Great War humour grisly and gruesome

By Blake Sittler

SASKATOON — Tim Cook is arguably the country’s foremost expert on the Canadian infantry in the First World War. He is the author of an award-winning two-volume history on the subject entitled At the Sharp End, and Shock Troops. Cook is the Great War historian at the Canadian War Museum and an adjunct research professor at Carleton University, Ottawa.

Cook’s writing on the war is not romantic, but descriptive and graphic. A reader could get trenchfoot after wandering through Cook’s detailed history of the war from Ypres (April 1915) and Vimy Ridge (April 1917) to Hill 70 (Aug. 1917) and Passchendaele (June - Nov., 1917). Stories of boredom, fear, hunger, disease and death far outnumber stories of heroism.

At a recent lecture in Convocation Hall at the University of Saskatchewan, Cook began with a series of questions, “How did soldiers cope in war? What were the psychological tools that they used to shield themselves from the constant strain of death and destruction?”

Training, tactics and belief in a just cause were important, but in personal interviews with nearly 30 veterans he heard stories and jokes.

It was not gentle humour, Cook explained, but, in the words of regimental medical officer Lord Moran to Winston Churchill, “humour that made a mockery of life, and scoffed at our own frailty . . . humour that touched everything with ridicule.” Another writer described the shield of humour as simply gruesome.

Cook pointed out that the young soldiers needed to retreat mentally from the bombs and decaying bodies of their fallen comrades, and that retreat often came in the form of a dark, grisly humour.

“The Western Front was the place where youth and laughter went to die,” Cook said — an allusion to Siegfried Sassoon’s poem, Suicide in the Trenches.

The laughter was not always dark, though. Much of the Canadian army came from civilian life, and they brought with them their culture of songs, jokes and quips.

“This is a story of resiliency, laughter as armour, the joke as a crutch, the song as a shield,” said Cook.

Songs like It’s a Long Way to Tipperary and K-K-Katie were popular ditties sung by soldiers and civilians alike. Other songs, such as When This Lousy War is Over and Has Anyone Seen the Sergeant? were sung only by soldiers because only they could see the life-sustaining humour of a song whose chorus chirped, “He’s hangin’ on the old barbwire.”

Cartoons passed from one soldier to another through frontline trench newspapers like The Dead Horse Corner Gazette. In one, two men lie in a foxhole with explosions and bullets all around. One man is yelling, “Well, if you know of a better hole, go to it!” In another, a wounded soldier joked that he was so filled with shrapnel that they carried him off not in an ambulance but an ammunition wagon.

The humour is that of the anti-hero. Soldiers were scared but they did not want to show it, and humour let them put on a brave face. They mocked the cold, the weather, the lice, the rats — even sudden death.

Cook argued that war had the potential to radically dehumanize the men who were forced to leave their farms, offices, bus and mail routes to kill other men. Somehow, though, they took a piece of their home, their culture, and humour to the front, and used that memory to stay human in an inhuman environment.

Soldiers’ humour offers a clue as to how ordinary young men refused to be broken in the machine of war. “In a world of destruction and death,” said Cook, “these Canadians chose creation and life.”

Cook’s lecture took place only days after the death of John Babcock, the last surviving Canadian veteran of the Great War. He observed a moment of silence to remember all those who lost their lives in the conflict.