the hands of the Hun. The morning and evening “straf” is equivalent to the morning and evening “frightfulness” or “hate,” the liveliness with which the German guns issue in the day and march it out at its close. The Germans apply the words “Morgengruss” (morning greeting) and “Abendsegen” (evening benediction) to these periodical outbursts from our side. “Hate,” used in this sense, undoubtedly owes its origin to that amusing sketch in Punch, showing a German family indulging in its “morning hate.” This clever cartoon had an immense vogue at the front, and I have seen it frequently hanging up on the walls of dug-outs and billets.
To be “crumped”—another expression often heard in the trenches—is to be bombarded with heavy howitzer shells, an onomatopœic word. To be “archied”—a Royal Flying Corps phrase—is to be shelled by anti-aircraft guns, which are universally known as “Archibalds” or “Archies.”
A whole vocabulary has grown up about the guns which are playing such a rôle in this war. “Gunning” is freely used as a synonym for “shelling”; the heavy guns are, tout court, “the heavies”; the howitzers are the “hows.” There is a wild and picturesque crop of nicknames to denote the different kinds of guns and shells. Thus, our heaviest howitzer is known as “Grandmother” or “Grandma,” while the next below it in size is “Mother.” A certain German long-range naval gun, whose shells have the peculiarity of bursting before you hear them arrive, is known as “Percy.” German high-explosive shrapnel shells are “white hopes” or “white swans.” “Jack Johnsons,” “Black Marias,” and “coal-boxes” are used rather indiscriminately for different kinds of heavy shells, while “whizz-bangs,” the small 15-pounder shell thrown by a mountain-gun, are also called “pip-squeaks.” The men in the firing-line got so free with their nicknames for shells in official reports at one time that a list of officially recognized and distinctive nicknames for German shells was drawn up and issued for use by some divisions.
From the French trench slang derives one or two expressions. “To function” (fonctionner) is one. A man “functions” as liaison officer, a trench-pump will not “function.” “Dégommer” is often used to denote the action of relieving an officer of his command. It is, of course, pure French slang, and is invariably used in this sense in the French Army. This word has a curious derivation. It was, I believe, first applied by the Humanité in its old sledgehammer days under the late Jean Jaures, to denote Aristide Briand, most fiercely hated of all French Ministers because, at the outset of his career, he was in the ranks of those revolutionary Socialists whom he had to combat so fiercely when in office. All public men who came under the ban of the Humanité had their nicknames, and were never referred to by anything else. Thus M. Lépine, the late Prefect of Police of Paris, was spoken of as le sinistre gnome, M. Clemenceau as Le Tigre, and M. Briand, after his fall from power as the result of his suppression of the railway strike, as Le Dégommé—“the ungummed one,” the innuendo being that he had clung to office until he was forcibly torn from power.
Talk at the trench mess, of course, principally turns round such trench topics as the men and their caprices, the date of relief, leave. There is “grousing” about the slowness of promotion, about the Mentions in Despatches. But there is no gloom. It is an eternal wonder to me that the officers in the trenches are so consistently cheerful. Neither death nor danger depresses their spirits; the monotony does not make them despondent. They do not hide the fact that they hate shell-fire, or that they could contemplate a more agreeable existence than living in a ditch in Flanders. Only they realize that they have a job to do, and they do it. And they will go on doing it until their work is done.
The Germans have realized too late what they have lost by sacrificing the respect of their enemies. Our soldiers in the trenches make no concealment of their admiration of the efficiency and bravery of the Germans as fighters, but as men they loathe and despise them. The British soldier is an easy-going fellow, and the Germans, had they only regarded the conventions of soldiering, might have prevented much of the bitterness which this war has engendered. Even as it is, though the anger of our men against their treacherous enemy makes them a formidable and pitiless foe in the assault with the bayonet, they are gentle and paternal with their prisoners.
I have actually seen the British escort giving German prisoners cigarettes. I have read letters written by German prisoners waiting in our lines in France to be sent with a convoy to England, dwelling on the good treatment they were receiving, and describing how they were given the same rations as their escort, including cigarettes, and were being taught football by their captors. The extraordinary agapes that took place during the Christmas truce, when British and Germans, for a few brief hours, fraternized between the lines, could not, I believe, occur again, except possibly with the Saxons, who have behaved decently in this war, and for whom our men have a soft corner in their hearts. Since Christmas the hideous crime of the asphyxiating gas has drifted in a foul miasma between us and our enemy. No man who fought in the second battle of Ypres and saw the sufferings of the gas victims would give his hand to a German to-day. But the psychology of the British soldier is so enigmatic that the prophet would run grave risk of coming to grief who ventured to predict what the British soldier will do where his heart is concerned. Nevertheless, this much I would say—that to-day the British soldier neither fears nor trusts the German. He knows that, man for man, he is his superior; he looks forward to the time when, gun for gun and shell for shell, the same will be true.
“Daily Mail” phot.
German Prisoners.
With the British and German lines in places only forty yards or less apart, there is always a certain amount of communication between ourselves and the enemy. The Germans generally contrive to find out which of our battalions is holding the trenches opposite, and often greet the reliefs with the name of their regiment. When a famous Highland battalion was going away, after a long stay in one portion of the line, the Germans played them out of the trenches with “Mary of Argyll,” very well rendered on the cornet. The Jocks were hugely amused, and gave the performer a round of applause to reward his efforts.