RESEARCH ARTICLE ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’: Trench Culture of the Great War Graham Seal Abstract English-speaking soldiers of the Great War created a large ‘trench press’, a body of periodicals by, for, and about their experiences. They contain a wealth of folkloric material and indications of its significance and functions. While acknowledging the constraints involved in retrieving once-living traditions from the fragmentary survival of mostly makeshift periodicals, this article describes and discusses the processes involved in the creation and development of an especially well-defined folk culture in unprecedented and extreme circumstances. While some elements of soldier folklore, especially song, verse, and language, have been the subject of usually discrete interest by folklorists, this is the first attempt to understand a range of folkloric practice and expression in the context of a particular set of combat circumstances. Introduction It is not often that we can precisely date and locate the beginning of a new culture. But in the case of the trench culture of the Great War we can say definitely that it did not exist before the Battle of Mons in August 1914. The oral culture of the trench evolved mainly on the Western Front, and also in the Dardanelles campaign of 1915. Central to this culture was the sense of shared suffering and interest in survival that held men together and sustained them through the darkest experiences of the war. As a culture it was profoundly masculine, single-minded in the imperative to survive, violent, vulgar, and savagely satirical. But it could also be sentimental, nostalgic, and even ‘soft’ or emotional. It ran on rumour, folk belief, crude self-entertainments, and food and drink, when they were available. Its modes and sentiments were blackly and bleakly humorous, chattily complaining, and communal. All these characteristics found their lodgement—if in ameliorated form—in the cartoons, jokes, gossip, banter, songs, and other folkloric genres appearing in these publications. Within and through these folkloric genres of expression and practice, both old and new, were projected a set of attitudes and values that defined the trench soldier as ‘us’ and everyone else as ‘them’. It was not uncommon to find references in trench journals to the feeling that Allied soldiers had more in common with their ‘enemies’ suffering the same thing in German trenches than they did with their own military, press, and home front. Thus, the soldiers on active duty came to identify primarily with the insular community of the trenches. It was a community that preserved such things as national and ethnic stereotypes and prejudices, but deployed and expressed these in new ways conditioned by the common experience of trench life and death. Folklore 124 (August 2013): 178–99 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2013.793068 q 2013 The Folklore Society