Lingo of No Man’s Land: A World War 1 Slang Dictionary

To mark the centenary of the First World War, authors are flooding the popular market with fictional accounts of fighting in the trenches. Yet, only with the reproduction of firsthand material like the Slang Dictionary of Canadian soldier Lorenzo Napoleon Smith can readers properly appreciate the lasting impact of the Great War on life and language today. Though lacking the powerful emotion of war poetry or the worthy length of a novel, Smith’s slim volume of technical jargon and soldier’s slang offers instead a contemporary insight into the lives of the Tommys (British), Sammys (Americans) and Poilus (French infantrymen) fighting...