Fighting Words: Canadian Soldiers’ Slang and Swearing in the Great War

I. Slang

The war brought together Canadians from across the country. The mixing of different social classes and religious groups, and the language and phrases these civilians brought to the forces, was strained through the soldiers’ experience. A new slang was being formed, forever evolving and adapting to meet the soldiers’ needs. ‘If I wrote you all the slang of the army you would never understand a word … It’s a language in itself,’ wrote Gunner Bertram Cox to his sister on the home front. ⁹ Words passed back and forth among the ranks, circling the platoon, company, and battalion, and then moving throughout the army, and finally from army to army. ¹⁰ The great mixing of men behind the lines, often in the French estaminets or while walking the countryside to visit friends in close-by units, or during joint training and leisure activities, allowed for this evolving language to pass throughout the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF). Infantryman L.M. Gould of the 102nd Battalion observed wryly, ‘Nothing changes so quickly as an army vocabulary. A new word appears from no one knows were and is adopted for a season on every possible occasion.’ ¹¹

Robert Gordon Brown from Montreal, Quebec, wrote an apologetic letter to his mother in late 1918, justifying his use of slang, of which she did not approve:

There is a host of so-called slang expressions which have come into common use among the soldiers, many of which will be retained in our vocabulary, I should say to its loss. We are all too apt, as you know, to incorporate into this language of ours, new and uncouth expressions which only go to make it more impure and complicated. ¹²

As another Canadian remarked, ‘The vocabulary as it existed was the same in all parts of the line, one section generously sharing with another any new words or phrases it had been fortunate enough to acquire, by passing it along from unit to unit.’ ¹³

Will Bird, a long-service veteran from Nova Scotia and professional writer with an ear for language, observed that there were very few men who did not succumb to the pervasive slang. One such man in his unit was Corporal Jimmy Hughes, whom the rank and file dubbed ‘The Professor’. According to Bird, ‘He spoke with a precise manner and never used slang. The platoon thought him a granny who considered even a knowledge of French immoral.’ ¹⁴ Sir Andrew Macphail, man of letters, educator, and physician, found much to dislike in the war, but his boorish companions in uniform were particularly trying, especially those whose ‘poverty of the mind discloses itself in the horrible jargon and worn out slang which they employ’. ¹⁵ Macphail’s solution was often to sit in gloomy silence, unable or unwilling to lower himself to speak like his fellow comrades in arms. Even if the slang was ‘fierce on ones English grammar’, as Bertram Cox wrote in a letter, opting out of employing slang meant to absent oneself from an important part of the soldiers’ society. ¹⁶

In the late 1920s two Great War veterans, John Brophy and Eric Partridge, compiled a list of British soldiers’ words, slang, and song, which was eventually published in 1930. By consulting men of different ranks and regions, and submitting requests throughout the empire, they received hundreds of words and phrases that were incorporated into the work, which they hoped would be not just a ‘mere dictionary-list, but a record-by-glimpses of the British soldiers’ spirit and life in the years 1914–1918’. ¹⁷

Brophy and Partridge’s work is the most important guide to the soldiers’ slang of the period. Several additional editions incorporated Canadian slang, with veterans writing to the authors to augment the lexicon. Moreover, many Canadian soldiers simply parroted their British cousins – because of their own British birth, proximity in the army, or cultural ties of belonging. But there were some differences between the soldiers of the empire. Fiercely independent Newfoundlanders, whose colony would not join Canada until 1949, took great pride in distinguishing themselves from the Canucks and other imperial troops. Newfoundlander W.C. Hawker wrote after the war about the idioms of speech among the empire’s troops:

All spoke the same language, and gave evidence of being sprung from a common stock, all had the same grand basic traditions that are known as British, yet each had its own peculiar mode of expression, its turn of dialect and speech, which perhaps more than anything else, marked its individuality. This was especially noticeable when the more rugged words and forms of language were being uttered, when, in short, there was profanity without the spirit profane. Our boys possessed some beautiful and vigorous figures of speech which unfortunately cannot be placed in print, and in the dark these were distinguishing, and, sometimes useful. ¹⁸

The language of war, as well as manly swearing, brought the different armies together, but, as Hawker observed, each of the empire’s ‘common stock’ distinguished themselves through their accepted slang, which in turn reinforced a constructed identity.

If one could listen to the men who formed the First Contingent in early October 1914, English, Scottish, and Irish accents would have been heard most frequently in the ranks. More than 70 per cent of the first 33, 000 soldiers who went overseas were British-born. A larger proportion of Canadians filled the ranks in the years to come, and they brought with them the accents from across the country, from different social classes, and from urban and rural areas. By the end of the war some 630, 000 men had enlisted in the CEF, and 51 per cent of them were Canadian-born. Canadian soldiers had no single voice or accent, but they saw themselves increasingly as a unique force within the larger BEF. One British soldier went so far as to write that once the civilian-soldier began to ‘use the army’s language without wishing it he has ceased to be an individual soldier, he has become soldiery’. ¹⁹ The army’s slang was part of the process of remaking the civilian-soldier.

