THE SOLDIERS’ WAR SLANG DICTIONARY
“Genius named them as I live! But what genius could compress,
In a title what man’s humor said to man’s supreme distress.”
Trench Nomenclature
Edmund Blunden
My Grandpa, Robert “Rab” Morris, was a word lover.
At the age of 25, he became what was known along WW1’s long and bloody front as a Linseed Lancer, a member of the Royal Army Medical Corp. By Christian choice, he was a non-combatant serviceman and later became a Minister in the Church of Scotland.
Like everyone in our family, Grandpa was also a dog person. Years after his death my Aunt told me he’d “saved” a starving puppy in the streets of Cairo, and before embarkation, fed it up, and smuggled it to Suvla Bay. The poor puppy must have freaked during the hideous bombardments, but somewhere in the family papers someone has written – “both man and dog survived”.
His legacy to me was a library, a mountain of great books (minus the divinity collection). He’d won the gold medal in English at Glasgow University in 1912 and was an indefatigable reader.
One book I have is a 1916 edition of John Masefield’s Gallipoli with the iconic photograph by Ernest Brooks of a soldier in a slouch hat, wounded mate slung across his shoulders along with a rifle, trotting down a hill. It’s a set-up, and rather comical as you see the big arse of the wounded man, front and center of the pic, and his mate laughing. The caption reads – AUSTRALIANS AT ANZAC – An Australian brings in a wounded comrade to hospital. The men were cracking jokes as they made their way down from the front.
It’s the classic propaganda image of the digger, relieved to be out of the firing line – mate helping mate. “Cracking jokes”. Deflecting the horror.
Another poignant legacy that I inherited from the library was a yellowed 24 page pamphlet, The Soldiers’ War Slang dictionary – a list of words and phrases used by British Soldiers in the Great War 1914 – 1918, which, as a keen linguist, Grandpa went through and corrected where he was able.
The pamphlet features many words derived from the languages of the British Empire’s army – Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Pashtun. It’s been put together in a hurry and is far too anecdotal – words from the trenches of both the European and Ottoman fronts of WW1.
Soldiers always have an informal language that shadows the disciplined army culture. This language uses heavy, ironic humor to both cheer them up and relieve long periods of boredom. Joke words that are also bitter fruit.
The slang dictionary is peppered with Australianisms.
Words like: Bonza (Bonzer) Good excellent (Colonial word); or Cobba – Friend, against which Grandpa has added in brown ink – Anzac. He’s put the same annotation against Dinkum – truly, honestly. And of course, Aussie also Aussie-land Australia, as well as an Australian soldier.
Other great old Aussie words were used in the trenches. Dekko or Dekker – to see derives from Hindustani verb Dekhna – Dekho is the imperative of look! See! Cop a dekko at that one.
Cushy, similarly from Hindi, Khush meaning “pleasant”. This word is followed by Cushy One In the Bake – Sarcastic description of a bad head wound. Or Dork – a thick slice of bread, or doorstep. This may have mutated to our meaning of Dork – a thick, awkward person.
And Digger – Soldier of the Australian or New Zealand expeditionary force.
The broader army lingo features many terms for cowards. A Cuthbert is a stay-at home who works in an office. A Limpet – one who clings tightly to a desk job. The Royal Standbacks – A legendary unit that suffered cold feet. A Cherry Knob is a military policeman – that red cap.
A Hot Cross Bun was a Red Cross ambulance. Lozenges were revolver ammunition. And anyone who sang in the trench was referred to as a Mud Lark. And unfortunately for middle-aged blokes, there’s a Wasbird – An elderly man – say forty or more – who wanted to enlist.
Asiatic Annie is in there. High powered cannons that fired shells across the Dardanelles. Grandpa has annotated: One on rails.
Grandpa’s own RAMC doesn’t come off lightly in this. They are described as: Roll All My Comrades: The Royal Army Medical Corps. The initials being the cause of this honourable nickname. The derivation of this nickname was scarcely “honourable”. It originated in 1915 after a large number of officers’ kits had been rifled in hospital trains taking the wounded and sick from the front to the various bases. The matter became a scandal and it was not until a number of examples had been made of RAMC orderlies that the practice ceased. Grandpa did not annotate this entry.
There’s the sanitized meaning of Binge – Social gathering. As verb – to imbibe alcohol. Grandpa added * Arabic “binj” hemp from which narcotic is produced. The social context has changed little over 118 years.
Of course, food translates well into slang. Adam and Eve on a Raft are poached eggs on toast. Two Dots And A Dash – fried eggs and bacon. Chuck or Rooti (Hindi) is Bread, Murphy – a potato; and the rather grim Pickled Monkey – a species of animal served by the Germans to prisoners of war as food. Its identity was never determined by recipients.
Rum appears as the meaning of two trench slang words – either Mhyrr (Rum backwards), or Red Eye. Red ink was Vin rouge; Van Blanc Anglays was Whiskey. Pigs ear – beer; Suds – Government ale. Plinkity Plonk – Vin Blanc.
In this sanitized little pamphlet the more salacious habits and language of army boys on the loose is nowhere to be found. The closest the dictionary gets to sexual misbehaviour is Binting (to go), euphemistically described as: to go on leave in Cairo to seek female society (Bint, a girl, Arabic). Click with a girl meant much as it means now. Poshed up (dressed for a special occasion) has the brown Grandpa annotation – cf- Afghan poshtoch = great coat. So much for “port out starboard home”.
