Words for war

As I read through the words and phrases in Australian English that date back to WW1, I am struck by two clusters of words. The first congregates around the idea that any special sphere of activity demands its official names, but also its unofficial names. Those within the sphere need to know who they are and where they are, but they also need to bond over the names that are not imposed from above but spring from the facts of that existence.

The second cluster relates to the humour that is derived from this particular experience, humour that ranges from cheerful to grim. The function of black humour is to prove to ourselves and others that we can deal with unbearable horror, that we can keep our sanity in an insane situation. 

 The official name for the soldiers from this part of the world was the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps  (ANZAC) but the informal name was the Diggers.  The first specialised use of digger in Australian English was a reference to someone digging for gold in a goldfield and dates back to the 1850s gold rush in Victoria. This use carried on through the century right up to the goldfields rush in WA in the 1890s. In New Zealand a digger might be a miner in the goldfields of that country, or someone digging for kauri gum, a fossilised resin used for jewellery. When Australian and New Zealand soldiers went to World War I in France and were introduced to trench warfare, the term digger perhaps came more naturally than the British sapper. It was the privates in the army who earned this name, the soldiers at the frontline who actually did the digging in the trenches, but the use spread until it encompassed all Australian and New Zealand soldiers of any rank. Finally it was used as a form of greeting. Prime Minister Billy Hughes was affectionately nicknamed `the Little Digger’ by the Australian troops he visited in France. In World War II the term was restricted to Australian soldiers.

A discussion of significant locations of this period must begin with Galipolli. The irony of ironies is that the name meant ‘beautiful city’, from the Ancient Greek kallos ‘beautiful’ and polis ‘city’.  The other landmarks of the region are well known so we can pass on to the unofficial naming that went on and was part of the job of the soldier. First there were the names for the enemy.  The Turks were referred to as Abdul, that being a common first name in Turkey.  The Turks for their part referred to the Anzacs as Johnnies and themselves as Mehmets (this was referred to in the speech made by Mustafa Kelmet Ataturk: ’There is no difference between the Johnnies and Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours.’)

Locations needed to be identified in fine detail in such a context and this kind of naming is engraved by terrible experience:

The Nek                  a ridge of land on the Gallipoli peninsula

Baby 700               the smaller of two adjacent hills, estimated to be about 700 ft high

Lone Pine             a site above Anzac Cove where the Turks cut down all the pine trees except one

Then there were  the names for the guns, shells, missiles, etc., used generally in the war:  

Big Bertha            a type of howitzer used by the Germans and named after Bertha Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, 1886–1957, proprietor of the German industrial company, Krupp

Beachy Bill           a Turkish artillery battery concentrated on the beaches of Anzac Cove

Lazy Lizz                 a heavy long-distance shell which made a droning sound as it passed by

flying pig         a heavy trench-mortar shell, name either from the fact that its large size and slow descent meant that it could sometimes be seen in flight, or from the squeal it made flying through the air, or both

gezumpher          a large artillery shell

mouth organ    a Stokes shell, from the sound made by the air passing through the holes around the base of the shell as it was rising

Minnie                        a German trench-mortar bomb, from the name Minenwerfer bomb

flaming onions  a form of incendiary used by German forces to illuminate and set fire to a target

pipsqueak            a small shell, usually a high-velocity shell fired from a field gun

plum pudding    a spherical iron shell filled with explosive and fired from a trench mortar

Then there was the soldier’s life:

lie-out possie    the position taken by troops when assembled in battle formation before an attack

up the line           in action

mug-gunner        a Lewis machine gunner

slushy                     a mess orderly

spook                      an army signaller, especially a wireless operator

over the top        over the top of a parapet, as in charging the enemy

 War takes its inevitable toll on one’s health.  The Aussie was the equivalent of the British Blighty – that is, the wound that was serious enough to have you packed off home.  Humour also comes through in the various uses of king meaning ‘expert’, one of which was iodine king for a regimental medical officer.   The iodine lancers were members of the Australian Army Nursing Service, a nickname which captured neatly the general use of iodine for treatment and the prevalence of boils needing to be lanced. The kiwi king was the soldier who polished his boots and leather carefully — from the Kiwi boot polish brand.

