One of the most fascinating things to me about our army in France
are the variations of speech. I have sometimes closed my eyes when a
battalion has been marching past me on the road and tried to guess,
often with some measure of success, at the recruiting area of the
regiment from the men's accents or from their tricks of speech.
Take the Scottish regiments, for instance. I have little acquaintance
with the dialects of Scotland, but my ear has told me that the speech
of almost every Scottish regiment, save such regiments as the Gordons
and the Black Watch, that attract men from all over the United Kingdom,
differs.
I spent a most fascinating half hour one morning with a handful of
Glasgow newsboys serving in a famous Scottish regiment that wears the
trews. Their speech was unmistakably the speech of the Glasgow streets,
and their wits were as sharp as their bayonets. I told them they were
newsboys and newsboys they were, or of the same class, vanboys and the
like.
I visited the Cameron Highlanders--what was left of their Territorial
battalion--after the second battle of Ypres and heard, in the speech of
Inverness-shire, their story of the battle. Many of them speak Gaelic.
One of their officers confided to me that during the battle, requiring
two men to go down to the rear, the wires being cut, to ascertain the
whereabouts of the brigade headquarters, he selected two notorious deer
poachers as likely to have their wits about them.
It is a gratifying task, this identification of dialects. I have heard
two sappers "fra' Wigan" engaged in a lively argument with two privates
(from Cork) of the Leinster Regiment, in whose trench the two gentlemen
"fra' Wigan" were operating. A London cockney, say, from one of the
innumerable battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, would have understood
less of that conversation if it had been carried on in German, but only
a little less.
During the Battle of Ypres two privates of the Monmouthshire Regiment,
who were talking Welsh, were pounced upon by two prowling Southerners
from one of the home counties and carried off to brigade headquarters
as German spies. What with Welsh miners talking Welsh and Cameron
Highlanders Gaelic, the broad speech of the Yorkshire Geordines, the
homely burr of the Third Hussars and other regiments recruited in the
West Country, the familiar twang of the cockneys, the rich brogue of
the Irish regiments, the strong American intonation of the Canadians,
a man out here begins to realize of what composite layers our race is
formed.