E.L.M. Burns, a signaller in the Great War and destined to become one of Canada’s most illustrious soldiers, wrote after the war that, while Partridge and Brophy remained the critical work for British soldier’s slang, many of the compiled words were rarely used ‘in the daily talk of the Canadian troops’, while other unique Canadian phrases and ‘stock words’ were missing. The Canadians also influenced the British by introducing some American slang, such as ‘bone-head, to get away with it, attaboy, joy-ride, dope, and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other phrases’. ²⁰ Many of these words would have been carried forward by civilian life, and Burns never revealed unique war words that were missing from Partridge and Brophy’s compiled lexicon. Perhaps there were not as many as Burns believed, if one put aside Canadian civilian slang. Sergeant Lorenzo Smith, an American from Massachusetts who served in the CEF, published a short book of Canadian lingo in early 1918. ‘It is no wonder that new words and new terms had to express our surroundings and our experiences,’ he wrote in the foreword:

Tommy has always been noted for making fun of his serious self, and when the brand new Lieutenant is dubbed the ‘One Star Wonder,’ and the finest company of infantry you could wish to see is called the ‘gravel crushers’ it affords an interesting clue to Tommy’s analysis of himself and the secret of his sure success. ²¹

Smith’s War Time Lexicon, as he called his slight monograph, offers some insight into the Canadian soldiers’ slang, but almost every word was also represented in the Brophy and Partridge dictionary. Moreover, a reading of thousands of letters and hundreds of published and unpublished Canadian memoirs does not reveal many words that were different than the British spoken word.

Nonetheless, there was a prevailing belief that Canadian slang distinguished the Canadian from the imperial soldier. George McFarland recounted in his memoirs being on a First Army musketry course, where the Canadians mixed freely with the British troops, and used their slang, sometimes in an exaggerated way, to differentiate themselves:

We Canadians were a sort of curiosity, especially Ormond, who was a breezy Westerner with an amazing vocabulary of slang. At the onset he was talking a language which was like Greek to most of the chaps, and he just set himself out to use all the slang he could rake up, much to the amusement of all the rest of us. ²²

Canadian infantryman Sergeant J.H. Flock, who was wounded at Vimy but survived the war, kept a little memory book, in which he put his favourite poems, stories, and inspirational thoughts. Flock devoted one page to, as he described it, ‘Canadian Sayings!’ They included:

That’s the stuff to give ’em

Cheers!

Up the line with the best of luck

Over the top with the best of luck

Rum up!

Hung up on the barbed-wire

Wire under foot. ²³

None of these sayings were particular to the Canadians, but it is interesting that Flock believed that to be the case, with language a component of identity construction.

While there was some uniquely Canadian slang, and this was also revealed through swearing, much of the English-speaking Commonwealth forces spoke in similar tongues. A common slang, dialect, and vocabulary helped to bring the empire’s soldiers together. ‘We are having kind of a windy and rainy period over here,’ wrote Cecil Frost to his parents in the summer of 1918. ‘However one learns how to get wet and merely laugh and say – “Send her down, Davy, send her down.”’ ²⁴ This was a phrase common to British soldiers, and its origin appears to be have been from the pre-war British army, and obviously picked up by Canadians in the field. The Australians put their own spin on this, with ‘Send her down, Hughie,’ in an irreverent reference to God. ‘“I am fed up,” was the commonest expression of all in the Tommy vernacular,’ wrote Canadian Arthur Hunt Chute. ²⁵ Also popular was the word ‘jake’, which, according to Major W. Leggat from Montreal, ‘appears to be the expression over here among the Tommies’. ²⁶ Indeed it was, and jake was to be found in soldiers’ letters home throughout the war, and generally used to mean ‘fine’ or ‘OK’. However, ‘I am fed up’ or ‘jake’ were common among other empire troops, although perhaps used by Canadians more frequently.

The most enduring of the old soldiers’ words was ‘blighty’, which came from Hindustani to mean home. As Samuel Honey wrote to his people back in Canada: ‘You know that a “blighty” is a wound severe enough to have a man sent to “blighty,” – the old soldiers’ name for England.’ ²⁷ Blighty was one of the most common terms of the war, as remarked by Gunner Bertram Cox:

Never say, out here, that you are going to England or London, always ‘Blighty’. If a fellow gets wounded, the doctor will say, ‘It’s a Blighty case’ or if it’s not too bad, a Base Case and if he has lost both arms and both legs, and both eyes shot out, one ear off and part of his nose, he might get ‘a Canada’. ²⁸

As with all modern armies, there were technical words for items, pieces of kit, equipment, and weapons that were unique to the soldiers. This military jargon was inherently exclusive, and not meant for the home front. Few civilians would have understood what a ‘pull-through’ was for or a ‘housewife’. ²⁹ L. McLeod Gould of the 102nd Battalion spoke frankly of one army bastardized word that related to the movement of a body of men, usually to a march, which became accepted vernacular, in conversation and written documents:

Of all the weird and horrible words that ever crept into the War Vocabulary the two worst were ‘embuss’ and ‘debuss’; to take the last syllable of a Latin trisyllable, graft on a prefix and, as compensation, to double the final consonant in order to force the accent on the last syllable, constituted an outrage on all the ‘ologies,’ but it afforded a cheap and effective method of describing the desired, and was found in all Orders emanating from the Higher Up. ³⁰

‘Emma Gee’ was short for a machine gun, and, according to one soldier of the CEF, ‘It is much simpler to say “Emma Gee” and much more descriptive of Tommy’s feeling for his weapon than to always say “machine gun.”’ ³¹ The language of the signallers also seeped into the everyday slang, much as acronyms did, and rolled like alphabet soup from the soldiers’ mouths. There was no 24-hour clock yet, so ‘Pip Emma’ stood for p.m. and ‘Ack Emma’ for a.m. Everything was acronymned, from rank to weapons. In and Out, a Canadian trench newspaper, joked:

An Army order comprises, as a rule, about twelve words of ordinary English, interspersed with several mixed alphabets and liberally bespattered with numerals … For infringing the K.R. and O. the unfortunate O.R. is paraded by an N.C.O. before the O.C., who may mercifully mete out C.B., or harshly send him to the A.P.M., who, under royal warrant and seal is empowered to inflict on him F.P., so that he may well and thoroughly understand the way of the transgressor is hard. ³²

In addition to individual words, there were phrases that demanded known responses. These phrases were spoken in a jocular manner, and the most popular was ‘I don’t think’, which was used at the end of a phrase to signify the opposite. This type of irony would not have been out of place with a tuned-in teenager from the 1990s who used the word ‘Not’ in the same manner. Combat veteran Albert Fereday offered some unintended advice on usage when he described life behind the lines: ‘Having concluded our tour of the town we retraced our steps to camp and called in at the Salvation Army hut and had a fine supper: 2 fried eggs, chips, bread and tea – even better than “Blighty”, I don’t think!’ ³³ Along the same lines, ‘c’est la guerre’ was a common phrase and said almost with a shrug, as the nonchalant soldiers dealt with the strain, stress, and annoyance of discipline by blaming the war.

