The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (45 page)

6
.
Joffre
: Joseph Joffre (1852–1931) was Commander-in-Chief of the French army from 1911 to 1916; he was replaced by General Robert Georges Nivelle (1856–1924) after heavy French losses at Verdun, and was given the ceremonial post Marshal of France.

7
.
Boy Greneer
: soldiers' term for the village of Bois Grenier, near Armentieères.

8
.
Mills bombs
: a type of hand grenade adopted by the British army as its standard grenade in 1915.

9
.
Stilly Nucked
: ‘Stille Nacht'.

10
.
Hully in West Saxony
: the East German city of Halle, on the banks of the Saale river.

11
.
bundooks
: a transliteration of the Hindi word for ‘gun'.

12
.
I want to go Home!
: opening line of a popular soldiers' song.

13
.
Dixie Lid
: lid of an army cooking pot.

14
.
Old Von Kluck, He Had a Lot of Men
: a popular First World War marching song, which began ‘Oooh, we don't give a f***/ For old von Kluck/And all his German army'. General Alexander von Kluck (1846–1934) had been in charge of the failed ‘march on Paris' in August 1914.

15
. ‘
Deutschland Über Alles
': opening line of the patriotic song ‘Das Lied der Deutschen' (1841). August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798–1874) composed the lyrics, which expressed love of country. It was adopted as the German national anthem after the First World War.

16
.
Padre
: regimental chaplain.

17
.
General French
: Sir John Denton Pinkstone French (1852–1925) was chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1912 to 1913;in 1913, he was made field marshal, and in August 1914 took command of the BEF. He was replaced in December 1915 by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (see note 26), and appointed commander of the British Home Forces until the end of the war.

18
.
The King!
: the toast is sufficiently neutral to be embraced by both sides: it might refer either to King George V (1865–1936) or Kaiser William II (1859–1941), who was also King of Prussia. Saxony, moreover, still had its own king, Friedrich August III (1865–1932).

19
.
Imshi
: an Arabic phrase for ‘take off' or ‘get lost', here meant as an order to hide.

20
.
boko camarade
: ‘
beaucoup camarade
', i.e. great friends.

21
.
Nürnberg Youth Rally
: a peace camp between young people from all countries that had participated in the Second World War. It was held in 1956– 7 in Nuremberg, a town particularly associated with Nazi atrocities; also, the Hitler Youth Movement had held rallies there.

22
.
sap-heads
: shallow holes – usually shell craters – in no man's land used as comparatively sheltered listening posts to monitor activities in enemy trenches.

23
.
brevet rank
: a rank one degree higher than one is paid for, held on a temporary basis.

24
.
the big German mine
: during the war, the German and British armies employed tunnelling companies to plant mines. As early as December 1914, ten German mines exploded under the British lines near Festubert; Graves's own regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, witnessed a major detonation in June 1916.

25
.
General Sir Douglas Haig
: Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (1861– 1928) was made Commander-in-Chief of the British army in December 1915. He had served in Sudan and the Boer War, and in 1909 had been appointed Chief of the General Staff for India after working in the War Office for two years. Haig was responsible for the British campaign of slow attrition after the battle of the Somme.

26
.
La Bassêe Canal
: La Bassêe is a town on the Somme connected
to nearby Aire by an industrial canal. The area saw the last heavy battles of the early war in October 1914, prior to the establishment of the British lines.

27
.
minny-werfer
: from the German word for trench mortar, ‘Minenwerfer'.

28
.
snobs
: junior officers. Well-connected public-school men were likely to enter the army with a commission, unlike their working-class contemporaries.

29
.
bobbajers
: bombardiers, or Royal Artillery corporals.

30
.
‘Stern-Endeavour' Haig
: Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (1861– 1928) was substituted for General French (see note 18) in the belief that he would instil the British war effort with new vigour.

31
.
Hock Solla Leeben
: A German song used for birthdays and anniversary celebrations – correctly, ‘Hoch soll er leben' (i.e. ‘three cheers for him').

32
.
a brother killed at Loos
: the battle of Loos, 25– 28 September 1915, during the wider Artois–Loos offensive by the French and British in the autumn of 1915.

33
.
chop wood in Holland
: the Kaiser fled to the Netherlands from Belgium on 10 November 1918. The Dutch government granted him asylum on the condition that he would abstain from future political activity, and Wilhelm II confirmed his resignation on 28 November. He spent the rest of his life at his house in Doorn, reportedly passing his time in chopping wood.

34
.
Peace Treaty
: Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919. It was strongly opposed in Germany and by many Allied politicians due to its particularly harsh reparation demands and the fact that Germany had to acknowledge sole responsibility for the war.

First published in the
New Yorker
in June 1975. The text used here has been taken from
The Penguin Book of British Comic Short Stories
(1990).

1
.
ESP
: extra-sensory perception.

2
.
The Grand Old Duke of York
: A popular nursery rhyme.

3
.
treaty of Brest-Litowsk
: peace treaty between Russia, Germany and its allies, signed on 3 March 1918, in which Russia ceded a third of its population in the Baltic region, Finland and Poland, to the German Empire.

4
.
‘I truly wish I were a fox or a bird'
: from a letter D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930, see Biographies, p. 395) wrote to his former neighbour in Cornwall, the Scottish composer Cecil Gray (1895– 1951)on 12 March 1918. Having been evicted from their Cornish cottage the previous spring, the Lawrences were about to take a new house, which inspired Lawrence with panic.

5
.
Bernard Shaw who was telling somebody to shut up
: the Irish playwright, Nobel Prize winner and socialist George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) strongly opposed the war and wrote numerous essays and articles against it. He was also an open critic of the Versailles peace treaty. His wartime writings were collected and published as
What I Really Wrote About the War
(1930).

