The Soldiers' Press

Trench Journals in the First World War

G. Seal

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137303264
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

Through the first comprehensive investigation and analysis of the English language trench periodicals of the First World War, The Soldiers' Press presents a cultural interpretation of the means and methods through which consent was negotiated between the trenches and the home front.

1

The Zones of War

There’s a zone

Wild and lone

None claim, none own

That goes by the name of No-Man’s-Land …

Sub Rosa, June 1917

Total conflict makes war the business of the civilian as much as that of the professional, or even the amateur, soldier. On an unprecedented scale from August 1914, civilians were required to support frontline troops. They needed clothing, feeding, supplying and supporting on a vast scale. They needed to be written to, and sent gifts of cakes, socks, cigarettes and anything else they were allowed to have but could not obtain. Previously unimagined levels and duration of medical attention were required. As well as these tangibles, they needed emotional and psychological support, entertainment and mourning. The astounding numbers of the dead left few families without direct or indirect losses, often undermining the financial and emotional viability of domestic relationships. The war became ‘Great’ not only for the immensity of its carnage but also for the impact on the citizens of its belligerents. These circumstances produced a need for some form of public communication between those at the front and those at the home front. Letters were essential but private – apart from the intervention of the censor – messages of love, affection and personal information. But the scale of the war, the difficulty or even impossibility for some of getting home for leave and the intense level of military control imposed on civilians and soldiers engendered a very different mode of communication. The trench press evolved as a form of communal public expression that operated within, but rarely as part of, the official frameworks of authority.

The soldier newspapers or ‘trench journals’¹ of the Great War constitute a unique body of journalism, literature, art and record of events. They are manifestations of their time and place and very much reflect the circumstances of their creation as well as the concerns of those who edited and contributed to them.² As J. G. Fuller described these publications in his Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914–1918, ‘They are not coloured by subsequent experience and they represent a collective rather than an individual commentary, validated to a large extent by their soldier audience.’³ The predominant tone of trench literature and art was humorous; ‘Nothing Serious’ was the motto of The Lancastrian. In his discussion of the trench magazine genre, Martin Taylor observed: ‘humour was its principal ingredient; humour in the face of official deception, petty regulations, physical discomfort, mental exhaustion and the ever-present threat of death.’ Taylor goes on to point out that this humour had an important function: ‘It was one of the few means of imposing order on an otherwise disordered existence, especially after faith in glory and patriotism had disappeared.’⁴ The need for order in a disordered and devastated world was a compelling one that also motivated the need of trench troops for information, any information, whether in the form of official pronouncements – which were widely disbelieved – or the much more available unauthorised forms of information.

By their nature, trench newspapers do not provide a perfect, unequivocal and unproblematic record of their time and place. But through investigating the many surviving British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and American examples, it is possible to retrieve an unprecedented soldiers’ eye view of the war. Through this mostly forgotten literature, language and art we can connect with the common concerns of foot soldiers and perhaps understand a little better how they endured the unendurable and why, at its end, many of the survivors experienced oddly mixed feelings of relief and regret. The open nature of the press meant that it was effectively a democratic cultural republic amidst a hierarchical martial regime, a militocracy engaged in the largest mass conflict humanity had known. The periodical productions of Great War soldiers are therefore an unparalleled and still largely unmined lode of insight into the mindset and culture of the trenches.

But the hundreds of titles that make up the trench press are far more significant than simple reflections of what soldiers thought and felt. The trench press did not project an unmediated representation of the world to its readers. Within its many thousands of pages we read a very particular, select and often ameliorated version of the trench experience, one riddled with contradictions, anomalies, absences and elisions. Soldiers’ newspapers did not only reprocess the reality of their mostly harrowing experience; they conveyed beyond their primary readership of other frontline troops a carefully constructed version of that experience to those back home. This vital secondary readership consisted of politicians, the mainstream press, military commanders and the civilian population of family, friends, workmates, ‘shirkers’ and whoever else made up the respective national communities of the creators of the soldiers’ press. These were the people who appeared to the frontline soldier to be the prosecutors or – in the case of conscientious objectors and other recalcitrants – avoiders of the war that they were forced to fight. The trench press was therefore not only meant for those serving men who edited, wrote, drew and read it but was even more importantly a message from the inferno to those who seemed to be the trench soldiers’ only chance of salvation. In other words, the trench press was the instrument of agency for its creators and readers. It allowed them to go beyond simply coping with what they had been dealt and to state a position of their own. This then gave them the ability to stake their own claim to the deadly geography to which they were condemned and so establish a rhetorical bargaining position otherwise denied them by the enormity of the forces to which they were hostage. From this position they were able to, at least metaphorically, negotiate consent. They agreed to die, but on their own terms.