The first thing to attack in the army, as in any institution, was the food.  There was the official iron rations, but there was also the joke Anzac wafer  (modelled on vanilla wafer) described as a hard biscuit, ‘one of the most durable materials used in the war’ Digger Dialects. Anzac stew was made with an urn of hot water and one bacon rind.  Flybog was the name for jam, aptly since flies were the scourge of Gallipoli and got into anything greasy or sticky. Axle-grease was the word for butter. Food can be used to familiarise something else, so came the reference a shell burst as a cream puff.

Humour comes also in sharing words and phrases borrowed from other languages with which soldiers suddenly come into contact.  These travel through the soldier’s lexicon whatever their starting point.  From French came such expressions as alley ‘to go’ from allez, compree ‘understand’ from compris, plonk  ‘cheap wine’ from vin blanc, san fairy Ann  ‘no matter’ from ça ne fait rien, and toot-sweet  ‘immediately’ from tout de suite.  From Arabic there was bint ‘a woman’, imshi ‘to go away’, magnoon ‘crazy, idiotic’, maleesh  ‘no matter’, and the Wazza ‘the red light district in Cairo’.

Even heroes and villains can be taken not so seriously in war.  The cold footer  and slacker are  basic enough terms but deep thinker meaning  ‘a person who enlisted late in the course of the war’ has that touch of amused mockery. Knut, meaning ‘a self-important person’, is definitely a joke. It is thought to have come from the popular music-hall song Gilbert the Filbert, the Colonel of the Knuts (1914) in which knut is a jocular variant of nut. This was parodied and used as a marching song.

The Military Cross abbreviated to MC becomes the Maconachie cross and the actual medal the Maconochie Medal.  Maconochie was the maker of the tinned stew of meat and vegetables that the soldiers ate. It became a colloquialism for ‘the stomach’ as in hit in the maconochie.

Euphemisms are common for death and slaughter, and the war situation breeds its own set. There is the transfer from cricket where the batsmen are skittled, that is, knocked out one after the other like a set of skittles, to the war where a man can be skittled, that is, killed.  To be hung on the wire or on the old barbed wire was to be absent and unaccounted for.  To say that someone had chucked it up was a nonchalant way of saying that they had died.  To say that he had been stonkered was to say that he had been killed.

A stoush was Australian and New Zealand slang for ‘a fight’, part of the jargon of the Larrikins, the street gang of the 1890s. The big stoush was the war and a stunt was a battle. These were the verbal ways of avoiding a grim reality.

And finally there was the blackest of black humour, the laughter that skitters over horror. These expressions are hard for us to fully understand at this distance. They are the verbal equivalent of the faded sepia photos of men with expressions that are hard to read. But in their moment of creation they would have provided a powerful release.  Anzac soup is, we read in Digger Dialects, ‘shell-hole water polluted by a corpse’. Pause for a moment to think about that and to consider the apparently light-hearted reference and you can see the distance between the term  and its meaning.  Other examples are go into cold storage  to be killed in the freezing winter of 1916, rest camp a cemetery,  shooting gallery the front line, body-snatcher a stretcher bearer, six-bob-a-day tourist an Australian soldier in World War I (from the daily rate of pay of six shillings).

 The war was long and the experience intense. We are lucky to have in Digger Dialects such a comprehensive record of a very special lexicon which may have disappeared completely if World War II hadn’t come round the corner and revived at least some part of it. When I say that we are ‘lucky’, it would of course have been better if this lexicon had never developed, but we can, through our knowledge of the words that the soldiers used to capture the physical and emotional terrain, get a glimpse of what their experience was. This at least gives us some understanding.