‘There was a young girl of the Somme,/ Who sat on a number five bomb’: The Representation of Violence in First World War Trench Newspaper Nonsense Rhymes

The Origins and Contexts of Trench Newspaper Nonsense

Nonsense was one of many features of trench newspapers borrowed from comic periodicals of the professional press. The mid-Victorian period saw a boom in the production of comic journals, and these remained popular in the first decades of the twentieth century. ⁹ Trench newspapers were amateur versions of the humorous magazines that abounded on the home front, varying in quality from handwritten texts resembling pamphlets to higher quality, professionally printed efforts. Like mainstream comic papers, trench journals contained poetry, short stories, articles, jokes, and cartoons and were filled with parodies of many different types of text. ¹⁰ Trench newspapers’ inclusion of nonsense verse was also a reflection of the professional magazines. Punch, for example, which enjoyed some of its highest circulation figures during the Great War, printed limericks and nursery rhymes mocking politicians, men of letters, and women. ¹¹ The publication of such verses reflected the influence of Lear in particular, as well as being an inheritance of the nineteenth-century boom in children’s publishing more generally. ¹² Lear’s nonsense writing came to prominence in 1861 with the third edition of his Book of Nonsense, popularising the limerick form, and the appeal of this text and his other poetic work endured. ¹³ The publication of a volume of his letters in 1911 provided opportunity for commentators to praise his ‘sublime fooling’, ‘wit and skill’, and ‘perennially fresh and unfaded’ work. ¹⁴

This volume of letters also prompted recognition of a connection between Lear’s poetry and a sense of broad societal turmoil, nonsense being noted before the war as a symptom of perceived disruption. An Athenaeum writer commented of Lear’s work that ‘nonsensical frivolity is a not unnatural tendency […] in an age of social, religious, and intellectual questioning and unrest’. ¹⁵ Reflecting this correspondence between nonsense and societal upheaval, trench journal rhymes seem to have been part of the turbulence that registered elsewhere in political and literary language in response to the war. Nonsense has something in common with the distortions of language and rationality that Vincent Sherry, in a now classic argument, associates with the case made for the conflict by a liberal government that ‘by precedent and convention […] they ought to have opposed’, the rhetorical contortions this involved sounding in English modernism. ¹⁶ At points Sherry discusses the war in this context as laughable or ridiculous, with the tensions between sense and irrationality he identifies creating ‘involuntary comedy’, and ‘reasonable absurdity’. ¹⁷ The limericks and nursery rhymes addressing the war’s destruction thus parallel wider contexts in which the war was associated with nonsense and irrationality.

The depiction in the rhymes of war zone violence as arbitrary or senseless creates some impression of resistance and dissent. As I claim towards the end of this article, this reflects associations between nonsense as a genre and the articulation of political and social alienation, as well as nonsense’s status as a counterpoint to serious, more canonical poetry. As in trench newspapers, similarly, nursery rhymes in particular have often been re-written for cheeky, rebellious ends. Censorship prevented servicemen from printing explicit, serious expressions of sentiment against the conflict and, in light of this, nonsense perhaps offered a suitably oblique means of venting frustration. Trench newspapers as a whole provided a platform for light-hearted protestation, possibly preventing more severe forms of unrest. Certainly, restraints on what could and could not be expressed in the journals were sufficiently relaxed to allow large amounts of humorous, and often tongue-in-cheek ‘grousing’ (complaining) about conditions, non-combatants, and even military authorities. ¹⁸ This is not, however, to say that those who composed the newspapers were opposed to the conflict in a broad sense: it would be a simplification to describe the periodicals as anti-war. The journals often present satire and cynicism alongside patriotic support for the British war effort. Both the rhymes and the newspapers seem to register concerns that arise from the experience of being on the ground in the war zone, rather than questioning the validity of the conflict as a whole.

