German officer wrote to a friend that
(t) he brisk, merry war to which we have all looked forward for years has taken an unforeseen turn. Troops are murdered with machines, horses have almost become superfluous ... The most important people are the engineers ... the theories of decades are shown to be worthless. (18)
Unfortunately for the miserable troops mired in the wet, cold, and filthy trenches, the generals refused to accept the deadly efficacy of the defensive weapons, and spent the first three years of the war mounting one costly frontal assault after another, until the abortive Nivelle offensive of May 1917 precipitated the mutiny of the French army and ended what JM Winter calls "the great slaughter." (19)
What, then, was the effect of trench warfare on the soldiers? First, the experience of war was an initiatory one. That is, the experience is, per se, so remarkable that no one who has not experienced it can ever share it or understand it. (20)
For Aldington soldiers were "men segregated from the world in this immense barbaric tumult. "(21)" Ein Geschlecht wie das unsere ist noch nie in die Arena der Erde geschritten, "(" A generation such as ours has never before stepped into the arena of the earth ") proclaimed Ernst Junger. (22)
This "initiate mentality" among combat troops was immeasurably strengthened in World War I by the characteristics of the fighting, the first of which was a tactical stasis that imposed physical inertia on the front line troops. The soldiers were literally immobilised in a maze of trenches, subjected to severe shelling and regular sniping, to say nothing of the rigours of outdoor life in northern Europe, with virtually no reliable protection from any of them. It is little wonder that the most common metaphor for the trench system, and by extension the war itself, was the labyrinth, a true "initiatory underground." (23)
It was not lost on German troops that the root word of der Schhtzengraben (trench) was das Grab, a grave. In Otto Dix's lost painting, Der Schhtzengraben, the trench becomes a grotesque grave filled with horribly mutilated bodies.
The group identity of the "troglodytes" (to borrow Fussell's term) emerges in the striking special language of trench slang. In his preface to Dechelette's dictionary, Georges Lentre recounts hearing a conversation between two soldiers that appeared to be mutually intelligible, but which he found incomprehensible. (24)
Against the incomprehension of the rear and the patriotic drivel of the press, the troops erected a linguistic wall that Jacques Meyer perceptively calls "le language d'une franc-mahonnerie" ("a language of free-masons "). (25)
The sense of identity and community is evident in what the soldiers called themselves. The usual two-week stint in the front and reserve lines tended to leave soldiers filthy, lousy, unshaven, and exhausted. (26) For the Germans, a front line infantryman was a Frontschwein, a front pig. For the French, he was a poilu, literally a hairy beast, as the noun poil is used primarily for the hair of animals. Dauzat points out that the term implies more than just an unshaven man, because the poilu is hairy, as he delicately puts it, "au bon endroit," - a traditional symbol of virility. (27)
In neither case is the animal reference pejorative. Bill Mauldin's World War II cartoons of "GI Joe" stand in the same tradition of affectionate commonality, all contempt reserved for those who are not a part of the community of combat.
The sense of community felt by the combat troops (a bond particularly marked among the Germans) was reinforced by the mass of war material thrown against them.
The Germans, in fact, use the phrase "war of material "(Materialschlacht) instead of" war of attrition "for the 1916-1918 period.
Front line soldiers often felt that they had more in common with the enemy soldiers in the trenches opposite than with their own rear echelon troops and the people at home. That sense of a common bond of suffering is reflected in the slang names for opposing and even allied forces. With the exception of boche, and perhaps "Hun," to which I shall return, epithets for opposing forces were generally based on a stereotypical national name or characteristic or a deformed foreign phrase, and were largely inoffensive.
On the German side, the favoured names for the French were Franzmann and several names based on germanised French phrases: Parlewuhs (Parlez-vous), Wulewuhs (voulez-vous), Olala, and the very popular Tulemong (Tous le monde). (28) For British soldiers, the Germans, like the French, used "Tommy," although naturally deforming the pronunciation.
English soldiers employed a variety of epithets for the Germans. "Fritz" was popular early in the war, with "Jerry" favoured later. According to Brophy, "Hun," a journalistic creation, was...
