Etymology at War
'Terminology and Tradition in the German Army'
Recently, while chasing other quarry in the digital library of Czech Ministry of Defense, I ran across a remarkable little book. Published in 1942 by a small press in Hamburg, Terminology and Tradition in the German Army (Wort und Brauch im deutschen Heere) provides readers with a catechism of sorts, a series of two-hundred and fifty-seven pairs of questions and answers, each of which explains the origin of an artifact of German military culture.
In his introduction to the book, the author, Walter Transfeldt of the Prussian State Library, explained that his motivation for writing the book comes from the poor quality of the answers provided over the years to quizzes published in newspapers and magazines. A ‘people in arms’ (Volk in Waffen), he argued, ought to know more about military history, cultural history, and the language that they speak.
Many of the entries deal with words that had already fallen out of use in the German Army of 1942. Thus, the seven pages that Dr. Transfeldt devoted to the different flavors of cavalry that served in the German armies of the years before 1918, offer little to the student of contemporary tank tactics. Likewise, his chapter on fortification tells readers more about Vauban than the Maginot Line.
These exercises in old-timey trivia make Wort und Brauch a useful resource for students of warfare in the age of black powder and bayonets. It also provides micro-historians, whether genealogists, re-enactors, or the readers of memoirs, with a handy guide to military jargon.
That said, the book also provides information of value to people interested in the time in which it was written. Among other things, it explains billet designations, such as Fahnenschmied, that pop up, from time to time, in tables of organization laid down during the Second World War.
For many years, Fahnenschmied defied my attempts to find a suitable translation. (‘What’, I wondered, ‘was a “flag smith”?’) Thanks, however, to Wort und Brauch, I now know that the non-commissioned officers who bore that title provided horses with a combination of suitable footwear and rudimentary healthcare. Wort und Brauch also taught me the difference between a Fahnenschmied, who corresponded to a farrier in an English-speaking unit, and a Furrier, who supervised the supply of equine comestibles.
For Further Reading