There are a number of more specific features and effects of nonsense that were important to the representation of the conflict and to servicemen’s emotional needs. It is on these features that this article focuses. First, as I discuss in the section below, trench newspaper rhymes reflect a ‘discrepancy’ that Michael Holquist identifies in his discussion of nonsense and the absurd ‘between purely human values and purely logical values’. ¹⁹ Holquist associates this opposition with absurdist literature rather than nonsense specifically, yet nonsense belongs to – and is a forerunner of – the absurd, and the discrepancy he discusses helps to illuminate texts thought of as literary nonsense, including trench newspaper rhymes. Servicemen’s nonsense rhymes include tensions between, on the one hand, the impersonal demands of the military machine and, on the other hand, the needs of servicemen as human individuals. These tensions, which are very like those highlighted by Holquist, contribute to servicemen’s articulation of the apparent ludicrousness of armed conflict, to their representation of the war zone as characterised by arbitrary violence. Second, and relatedly, in the final part of this article I indicate ways in which trench newspaper rhymes reflect the tradition in nonsense writing of expressing, in Neil Cornwell’s words, ‘cultural or political alienation, or […] other forms of oblique comment’. ²⁰ In particular, trench newspaper nonsense depicts servicemen as dehumanised, as reduced to the status of ‘things’ – targets, weapons, and bodies – and these portrayals reflect the deformed bodies that appear in Lear’s poems, which responded to an earlier crisis of identity, in this case prompted by evolutionary theory. ²¹ At the same time, the nonsense found in trench newspapers pushes against senses of dehumanisation by foregrounding wit and amusement, the clever ways in which servicemen make use of nonsense counteracting the impression that war turned them into unthinking objects. Servicemen’s nonsense rhymes thus play a specific role in trench newspapers’ broader function as sources of entertainment and emotional relief. ²² Elizabeth Sewell’s idea that nonsense has the quality of a game is useful here. Nonsense can and does belong to the ‘real’ world as well as a world of play, but composing the rhymes was partly, as in Sewell’s argument, a matter of entering into the system and rules of a game, of finding pleasure in the challenge of fulfilling strict metrical and structural forms, and of enjoying the fancifulness of the outcome. ²³ Mainstream comic periodicals in fact sometimes ran limerick competitions, and trench newspapers were no different, making explicit the verses’ correspondence with fun and games. These contests appeared, for example, in the Sphinx, of the 6th Battalion Manchester Regiment, and the Maidstone Magazine, of the 8th Submarine Flotilla, H.M.S. Maidstone. ²⁴

Trench journal nonsense should be viewed as part of the history of how writers have grappled with discussing the conflict. Trench newspapers were depictions of military life made for posterity, and nonsense rhymes were part of this portrayal. ²⁵ The editors of the Searchlight, albeit with a typically tongue-in-cheek tone, urged readers to imagine the pride with which contributors in old age could turn ‘with palsied hand’ the ‘yellow and brittle’ pages when their grandchildren asked to hear about the war and, in a brisker manner, those behind the B1: Chronicle of the Reserve Garrison Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers declared that the ‘chief point’ of their magazine was ‘its value in the remote future’, claiming that without such ‘records of past events’ much ‘that is of interest now must be forgotten’. ²⁶ Neither trench newspapers nor the nonsense rhymes they contain have been firmly inserted into the canon and history of Great War literature in the way that these writers hoped they would be. The poems discussed below, however, offer insights into the importance of these texts for the literary history of the conflict. They demonstrate how the violence of the conflict was captured, powerfully, via an established, popular, and familiar genre.

Nonsense Rhymes and the Absurdity of Great War Violence

Limericks and nursery rhymes were almost ubiquitous in trench journals. The rhymes appear in newspapers belonging to a range of units – cadet, naval, artillery, infantry, medical, transport, and logistics – serving both in the UK and overseas, and were published throughout the conflict. ²⁷ These verses covered a range of topics, including, romance (‘There was a Lce.-Corporal named Newley, | Who was fond of all girls most unduly’), food (‘This is the bully, with awful smell, | That was found in the stew that Jock made’), officers (a ‘stout Sergeant-Major’ turns ‘into a regular rager’), the cold (‘Old Kind Coal | Is under control’), and the activities of amusing characters, possibly based on real people (such as a ‘young fellow called Clutterbuck’ whose room is ‘a most awful muck’). ²⁸ Opportunities for word play were embraced, for instance a ‘staff-sergeant stationed at Dickebusch’ finds ‘Dickebusch sticky bush pricky bush’, the author of this rhyme exploiting the Belgian place name for comic effect. ²⁹ Those rhymes that depict violence are similar, though their subject matter darkens their humour. As is explained below, they include playful illogicality that communicates with great expressiveness the perception that, at an individual, personal level, violence did not make rational sense, that it was arbitrary and random. The verses evocatively convey a senselessness that, by definition, resists logical, reasonable explication.