Death features, of course. Go west is there. If the Village People’s song Go west meant to find your gay fortune in San Francisco, the Pet Shop Boys being British and ironists, knew the WW1 meaning – killed, when they decided to cover the song at an AIDS benefit and produce a video of young men climbing the stairs to heaven.
Landowner (To be a) is also listed as to be killed – thus occupying a piece of land. Also Neck (To get it in the), Na-poo’d, Peg out (to) and Snuff it.
The horror of the trenches is lightened by silly nick-names for the most lethal of munitions. If you were in a trench, you were in a Shooting Gallery and could be under fire from a Coal box – German heavy shell; or a Jack Johnston – High powered shell that leaves black smoke (named after the heavywight Afro-American boxer who achieved 44 KO’s in 114 bouts. This explanation is not in the dictionary because the blokes at the front knew the backstory).
Iron rations were Shells. “Gerry’s iron rations were our shells”; A grandmother – a heavy howitzer; A Flying Pig – Large trench mortar; A Woolly Bear – High explosive timed to burst in the air, named from its black smoke; or A Flaming Onion – anti aircraft device used by the Germans the precise nature of which, or means of propulsion, seems never to have been clearly established. Then there was the Whiz Bang – A very high velocity shell. A German light shell, the whiz and explosion occurring almost simultaneously.
Whiz bangs blind a soldier in Wilfred Owen’s hideous poem, The Sentry. If you ever wanted to feel how truly horrible it was in the trenches, this is the one.
Owen’s platoon finds itself trapped in an old boche dug-out…/rain guttering down kept slush waist high/that rising hour by hour /choked up the steps too thick with clay to climb/.
Trapped, they cower from a massive bombardment.
/then we herded from the blast of whiz bangs/ but one found our door at last./ Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles,/ and thud flump, thud…
The unit awaits oblivion in the muddy dark, when a sentry slithers into the shelter, blinded by the blast. Owen, the officer, tests the man’s vision who can’t see the candle in front of him, eyeballs bulged like squids. As the bombardment continues and the men descend into their private hells, the sentry imagines he can see light in his blinded eyes – /through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout/ ‘I see your lights!’ But ours had long died out.
In recent times whiz bang refers to technology that is cutting edge. It’s a word that’s well and truly morphed.
The little yellowed dictionary (price sixpence) is Boys Own, full of words you find in old Biggles books. A pamphlet clearly botched together from someone’s memory, with no regard to etymology, given all the mistakes and in many cases, paucity of meaning that Grandpa tried to fix in his faded ink. The humor reflects the ambiguity of attitude towards the horror and stupidity of campaigns like Gallipoli, the western trenches, and the camaraderie and adventure that attracted and killed so many boys and men who realised they were cannon fodder and tried to joke about it.
The full irony of The Soldiers’ War Slang Dictionary is that it was published in 1939, just before Dunkirk. perhaps as an entertaining recruitment tool to educate the next generation of soldiers of informal army language, as they took on the Germans in France for the second time that century.
On the back is advertised a companion volume: The Soldiers’ English and French Conversation Book. Phrases for landing, Marching, Billeting and Action.
I doubt that my Grandfather deflected the horror with jokes though. He was a serious man, there as a non-combatant because of his Christian principles.
Like many of his classically trained generation he tried to see the Dardenelles campaign reflected in the mythic significance of Troy across the way.
I think he went that glorious white-washed Edwardian route through Classical Heroism beloved of Brooke and Masefield – all of those Troy boys. At the end of Masefield’s book on Gallipoli, Grandpa has marked some dedicatory words where the author elevates his propagandist reportage to prose poetry. Masefield was clearly moved by the heroic, in a classic Greek sense and this infused the Gallipoli legend from the start. One sentence Grandpa underlined is:
But the cities of those camps were not the cities of the dead, they were cities of intense life, cities of comradeship and resolve, unlike the cities of peace.
Another marked paragraph about the soldiers states:
On all the roads on the plain, which lay like white salt in the glare, and on the sides of the gullies, strange, sunburnt, half naked men moved at their work with the bronzed bodies of gods … Their half nakedness made them more grand than clad men. Very few of them were less than beautiful; whole battalions were magnificent, the very flower of the world’s men. They had a look in their eye which those who saw them will never forget.
A dedication to men who ultimately suffered the gruesome toll, the extreme heat, the winter’s cold, hunger, lice, dehydration, and chronic dysentery during Churchill’s greatest blunder. You just wonder where that “look in their eyes” took them.
After the Gallipoli withdrawal Rab returned to Egypt and served as a Captain in the British Army’s Arab Labour Corps, as a logistics specialist until the end of the war. He achieved fluency in Arabic and remained a passionate supporter of the Arab people until his death in 1973. He allegedly met Lawrence of Arabia but I only heard that one second hand.
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One of the more listenable post-colonial takes on the Gallipoli tragedy is in the Podcast Empire. Listen as William Dalrymple and Anita Anand are joined by Eugene Rogan to discuss the attempts to take Gallipoli and the brutal fighting that ensued.