Will Bird recounted some of the other catchphrases of soldiers:

On the march one heard: ‘What did you do in the big war, daddy?’ ‘Are we downhearted? Sure we are.’ Meeting another battalion: ‘Thank God, we’ve got a Navy.’ Then, ‘Some say, Good old Sergeant,’ but I say …’ In the billets in bad weather: ‘Send her down, Davy.’ And ‘Roll on, duration.’ Getting ready for parade: ‘Ah-ah, no —— shave this morning? Ah-ah! No razor …’ ³⁴

There were also multiple greetings and goodbyes available to soldiers, with one of the most popular and ritualized among the Canadian and British servicemen being:

Are we downhearted?

No!

Then you damn well soon will be!

The final phrase could have been ‘bloody well’ or ‘fuck well’ or anything else, but the sentiment was the same: if you think it is all well now, wait a bit and see what the war has in store for you. Another common farewell was ‘Goodbyeee and fuck you!’, which was taken from the popular and sentimental song of the time ‘Goodbyeee’, but with the added vulgarity to perhaps distinguish the masculine soldiers from civilians. The ‘goodbyeee’ part of the phrase was often drawn out with flourish, while the ‘fuck you’ was delivered in a harsh and direct tone.

Soldiers had no compunction about using facile civilian phrases and twisting them into ironic displeasure. The much-used newspaperman tag line ‘The spirit of the troops is excellent’ was employed by the soldiers, and grunted to one another as they were shelled in mud-filled trenches. Famous British cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather employed it in a cartoon signifying the importance of rum, showing that the spirit of the troops was indeed fine when supported by spirits. The accusatory question ‘What did you do in the war, daddy?’, often seen on recruiting posters, was remarked upon jokingly by the men with an abrupt response of ‘SFA’ – ‘Sweet Fuck All’. ‘What did you do in the Great War?’ remembered Tom Spears, a signaller who lived past 100. ‘“S.F.A.,” came the reply. “What did you do today?” “S.F.A.”’ ³⁵

Soldiers’ slang was also a shield, allowing combatants to trivialize death. ³⁶ Slang allowed soldiers to remake their own world in a language of their choosing. Objects, events, and actions were renamed to provide a sense of distinction and meaningfulness, to produce familiarity, and to reduce the terror, in the words of one historian, of the ‘bald representations of mass destruction’. ³⁷ The phlegmatic, stoic stance of the soldier was one of his greatest shields against the strain of war. ‘All who reached the front looked Death in the eye every day,’ wrote infantryman D.E. Macintryre. ‘If a man were killed they said succinctly that he had “gone west.”’ ³⁸ In fact, there were a series of euphemisms for being killed. A soldier ‘went west’, was ‘knocked out’, had ‘gone under’, ‘copped a packet’, was ‘pushing up the daisies’, ‘hanging on the barbed wire’, ‘buzzed’, ‘kicked-in’, or ‘napooed’. With death a prevalent part of the soldiers’ life, it is not surprising that they had so many words for being killed. Most soldiers expected – and many accepted – that they would get it when their ‘number was up’, as the popular saying went, and it helped the soldiers cope with the unpredictable nature of warfare.

Soldiers who were frightened or close to a breakdown observed that they had the ‘wind up’. For those who were driven over the edge into a mental breakdown, they were labelled shell-shocked by military authorities and soldiers. Initially, the illness was first thought to be a physical ailment caused by high-explosive shells causing microscopic lesions to the brain, but it was later revealed to be a psychological breakdown from accumulated stress, lack of sleep, and relentless strain. The term shell shock was dropped at the midpoint of the war to be replaced by the anodyne ‘Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous’. ³⁹ In later wars it would be known as combat exhaustion, post-traumatic stress disorder, or stress injuries, words and phrases that have elbowed their way into the English language.

A unit of men rotating back into the front-line trench system was known to be ‘going up the line’. A battle was a ‘show’, which helped to take the sting out of the potential slaughter that was soon to follow. Attacking the enemy – the terrifying act of leaving the relative safety of the trench to advance over open ground – was referred to nonchalantly as ‘going over the top’ or ‘jumping the bags’. The phrase ‘over the top’ had initially been coined as ‘over the top, and best of luck’, but the results of facing enemy steel and uncut wire were so ghastly that the cheerful quip ‘best of luck’ seemed so out of place, even among cynical, battle-hardened soldiers, that it was soon dropped.