The violence in the limericks is sometimes directed towards enemy soldiers – as when a ‘young fellow called Chilcott’, swore ‘if I see a Hun, | I swear that by Jingo I will pot’, or when a ‘young Boche at Bazentin’ is sent ‘flat in the mud | And he found that his helmet was bent in’. ³⁰ These verses represent some perhaps predictable humour at the expense of the German forces, a kind of goading that strengthens senses of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yet those who included violence in their limericks did not always show such discrimination. The Dump, the newspaper of a mixed unit serving on the Western Front, featured a man who was ‘in a trench’ until a ‘Minnie one day | Blew the whole thing away’. ³¹ Elsewhere, the love letters of one ‘gay little spark’ lead to him being ‘poisoned […] just for a lark’, and a ‘young girl of the Somme’ sat on a bomb and made her exit ‘with aplomb’ (quoted above). ³² In a 1915 edition of the Numbrate, the journal of number eight squadron, Royal Flying Corps, a ‘budding young second A. M.’, who looks ‘Down a new Lewis gun’ is ‘transferred to – ahem!’, while Night Lines, which belonged to the 160th Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, in 1917 told the tale of a ‘young bombardier’ who is killed and ‘We take flowers to that young fellow’s bier!’ ³³ A Hangar Herald issue of January 1915 reported the story of a ‘young lady of Ypres’ who is shot and astonishes the ‘Cameron pipers’ with ‘the tune which she played | Through the holes which they made’. ³⁴ Some limerick-like short verses, entitled ‘Ruthless Rhymes’, of the July 1918 Hobocob are similar. They depict members of the unit variously drowning, bayoneting, shooting, and bombing each other for little or no reason. The ‘Bath House man’ is found ‘Almost – if not entirely – drowned’ after ‘Cadet McCormick’ decides he wants to ‘scor[e] off’ him; ‘Hector, at his morning drill, | Could never hold his rifle still’, so ‘His sergeant killed him with a Mill’s grenade, | You should have seen the awful mess it made!’ Jasper drove his ‘bayonet through | Cadet Adolphus Pettigrew’, the poet commenting of this death that ‘Adolphus was a friend of mine, | He and I were going to dine’. ‘Woger’, meanwhile, heard ‘poor Gewald wimper, | So he shot him, with a simper’, murmuring, ‘as he went to dine, | “I had to teach him not to whine!”’ ³⁵ And, though they are not representations of violence directly, a 1917 limerick in the Dump and a 1915 limerick in the Fifth Gloucester Gazette both describe the effects of bodily destruction. Sapper Jones in the former publication discovers a dead German and, ‘As he dug up his bones’ is ‘distressed at the way that he smelled’. In the latter, a ‘C. Company swell’ could not identify whether ‘a h—of a smell’ was from ‘drains’ or ‘human remains’. ³⁶

