Outside rhetorical positioning of this kind, fire occupied a prime place in military diction, whether in assessments of firepower (‘the total effectiveness of the fire of guns, missiles, etc., of a military force’, a word first used in 1913 according to the OED) or in offering accounts of fire-trenches – another form which antedates WW1 (it is dated to 1909 in the OED) but which was swiftly assimilated into the complexities of trench warfare after 1914. What a splendid virtue! To see it on the battlefield, under fire, is to see it transfigured, consecrated into the sublime ( Daily Express 10 Sept 1914) Comradeship, which breeds simple faith, fine endurance, noble self-sacrifice rising to self-obliteration. Across the Words in War-Time Archive, the phrase appears with striking frequency, appearing in sources which report on action from the Front as well as in the purple prose by which, early in the war, the ‘sublime comradeship’ of war could, as in the extract below, be extolled:Ĭomradeship! It is a wonderful word, a binding of soul to soul, heart to heart in a bond that death alone can sever. To be under fire is perhaps an inevitable condition of war.