Nor were the trench newspapers simply a form of subaltern resistance or protest against the manifold impositions suffered by their constituencies. There is certainly complaint and criticism, covert and sometimes overt. There is grumbling and implicit disaffection. Very occasionally there is direct confrontation with military, civil or political authority. Nowhere are there calls to arms, disloyalty or treason. There may possibly have been individuals and even groups among soldiers who harboured such views – particularly later in the war – but they do not appear in the trench press. No one proposed revolution as the answer to the predicament of survival. It was not that most soldiers did not believe in winning the war; it was rather that they were often appalled by the way in which the military, the politicians and those at home wanted them to win it.

Conversely, although some trench journals were instigated by officers, censored by them and even edited by them, this did not mean that the resulting publications were inevitably instruments of propaganda and official manipulation. There are certainly examples of this in some publications, mainly those of the more sophisticated type, but the prevailing mood, tone and attitude of the trench press is sardonic, satirical, sometimes cynical, regardless of who was in charge. If they had been only official propaganda sheets, they would not have been patronised by the majority of soldiers. And in any case, there was no shortage of reading matter that did emanate from above and which was official or semi-official in nature. This was not produced by the troops themselves and had a quite different character to the trench genre.

These characteristics and contexts imparted a complexity to the production, content and audiences of what were ostensibly straightforward soldier rumour and joke sheets. The circumstances and the locale in which they existed were also far more nuanced than is often assumed. The trench press existed within and was shaped by the zones of war across which it operated.

The zones of war

The stark and all-encompassing geography of the trenches evolved rapidly as the unprecedented nature of the war unfolded. Within this geography, five distinct but connected zones of war determined the totality of life and death for millions. At the centre of these zones lay the frontline trenches themselves. Soldiers moved in and out of these earthworks, either coming from the rear, or ‘behind the lines’ – an area of billets, depots, HQ and the organisation needed to run a war; or they moved away from the trenches when they went ‘over the top’ towards the enemy across ‘no-man’s-land.’ Both no-man’s-land and behind the lines were liminal areas between the safety of ‘Blighty’ and the strong likelihood of death in the face of the enemy. Soldiers moved from home and life through the transitional zone behind the lines, into the trenches, then across the blasted nothingness of no-man’s-land towards the fate dealt to them by the enemy. If they were lucky, they then traipsed, crawled or were carried back through the intermediary no-man’s-land, into their own trenches, then to the rear and perhaps, with a ‘Blighty’ wound or leave due, back to safety, home, family, country and life itself.

These zones were the spatial and psychological realities of life and death, hope and fear, love and hate, which the culture of the trench mediated in its speech, song, story, humour, rumour and superstition.⁵ Those things that happened, or were believed to have happened, in these zones were the basis for the content of trench publications. The patterns and practices of everyday life, such as were able to be maintained or recreated in the circumstances, existed side by side with a range of new concerns, interests and activities that together made up the lineaments of trench culture. The inescapable reality of the zones of war had to be dealt with by two strategies: clinging to the familiar and the homely, and reprocessing elements of the trench experience into usually satirical and humorous expressions that were effectively elisions but also communications with the prosecutors of the war.

All these locations, realities and strategies feature in the soldier publications of the trench: sometimes in stereotype, occasionally through a revelation glimpsed in verse, a cartoon or perhaps a story. Together they constituted the soldier’s universe, all that he could or would know. The centre of this universe remained the pit of the frontline trench. The soldiers’ press was a means of acknowledging and negotiating these fundamental realities and their potential consequences. It was also a means of recording them for whatever posterity there might be and at the same time projecting a version of the experience to those significant others at home.

The essential soldiers’ eye perception underlying all this was that while home was the location of family, comfort and security, it was also the location of politicians, jingoists and press who wished to prosecute the war. The dangerous, and uncomfortable front line, by contrast, was very much not home as confirmed by trench ditties and press items that evoked darkly parodic images of home, childhood and the familial. The front was where the war was actually fought by those who did not shirk their duty – even if they were profoundly unhappy about it. In these circumstances comradeship, complaint, rumour and superstition became a communal strategy for coping. We should read the trench press not solely as a form of everyday journalistic communication, but as an instantiation of these intangibles of survival. But even as it made manifest those realities and perceptions, the trench press was nevertheless a representation of the underlying trench experience, presented as the soldiers wished it to be – to themselves, their officers, their families and, especially, to the mainstream press. It is this need that explains the apparently contradictory obsession of many editors and contributors with their reception by the newspapers of the day.

Crucial in these mediations and projections were negotiations of identity, whether of nation, ethnicity, region, class or gender. For the first time on such a large scale, men – and some women – from many different countries, cultures and backgrounds were thrown together as allies. The dynamics involved were almost as unprecedented as those of the war itself and produced a widespread need for articulations of sameness and difference. This involved not only allies but also the enemy. What to make of ‘them’ was as vital an issue within the trench press as dealing with complications of colonialism, with racial, ethnic and regional prejudice, as well as assumptions and expectations of – particularly but not only in the British case – class.