Trench newspaper nursery rhymes include similar portrayals of violence, the writers of these texts finding inventive ways to update children’s poems for the wartime context. Their status as re-writings is in fact often emphasised in their titles: ‘Trench Nursery Rhymes’, ‘Up to Date Nursery Rhymes’, ‘Nursery Rhymes Renewed’. The violence and anxiety sometimes present in nursery rhymes (Jack and Jill facing injury, Miss Muffet being scared, Ten Little Soldiers diminishing in number) become strikingly and amusingly relevant to the conflict. For instance, Miss Muffet faces shells rather than spiders. Some characters are given lucky escapes, such as ‘Little Tom Buffet’, who ‘Thought he would snuff it | When hit on the chest with a shell’, but the ‘shell was a dud-un’ so he ‘rose and is now doing well’, as well as ‘Jack and Jill’ who ‘built an O Pip Station’, but ‘Frightful Fritz blew it to bits | To their great consternation’. ³⁷ Most, though, are not so fortunate. ‘Lieutenant Snugowt’ who ‘sat by his dugout | Censoring letters galore’ meets a ‘Hun bullet’ that ‘stuck in his gullet | And censored the censor still more’. ³⁸ ‘Machine gunner Horner’, waiting ‘for Turks to pass by’, got in front of ‘the gun’ and becomes ‘decidedly high’. ‘Turkey Bill’ went ‘up a hill | To save a strip of water’, but is ‘driven down’ and loses ‘his crown | Amid terrific slaughter’. ³⁹ Little Miss Muffet is sitting on her tuffet when ‘A Taube then espied her’ and ‘Dropped a shell right beside her’, so she ‘had a fine funeral next day’, and Little Bo-Peep loses her sheep and will find them in a trench ‘Being served red hot, | With a piece of hard tack behind ’em’. ⁴⁰ Elsewhere, the rhyme ‘Ten Little Soldier Boys’ is given twists specific to the Great War. ‘Ten little soldier-boys tried to form a line, | One formed échelon, and then there were nine’; ‘Eight little soldier-boys thought it wasn’t heaven, | One told the sergeant so, and then there were seven’; ‘Six little soldier-boys strove to keep alive; | One took a Number Nine; then there were five’; ‘Five little soldier-boys at lectures chose to snore; | One did it audibly, and then there were four’; ‘Two little soldier-boys, sweating in the sun; | One became a casualty, then there was one’. ⁴¹ Or, in relation to German soldiers in particular: ‘Ten little Allemagnes worked in a line, | Along came a “whizz-bang” – then there were nine’; ‘Nine little Allemagnes lamenting their mate, | Cr-r-rash! burst a “Lloyd-George” – and then there were eight’; ‘Six little Allemagnes – glad their [sic] alive, | Looked for a sniper – & then there were five’; ‘Four little Allemagnes – so scared were they – Ah me! | One pulled his trigger – & then there were three’; ‘Two little Allemagnes – turned round to run, | One stopped a large grenade – & then there was one’. ⁴²

The short narratives in both trench newspaper nursery rhymes and limericks thus depict a variety of violent situations and experiences, focusing in on specific moments of destruction and staying away from broader considerations of violence’s implications. In one sense they are self-contained stories with clear plots based on simple cause and effect. In the limericks, the ‘fellow called Chilcott’ wants to ‘pot’ German soldiers because they are enemies; the ‘gay little spark’ is poisoned because his comrades want a ‘lark’; the girl ‘of the Somme’ is killed because she sits on a bomb; the ‘second A. M.’ dies because he looks down the barrel of a Lewis gun. In the nursery rhymes, Miss Muffet is a victim because a shell drops next to her while she is eating; Turkey Bill dies because he tries to maintain some territory; ‘little soldier-boys’ meet their ends in an extremely ordered countdown because, for instance, they arrive late, run for their lives, or raise their heads too high. However, none of the rhymes offer satisfying, larger explanations for why their characters inhabit a world in which they remain constantly close to death, and at times there are even quite explicit suggestions of purposelessness. The military objective Turkey Bill sacrifices himself for is a meagre-sounding ‘strip of water’, possibly a comment on the frustrations of attrition warfare. Nor do the rhymes include emotional responses to violence, further curtailing the poems’ narratives. We do not know how the injured reacted to their plight, or how the dead were remembered and mourned, so that satisfying resolution is withheld at an emotional level as well as at the level of reasonable causation. Their apparent narrative logic is superficial, the relationship between cause and effect unbalanced: readers are told the immediate explanations for death and injury, but these are disproportionately small and local. The only rhyme that does have gratifying internal narrative logic, in the form of poetic justice, is that in which an officer engaged in censorship duties receives a ‘Hun bullet’ in his ‘gullet’, this particular verse combining nonsense with a satirical swipe. ⁴³

