Famous German/British women in the time of the Christmas Truce

[FROGSMILE]

You don’t appear to have read the contemporaneous book the Middle Parts of Fortune either.  If not I do urge you to obtain an unexpurgated edition and enjoy it during this period of lockdown. It gives an exact representation of the vernacular that soldiers of that time used, not least because the author who wrote it was actually there and recounting from direct experience a decade after the war: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Manning

 

Also: https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar1/poets-and-poetry/frederic-manning/

Edited 24 March , 2020 by FROGSMILE

[Amitmis]

On 23/03/2020 at 17:36, FROGSMILE said:

 

Not really.  Steven gave you excellent advice exactly as was.  'The Middle Parts of Fortune' uses soldier's (working men's) uncensored argot throughout, but make sure you get the unexpurgated edition.  You'll get a shock. 

 

Two other good examples, but without the swearing, are Old Soldier's Never Die, by Frank Richards DCM and There's a Devil in the Drum, by John F Lucy.  Both were regular soldiers in 1914.  Used copies can be had cheaply online.

 

O.k, then, great. I'll get the book. Thanks a lot!

[Amitmis]

5 hours ago, Moonraker said:

Undoubtedly there were mannerisms, but very few soldiers would get that close to a prominent figure to notice them, and any newsreel film was very jerky. Some British officers might have known that the Kaiser had a weak arm from a tricky birth and a few senior German officers might have met Kitchener who had an eye defect. (You would need to check out exactly what these features were for yourself, it's past my bedtime.) Ordinary soldiers would be unaware of them.

Seeing none of us were there, we can't be sure how they spoke, and any primitive phonographs recordings that may exist are of well-spoken people, singers and so on. We may be confident that bad language featured prominently but for obvious reasons was seldom included in books. On the British side, and probably on the German too, regional accents would have been far more pronounced than they are today. Attempts at replicating the accents in written form usually serve to distract readers as they struggle to make out unfamiliarly-rendered words. (To go off topic, I found annoying P C Wren's "writing" an American accent for "Hank Miller" in one or more of the Beau Geste books.)

 

Yeah, I wouldn't try to 'write the accents', especially due to the novel being written in Hebrew, not English.

 

Thank you for your answers!

5 hours ago, FROGSMILE said:

You don’t appear to have read the contemporaneous book the Middle Parts of Fortune either.  If not I do urge you to obtain an unexpurgated edition and enjoy it during this period of lockdown. It gives an exact representation of the vernacular that soldiers of that time used, not least because the author who wrote it was actually there and recounting from direct experience a decade after the war: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Manning

 

Also: https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar1/poets-and-poetry/frederic-manning/

 

I will certainly get the book. Sounds like a treasure for me, for what I'm looking for.

 

Thank you!

[Gibbo]

Men in both sides might have heard of Steve Bloomer, a former England international footballer who was a coach in Germany in 1914 and was interned in the Ruhleben civilian detention camp during the war.

[Moonraker]

On 21/03/2020 at 00:13, Amitmis said:

...  I am trying to think of topics that British and German soldiers could have been talking about while meeting in no-man's-land. As the British knew very little German, for the most part, I'm guessing the main form of communication between these young boys was through name-dropping of famous figures, preferably actresses and models...

And the Germans would have known very little English, unless one or two had happened to be a waiter in Britain before the war. So any form of communication would have been insufficient to discuss famous figures or anything else. There might have been a few words in pidgin language, some gesticulating and exchange of token gifts, such as tobacco and chocolate.

 

It might have been easier for officers (how many took part in the Christmas Truce?), which brings us to the cliché that for some reason we re-enacted in my office 45 years ago:

 

German officer, complete with monocle and smoking a cigarette in holder: "Ach! I too was at Oxford. A pity, but for the war, we might have been friends." (I can't recall what inspired this - I use "inspired" loosely.)

[FROGSMILE]

9 hours ago, Amitmis said:

 

O.k, then, great. I'll get the book. Thanks a lot!

 

Incidentally Frank Richard's book that I also mentioned, 'Old Soldiers Never Die', specifically recounts his recollected experience of the 1914 Christmas Truce, as he saw it with 2nd Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers.  His narrative also conveys extremely well the day-to-day, front line life of a British infantry soldier of that time, and so it will be of great assistance to you in creating an authentic backdrop to your story.

Edited 25 March , 2020 by FROGSMILE

[BullerTurner]

On 23/03/2020 at 15:34, Amitmis said:

 

I have some reservations about that. Mainly because the literature of the time, I believe, had a tendency to 'round the edges' of day-to-day speech. I doubt it (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that any stammering or curse words would be included in a literary dialogue. I couldn't be able to tell, say, whether there's an overdramatization of the soldiers' speech or was that really the way they spoke back then.

 

Am I making any sense here?

 

 

I can assure you that Manning’s book rounded off no edges.  Have you read Frank Richards DCM MM’s books?  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Richards_(author)
 

I recommend you do.  And Henry Williamson’s fictionalised account of the Truce in his novel How Dear Is Life. https://www.henrywilliamson.co.uk/bibliography/a-lifes-work/how-dear-is-life  Although it may demoralise you, when you hear its authenticity.

Edited 25 March , 2020 by BullerTurner
Typo

[FROGSMILE]

2 hours ago, BullerTurner said:

I can assure you that Manning’s book rounded off no edges.  Have you read Frank Richards DCM MM’s books?  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Richards_(author)
 

I recommend you do.  And Henry Williamson’s fictionalised account of the Truce in his novel How Dear Is Life. https://www.henrywilliamson.co.uk/bibliography/a-lifes-work/how-dear-is-life  Although it may demoralise you, when you hear its authenticity.

Typical gunner....reading responses to your own posts, but not the whole thread...

[Amitmis]

On 25/03/2020 at 12:27, Gibbo said:

Men in both sides might have heard of Steve Bloomer, a former England international footballer who was a coach in Germany in 1914 and was interned in the Ruhleben civilian detention camp during the war.

 

Duly noted!

 

And thank the rest of commentors for the book recommendations, that are also most definitely duly noted!

[Chris_Baker]

Ahem.