In a response to the industrialized nature of death, soldiers reacted to the impersonal killing devices of shells and bullets by drawing them back to the knowable and understandable. The rocketing shells overhead were likened to trains running or trucks driving out of control. One soldier spoke of the shelling at the battle of Second Ypres: ‘one after another the big German shells roared over the Canadians there with the sound of a passing train. The men spoke of them as the “Wypers Express.”’ ⁴⁰ Soldiers grunted ‘his or ours?’ when they could hear a shell coming, wondering from which side’s gun it came, although not particularly caring as enemy shells or one’s own ‘drop-shorts’ were equally lethal. The use of metaphors and the renaming of fear helped soldiers deal with the stress, and reflected a deliberate practice of trivialization. ⁴¹

A high-explosive shell was less terrifying when it was referred to as a ‘Jack Johnson’, the American heavyweight boxer before the war that could deliver a knockout with one punch. ‘Whiz-bang is the name given to a light shell of high velocity and trajectory,’ wrote Private Donald Fraser. ‘It is practically on the top of you as soon as you hear the report of the gun … First you hear the whiz and almost simultaneously comes the bang, then a metallic singing in the air as the pieces of shrapnel fly through the space.’ ⁴² ‘woolly bears’ and ‘Black Marias’ were types of shrapnel shells; a ‘coal-box’ was a high-calibre German round, as was a ‘Silent Percy’, which the Canadians first faced – and then entered in their lexicon – on the Somme. ⁴³ A ‘crump’ was a 5.9 inch German shell, the name derived from the sound of its explosion, and it was often employed as shorthand for all manner of enemy shells. German hand grenades were known as ‘potato mashers’. The multiple forms of the German trench mortars had names such as ‘flying pigs’, ‘pineapples’, ‘toffee apples’, ‘footballs’, ‘rum jars’, and ‘minnies’. The enemy’s ‘morning hate’ or ‘strafe’ was one way to describe the gut-wrenching, bowel-clenching artillery bombardments that reduced men to red paste or drove them insane.

The soldiers’ propensity to rename all weapons could also be a source of merriment within the irreverent soldiers’ society. Sapper F.N. Blue published this riff on soldiers’ slang in The Listening Post, entitled ‘The Kaiser’s Birthday’:

On the occasion of the Kaiser’s fifty-ninth birthday all was quiet in the trenches held by the famous ‘Byng Boys’; but even during such quiet times our patrols ever keep a watchful eye open for the celebration that is to be expected at such a time. One of our men who on duty at that cruel hour of three ack emma, noted that the All Highest’s main supporter, Lady Werfer, was about to commence her daily duties, and being of a generous nature, he decided to donate a clip of highly-polished .303. Immediately this presentation was made, Lady Werfer sent her eldest daughter, Minnie, to search for the donor; but when Minnie arrived at the suspected spot and found no one in sight, she burst into tiers (of sandbags). Captain G. Howie Chutes [,] being close by, heard her sobs, and at once sent his most reliable assistant, Lieutenant O.U. Stokes, to inform her friends of Minnie’s fate. Mr. O.U. Stokes soon reached his destination and immediately spread his message. This caused great alarm, and a search party was at once sent out. ⁴⁴

The closed language of the soldiers is revealed in this passage through the enemy’s use of ‘Werfer’ and ‘Minnie’, slang for trench mortar shells, while the Canadians – known as the ‘Byng Boys’ after their respected corps commander Sir Julian Byng – retaliated with their own stokes mortar, ‘Lieutenant O.U. Stokes’. Another Canadian punster wrote in the same journal: ‘After several years of war, Fritz is providing us with “Sausages,” “Pineapples,” “Egg Bombs,” “Rum Jars,” and “Johnnie Walkers.” The question is, How soon will he provide us with the means for a four-course dinner?’ ⁴⁵

Soldiers also bastardized words to provide new fodder. English-speaking Canadians took great delight in the shameless mispronunciation of French and Belgian towns, partly to tweak the noses of the civilians, but also because some were simply hard to get the tongue around, and it again helped to insulate and create the soldiers’ culture as something different. The official name of Ypres and Albert where the Canadians fought brutal battles were twisted into Wipers and Bert. Ypres was a horror show. The blasted wasteland in Belgium had been fought over for much of the war. Most soldiers shivered at the very name. Reducing it to ‘Wipers’ assuaged some of that anxiety.

Soldiers warped the words to imprint new meanings on their service. Coningsby Dawson, a professional writer turned soldier, was taken with slang. ‘The great word of the Tommies here is, “No bloody bon” – a strange mixture of French and English, which means that a thing is no good.’ ⁴⁶ ‘Alley at the toot’ was used to get men to move quickly and came from ‘Allez tout de suite’. ‘Beaucoup’ was used in multiple ways, but usually meaning ‘plenty of’ or ‘lots’. ‘San Fairy Ann’ was a popular phrase and stood for ‘it doesn’t matter, it makes no difference’, and was twisted from ‘ça ne fait rien’. ‘Trez Beans’ was a deliberate corruption of the French ‘très bien’, and was used to denote something that was good. There were dozens of other phrases that were shaped by the geography, time, and place of soldiers fighting on foreign soil. Without the interaction with civilians, wrote Canadian E.L. Chicanot, ‘the language of the army would have been a good deal less pungent and picturesque’. ⁴⁷

The prolific use and abuse of the English language, when augmented with new soldiers’ slang and bastardized French, begs the question of whether visible minorities in the CEF engaged in such talk. Evidence from French Canadian sources reveals that French-speaking soldiers employed the established slang for weapons of war, especially shells and mortars. Acadian infantryman Theodore Dugas, who did not survive the war, spoke of ‘whiz-bangs’, ‘pine-apples’, and ‘Jack Johnsons’, though he called the heavy shells ‘Jock Johnson’. ⁴⁸ Other French Canadian soldiers used similar slang, although this probably did not include such bastardizations of the French language, although that is unclear from the limited available sources. ⁴⁹ For those Canadians who might not have spoken English or French, and there were 3500 natives and thousands of recent immigrants, the adoption of slang might have helped to ease language barriers. ⁵⁰

Recent recruits arriving at the front had to absorb this slang to find their place in the closed society. As stretcher-bearer F.W. Noyes remarked, new men ‘had to learn a whole new language – a weird vernacular of war-slang, pidgin-French, barrack-room jargon and front-line wisecracks – all rolled together’. ⁵¹ Most soldiers’ newspapers periodically published definitions of slang with the humorous meanings in the hope of educating new men, and, in the case of the Listening Post edition for 10 August 1917, for the Americans, who were welcomed by the Canadians to the Western Front – even if they were three years late:

Study this list thoroughly, and when you arrive in the trenches you will be able to greet the old soldier in his own language, whilst the shrapnel burst around and the machine-gun beats its devil’s tattoo in your ears – that is, of course, if the old soldier hasn’t disappeared into the deepest dug-out on the first whisper of the approaching storm. There are some things we cannot teach you by mail! ⁵²

Trench slang was meant to be exclusive and not easily transferred to those who were not sharing the dangers or drudgery of military service.

