Abstract
In addition to its role in rumour transmission, the trench press was also a vehicle for complaint. Complaining has always been one of the common soldier’s few pleasures, and the Great War provided ample opportunity to continue and expand this tradition. The chance was seized with enthusiasm. One way of understanding trench journals is as glorified — and sometimes not so glorified — complaint sheets. Regardless of the genre or mode of expression employed, a large proportion of what was printed in these publications took the form of a grievance or a grumble. Few subjects did not come in for jaundiced comment at some time or other, from the ‘chats’ to the food, the mud, the bureaucracy and the sheer madness of it all. As with much else to do with the trench press, the complaint had more than one purpose. It clearly allowed men to let off steam as part of the safety valve dimension of these publications. But beyond that useful though limited function, the complaint was another means of highlighting for those not at the front the many unsatisfactory aspects of the experience. If ‘unsatisfactory’ sounds like an understatement, that was exactly what the grouses and whinges of the trench were: a radically understated amelioration of the realities of life and death at the front. They were pleas for the consideration of their plight.
Keywords
Conscientious Objector Popular Song Oral Culture Home Front Western FrontPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
- 1.See Brophy, J. and Partridge, E. (eds.), Songs and Slang of the British Soldier 1914–1918, Scholartis Press, London, 1930.Google Scholar
- 35.Taylor, M., ‘The Open Exhaust and some other trench journals of World War I,’ in the Imperial War Museum Review, no 5, 1990Google Scholar
- quoted from Murray, Capt. W., ‘The Trench Magazine,’ Canadian Defence Quarterly vol V, no 3, April 1928, p. 329.Google Scholar
- 38.Hayward, J., Myths and Legends of World War I, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 2002, pp. 6–7.Google Scholar
- 39.Graves, R., Goodbye to All That, Cape, London, 1929Google Scholar
- Ponsonby, A., Falsehood in War-Time, G Allen & Unwin, London, 1928Google Scholar
- and Bonaparte, M., Myths of War, Imago, London, 1947Google Scholar
- 40.Sanders, M. L. and Taylor, P. M., British Propaganda During World War I, 1914–1918, Macmillan, London, 1982, pp. 146–7, 156–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 41.Most commentators since have dismissed these findings as unreliable, motivated by political needs, see Buitenhuis, P., The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914–18 and After, Batsford, London, 1989, p. 27.Google Scholar
- Also Read, J. M., Atrocity Propaganda: 1914–1919, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1941Google Scholar
- Vaughn, S., Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism and the Committee for Public Information, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1980 for the American propaganda effortGoogle Scholar
- and Knightley, P., The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1975Google Scholar