I was reading a book a couple of months ago about the Royal Air Force and was surprised to find that a lot of the language the pilots used in WW II was part of my childhood vocabulary almost 30 years after the war ended. Those guys sure made an impression. Up until I read this book I had no idea that “jammy”, which we used for undeserved luck, was RAF slang. Is there such a thing as deserved luck? But I digress.
How different my generation was from the youngsters today who want to speak like urban American black “gangstas”. At least the guys we were taking a lead from, albeit without realising it,  helped save the world for democracy, or at least paid a key role in holding back the Nazi hordes when Britain stood alone – if you don't count India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies, and other odds and sods from the Commonwealth/Empire.
Or so I thought. More recently I was reading a book about the first penal colonies in Australia. I found that many of the criminal exiles spoke a language unintelligible to non-criminal outsiders. It was called “flash” or “cant”. And lo and behold the word for a juvenile who grabbed stolen property from a thief and darted away through the crowd with the evidence was “kiddy”. I remember my grandpa always talked about “the kiddies” and I'm sure he didn't mean child criminals who should have been behind bars. I refer to small children as “kids” all the time. So, I use 18th Century criminal slang all the time. I wonder what “rap” lingo will be used in 200 years time. I'm sure some of it will.
In a third book, yes I do read a lot, I came across the surprise origin of a word a lot of my school mates used for 'crazy”, usually “fighting crazy”. The word was “raj”. It turns out the word in Romany in origin. I would never have guessed. There was time when a gypsy was as welcome in the average home as a modern-day rapper determined to prove he's still “real”. Or whatever the term is.

I don't know how many memoirs there are from the First World War written by Germans. But I'd be interested to see what they have to say about killing prisoners. I've just finished a book, first published in 1929, in which a variety of British servicemen recounted their experiences during the war. What stuck me was that more than half of accounts mentioning the murder of surrendered or surrendering Germans were from former members of Highland regiments.
One account detailed how during the Battle of Loos in 1915 a platoon of Highlanders found about 20 Germans at their mercy in a captured trench. The Germans, who wounded some of the Highlanders as they stormed the trench, begged for mercy. Then one of the Scots shouted “Remember the Lusitania” and the Germans were slaughtered. The deaths of almost 1,200 civilians when a German submarine torpedoed the ocean liner were widely regarded at the time as a war crime. Another member of a Highland regiment told how that no German was left alive after his unit took a German trench at Ypres in 1917. In another book, a private in the 7th Camerons also recalled the murder of prisoners at Loos. 
Now, it could be that Scottish soldiers were more honest about whether they killed surrendered Germans. Or it could be that they were more likely to kill prisoners than most other British soldiers. The Canadians and Australians were also notorious for killing Germans who could have been easily captured.
About a year ago, while working on a companion volume to Scottish Military Disasters, I was going through some battalion histories from the First World War. Most did not explicitly mention the killing of surrendering Germans but simply noted with satisfaction that there were no survivors from such-and -such a German machinegun post after had been over-run. But the history of the Glasgow Highlanders was not so coy. The history tells the story of an officer of the Worcestershire Regiment who asked a sergeant from the unit how many German prisoners he’d taken during a recent battle. “Prisoners,” replied the sergeant. “None, my ammunitions no done yet.”
Winston Churchill would have understood. During his days as a war correspondent during the Boer War he quoted a British soldier complaining about his officers stopping his unit finishing off some captured enemy troops. “I never saw such cowards in my life,” the disgruntled soldier said of the Boer prisoners. “Shoot at you until ‘til you come up to them and then beg for mercy. I’d teach ‘em.”  In the Second World War this feeling was often translated to the pithy phrase “too late chum”. There's also the question of scared men being unable to flick a switch in their heads which turned them from frenzied killers, careless of their own safety, back into caring compassionate human beings. During the First World War these men were described as “battle drunk”.  
Now, soldiers who don't take prisoners can hardly expect to be taken prisoner. Something like one in four Scots who enlisted for military service in the First World War was killed. I wonder if there's a connection. As well as German retaliation for the murder of prisoners by the Scots, Germans who knew surrender was pointless would fight to the death and take as many Jocks with them as possible. One English soldier reported with “dismay” that the Scots were against taking prisoners because they claimed the Germans didn't take any.
The writer and poet Robert Graves wrote that a “division of Lowland territorials” was notorious for killing German wounded. A private from the London Scottish had a nervous breakdown after being ordered to take no prisoners during the Somme Offensive in 1916.
The Scots didn't have a monopoly when it came to killing prisoners - far from it. However, I'd be interested to see what the Germans had to say about the Scots and prisoners. Oh by the way, it's an accepted fact that the Germans were the first to kill prisoners as a matter of policy, in late August 1914.

