Poker & Pop Culture: Poker in the Trenches During WWI

We’ve discussed before the prominence of poker among the soldiers who fought on both sides of the Civil War. Indeed, one consequence of the battle between the North and South was the further spread of poker throughout the country, with survivors carrying the game back from camps and battlefields to their respective homes.

Card-playing continued to be a significant part of soldiers’ experiences during subsequent wars, with World War I — a.k.a. the “Great War” — similarly fostering the spread of poker on a global scale.

Poker and Propaganda

Coinciding with WWI’s centennial, the National Playing Card Museum in Tahout, Belgium (i.e., the Nationall Museum van de Speelkaart) hosted an exhibition showcasing the prominent place of poker and card playing among European soldiers during the First World War.

Among the highlights of the exhibition were examples of the many card decks used by German soliders during WWI. According to curator Filip Cremers, “production of these decks reached the astronomical number of one million by the final year of the war.”

The decks not only gave soldiers a way to pass considerable stretches of downtime while in the trenches, but served propagandistic purposes as well.

The cards “depicted German war heroes, famous generals and battle scenes,” explains Cremers. Some also featured unflattering cariacatures of their opponents from the Allies’ side, including Russian Tsar Nicholas II, Serbia’s King Peter, and the United Kingdom’s First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill.

The exhibition additionally included decks used by Americans once they entered the fray in 1917.

Some of those decks featured flags and colors indicating who the Allied forces were. Others furthered the U.S. soldiers’ education by including French phrases and song lyrics, introducing some basic vocabulary to the English-speaking men to help as they fought alongside the French and Belgians.

Bets and Bluffs in Between Battles

The British likewise took cards with them into battle. Telling of the difficult conditions of trench warfare in his diary, British soldier George F. Wear describes himself fighting in France in the summer of 1916 while enduring frequent German shelling and engaging in intermittent battles.

Eventually Wear reaches a point where his initial fears about coming to harm had lessened thanks to danger’s constant proximity. In spite of being fired upon constantly, he …

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