6
.
Tout le monde à la bataille!
: ‘Everyone to arms!' A reference to General Foch's (1851–1929) Meuse-Argonne offensive, 26 September– 11 November 1918. French, British and American forces were to attack along the entire Western Front, joining forces in a final effort at breaking the German lines.

7
.
the time the
Vindictive
was sunk in Ostend harbour
: In a massive military action, British naval forces attacked the German bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge in April 1918, aiming to block the harbours. HMS
Vindictive
, laden with cement, was sunk to effect this blockade.

8
.
The Playboy of the Western World
: a play by J. M. Synge, first performed in Dublin and subsequently in 1907 at the Court Theatre in London. It is set in a public-house during the early 1900s, where the main character, Christy Mahon, thrills a large audience with an account of how he allegedly killed his father.

9
.
Picasso was getting married
: he married Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova on 18 June 1918.

10
.
the Silver Wedding of King George V and Queen Mary
: the celebrations took place on 6 July 1918.

11
.
the Czar and his family
: the assassination of the Romanov family in the wake of the Russian revolution. On 17 July 1918, Nicholas II (1868–1918), his wife and five children were shot in the basement of Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg to prevent their rescue by counter-revolutionary forces.

12
.
Bertrand Russell
: an ardent pacifist, the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) opposed British participation in the war, and worked for the No Conscription Fellowship from 1916 onwards. In January 1918 he published an article in the
Tribunal
, suggesting that American soldiers might be used as strikebreakers in England after East End dockworkers had refused to
load a ship bound for Russia, the
Jolly George
, with munitions in early 1918. Russell's article was seen as criminal agitation, and he was sentenced to six months' imprisonment.

13
.
A certain oration by Mr Asquith
: Herbert Henry Asquith (1852– 1928), prime minister 1908–16. Blamed by many for the unsuccessful conduct of the Somme offensive, Asquith had resigned in December 1916 and was succeeded by David Lloyd George (1863–1945). As Liberal opposition leader, however, he remained a public figure, and gave the speech referred to here in Parliament, following Lloyd George's, on 18 November 1918. Asquith's eldest son, Raymond, was killed during the battle of the Somme in September 1916 (see
note 18
).

14
.
that damned Welsh goat
: despite his public proclamations of (professional) friendship, Asquith did not like Lloyd George, whose takeover as prime minister ended Asquith's tenure in 1916. Lloyd George was commonly considered a more fitting wartime leader; Asquith's hesitant policies had been much criticized in the press.

15
.
I have a rendezvous with death
: a poem by the American Alan Seeger (1888–1916), who served in the French Foreign Legion during the First World War.

16
.
Putting his arm around a lady's shoulder in a Daimler motor car
: Asquith was well known as a ladies' man and had a number of intimate female correspondents, even though he was happily married. He had a prominent affair with young socialite Venetia Stanley (1887–1948), a friend of his daughter Violet, who eventually married one of Asquith's
protêgês
, the Liberal MP Edwin Samuel Montagu.

17
.
What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
: the opening lines to ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth' by Wilfred Owen (1893–1918).

18
.
All things have become new
: From Asquith's speech, on 18 November 1918, to the House of Commons, in support of a resolution to congratulate King George V on the conclusion of the Armistice. Asquith's interpretation of the war stressed its ‘purifying' effect on the British people and the righteousness of the British cause, stating that the war ‘is and will remain by itself as a record of everything Humanity can dare or endure – of the extremes of possible heroism and… of possible baseness, and above and beyond all, the slow moving but in the end irresistible power of a great ideal'. The full text can be found in
Speeches by the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, KG
(1927).

First appeared in the
Spectator
, 23/30 December 1989. It was subsequently included in two anthologies of short stories,
Best English Short Stories 2
(1990) and
The Minerva Book of Short Stories 3
(1991).

First published in the
New Yorker
, 13 November 1995, and subsequently appeared in the author's
Cross Channel
(1996).

The cemeteries mentioned in this story – Cabaret Rouge, Caterpillar Valley, Thistle Dump, Quarry and Blighty Valley – are all British and Commonwealth war cemeteries on the Somme. Herbêcourt has one for troops from the United Kingdom and Australia. Some accommodate a few German graves.

1
.
field-service card
: field postcards, given out in the trenches to be sent as a faster substitute for letters and speed up the process of censoring. The soldiers could delete information that did not apply to them, but were not allowed to add any message of their own.

2
.
Thiepval
: the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme was opened in 1932. Thiepval is the largest British war memorial in the world, displaying the names of nearly 74,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who fell on the Somme between July 1916 and March 1918 without a known place of burial.

3
.
Ulster Tower
: commemorates the men of the 36
^th
Ulster Division, who fought and died on the Western Front.

4
.
THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE
: from the Book of Ecclesiastes, chosen for the Imperial War Graves Commission by Rudyard Kipling, who also composed the standard inscription for the headstones of the unknown, ‘A soldier of the Great War… Known unto God'.

5
.
Brigadier Sir Frank Higginson's domed portico
: shelter building at the entrance to Cabaret Rouge cemetery, designed by Higginson (1890–1958) in his function as secretary of the Imperial War Graves Commission.

6
.
Sir Edwin Lutyens
: the distinguished architect (1869–1944), appointed to the Imperial War Graves Commission in 1917–18.

7
.
the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month
: the exact time of the Armistice of 1918. Since 1945, the Armistice
has been commemorated on Remembrance Sunday, the second Sunday in November, when the fallen of all conflicts since 1914 are remembered. On 7 November 1919 King George V issued a proclamation calling for the observance of a two-minute silence in ‘reverent remembrance of the glorious dead'; it still takes place on 11 November each year, and at the services of Remembrance across the United Kingdom.