I heard a pretty sad thing on the radio a couple of months back. It was on the BBC World Service. There was an item about some middle-class English teenager who was managing a carpet factory in one of the former Soviet-stans. His sole qualification for the job seemed to be that he was a middle-class English teenager on what is now called a “gap year”. This is when a youngster whose family have piles of cash goes travelling for a year before going to University. As far as I can gather nearly all British children who attend private school do this. Often at least part of year is spent doing some humanitarian project run by a Non-Governmental Organisation. The bulk of people working for British NGOs seem to have attended private schools.
Now what to me was sad was that there were probably plenty of unemployed carpet factory workers in the United Kingdom who could have run this factory. But they never got the chance.
When I started work what they call “interns” were rare. These are youngsters who can basically afford to work for free. They hope that if they do a good job they will be taken on as permanent employees. At worst the work experience looks good on their resume/CV. What this means is that in many fields of employment, the media for sure, the only people getting hired are rich kids. That seems a terrible, terrible, waste of the talent pool available. What happens to the talented kids who can't afford to work for free? They don't work.
There was a time when Scotland led the world in medicine and engineering. The list of Scottish inventions is long. This was because there was a time when Scotland was a world leader in offering free education to the masses. Now, it's a myth that this meant that any poor kid with brains could become a doctor or an engineer. Too often, poor kids had to go out and work to help support their families. But some, a lucky few, were plucked from poverty and allowed to fulfil their potential. The kid won, and society won by having the best medical or engineering talent in the country put to work. Now, thanks to intern system the best we can hope for is a mediocre middle-class kid. Yay!

I think it's a bit sad that during the World Cup Scots were wandering around with T-shirts bearing the letters ABE. ABE means Anyone But England. That's just hurtful and there's no doubt that many English people were hurt. During international football tournaments many English people throw their support behind Scotland, Wales or the Irelands if their own team is not playing or has already been knocked out. That is a far more generous attitude than that shown by wandering around in an ABE T-shirt.
Yes, the English can be insensitive when it comes to the feelings of their neighbours. As a kid I remember that the so-called “national” coverage of football matches between Scotland and England was so biased and inflammatory, thanks to the likes of dreadful English pundits such as Jimmy Hill, that it was a disgrace. And in athletics it was funny how when a Scottish runner was winning a race he was British but when he failed to cross the line first he became Scottish again. But two wrongs don't make a right.
Let's just tell the English that it's nothing personal. And that the T-shirts only against the English Football Association. It did after all cancel the world's oldest international football fixture because it claimed the Scots just weren't good enough to be worth playing.

If an American leak says it’s true, then it must be. That seemed to be the attitude of the bulk of the Canadian media last week when it was revealed that a US military bureaucrat had logged the deaths of four Canadian soldiers in 2006 Afghanistan as being the result of so called friendly fire.
Instead of being the starting point for a story about Canadian soldiers being killed in a so-called friendly fire incident, the story was that the Canadian military had lied when it said the men had died in a gun-battle with the Taliban. Basically for two days Canada’s military leaders were asked why they’d misled the public about how the soldiers died. It was only on Day Three that it seemed to occur to reporters that the bureaucrat who filled in the log, one of 75,000 documents released by WikiLeaks, might have got it wrong. Now, common sense would have suggested that the log should have been taken with a pinch of salt from the get-go. Honestly, what are the chances of four friendly fire deaths being kept secret for almost four years? A number of Canadian soldiers were involved in the battle in which the four died and we’re supposed to believe that not one of them spoke up: that no former colleague told the families of the dead how their loved ones really died. At any given time there are a number of Canadian journalists embedded with the military in Afghanistan. Are we supposed to believe that the ones there at the time were incompetent or complicit with the military's lie? The media coverage of the leaked friendly fire report certainly caused the families of the four soldiers – Shane Stachnik, Frank Mellish, William Cushley and Richard Nolan - some distress. Basically, they were being painted as naïve for taking the military’s word about how the men died.  Too many Canadian journalists are, literally, suckers when they hear the words “cover-up” and “leak”. Common sense and good journalistic procedures are cast aside and they don’t care who gets hurt. I think the fact that no soldiers have come out of the woodwork in the past week declaring that they're glad the truth has finally come out about it being a friendly-fire incident says a lot.