WORDS MADE BY WAR.
Since the earliest ages men have made war on one another, and we have
a great crowd of words, new and old, connected with war. Some of these
are very simple words, especially the names of early weapons; some are
more elaborate and more interesting in their derivation.
The chief of all weapons, the sword, has its simple name from the Old
English language itself, and so has the spear. But it was after the
Norman conquest of England that war became more elaborate, with
armoured knights and fortified towers, and nearly all the names
connected with war of this sort come to us from the French of that
time. The word _war_ itself comes from the Old French word _werre_.
_Battle_, too, comes from the French of this time; and so do _armour_,
_arms_, _fortress_, _siege_, _conquer_, _pursue_, _tower_, _banner_,
and many other words. All of these words came into French originally
from Latin. _Knight_, however, is an Old English word. The French word
for knight, _chevalier_, never passed into English, but from it we got
the word _chivalry_.
The great weapons of modern warfare are the gun and the bayonet. There
are, of course, many kinds of guns, small and large. Formerly it was
the fashion to call the big guns by the name of _cannon_, but in the
great European war this word has hardly been used at all. They are all
"guns," from the rifles carried by the foot soldiers to the Maxims and
the great howitzers which each require a company of men to serve them.
The word _cannon_ comes from the French _canon_, and is sometimes
spelt in this way in English too. It means "great tube."
The derivation of the word _gun_ is more interesting. Gunpowder was
not really discovered until the fifteenth century, but long before
this a kind of machine, or gun, for hurling great stones, or sometimes
arrows, had been used. These instruments were called by the Latin word
_ballista_ (for the Romans had also had machines of this sort), which
comes from the Greek word _ballo_, meaning "throw." In the Middle Ages
weapons of this sort were called by proper names, just as ships are
now. A common name for them was the woman's name _Gunhilda_, which
would be turned into _Gunna_ for short. It is probably from this that
we get the word _gun_. The most interesting of all the guns used in
the Great War has only a number for its name. It is the famous French
'75, and takes this name merely from a measurement.
The special weapon of the foot soldier, or infantryman, is the
bayonet. This is a short blade which the foot soldier fixes on the
muzzle of his rifle before he advances to an attack. In the trenches
his weapon is the rifle; before the order is given to go "over the
parapet"--that is, to climb out of the trenches, to run forward and
attack the enemy at close quarters--he "fixes his bayonet." The word
_bayonet_ probably comes from _Bayonne_, the name of a town in France.
The word _infantry_ itself, now used to describe regiments of foot
soldiers armed with the ordinary weapons, comes to us, like most of
our words connected with war, from the French. We have already seen
that the words of this sort which we borrowed in the Middle Ages were
Norman-French words descended from Latin. But after the use of
gunpowder in war became general there were many new terms; and as at
this time the Italians were the people who fought most, and wrote most
about fighting, many words relating to the methods of war after the
close of the Middle Ages were Italian words. It is true that we
learned them from the French, for the great writers on military
matters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were Frenchmen. But
they borrowed many words from the Italian writers of the fifteenth
century. One of these words is _infantry_, which means a number of
junior soldiers or "infants"--the regiments of foot soldiers being
made up of young men, while the older and more experienced soldiers
made up the cavalry.
This, again, is a word which we borrowed from the French, and which
the French had borrowed from the Italians. _Cavalry_ is, of course,
the name for horse soldiers, and the Italian word _cavalleria_, from
which it comes, was itself derived from the Latin word _caballus_, "a
horse." The general weapon for a cavalryman is the "sabre," a sword
with a curved blade. This, again, comes to us from the French, but was
probably originally an Eastern word. It is quite common for officers,
in reckoning the number of men in an army, to speak of so many
"bayonets" and so many "sabres," instead of "infantry" and "cavalry."
Many of the words which people began to use familiarly during the
great European war first came into English in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, a time when it seemed to be the ordinary state
of affairs for some, at least, of the European countries to be at war
with one another. _Bivouac_ is a word which was used a good deal in
descriptions of earlier wars. It is a German word, which came into
English at the time of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) in Germany.
It means an encampment for a short time only (often for the night),
without tents. It plainly has not much connection with modern trench
warfare.
Another word which came from the German at the same time may serve to
remind us that the German soldier of to-day is not very much unlike
his ancestors of three hundred years ago. The word _plunder_ was
originally a German word meaning "bed-clothes" or other household
furnishing. From the fact that so much of this kind of thing was
carried off in the fighting of this terrible war, the word came to
have its present sense of anything taken violently from its rightful
owner. It must be confessed that the word was also used a great deal
in the English Civil War, which was, of course, fought at the same
time as the end of the Thirty Years' War.
