![]() Inexorable advance is not so easily achieved. Yet, it warned, ‘to talk of Steam Rollers is to talk feebly’. As a clipping from August 1914 made plain, ‘the hope of the world’ may indeed ‘be with that grey cloud in the eastward sky’, it acknowledged Russia’s power was recognized as critically important to Allied aims. Earlier evidence in Clark’s archive had, however, already warned of the delusive presuppositions that steam-rollers might suggest. ![]() It was written in patriotic defence of the ‘so-called defeat of Russia between the Vistula and the Warta’. Surely, it added, if the steam-roller had proved deceptive, this was merely ‘a prelude to a great and definite victory over the War Lord and his army’. ‘I was always opposed to the description of the Russian army as a “ steam roller“, stated a first-person account Clark gathered from the Daily Express in November 1914. As other evidence in ‘Words in War-Time’ suggests, arguably more important was the strategic use of power of this kind, alongside its underlying realities. So, too, were the rhetorical persuasions at stake. Had we been Russian, we might, it adds, have appropriated something from the ‘Steppes’. ‘We take our word-imagery from the streets’, stated an early clipping in which figurative steam-rollers were anatomized. Even so, as Clark’s evidence indicated, the metaphor was seen as decisively western in origin and intent. If no nation had an absolute monopoly in uses of this kind, Russia, given its abundant man-power, was a prominent element in resulting collocations. ‘At last t his steam-roller in motion and rolled the enemy flat’, stated a triumphalist citation from 1902. Depicting individual as well as national power, they appeared from the final decades of the nineteenth century. ![]() Transferred meanings had obvious figurative appeal. Steam-rollers – displacing the horses of the past ( horse-rollers) – embodied a supra-human effectiveness and strength. Importantly, in these early uses, the steam roller evoked a sense of aggressive modernity and industrial force. The first citation, from 1866, was taken from the journal Engineering where the tireless power of the ‘locomotive engine’ was made overt: ‘The Ballaison steam roller.may now be seen at all hours of the day crushing smooth the granite of the new boulevards of Paris’. It defined steam-roller in literal and figurative terms. The corresponding entry in the first edition of the OED - which appeared two years later in 1916 - agreed. Steam-rollers might be slow but they were not easily deflected from their purpose. Battle could go either way, courtesy of a set of ‘applied uses’, which, Clark carefully explained, were used to signify ‘an army steadily advancing, bearing down all opposition’. Yet, as Clark also records, Germany, in WW1, might deploy steam rollers of its own, such that the direction of attack was reversed: ‘The Belgian 4th Division from Namaur passed behind the French troops, and has gone to help swell the stopping army before Paris’, as another clipping he gathered in August 1914 attested: ‘These 30,000 men are a very valuable addition to the allied forces, who will need all the help they can get to arrest the German steam roller’. Here at least, the Russian ‘ Steam Roller’ was placed on the right side of history, its forces, as in the image above, rhetorically allied with Britain, Belgium, and France. Relevant associative meanings were, however, positive. As it explained, the image of the steamroller evoked ‘the advance of Russia’s power’ which, ‘rolling mighty and remorseless’, was ‘crushing all in its terrible road’. ‘We have come to call the armies of Russia the Steam Roller’, a clipping he collected from the Evening News in September 1914 affirmed. They are flattened, horrendously transfigured by the violence of war.ĭocumenting the onset of WW1 in 1914, Andrew Clark had likewise paid careful attention to similar patterns of use. The buildings of Mariupol, shattered by long-range military attack, vividly reveal the ‘Russian steam-roller’ at work. Directed at Ukrainian resistance or the nation as a whole, the implications are of wholesale destruction, and unstoppable and unremitting force. In recent weeks, the Russian steam-roller, a metaphor familiarized in WW1, has claimed new manifestations in reporting events in Ukraine. Image by Andrew McCarthy, private collection.
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