The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

The Scampering Champion of the Champagne Campaign

According to legend (the beautiful elder sister of truth), champagne was invented by a Benedictine monk called Dom Pérignon who shouted to his fellow monks: ‘Come quickly, I am tasting the stars.’

This is, of course, balderdash. Making sparkling wine is simple; it’s bottling it that was difficult. If you put fizzy wine in a normal bottle, it can’t take the pressure and explodes. A champagne bottle has to contain six atmospheres of pressure. Even now the caverns of Moët and Chandon lose every sixtieth bottle to explosion. Moreover, it was English glassmakers who perfected the method in order to keep their cider fizzy, and the French simply stole the technology to bottle their bubbly.

Champagne was originally just vin de campagne, or wine from the countryside. It was only in the eighteenth century that it came to refer to wine from the particular region around Épernay, where many of the worst bits of the First World War happened. That Champagne saw some of the worst trench warfare is no coincidence.

The German advance of 1914 started very well. They circumvented the Maginot Line and stormed across northern France with Teutonic efficiency, until they got to the champagne warehouses. There’s something about finding the whole world’s champagne supply that can make even a German commander find reasons for pausing, and the pause was all that the French and British needed. The Allies arrived, everybody dug trenches and the rest is War Poetry.

The German campaign took place during the summer. It had to. When winter arrives, armies generally have to find somewhere warm to hole up and wait for the snows and the gales to pass. Then in the spring they can set out into the campagne again, which is why an army fights a summer campaign: literally on the countryside.

Campagne comes from the Latin word campus, which meant field. The very best soldiers in the field were called the campiones­, from which we get champion. So the champion of a champagne campaign would be the same thing three times over.

You can do a lot of things with a field. You can, for example, build a university on it, in which case you have a university campus. But what most campaigning armies do is simply take out their tents and guy-ropes and pitch camp.

Actually, there’s another thing that armies usually do. Armies are mostly composed of men, young men, without any women to keep them company. This means that the soldiers have every reason in the world to try to sneak out of the camp to seek the solace of sex. Creeping out of camp was called excampare by the Romans and escamper by the French, but we call it scampering.

The ladies towards whom these young champions would be scampering were the camp followers, women of more enterprise than virtue, who would follow the soldiers around and rent their affections by the hour.

Camp followers aren’t the classiest of broads (a broad, by the way, is a woman abroad). They tended to wear too much make-up to be truly ladylike, and their dresses were garish and their hair badly dyed. During the First World War, British soldiers started to call such a get-up campy. They also referred to such illicit sexual scamperings as camp. From here the word camp had to make only a short hop before it referred to a man in make-up (and maybe a dress) who had illicit sexual encounters, and that’s why tarty men in make-up are, to this day, camping it up, often with a glass of pink champagne.

Camp, in the sense of battlefield, also wheedled its way into German as Kampf meaning battle. So Hitler’s book Mein Kampf could reasonably be described as rather camp.