Objectively speaking ...

A few objects from the world of the book:

A collar badge from the actual 108th Battalion, raised in Selkirk, Manitoba, and later absorbed into the 14th Reserve Battalion.



A badge given by the Imperial Munitions Board to one of its women workers; 30,000 Canadian women worked in munitions factories across Canada.



A hand-sewn cross on a Nursing Sister's veil. Two thousand four hundred Canadian Nurses served overseas; 18 died in action.



A Returned Man's Service pin; these were numbered, assigned, and prized.



Medallion marking the Canadian Corps Reunion of 1934; Sir Arthur Currie, the Corps Commander by the war's end, the Victor of Hill 70, Amiens, Passchendaele, Canal du Nord, the Drocourt-Queant Line, and Mons, had just died.



A Great War Veterans' Association pin. The GWVA was the rank-and-file equivalent of the more officer-friendly Legion



A handful of glass marbles ...



... & what they were hurled against (see Chapter 3).

There and Back Again

Click on the image to enlarge.

Our armies swore terribly in Flanders ...

So runs the one of the epigraphs to my latest acquisition in the search for period feel. The source is Tristram Shandy, a work to which & after this our exile has been compared. The new old book under consideration here is Soldier & Sailor Words & Phrases and the source for it was The Grenadier, a superb book and militaria shop in Port Perry, Ontario. Much of the bibliography at the back of the novel came from this store, whose proprietor, Dave Zink, still issues an actual paper catalogue of his inventory.


The language of the Great War was not our language and specifically, the words used by the men as they cursed and sang has been lost to us forever. Time and again, as I read narrative after narrative, history after history, the author would say something like, "At this point the Colonel let out such an oath whose length and colour alone ...." You will search in vain for the oath.


This book is not so much about swearing as it is about slang, the child of English and Army English. It covers both Imperial and Dominion forces, as well as terms from the American Expeditionary Force (or A.E.F., which, the first page informs us, was also taken to stand for "After England Failed"). Etymologies are given when appropriate (a large number of terms come from the British Army in India); definitions often run to a page in length.


It is altogether a superb volume, one of many that go towards researching the sequel to & after this our exile.