Equally compelling was the need to engage and cope with the trauma of the war itself. There was little to prepare its victims in the existing military histories, the official glorifications of war or even in the folk traditions of combat. Nothing as enormously dreadful as this had ever happened before. And it got worse rather than better as the deadly months dragged on. In these circumstances the trench press devoted considerable space to those aspects of the war that confronted its soldiers. These included the trenches themselves and their accompanying technologies of barbed wire, the tank, gas, ordnance and a host of other everyday actualities that shaped and guided trench life and death.

Related to these needs were those of communication and information. The average soldier received little information apart from what might be included in official orders. Newspapers and mail were unreliable, and the former were deeply mistrusted even when available. Into the resulting information vacuum flowed the currency of hearsay, rumour and speculation. Every trench journal carried a nominated rumour section or – in the rare instances where a title did not – nevertheless engaged with rumour, an indication of their role not only as purveyors of gossip, but as providers of information, no matter how unreliable it might have been. The act of communication, of saying something that might be true, or not, was more crucial than the factual accuracy of much of the content.

While complaining was a traditional soldiers’ prerogative, the Great War brought the art to new heights, or perhaps greater depths. Not only were there many more soldiers who could complain, but there was also a lot more to complain about. The scale of action, massive casualties, inevitable ineptitude and even the pace of technological innovation were confronting realities that required accommodation. When they focused their ire on the other extremity of the zones of war, soldiers grumbled about politicians, uncaring civilians, the mainstream press and, with special vehemence, ‘deep thinkers’ and others who would not do their duty. As with many other aspects of the war treated in the trench journals, satire, parody and black humour were the major vehicles for conveying dissatisfaction and criticism.

One product of these dynamics was a certain level of ambivalence. This was reflected in a number of ways, most overtly perhaps in relation to sex and gender, masculinity and ‘softness’ or intimacy. In the circumstance of all-male combat that prevailed, such issues were sharpened and thrown into much higher relief than in civilian life. While the trench press was generally silent, circumspect or sometimes elliptical on matters sexual, there do appear certain items, usually expressed humorously or in advertisements, that allow some observations about gender identity and attitudes towards sex. Ambivalence also existed in relation to attitudes towards the enemy. On the one hand, they were stereotyped in the usual ethnic manner and portrayed as intent on imposing ‘kultur’ on the rest of Europe. But they were also seen as common soldiers suffering the same privations as the Tommy, the Digger and the Poilu.

These experiences, places, perceptions and ambivalences of the zones of war constituted a narrative terrain from which the writers and editors of trench journals selected and shaped their art and writing. The mud, the wire, trenches, rum rations, the food, the billets, rumours, and, eventually, the poison gas and tanks were the major elements of that terrain. The events that occurred, or were alleged to have occurred, in this landscape provided the characters and plots of the preferred narratives, overt and covert, of the newspapers. What was selected for publication was also conditioned – effectively censored – by the preferred representational styles and tropes of the genres deployed. Humour, satire, parody, cartoon and lampoon were the sanctioned modes. The stoically cheerful and the communal were generally preferred to the personal and the reflective. Complaint and criticism were allowable, though constrained by the public nature of the press. The informational necessities of obituaries, honour rolls and casualty lists published in many of the periodicals constituted their own tragic counterpoint to the mourning of the still-living, likely victims themselves. In combination, these gave the trench newspapers and magazines their unique characteristics and ambience.

Despite its appearance and the implicit or explicit assertions of its editors and contributors, the trench press was not an ‘authentic’ reflection of trench culture but a refraction of it. Trench newspapers selected elements of the experiences, emotions and articulations that inhabited the zones of war and presented them in partial and particular ways. Like a prism bending the white light that enters it and separating that beam into its constituent colours, the trench press projected an array of forced bright vignettes, cameos, anecdotes and narratives to its primary audience at the front and also to the vital secondary readership, primarily on the home front.

But not only did the trench journals refract trench culture for the consumption of those at home; they were also a refraction of home-front culture. Their contributors and editors selected elements of that broader society that concerned them and projected these back to their frontline readers. These were represented in partial and particular ways that their editors, themselves members of the trench culture, understood their primary readership would wish to receive. Typically, these elements were the manifold failings of the mainstream press, selected news (if available), shirkers, civilian incomprehension of the frontline soldiers’ experience and a suppressed but persistent undertow of interrogative doubt and implied criticism about the prosecution of the war.

This playful but pointed dialogue – partial and constrained though it was – provided the only available public communication channel between the collectivity of trench troops and the home front, between those who were seen to be prosecuting the war and those condemned to fight it. An understanding of this process provides an insight into the fundamental role of the trench press. It was a form of transaction, of negotiation, between those who were about to die and those who, in the view of the doomed at least, should have been able to do something about it. Trench soldiers could not stop the insane killing. Nor did they believe the propaganda designed to give them ‘fighting spirit.’ But they did wish to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Zones of War
• 2. From the Trenches
• 3. We’re Here because We’re Here
• 4. Things We Want to Know
• 5. In the Pink
• 6. The War
• 7. Identities
• 8. Suffering Cheerfulness
• Notes
• Sources, Select References and Credits
• Index