When Private Mugrums Parley Voos

In late spring of 1918, as thousands of A.E.F. doughboys were arriving in France, an article in the American military newspaper The Stars and Stripes offered “An Earful of Suggestions for Boys Back Home.” One suggestion advised those headed “Over There,”

Throw away your ‘parley-voo’ books and forget all the French the Y.M. has been teaching you in your cantonment huts this winter.  You won’t need it.  “We have the natives so well acquainted with United States now that they understand everything we say—even when we get unduly accurate on one another’s ancestry.  Even if you do get stuck, there’s only one way to learn French—that is to talk it, and make it up as you go along.  In the course of time you’ll get at least half of what you want.”*

Charles (“Chick”) Divine “the babbling Rupert Brooke of the New York Division, [who] slings as hot a sonnet as anybody,”** was a newspaper reporter on The New York Sun before the war. 

Divine recalled his efforts to join the army after war was declared:

Trying to enlist and being rejected twice for underweight, wondering, fatuously, what to do next.  Hegira to Binghamton.  Cottage by the river.  Lots of sleep and rustic diet.  Gained weight.  Appearing at the Binghamton armory for another physical examination.  First drinking many quarts of water. Passed examination!***

Combining self-deprecating humor with a bit of swagger, Divine’s verse and comical essays were enormously popular, and the New York Sun praised his collection of war poetry as “the Happiest Verse of America at War.”†  Other reviews praised City Ways and Company Streets for capturing “the real spirit of the American citizen soldier,”†† while the writer himself was described as “a sort of camp Kipling; he is sometimes grave, sometimes gay, but always cheerful.”††† 

It’s worth considering the ways in which Divine’s poetry both reflected and shaped  Americans’ sense of their identity and their attitudes towards the war. Americans wanted a quick and easy victory, and so they welcomed the “Happiest Verse of America at War.” The Cornell Alumni News said of the former student, “Divine is a true poet.  He never tries to write what he hasn’t seen or felt. He never poses. He is no rhapsodist. In the sincere work of such as he, in the broadening and deepening of their experience and the increase of their delineative skill, lies the immediate hope of American poetry.  England has had great and living verse out of this tragic war; we should have it too.  From three thousand miles away, it will come to us, celebrating in fit and memorable measures the part we are taking in the effort to save the freedom we have always died for.”§

Serving in France, Divine wrote of the language battles doughboys waged behind the front lines; the following poem was published in The Stars and Stripes in late October of 1918.

When Private Mugrums Parley Voos

I can count my francs and santeems—

If I’ve got a basket near—

An’ I speak a wicked “bon jour,”

But the verbs are awful queer.

An’ I lose a lot o’ pronouns

When I try to talk to you,

For your eyes are so bewitchin’

I forget to parlay voo.

In your pretty little garden,

With the bench beside the wall,

An’ the sunshine on the asters,

An’ the purple phlox so tall,

I should like to whisper secrets

But my language goes askew—

With the second person plural

For the more familiar “too.”

In your pretty little garden

I could always say “juh tame,”

But it ain’t so very subtle,

An’ it ain’t not quite the same

As “You’ve got some dandy earrings,”

Or “Your eyes are nice and brown”—

But my adjectives get manly

Right before a lady noun.

Those infinitives perplex me;

I can say you're “tray jolee,”

But beyond that simple statement

All my tenses don't agree.

I can make the Boche “comprenney”

When I meet ’em in a trench,

But the softer things escape me

When I try to yap in French.

In your pretty little garden

Darn the idioms that dance

On your tongue so sweet and rapid,

Ah, they hold me in a trance!

Though I stutter an’ I stammer,

In your garden, on the bench,

Yet my heart is writin’ poems

When I talk to you in French.

            —Charles Divine

Most American soldiers had never left their home states, and many had never encountered any language other than English.  The Soldiers’ French Phrase Book, published in Chicago, offered “a convenient and serviceable aid to the intelligible expression in French of words and phrases.”  Phrases that were deemed useful included translations of the following:

How is your father/mother/wife/husband?

Did you sleep well last night?

He has been wounded in the chest.

A bullet pierced his lips.

Are you telling me the truth?

My sweetheart.

You will always be in my memory.

Please write to me.

Are you fond of flowers?

Do you dance?

She is a doll.

Popular songs of the time such as “Wee, Wee, Marie” and “I’m Crazy Over Every Girl in France” celebrated the romantic inclinations of American soldiers while laughing at their linguistic shortcomings, with lyrics such as,

Young Sammy Brown was a volunteer,

Went off to France like a cavalier,

Sammy learned to say ‘oui oui/ wee wee’

You for me, ‘Ma cherie.’°

Historian Hilary Kaiser in French War Brides in America estimates that “approximately 10,000 members of the AEF ended up marrying European women" and of the weddings that were officially recorded, about 6,000 were with French women.°° The Stars and Stripes’ advice to doughboys seems accurate: even halting attempts to speak French gained some lovelorn American soldiers the desires of their hearts.      

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* Earful of Suggestions for Boys Back Home,” Stars and Stripes, 22 Feb. 1918, p. 3. 

** “Here are the Men Who Launch the Gas Attack,” Gas Attack of the New York Division 23 March 1918, p. 21.

*** Howard Willard Cook, Our Poets of Today, Moffat, Yard & Co, 1918, p. 109. 

† “Divine, True Soldier Poet,” The Sun, 25 Aug. 1918, section 6, p. 1.