II. Profanity

Great War veteran E.L.M. Burns was fascinated by the swirling Canadian slang, but he struggled with the fighting man’s propensity to swear. He made a brief study of it in the early 1920s and noted that soldiers’ profanity, with all its varied roughness, nuances, and severity, was highly appealing to those in uniform. While Burns had a difficult time accepting the profanity, he wrote that it could not be ignored:

It would even be false to leave the impression that swearing in the army was no more prevalent than it is in ordinary life. The truth is that the army swore excessively, and that the majority – or the loudest-mouthed, at any rate – acquired the habit of using obscene and blasphemous expletives and intensifying adjectives wholesale, so that the perception of their actual meaning soon became blunted; the most shocking of them soon signified nothing more to speaker or listening, than the ‘bloody’ of the English workingmen. ⁵³

Gregory Clark, who came from a middle-class Toronto family, a much-beloved post-war humorist, said of his comrades in arms: ‘In some ways, the Canadian troops I am acquainted with are a brutal lot. The two commonest words heard from them are the vilest words in the language. There is something, apparently, brutalizing in the military atmosphere.’ ⁵⁴

Brophy and Partridge’s post-war dictionary observed that ‘Most men who served in the army were coarsened in thought and speech; in many the process was swift, violent, obtrusive. The agents of this corruption of the mind were these three obscene words uttered in every other sentence.’ ⁵⁵ A decade after the war, they refused to name the three words, hoping they might be purged from popular memory and the historical record. But they were surely ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’, and ‘bugger’, with ‘bloody’ being even more common but not in the realm of the unprintable.

‘Fuck’ was used as a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, and possibly in other ways. It was employed to give urgency to any action. One did not ‘come to attention’ but ‘come to fucking attention’. It was generally pronounced ‘fuckin’ or ‘fackin’. In one of his letters Brooke Claxton, a future minister of national defence, revealed deftly the ways to insert the intensifier and amplifier. Here he wrote of the difference, in his mind and that of many comrades, between Canadian and British troops:

We get into a hole & our feeling is ‘come on boys, this —— thing is a hole. We’ve got to get into action as soon as possible so let’s get it out and get to bed’ & everyone jumps and & pulls & heaves and uses the brain. The Imperial says ‘fuck the fucking thing. I’m going to fucking well stay in the bloody hole.’ ⁵⁶

Like ‘fuck’, ‘bloody’, ‘balls’, ‘dick’, ‘shit’, and ‘bugger’ all were used in weird and wonderfully ungrammatical ways, with ‘cunt’ being equally popular with soldiers who employed it as an adjective by adding ‘ing’.

Swearing further distanced soldiers from their former civilian lives. George Maxwell of the 49th Battalion remarked how men, despite a

wide diversification of backgrounds, when thrown together as soldiers, become bestial and careless, regardless of how well they might have observed the amenities as civilians … This tendency [to swear] is insidious; even the strongest willed finds the proneness difficult to resist. I think it is due largely to the absence of the mellowing influence of home-life and the concomitant feminine graces of womankind. ⁵⁷

That is not to say that civilians never swore, but it became more habitual in the army, especially with no mitigating family, women, or children to tone down vulgarities. The isolation of the soldier in his unique tribe led to a coarsening effect, but also helped to shape a new society and societal norms. ⁵⁸

Where soldiers’ free will was confined, when they were lorded over by others, subjected to discipline, and always straining against the unavoidable threats of death and maiming, E.L.M. Burns held that ‘the relief of strong language will often be sought’. ⁵⁹ Partridge and Brophy believed that swearing ‘was a vent for the nervous exasperation set up by the unnatural strains of modern warfare’. ⁶⁰ Most NCOs and officers let such language go, as they were likely to use it too. Junior officer Charles Savage remarked from long experience: ‘A good poker face was one of the finest assets that an officer or NCO could have, and a few lusty curses delivered when things looked bad would often have a steadying effect.’ ⁶¹

The last commander of the Canadian Corps, Sir Arthur Currie, had a reputation for turning to profanity freely and frequently; his son recounted that it was not uncommon for him to fire vulgarities, machine-gun-like, for up to a minute without repetition. ⁶² Divisional commander Archibald Macdonnel was no stranger to swearing either. ‘I saw him actually get wounded one day,’ wrote infantryman and future historian G.R. Stevens:

Somebody said, ‘Be careful, sir, there’s a sniper,’ and he said, ‘Fuck the sniper’ climbed up to get a look and the sniper took him through the shoulder and he went ass over applecarts into his shellhole from which he had emerged … My god, his language! You could hear him around for miles. ⁶³

Except for the occasional puritanical officer, most leaders ignored the profanity, except, in E.L.M. Burns’s observation, ‘when the soldier swears in such a way as to show insolence to authority’. ⁶⁴

Like slang, swearing was closely linked to the Canadian soldiers’ identity. Tom Johnson, a pre-war clergyman who served with the 102nd Battalion, wrote that swearing revealed elements of national identity:

Let me contrast the difference between the Canadian and the Englishman with one example: The Canadian swears more. His language is richer and more original in curses and obscenity. The Englishman swears too, but it is hackneyed and lacking in ideas. He swears with a sort of apology in his voice, whereas the Canadian is conscious of that he is inventing phrases which are his own, so he has pride in his own language. Perhaps this is a superficial distinction, but in warfare it is one which seems essential to success. This originality tends to make him a more dangerous opponent. ⁶⁵

The Listening Post wrote of Canadian soldiers with their unique ‘signature’ swearing:

Two of our scouts who were wearing German caps, souvenirs of the recent fighting, were to their dismay, arrested by the battalion next-door; and had a deuce of a time providing an alibi. Their innocence was eventually established, and their identities proven by sheer volume of profanity. You may fake an identity disc and a pay book, but army English, Canadian army English, can only be acquired through long experience and incessant practice. ⁶⁶

The profane was public and popular, and one of the tools of shaping or refining a sense of Canadian identity.

The Canadians took pride in their swearing, although this was obviously not exclusive to the dominion forces, and was practised by all national formations. Canadian trench newspaper Dead Horse Corner Gazette joked about a Professor Morgan of University College, who had told a shocked audience in London that ‘soldiers swore most horribly, because what was called the subconscious self got the upper hand, causing men to use language which ordinarily they would not’. Instead of refuting the article, the soldier-written editorial embraced it lustily: ‘Judged from our first-hand knowledge of the language used during a quiet day in the trenches, we should positively hate to have the language of action recorded.’ ⁶⁷ In other words, if civilians were worried about soldiers swearing during the quiet times at the front, they should be extremely concerned about soldiers’ vulgarity in battle. In this trench newspaper, swearing seems to be a badge of pride, but also a means to distance the soldier from the civilian.

Swearing was also built into the combatant’s cultural products, especially singing. Canadian soldiers’ musical repertoire drew upon the popular songs of the day and religious hymns. There were also soldiers’ parodies of all of these songs, where the warriors took the popular melodies and added new lyrics to better reflect their soldiering circumstances. ⁶⁸ Singing was an activity that brought men together, forged bonds of comradeship, and reinforced belonging in the group. Many of these songs were testosterone-driven, smutty tunes that relied on shocking swearing and profanity.

‘My Nelly’, ‘Skibboo’, ‘I’m Charlotte, the Harlot’, ‘Oh, Floreas (or Florrie’s) New Drawers’, ‘Three German Officers’, and the most famous dirty song of them all, ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’, with its ever-changing and increasingly vulgar lines, revealed the bawdy male culture of the soldiers. There were at least 700 recorded versions of ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’, and that does not include most of the unprintable ones that employed vulgarity. ⁶⁹ Thomas Dinesen, a future Victoria Cross winner, recounted a bout of singing:

Again and again we go back to the good old Pack Up Your Troubles; or else we roar so that the whole countryside may hear: The Gang’s All Here! But the best of the lot is the everlasting and ever-varying song of Mademoiselle from Armentières:

Oh, madam, have you any good wine?

  Parley voo,

Oh, madam, have you any good wine?

  Parley voo,

Oh, madam, have you any good wine,

Fit for a soldier from the line?

Hinky dinky, parley voo.

It continued, he wrote:

‘Oh, madam, have you a daughter fine? Yes, I have a daughter fine.’ ‘Then …’ Our imagination pictures the continuation of the song in lusty and vivid colouring, although in any case we have now turned our back on all such pleasures for some time to come. ⁷⁰

‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’ was popular because of its jaunty tune and full-on obscenity, but its cyclical nature, with the refrain used again and again, allowed different voices to take up the song and add their own absurd or irreverent series of lyrics. These vulgar songs were shaped by, and helped to shape in return, the soldiers’ masculine culture. Raunchy songs of dubious taste were an expression of masculinity and a reaction against the soldiers’ experiences on the Western Front, be it mud, death, authority, or the lack of simple pleasures. The songs also ensured an in-group culture, largely inaccessible to others, especially civilians. The more blasphemous the song, the more it was sung with gusto.

Just as songs forged bonds of camaraderie, many soldiers believed swearing had a cathartic effect to relieve internalized emotions. ⁷¹ ‘There may be a protest in the minds of some against the swearing habit of the soldier,’ wrote infantryman Harold Baldwin. ‘I firmly believe that if he were deprived of the power to express himself profanely when occasion seemed to warrant, his efficiency would be materially hampered. And, therefore, I have no apology to make.’ ⁷² E.L.M. Burns thought the swearing came from the nervous tension and impotence felt by men confined to the trenches: ‘The forces beyond the power of the soldier drove men to volleys of curses in the hope of warding off the angst and perhaps “blowing off steam.”’ Some men also swore as a form of ‘magic spells and incantations … If words of a sufficient power are pronounced in a certain unfavourable situation, something has been done to ameliorate that situation.’ ⁷³ Lieutenant -Colonel J.G. Rattray, the commander of the 10th Battalion at the June 1916 battle of Mount Sorrel, spoke of the talismanic effect of words, and especially profanity, when describing the terrible fighting as part of the aborted counter-attack on 3 June. Rattray was near the battalion’s Colt machine-gunners, who laid down deadly fire all through the day, and he was thrilled by their bravery and their indomitable will: ‘Many of the machine gunners were using the usual expletives peculiar to the soldiers in anathematizing the Hun.’ ⁷⁴ Profanity helped to motivate these soldiers in a time of intense stress.