In presenting contrasts between, on the one hand, order and logic and, on the other hand, chaos, unreasonableness, and a lack of concern with human values, the rhymes create pictures of war zone violence as being senseless and laughable. As already mentioned, Holquist argues that absurdist literature ‘points to a discrepancy between purely human values and purely logical values’ – he gives as an example a computer that suggests brain tumours could be cured by amputating patients’ heads – and this kind of incongruity is at work in the trench newspaper rhymes. ⁴⁴ The juxtapositions of logic and unreasonableness the rhymes contain communicate an evocative sense of ridiculousness that is not dissimilar to the tenor of Holquist’s example. As has been seen, the rhymes account for violence at a purely logical level – people and things are killed and blown up if they are in the vicinity of weapons designed for those purposes – but not at an emotional or personal level – they exclude explanations that are deep and important enough to justify violence, and also withhold personal reactions to destruction. Nonsense and absurdity are to do with that which resists rational explanation and understanding, and in the rhymes their representational work is to reflect a corresponding senselessness perceived in war zone violence. While the men who wrote the rhymes may have seen the conflict overall as politically and/or morally justified, its violence as it appears in their verses – from the perspective of those on the ground in the war zone – is random and arbitrary, laughable and ludicrous. This is a matter of conveying the ‘truth’ of war experience in a way that is very different from those works of war literature that tend to be praised for their realism. Comedy is often thought of as being removed from ‘reality’: John Moreall, for example, theorises that ‘problems’ are more easily treated humorously if they are fictionalised, and the same has been said of nonsense specifically. Holquist’s position that nonsense is ‘abstract’ and ‘hermetic’, like ‘the pure relations which obtain in mathematics’ is is an extreme form of this view. ⁴⁵ In fact, nonsense can have a mimetic function and connections to a world that is not entirely imaginative. ⁴⁶ In the trench newspaper rhymes, comic absurdity picks up on the apparent irrationality or randomness of the violence its writers faced.

The comically absurd pictures the verses give of violence are enlightening partly because, often, they do not produce mirth alone, but are finely balanced between humour and disquiet. The 1915 ‘Turkey Bill’ rhyme already mentioned, which appeared in Fag-Ends, the journal of a signal company in the Royal Naval Engineers, is an illustrative example. The poem appears next to other verses that have the usual, amusing tone of trench journal rhymes (they include a limerick about a ‘dashing young soldier of Maides’ who ‘Led a section of nude desperadoes’), and because of this placement its bleakness is all the more striking:

Turkey Bill

Went up a hill

To save a strip of water;

Got driven down

And lost his crown

Amid terrific slaughter. ⁴⁷

As this blackest of trench newspaper poems indicates, the rhymes contain insights and nuances that their light, slight quality at first glance seems to preclude. In the case of the ‘Turkey Bill’ poem, this takes the form of a violation of what was expected from limericks at the time, a violation that creates unease from a generally amusing type of poetry. The tone of this particular text is more sombre than that of other trench newspaper rhymes, but a similar method of depicting war zone violence appears in each of the works considered. The contrasts in the rhymes between logic and unreasonableness communicate a sense of laughable absurdity that resists rational articulation. The poems are constructed in ways that, though simple and long established, are apt and eloquent when it comes to portraying perceptions and experiences of modern, mechanised violence.

Nonsense Rhymes, Dehumanisation, and Resistance

Qualities long associated with nonsense as a genre also surface in the rhymes’ depictions of how violence affected servicemen’s identity. Nonsense literature can be an expression of political and/or cultural alienation, and Lear’s work in particular includes representations of bodily distortion that speak to anxieties about identity becoming fluid. ⁵⁰ Senses of alienation and bodily distortion appear in trench journal rhymes, emerging in relation to concerns about dehumanisation. The poems’ representation of violence suggests that it threatened to give its human objects a thing-like aspect: in a setting ruled by military machines, the rhymes’ characters begin themselves to take on the qualities of objects of war. At the same time, by creating humour from their adverse circumstances, servicemen resisted the very process of dehumanisation they depicted. The dehumanisation the rhymes present is a matter of military personnel becoming like targets and resources. This is countered by the authors’ amused stance, which corresponds with a positive notion of soldierly identity current at the time of the conflict, as well as by the creativity and wit involved in the poems’ composition.

The lack of attention to emotion and individuality in the rhymes makes characters appear less as thinking, feeling subjects, and more as expendable targets, as objects of violence alone. ⁵¹ This is particularly evident in the verses based on the ‘Ten Little Soldiers’ nursery rhyme, in which servicemen are numbered rather than named, and their steady demise recorded as a countdown, creating an impression of troops as being only a quantifiable resource. Indeed, the rhymes present the war zone as being populated and dominated by objects of war that threaten, implicitly or explicitly, to reduce their human victims to the status of ‘things’, that is, to reduce them to bodies alone: a ‘bomb’, a ‘new Lewis gun’, a ‘rifle’, a ‘Mill’s grenade’, a ‘bayonet’, several shells, a ‘Hun bullet’, a ‘gun’, a ‘Taube’, a ‘Number Nine’, a ‘whizz-bang’, a ‘Lloyd-George’, and a ‘large grenade’. ⁵² It is under the rule of these machines that servicemen become equal with objects. The ‘young Boche at Bazentin’ is sent ‘flat in the mud’, in the same way that his ‘helmet was bent in’. ⁵³ A ‘man in a trench’ is levelled along with his physical surrounds when a ‘Minnie’ ‘Blew the whole thing away’, ‘thing’ here seemingly referring to both the serviceman and the trench. ⁵⁴ Soldiers become ‘human remains’ to be ‘dug up’ in an almost archaeological way, having been turned into a combination of ‘bones’ and ‘smell[s]’ that resemble ‘drains’. ⁵⁵