It was also in the English Civil War that we first find the word
_capitulation_, which now generally means to surrender on certain
conditions. Before this, _capitulation_ had more the meaning which it
still keeps in _recapitulation_. It meant an arrangement under
headings, and the word probably was transferred from describing the
terms of surrender to describing the surrender itself.
One of the many words connected with war which came into the English
language from the French in the seventeenth century was _parade_,
which means the showing off of troops, and came into French from an
Italian word which itself came from the Latin word _parare_, "to
prepare." Another of these words which has been much used in
descriptions of the battles of the Great War, and especially in the
"Battle of the Rivers" in the autumn of 1914, is _pontoon_. Pontoons
are flat-bottomed boats by means of which soldiers make a temporary
bridge across rivers, generally when the permanent bridges have been
destroyed by the enemy. The word is _ponton_ in French, and comes from
the Latin _pons_, "a bridge." Most words of this sort in French ending
in _on_ take the ending _oon_ in English. Thus _ballon_ in French
becomes _balloon_ in English. _Barracks_ also comes from the French
_baraque_, and the French had it from the Spanish or Italian _barraca_
or _baraca_; but no one knows whence these languages got the word.
The word _bombard_, also much used during the Great War, came into
English at the end of the seventeenth century from the French word
_bombarder_, which came from the Latin word _bombarda_, an engine for
throwing stones, and which in its turn came from the Latin word
_bombus_, meaning "hum." Even a stone hurled with great force through
the air makes a humming noise, and the "singing" of the bombs and
shells hurled through the air became a very familiar sound to the
soldiers who fought in the Great War. The word _bomb_, too, comes from
the French _bombe_.
The words _brigade_ and _brigadier_ also came from the French at this
time. So, too, did the word _fusilier_, a name which some British
regiments still keep (for example, the Royal Fusiliers), though they
are no longer armed with the old-fashioned musket known as the
_fusil_, the name of which also came from the French, which had it
from the Latin word _focus_, "a hearth" or "fire." It is curious how
the names of modern British regiments, not even carrying the weapons
from which they have their names, should take us back in this way to
the days of early Rome.
The word _patrol_, which was used very much especially in the early
days of the Great War, has an interesting origin. It may mean a small
body of soldiers or police sent out to go round a garrison, or camp,
or town, to keep watch; or, again, it may mean a small body of troops
sent on before an advancing army to "reconnoitre"--that is, to spy out
the land, the position of the enemy, etc. The word _patrol_ literally
means to "paddle in mud," for the French word, _patrouille_, from
which it came into English in the seventeenth century, came from an
earlier word with this meaning.
The word _campaign_, by which we mean a number of battles fought
within a certain time, and generally according to a plan arranged
beforehand, also came from the French word _campagne_ at the beginning
of the eighteenth century--a century of great wars and many campaigns.
The word was more used in those earlier wars than it is now, because
in those days the armies used practically never to fight in the
winter, and so each summer during a war had its "campaign." The
earlier meaning of the French word _campagne_, and one which it still
keeps besides this later meaning, is "open country," the kind of
country over which battles were generally fought.
_Recruit_ is another word which came into English from the French at
this time. It, again, is a word which has been used a great deal in
the European war. It came from the French word _recrue_, which also
means a newly-enlisted soldier. The French word _croître_, from which
_recrue_ came, was derived from the Latin word _crescere_, "to
increase."
All these words, we should notice, have now a figurative use. We speak
of "recruits" not only to the army, but to any society. Thus we may
say a person is a valuable "recruit" to the cause of temperance, etc.
A "campaign" can be fought not only on the field of battle, but
through newspapers, meetings, etc. It is in this sense that we speak
of the "campaign" for women's suffrage, etc.
Many words relating to the dress and habits of our soldiers have
curious origins. We say now quite naturally that a man is "in khaki"
when we mean that he is a soldier, because the peculiar yellow-brown
colour which is known as "khaki" is now the regular colour of the
uniform of the British soldier. In earlier days the British soldier
was generally a "redcoat," but in modern trench warfare it is so
important that the enemy should not be able to pick out easily the
position of groups of men in order to "shell" them, that the armies of
all nations use gray or brown or other dull shades. _Khaki_ is a word
which came into English through the South African War, when the policy
of clothing the soldiers in this way was first begun on a large scale.
It comes from a Hindu word, _khak_, which means "dust." The object of
this kind of clothing for our soldiers is that they shall not be
easily distinguished from the soil of the trenches and battle-fields.
When a soldier or officer or any other person who is generally in
uniform wears ordinary clothes we say he is "in mufti." This, again,
is an Arab word meaning "Mohammedan priest."
The soldiers in the Great War used many new words which became a
regular part of their speech. They were chiefly "slang," but it is
quite possible that some of them may pass into good English. We shall
see something of them in a later chapter.