†† Howard Willard Cook, Our Poets of Today, Moffat, Yard & Co, 1918, p. 104. 

††† “Current Poetry,” Literary Digest, 23 Mar. 1918, p. 46.

§ Cornell Alumni News, 24 Oct. 1918, vol. 21, no. 5, p. 55. 

° “I’m Crazy Over Every Girl in France,” lyrics by Alfred Bryan, composed by Pete Wendling and Jack Wells, 1917.

°° Hilary Kaiser, French War Brides in America, Greenwood Publishing, 2008, pp. xxiii-xxv.

In the glen where I was young

Bluebells at Ballachulish Scotland, photo by Jim Monk 

When asked by a friend on a countryside walk why he had decided to volunteer and fight in the Great War, English poet Edward Thomas is said to have stopped, picked up a handful of earth, and replied, “Literally, for this.”*  It is difficult to overestimate the attachment soldiers felt for their homelands. 

In Scotland, the pull of the land echoed with loss: the defeat of the Scots at Culloden in 1746 and the subsequent Highland Clearances that altered traditional ways of life.  One of the most popular Gaelic songs of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century was the mournful “An Gleann ‘s an robh mi òg”— “The Glen where I was young” — written by Neil MacLeod and sung to the traditional tune “When the Kye come hame.”** Translated into English in an 1893 issue of The Highland Monthly and recorded in February of 1914 on 78rpm vinyl, many would have known the lyrics that nostalgically recalled “my bonnie native glen,” where birds sang among the trees, lassies “gaed a fauldin,’” children played along the banks of the lochs, and friends and families gathered about the fire to tell stories of

Averon River near Alness, photo by George Evans 

the brave and mighty men,

That were ance the pride an’ glory

O’ my bonnie native glen.†

Ewart Alan Mackintosh, though born in Brighton, spent childhood holidays in his father’s native Scotland, where the family stayed at Alness. The boy learned to speak Gaelic and play the bagpipes, and when war broke out in 1914, Mackintosh joined the Seaforth Highlanders.  His first volume of poetry, A Highland Regiment, was published in 1917, and it included a war poem that alludes to the Gaelic folk song penned by Neil MacLeod over 35 years before. 

Anns an Gleann’san Robh Mi Og

In the Glen where I was young

Blue-bell stems stood close together,

In the evenings dew-drops hung

Clear as glass above the heather.

I’d be sitting on a stone,

6th Seaforth Highlanders,  Aug 1918
© IWM (Q 7007) 

Legs above the water swung,

I a laddie all alone,

In the glen where I was young.

Well, the glen is empty now,

And far am I from them that love me,

Water to my knees below,

Shrapnel in the clouds above me;

Watching till I sometimes see,

Instead of death and fighting men,

The people that were kind to me,

And summer in the little glen.

Hold me close until I die,

Lift me up, it’s better so;

If, before I go, I cry,

It isn’t I’m afraid to go;

Only sorry for the boy

Sitting there with legs aswung

In my little glen of joy,

In the glen where I was young. 

            —August 1914, Ewart Alan Mackintosh

Written in the early days of the war, each of the poem’s three stanzas occupies a different place in time: the past, present, and future.  The first stanza visits an idyllic moment from years gone by: a young boy enjoys springtime solitude amongst wildflowers and water.  In the second stanza, grown to be a soldier, the young man crouches in the muddy waters of a trench and endures his baptism of fire.  Staring at the death and chaos that surround him, he allows himself to slip into the world of imagination, returning to loved ones and his home in the Scottish glen.  In the third stanza, the soldier foresees his own end: cradled by his comrades-at-war, his last regret is not for himself, but for the boy he once was and for the innocence that the war killed long before it claimed his body in death.   

Mackintosh would have known what it was to hold the body of a dying soldier; his best-known poem, “In Memoriam: Private D. Sutherland Killed in Action in the German Trench May 16, 1916, and the Others Who Died,” relates his guilt and grief at not being able to save one of the young men under his command.  Both “In Memoriam” and “Anns an Gleann’san Robh Mi Og” lament not only the casualties of war, but the loss of innocence that war has stolen from those who fight.

Mackintosh himself was badly wounded during the Somme while fighting at High Wood. Sent back to England to recover, he was next assigned as a training officer near Cambridge, where he met and wooed Sylvia Marsh, a Quaker VAD nurse. They became engaged and planned to marry after the war.  The closing lines of MacLeod’s Gaelic folk song express the eternal wish to return home:

When life’s gloamin’ settles down,

An’ my race is at an en’,

‘Tis my wish that death should find me

In my bonnie native glen.

Mackintosh, however, never returned to Scotland.  He was killed by a sniper during the Battle of Cambrai on November 21, 1917 and is buried in France.  The obituary of the 24-year-old  Military Cross recipient appeared in the London Times and lamented the death of “A New Heroic Poet”: “What Lieutenant E. A. Mackintosh sang about in his poems he has at last accomplished. The war created him; the war has taken him away.”††

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* Eleanor Farjeon, cited in Matthew Hollis’ Now All Roads Lead to France, Faber and Faber, 2011, p. 287.

** Inverness Gaelic Society, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, vol. 9, Free Press Printing Company, 1881, p. 64.

† Le Niall Macleoid translated by Fion, “An gleann ‘s an robh mi og,” The Highland Monthly, vol. 4, 1893, pp. 95-97.

†† “Roll of Honour, 143 Casualties to Officers, Personal Notes: A New Heroic Poet,” The Times, no. 41652, 4 Dec, 1917, p. 4.