In communicating violence’s potential to reduce humans to the status of things, the rhymes replicate connections in Lear’s work between bodily change and unstable notions of identity. Anna Henchman has demonstrated that Lear’s limericks frequently involve ‘bodily distortion’ (‘dismemberment, beheading, rearranged body parts’) alongside fears that ‘one might lose one’s identity’, a combination she suggests speaks to a ‘mid-nineteenth-century fascination with the fluidity of identity’ related to the development of evolutionary theory. ⁵⁶ For servicemen, though, the concern was more with bodily destruction than alteration, and the context of their writing was not influential (and unnerving) advances in natural science but modern technological warfare. In Nicholas Saunders’ words, the conflict prompted a sense that ‘perhaps for the first time in human history’ the ‘differences between war matérial and human beings [were] elided’. As he explains, servicemen who returned maimed, especially those who underwent reconstructive surgery and had artificial limbs, were ‘ambiguous and tragic […] objects’, as much the ‘artefacts of war as battlefields, souvenirs and memorabilia’. ⁵⁷ The depiction of servicemen in trench journal rhymes speaks to such perceptions of how war zone violence affected body and identity. Characters appear less as individuals than as objects of violence and are defined by their injuries. They seem to be important in the texts primarily (or only) for the way in which they are harmed, presented as part of the debris of the war zone. Indeed, the truncated nature of the rhymes’ description reflects an account of the injured from a contemporary observer, in which identity is also articulated via reference to wartime destruction:

there was a Mr Jordan who’d lost his right arm, my old man who’d been gassed, and the man at the top of the street who was so badly shell-shocked he couldn’t walk without help. ⁵⁸

From one perspective, the sense of dehumanisation conveyed in the rhymes is extremely unfunny, yet it is from the poets’ treatment of this subject that much of their humour stems. The humour at work in the rhymes corresponds with a form of comedy burgeoning at the time of the conflict: ‘machine-age comedy’. ⁵⁹ This is Michael North’s term for a type of humour that had a ‘mechanical quality’, that was ‘more mechanical’ than earlier humour had been, and that reflected the ‘mechanization in the modern period’, by which he means the rise of industrial technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ⁶⁰ Henri Bergson’s account of comedy, which was translated into English in 1911, is perhaps the most well-known theory associated with this style of humour: he argues that ‘we laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing’. ⁶¹ The manifestation of machine-age humour more relevant to trench newspapers, though, is Charlie Chaplin’s work. Chaplin was a popular point of reference in the journals, often appearing in their pages in cartoon form, and the mechanical, thing-like quality of the characters in the nonsense rhymes, as well as their slapstick fates, resemble Chaplin’s puppet-like movement and pratfalls. The rhymes’ recurrent theme of servicemen becoming entrapped by and subject to military machines also parallels the comedian’s treatment of the relationship between individual and machine or institution. The most celebrated instance of this in Chaplin’s oeuvre is in Modern Times (1936), but the rhymes most closely foreshadow Chaplin’s First World War film Shoulder Arms (1918). Michael Hammond argues that in this film Chaplin faces the depersonalising forces of the military, yet his physical individuality and the pathos and empathy his character creates also works against becoming no more than ‘a cog in the military machine’. ⁶² In accord with this, the rhymes’ playful and humorous tones convey an amused authorial attitude to the conflict, a gap emerging between the dehumanised characters and the wits who created them.

