Free Tommy by Richard Holmes

harmlessly overhead. But Pissing Jenny and Whistling Percy were shells from German 9-inch naval guns, and the Wipers Express was a heavy gun notably used at Second Ypres. A whiz-bang or a pip-squeak was the shell from a German 77-mm field gun, often fired at such close range that the whistle of the shell’s arrival almost coincided with the sound of its explosion: Sidney Rogerson wrote of ‘the double-tap of a Hun 5.9 inch or the Whiz-Bang! of our eighteen pounders.’ A Coal Box or a Jack Johnson was a heavy shell which burst with a cloud of black smoke. Five-nines and nine-twos were German 5.9- and 9.2-inch guns, the decimals generally omitted by those who had heard the brutes. Two German machine guns near Festubert were christened Quinque Jimmy and Blighty Albert. A rifle, when not a bundook or a shooting iron, might be a hipe, from NCOs’ practice of mispronouncing words when giving orders to give extra snap, as in: ‘Order … hipe!’ A bayonet could be a tin-opener, a toothpick or a pigsticker.
    Soldiers often sang on the march. Unlike their German opponents or their French allies, as they tramped the pavé they had a marked aversion to overtly patriotic songs (though these had their place at concerts) and preferred a mixture of the mawkish and sentimental, the pop songs of the day, borrowed from music halls, and the obscene and irreverent. Captain Dunn believed that:
    The best-known snatches are short, four-line pieces that some vocal, inglorious Milton has been delivered of suddenly. They are fitted, as a rule, to a metrical or psalm tune. They can hardly be called songs, they’re not songs. Their drollery makes them catch on, and they get an extraordinary circulation just to be hummed or trolled at odd times, with more or less variation according to individual taste and ingenuity … Here is one that is merely vulgar; it illustrates the inconsequence and clowning that give most of them their distinctively English flavour.
    You can wash me in the water
    In which you’ve washed your dirty daughter
    And I shall be whiter
    Than the whitewash on the wall.
    She may be the ‘Colonel’s’, ‘Quarter’s’, or ‘Sergeant’s’ daughter. 21
    The French sometimes produced bands and colour parties just behind the lines to give a stirring welcome to troops coming out of the line. But as one British soldier wrote:
    One of our younger officers copied the idea; and we were to sing; and about a minute later we were to stop singing. We had not got the thing right, it seemed … We all sang with extremely improper versions to the tune of ‘We Wanted to Go Home’. 22
    Such frivolity could offend the serious-minded. Captain Robert Dolby, captured when his regimental aid post was overrun by the Germans at First Ypres, heard, in his prison-camp, how:
    The [German] recruit however sings all the time; on the march he is ordered to sing. One can hear the Sergeant-Majors shouting
‘Singen Sie’.
And their songs are simple, homely subjects as a rule; of home, of peace, of quiet farms, of golden harvests. There are, of course, the more arrogant songs like ‘Deutschland über Alles’ and the ‘Wacht am Rhein’. But on the whole one cannot fail to be struck with the quality of the verses. German songs are melodious, simple, and speak of noble subjects. The French songs, barring the ‘Marseillaise’ are trifling and often vulgar; but our English songs are futile: American rag-time and the odious ‘Tipperary’. If songs be a test of national character, then the German has much to his credit. 23
    It’s a Long Way to Tipperary
was indeed a favourite throughout the war, with alternative words beginning, ‘It’s the wrong way to tickle Mary … ’, and ending rather worse. There was the supremely lugubrious
We are Fred Karno’s Army,
its words readily adaptable to fit the names of