Abstract
Before August 23, 1914, there was no culture of the trench. After November 11, 1918, that culture ceased to exist, except as an exercise in nostalgia. In approximately four years of war unlike any the world had seen, a new human collectivity was born, grew and ended; the rationale and circumstances of its existence immediately became history. It was a community almost exclusively of men thrown into the most violent and basic of circumstances by the failures of politics. The locus of this culture was the zones of war. Its Anglophone victims were, at first, largely professional soldiers, followed quickly by various forces of citizens, militia, conscripts and volunteers from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America. The massive scale of the conflict necessitated, for the first time, a state of total engagement in which the home front became an integral part of the war effort. Enmeshed in these novel circumstances, the soldiers of the trench were thrust together in undreamed of circumstances to defend home and hearth against enemy aggression. Little of what they had previously known in their lives and occupations was relevant to the duty they were asked to perform. Those asking them to perform it, the military and their political masters, had no experience of operating with such large numbers of relatively untrained and unsoldierly men and certainly no experience of conflict on such a scale.
We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here,
We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here …
Trench song to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’
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Notes
Fuller, J. G., Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990, p. 155.
Palmer, Roy. ‘What a Lovely War’: British Soldiers’ Songs from the Boer War to the Present Day, Michael Joseph, London, 1990, p. 100.
These and other legends of the war are discussed by various writers, including Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford University Press, New York and London, 1975, mainly Chapter 4
and Hayward, J., Myths and Legends of World War I, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 2002.
There had been soldier newspapers in previous conflicts, including the South African, or ‘Boer,’ war of 1899–1902 and the American Civil War, as well as earlier American conflicts, see Cornbise, Alfred Emile, Ranks and Columns: Armed Forces Newspapers in American Wars, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1993.
Begbie, H., On the Side of the Angels, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1915
Campbell, P., Back of the Front Line, Newnes, London [1915].
See Clarke, D., The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians, Wiley, England, 2004.
See Hayward, J., Myths and Legends of World War I, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2002, for an investigation of these rumours and legends.
Terraine, J., The Smoke and the Fire: The Myths and Anti-Myths of War, 1861–1945, Pen & Sword Books, London, 1980, Chapter. 2.
Sassoon, S., The Complete Memories of George Sherston, Faber and Faber, London, 1937, p. 605.
For more on estaminets see Fuller, pp. 74–5, and Stanley, Peter, Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force, pier 9, Sydney, 2010, pp. 88–90, 123.
See Cuttriss, G. P., ‘Over the Top’ with the Third Australian Division, Charles H Kelly, London, nd (1918), pp. 49ff.
See Linton, R., ‘Totemism and the AEF,’ in Lessa, William A. and Vogt, Evon Z. (eds.), Reader in Comparative Religion, 2nd edn., Harper and Row, New York, Evanston, IL, London, 1965
and Oring, E., ‘Totemism in the AEF,’ Southern Folklore Quarterly, vol 41, nos 1–2, 1977
For the quantity and variety of mascots at Gallipoli, see also Gallishaw, J., Trenching at Gallipoli, A L Burt, New York, 1916, pp. 31–2.
See Leed, E., No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War One, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (England), 1979, p. 128; pp. 127, 129, 144–5, and Fussell, Chapter 4, esp. pp. 124–35.
Derived from a tradition traceable to at least the nineteenth century, see Opie, I. and Tatem, M. (eds.), A Dictionary of Superstitions, Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, 1989, pp. 55, 82.
MacGill, P., The Great Push: An Episode of the War, Herbert Jenkins, London 1916: at http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Soldier_Songs_of_World_War_I, accessed November 2010.
See Brophy, John and Eric Partridge. The Long Trail. London: Andre Deutsch, 1965 (first published in 1930), p. 66
and Seal, G., Digger Folksong and Verse of World War I: An Annotated Anthology, Antipodes Press, Perth, WA, 1991, p. 31.
Quoted in Dickson, P., War Slang: American Fighting Words and Phrases from the Civil War to the Gulf War, Pocket Books, New York, 1994, p. 48.
Cooper, A. H. (comp.), Character Glimpses: Australians on the Somme, Sydney, nd, p. 5 (pagination imperfect). A similar yarn in Honk no 9, August 29, 1915, p. 2.
Mencken, H. L., ‘War Slang,’ in his The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (1919), Knopf, New York, 1921.
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© 2013 Graham Seal
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Seal, G. (2013). We’re Here because We’re Here. In: The Soldiers’ Press. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303264_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303264_3
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