Dehumanisation in trench journal rhymes is treated not with gloominess but with amused, even affirmative, defiance. The very act of crafting inventive, amusing verse is a riposte to the dehumanisation posited in the rhymes, an idea that finds an analogy in a 1915 Hangar Herald limerick already mentioned. This is the poem in which a ‘young lady of Ypres’ astonishes the ‘Cameron Pipers’ by using the bullet holes in her own body to play a tune. ⁶³ The young lady’s predicament is one of the clearest instances of a person becoming thing-like in trench journal rhymes, since she actually turns into an instrument. In undergoing this alteration, though, she bypasses the ultimate extension of war zone dehumanisation, which is the transformation of humans into objects by being dismembered or by becoming a corpse. And, by making music from her injuries, the young lady claims agency, individual creativity, and delight in her damaged body. Lear plays with the idea of reassembling broken bodies in new and incongruous ways, and there is a similar unruly pleasure here, a dissident, perhaps carnivalesque, refusal to accept the rule of a war machine, and the rules of biological sense, a pleasure which reflects the joyful poetic inventiveness servicemen showed in creating their rhymes about destruction. ⁶⁴

The poems’ exclusion of personal feeling and individuality, furthermore, is not only to do with awareness of individuality being eroded, but is also a wry representation of soldierly stoicism. They present a cheeky, amusing take on the idea of servicemen meeting violence in an aloof, matter-of-fact way. For instance, the limerick in which a ‘Minnie’ demolishes the dugout of a ‘man in the trench’ concludes ‘all that he said was “Don’t mensh”’, and the destruction of Jack and Jill’s observation post prompts not their outrage or alarm but their ‘great consternation’. ⁶⁵ There is a half serious, half facetious statement of soldierly identity here, an assertion of martial ‘grit’ that is both celebratory and attentive to the potentially ridiculous or fantastical sides of such extreme stoicism. The rhymes participate in a humorous outlook on the conflict that was associated with military personnel specifically. Those who wrote for mainstream magazines often praised soldiers’ humour: to quote just one of many examples, F. A. Clement of the Academy and Literature claimed that, although servicemen’s letters offered glimpses into the terrible nature of the fighting, these insights were followed by ‘some escapade full of light-hearted fun, or some happy jest at the expense of the enemy’. ⁶⁶ Such assertions were often bombastic and propagandistic and it would be a simplification to say that the humorousness of the trench newspaper rhymes reflected them directly, especially given that contributors sometimes expressed displeasure at the version of the conflict presented in the mainstream press. Nevertheless, making a joke of the war’s destructiveness specifically was far less common in the mainstream press than in the trench press, probably to guard against suggestions of creating entertainment from the plight of those in the military. In light of this, servicemen’s playful treatment of violence in their periodicals does seem to have been a privilege of belonging to a special group. It was regarded as legitimate and commendable for military personnel on active service to make jokes about the fighting, and by engaging in the limericks’ black humour, soldiers were participating in the kind of fooling that their position licensed.

The version of soldierly attitude presented in the rhymes was partly a matter of cheeky, parodic dissent, and we can see this particularly in servicemen’s mischievous re-writing of nursery rhymes. Already often involving taboo subjects, nursery rhymes have been adapted by children to have new kinds of naughtiness, and the trench rhymes reflect this pattern. For example, one children’s parody of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ ends with the sheep ‘between two slices of bread’, and here there is an especially striking overlap with the Wangler trench rhyme in which Bo-Peep’s sheep are eaten by hungry soldiers. ⁶⁷ Children’s own subversive parodies of verses created for them by adults are matters of asserting agency and individuality, and servicemen echo this dynamic when they adopt and adapt nursery rhymes as means of presenting their own perspective on military life and the violence it involved. ⁶⁸ More broadly, both the nursery rhymes and the limericks imitate the way in which Victorian nonsense, in Roderick McGillis’ words, ‘takes aim at the high seriousness of canonized poetry’, for instance Carroll’s writing encompasses parody of such writers as William Wordsworth and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Nonsense, ‘breaks the barriers of high art’, laughing at ‘pretension’ and solemnity. ⁶⁹ Reflecting this tradition, not necessarily self-consciously, the trench journal rhymes challenge and subvert the gravity and earnestness of more mainstream war poetry. Unlike the kinds of texts in which the conflict, its dangers, and those entangled with the fighting are associated with superlatives – glory, horror, bravery, suffering, grief, honour – the rhymes do not present servicemen as heroes or victims. Instead, they highlight soldiers’ mischievous humour, their grins in the face of violence. ⁷⁰ This is not to say that the servicemen who wrote the rhymes were hostile to solemn war poetry. On the contrary, non-humorous poems did appear in trench newspapers, and this included famous texts such as Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’. ⁷¹ It may well be the case that trench journal poets simply recognised the fun to be had with more mainstream, more solemn, Great War literature, in doing so creating works that captured their own sense of humour, an aspect of their attitude to war not covered in the graver texts.