Swearing also underpinned issues of masculinity and the soldier, ‘the cult of virility’, as one historian described it. ⁷⁵ There were norms and regulations to follow in emulating the masculine ideals of warriors, and swearing was a means to draw the divergent group together with the bonds of words. ⁷⁶ This was especially prevalent among young soldiers, who did not like to stand out as anything other than a companion in the ranks. Some overcompensated. John Lynch recounted that as a 19-year-old private he and other young soldiers ‘wanted to impress the world with their toughness. We cursed louder, drank harder and behaved in a very boisterous manner, putting on a front for the veterans of the outfit, many of whom were older than our fathers.’ ⁷⁷ Infantryman Al Symes committed his embarrassment to his diary:

The eighteen and nineteen year-old lads are becoming very proficient at cursing. They work so hard at behaving like the other men. Once or twice I have been on the verge of explaining to civilians within earshot that they are only kids and will soon pass through this stage. ⁷⁸

While service conferred adulthood on young men, many felt they needed to prove it.

While swearing met multiple needs in the army, not all soldiers participated in the litany of vulgarities. ‘I need hardly say that profanity was rife amongst the troops, for the most part, but I met several who were otherwise and in fact religious,’ wrote a seemingly shocked E.W. Russell in his post-war memoirs. ⁷⁹ Gunner Thomas Walker, in writing to his girl at home, noted sheepishly that all the swearing, which he claimed not to indulge in, ‘tends to make a fellow feel a little down hearted’. ⁸⁰ Another Canadian from the rank and file, Private William Ogilvie, a 17-year-old mule-driver from Lakefield, Ontario, testified to his own naivety:

I was amazed at the cursing, the extravagant use of the four letter words seldom heard in our quiet village. I, whose swearing propensities generally ran to such inoffensive outbursts as, ‘God all fishhooks,’ or ‘gosh, golly,’ or an occasional ‘darn’ or ‘damn,’ was now treated to round after round of obscene language. ⁸¹

Those men who did not swear – like those who refrained from using slang – were seemingly in a minority, and Victor Wheeler of the 50th Battalion was surprised that ‘some of the signallers seemed puzzled that I did not cuss, smoke, drink, or show much interest in les mademoiselles. There must be something wrong, was the consensus.’ ⁸²

With officers often complicit in the swearing, or not willing to look like puritanical stick-in-the-muds to enforce censure, it often fell to the YMCA and the padres to moderate some of the most blasphemous phrases. Padre George Wells was one concerned clergyman who agonized over the soldiers’ dirty language, which had become, in his belief, ‘steadily worse as the war raged’. ⁸³ He used his influence to drive for a ‘language purge’. Lectures were given on clean living and pledge cards issued in the hope that soldiers would lead a better life, and one without alcohol and swearing. ⁸⁴ While this concern for swearing was a natural fit for the padres, they always walked a fine line with the rank and file: if they pushed too hard, they were likely to alienate most of the men.

While some soldiers signed the pledge cards – and curbing one’s tongue was another matter too – it seems that most chaplains and padres tolerated the swearing, which was usually toned down in their presence anyway. Ralph Connor, the Canadian writer and a senior chaplain, arrived at the front line on an unheralded visit in July 1916. He came upon a 49th Battalion corporal castigating his men

in language which was offensive both to the chaplain and to the novelist; it was blasphemous and it also was highly ungrammatical. He therefore sternly rebuked the corporal, pointing out the awful consequences of being hurled into eternity with oaths on one’s lips. The NCO apologized but explained that these sons of suppurating seacooks would not have understood him had he used milder expletives. The chaplain twinkled, shook hands with the corporal and went his way. ⁸⁵

Here we see a narrative where a swearing soldier is chastised, but with a wink and a nod. Hugh Kay of the 43rd Battery, which had originally been raised as a temperance unit, recounted their hard-bitten sergeant trying to instil discipline into the men through tough words and blasphemy:

‘Steady in the ranks there! Blank Blankety Blank, Conroy, can’t you stand still for five minutes.’ ‘Can’t youse men understand good English.’ ‘Do youse men think this is a Sunday School picnic’ (Eyes flashing fire). And finally one Sunday morning with a burst of irreverence, ‘J— C—, don’t youse men know this is a Church Parade.’ ⁸⁶

Such humorous stories suggest a narrative of genial acceptance.

However, when the war ended, there was a more determined push by the army to clean up the swearing, which was again driven by the padres. ⁸⁷ Orders from senior commanders demanded that soldiers refrain from profanity, even as they originated from the headquarters of legendary swearers such as Currie and Macdonnel. Brigadier William Griesbach, who served in Macdonnel’s division, was anxious to cut back on swearing and established a Society of the Holy Name. Officers and NCOs were to sign pledge cards that urged them to revoke profanity. ‘I take particular exception to swearing by Jesus Christ,’ wrote Griesbach. ‘No officer who is a gentleman should use such language.’ ⁸⁸ It is unclear how many in the 1st Brigade signed the card, but this purity pledge was not unique to only a brigade of 4000 men. A Canadian in a different unit recounted how his captain urged the ‘boys not to take back to Canada … the dirty filthy adjective which everyone here uses to describe everything under the sun’. ⁸⁹ Despite hoping for such a reversal in habits, years after the war the Legionary magazine joked that the attempt to clean up the soldiers’ language was ‘like prohibition in the United States, it was a “noble experiment.” It had about the same result.’ ⁹⁰

Alfred Hale, a conscript in the British army, lamented the rough language of his mates: ‘one got so very wearied of hearing everything being described as f-cking this and f-cking that, the very word, with its original indecent meaning, being at length a mere stupid and meaningless vulgarity’. ⁹¹ With soldiers’ mouths spewing obscenities, the written record of the war is unrepresentative. While some of the post-war memoirs or wartime diaries contain some evidence of swearing, it is very rare to find a wartime letter home containing vulgarity. That is perhaps not surprising, since soldiers were generally writing to their loved ones, parents, wives, girlfriends, and children.