As well as conveying pictures of soldiers as dehumanised, then, the poems have a dissident quality to their humour. Echoing the senses of alienation and concerns with mutating identity found in Lear’s works, the trench newspaper rhymes convey pictures of soldiers as targets and resources, as objects of the war zone, the ultimate manifestation of which status is transformation into physical material via injury, or death. The shortness of the poems’ forms and their tendency to exclude characters’ emotions and reactions mean that those who appear in the rhymes are defined mainly by the destruction to which they fall victim. This is from one perspective an unsettling picture of individuals becoming subject to the mechanised workings of the war machine. Yet the rhymes also invite amusement, defying dehumanisation in their wit and their fun. The mirthfulness and creativity of their authors is evident, these qualities asserting an individuality that contrasts the dehumanisation of the servicemen who appear in the poems. The humorously parodic quality to the rhymes, meanwhile, opposes the tone and assumptions of more serious depictions of Great War violence, their frank, amused outlook presenting servicemen as wry, smiling observers.

Conclusion: The Importance of Trench Newspaper Rhymes

The rhymes have literary-historical and representational value that gives them significance beyond what might be expected from their playfulness, from the lack of attention they have received in criticism, and from their relative obscurity in popular accounts of First World War literature. First, the tensions on which the rhymes rest create evocative pictures of the laughable and the paradoxical. The apparently bizarre, inexplicable nature of war zone violence resists rational, documentary, or ‘realistic’ representation, contrasting the kind of depiction that might normally be associated with ‘accurate’ or ‘truthful’ portrayal of the conflict. The nonsensical, or absurd, structures on which the rhymes rest evoke a powerful impression of war zone destruction as being senseless. In trench newspaper nonsense, violence is depicted as striking at random, a disjunction emerging between the misfortunes characters suffer and the conflict’s wider significance. Second, and relatedly, the poems communicate the idea that violence threatened servicemen’s individuality, this theme echoing the concerns with bodily integrity and identity found in Lear’s work. There is a sense that violence turns the rhymes’ characters into targets and objects, which impression chimes with a wider contemporary perception of returning soldiers as ‘things’ of war. Those who inhabit the war zone in the poems are present primarily to be damaged or killed, the machines that appear to rule the environment (guns, shells, bombs, bullets) reducing their human victims to something closer to matériel. The creative playfulness involved in writing the poems, however, is a riposte to the senses of dehumanisation depicted, as well as indicating membership of a special military group for whom it was a mark of privilege to joke about the fighting. The poems are blackly comic, asserting the soldierly prerogative to create amusement from threats faced at the front, and the wittiness typical of the rhymes contrasts their characters’ lack of agency. While the fictional servicemen in the poems appear as dehumanised in the face of violence, this is not the impression given of the soldiers behind the papers.

Nonsense writing had a durability at the level of form and theme that contrasts with the relatively ephemeral nature of its trench newspaper manifestations. Paying attention to the poems’ representations of Great War violence counters this sense of ephemerality, aligning with the newspapers’ status as historical records and revealing that their nonsense rhymes have the capacity even today to amuse, to move, and to provoke. Trench newspaper rhymes were wartime manifestations of the nonsense verse that appeared in mainstream comic periodicals before 1914. The form and humour of these verses contributed to evoking fresh and engaging impressions of war zone violence. As well as adding to the trench papers’ wider value as sources of entertainment, the humorousness of nonsense produces a picture of those who faced violence that is distinct from that presented by more familiar, solemn war poetry. The rhymes suggest that portraying the experience of fighting in the conflict did not require modernist innovations (frequently viewed as a suitably different and energised response to a modern warfare), the development of a new ‘ironic’ outlook, or the emergence of a ‘shell-shocked’ Georgianism. Nonsense literature attracted praise in the Athenaeum in 1919 as it did before the conflict, especially for its durability – ‘good nonsense is always the same and delightful, whether it occurs in a nursery rhyme, in an Elizabethan song, in Lear’ – and trench journal writers’ employment of it reflects this account of its robustness. ⁷²