Cape Bretoner Percy Willmot of the 25th Battalion wrote to his sister:

There is one art in which I have become proficient since becoming an atom in this ‘contemptible little British Army’. The art I refer to is ‘swearing’ and ‘believe me’ Kid it is only the rigours of censorship that prevents me from giving you a first class exhibition. ⁹²

Willmot, who died of his wounds in the war’s aftermath, not only drew attention to the soldier as part of a machine, and incorporated within it, but he also shed light on the difference between the presentation of language in oral interaction and written records. Partridge and Brophy’s work refused to go into details about the smutty words, yet the authors noted that, when the soldiers sang dirty songs, ‘ninety-nine times out of a hundred there was no thought in the soldier’s mind of the literal and obscene meaning of the word upon his lips’. ⁹³ If that was true – and it seems unlikely – then when soldiers were indeed ‘thinking’ about writing down their experiences for loved ones, they left out the profanity, even if it was an important part of their life at the front. Bruce Bairnsfather, who was much loved by Canadian soldiers, wrote after the war of his famous cartoons:

Good lusty topical swearing and sergeants did more to hold the war together than anything else. I found it difficult to give euphony to my sub-titles without the real hundred horsepower swearing of the trenches. I coined the word ‘blinkin’’ to fill the most pressing apertures. ⁹⁴

The stigma continued into the post-war years. Frederic Manning, in the first censored version of his book Her Privates We, covered up the profanity and the use of the word ‘fuck’ with ‘muckin’, but he allowed it to stand in the second edition. ⁹⁵ And then there were toned-down memoirs like that of Canadian Lieutenant Thomas Dinesen, who in Merry Hell! described one artillery bombardment:

The very ground is trembling and we too tremble. Our hair is standing on end – but – are we scared? are we downhearted? No!! We hurl all sorts of execrations towards the shells flying above us, though our voices are lost in the din of the explosions. ‘Get away, you damned son-of-a-gun! Good boy, he passed us! There’s another bastard coming … bloody hell – he nearly got us!’ ⁹⁶

One could assume that Dinesen cleaned up his comrades’ language for his memoir, although it was still racy for the late 1920s.

III. Conclusion

It was difficult for soldiers not to bring their swearing and slang home, for this was their culture for a year or two, perhaps as many as four and a half. The Kilt, trench paper of the 72nd Battalion, chided civilians that the men they once knew had changed. They ‘used to lie in bed to nurse a headache’, but now they had been transformed into ‘men’. ⁹⁷ Part of that masculine transformation had involved a hardening in the army and a distancing from civilian life, especially in the creation and use of words that had also served as a collective shield to endure the unending strain. While Canadian society did not stand for foul-mouthed veterans, many returned men must have fought private battles against the vulgarities on the tips of their tongues. It was more acceptable that soldiers’ slang would seep back into Canadian society.

Some of the soldiers’ slang was kept alive in the regimental association newspapers and songs, and of course in the minds and mouths of the men who survived. As during the war, the slang was often meant to keep civilians at bay, so that they were not fully part of the soldiers’ culture. It was a secret language of sorts, and more readily spilled forth in the closed company of old comrades. It was also a badge of identity in the post-war years. In 1934, when some 75, 000 veterans descended on Toronto for the largest CEF reunion, they sang the old wartime songs, played crown and anchor, and relived the wartime years. One of the most interesting representations of wartime slang was a wartime side-door Pullman train that had been lent by the CNR for veterans travelling from Montreal. The Legionary captured it in a photograph and noted that ‘many willing hands wrote the quirks and quips in chalk all over the car’, and included phrases such as ‘Are We Downhearted, No’, ‘If you know of a better ’ole, go to it’, ‘Thank Gawd we have a navy’, ‘Good Old Blighty’, and many more. ⁹⁸ Soldiers’ slang formed part of the threads that wove through the tapestry of veterans’ experiences.

As the veterans began to die off, so too did their words and slang to some degree. But not all, and some terms were incorporated into the English language after the war. Phrases such as ‘lousy’ and ‘crummy’, referring to soldiers infested by lice, are still popular, although applied more generally to show disapproval or shabbiness. ‘Souvenir’ replaced ‘keepsake’, which was a more common English word for an object of remembrance. The ‘trench coat’ remained as a word and as an object in the post-war years. ‘Shell shock’, the term so desperately banned by the military authorities during the war for fear of acknowledging its existence, remains the same today as it did in the war. ‘Firing line’, ‘behind the lines’, and ‘over the top’ are all still in use. ‘No man’s land’ had its origins before the war, but it received its evocative power from the trench experience.

Soldiers’ slang was used to protect and to trivialize. These new words defined groups, the soldier from the civilian, but also drew together the divergent forces and nationalities that served in the BEF. If the soldiers from the various dominions, colonies, and British isles all spoke with similar slang and jargon, albeit with minor national differences, perhaps this is one more unifying force that drew together British, dominion, and colonial forces. It is impossible to measure or quantify such a hypothesis, but it may be an intriguing jumping-off point for future studies that explore how language and, more broadly, culture support concepts of combat motivation and identity. Easier to pinpoint is the important role of swearing in defining issues of masculinity, another underexplored concept in the study of Great War soldiers. And, finally, there is much evidence to suggest that questions of slang and language support and contribute to the shifting tectonics of identity construction, especially with Canadians who saw themselves as using unique phrases or words, when in reality many of them were empire-wide. Perhaps the unique Canadian emphasis was more on accent, rhythm, or pacing, which is impossible to detect in the written record. Nonetheless, more than 90 years on from the end of the war, the soldiers’ jargon has been reduced to whispers in the archives. Yet the whispers offer clues to better understand how the civilian soldiers saw themselves in relation to civilians, and how language became a tool to help them endure and make sense of the Great War. For the Canadian trench soldier, a word may indeed have been worth a thousand pictures.