FIGURE 2.15 Postcard sent in February 1916.
Transcribing the sound of war
The cliché of the sound of the guns at the Somme being heard from Blackheath, in south-east London, masks the reality that artillery fire at the Western Front could be heard from the south-east coast of England for most of the war, and, with the right meteorological conditions, from much further away. Andrew Clark noted in his diary on 17 July 1918 that bombs in Flanders could be heard at Brooklands, ten miles from the coast, near Chelmsford in Essex, when the tide was at its lowest.385 The closer to France, the louder and clearer the noise could be heard: Graves writes of Sassoon, ‘Down in Kent he could hear the guns thudding ceaselessly across the Channel, on and on …’.386 Florence Billington noted that from England you could not only ‘hear the guns firing, … if you were out in the dark you could see the flashes over in France, of the actual war going on’,387 and in France away from the Front ‘the reports from all the guns mingled in a curious oppressive rumble’.388 Reports in 1915 stated that guns could be heard from the Yser Front in Amsterdam, across the entire breadth of Belgium.389
For some soldiers the noise at the Front was constant: in a 1971 interview for The Listener Robert Graves stated that ‘noise never stopped for one moment – ever’. Lancelot Spicer wrote in a letter: ‘For the past 10 days or so we have been living in a small cottage less than a mile from the Boche front line. And yet at times it has been so quiet that one could almost believe one was back in England, say in Sussex. At other times the guns make such a row you can barely hear yourself speak. At night sometimes it is absolutely quiet, at other times you can hear nothing but the pop-pop-pop-pop of the machine guns’.390 Vivian Stevens wrote to his parents on 3 April 1916 of ‘pure country air & surroundings & it is so peaceful & quiet with the farmers ploughing spoilt by the noise of guns in the nights’.391 In contrast Charles Douie described how on the first day of the Battle of the Somme ‘the thunder of our barrage was such that orders could not be heard’,392 while Neil Tytler wrote that ‘Every order to the guns has to be written on slips of paper, it being absolutely impossible to make anyone hear the spoken word’.393 Amongst this mayhem and the ‘roar of falling buildings’394 and while ‘being continually shelled by the enemy’395 soldiers noticed birdsong, and the noise of insects.396
The loudest noise was that of the heavy artillery, sometimes miles behind the the front line, description of this including similes and imitative words. Thunder features heavily, ‘the ceaseless thunder of the guns’,397 ‘the guns thundered’,398 ‘our own guns thundered overhead’;399 Graves records one of his comrades saying ‘where the gunder ended and the thunder began was hard to say’.400 Guns also roared – ‘the roar of guns audible for hours’,401 and sometimes these similes overlapped with imitative descriptions: ‘the sudden whoop and roar of battery fire’.402 Imitative words include ‘an occasional loud boom’,403 guns ‘banged away like mad’,404 Masefield’s ‘bong of a big gun’,405 or the ‘continual banging’ Harold Watts wanted to get away from, in a letter dated June 1916. The continuous noise of artillery is often referred to: ‘the boom, boom, boom of the guns continually carry on’.406 For some commentators the sound was beyond description: ‘many veterans said that no one could capture the sound of a massive bombardment’.407 The continuity of the environment of noise is seen in the use of the same words to describe the sound of the gun and the sound of the explosion, both sent and received. Masefield gives ‘the roar of a shell bursting far off’,408 while Lt W. Carr described a German bombardment as ‘the loudest clap of thunder you have ever heard’.409
From mid-1916 massive bombardments were employed to destroy morale as much as flesh, a strategy maintained through the rest of the war. As the shells exploded in the air or on or below ground they caused ‘shakings and concussions’,410 a ‘noise, incessant and almost musical, so intense that it seemed as if a hundred devils were hammering in my brain’;411 2nd Lt A. Lamb wrote ‘the din is terrific’,412 which could at that time mean ‘great’, ‘very good’, or ‘terrifying’, or all three. The soundscape of the Front seems so extreme and disconcerting that it is a wonder men were able to function, let alone manage the perception of noise, but George Coppard wrote that ‘several times I noted the similarity of sound when bullets found their mark in the head’.413 Men in the trenches, while being subjected to some of the loudest noise, were supposed to make as little noise as possible, in order both not to give evidence of a gathering of troops and to hear the tiniest noise that would signal a raid or the release of gas – Graves describes ‘sorting out all the different explosions’ and picking out ‘at once the faint plop! of the mortar that sends off a sausage’.414 David Jones notes the banning of cowsons (ear-muffs) because it was so essential to be able to hear,415 but high-velocity shells gave no warning and were called ‘stocking footers’.416 Fears were exemplified by the rumour reported in the Manchester Evening News 1 December 1914 that the Germans were developing a ‘silent gun’, working on pneumatic, electric or silencer principles; and Canadian soldiers at the Somme faced a shell which they named ‘Silent Percy’.417 Even at a distance from the front line soldiers were reminded of what they had faced or would face: ‘the hoomp! of distant shrapnel bursts’.418 Distant sounds like the ‘distant drone of the Gnome engine’419 and the ‘hum of aeroplanes’420 might signal assault from the air, while at any moment there might be the sound of a new weapon, the hiss of a gas-grenade or the ‘chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk’ of a tank.421
Most people got through it: ‘The noise is terrific, but one gets used to it’ wrote Lt B. Willmott, 2nd Essex Regt.422 Graves eventually managed to sleep through it,423 and others seemed to find it an annoyance more than anything else – George Williams’ diary for 6 April 1916 has ‘Heavy Bombardment by our Artillery 9–10pm awful row’.424 Others did not; temporary or permanent deafness was a standard symptom of manning a gun, or even passing by one being fired: ‘the main impact of an 18-pounder gun firing is the compression of the shell leaving the muzzle as it goes forward. When you were in front of the guns, you got into that compression’.425 Aubrey Smith records that he was deaf for two hours after being near a gun firing,426 an officer reported ‘a continuous din that was deafening’,427 Pte Stanley Woodhouse during a period of a night strafe reported that ‘the noise was simply deafening’,428 while The Army and Navy Magazine 15 May 1915 reported on ‘naval “gun-deafness” ’. The same magazine a week earlier stated that the noise from guns was ‘nerve-shattering’, while ‘Wagger’ in Battery Flashes wrote of a soldier going ‘dotty with noise’.429 Though it depends on the need for a rhyme, there is a strong truth in the soldiers’ song:
We are the boys who fear no noise
When the thundering cannons roar430
It was essential for people to be able to read noise. Noise was information, especially the noise of the shell in flight; instantaneous recognition allowed a decision to be taken on the direction to throw oneself, or whether not to bother. ‘We know by the singing of a shell when it is going to drop near us, when it is politic to duck and when one may treat the sound with contempt’.431 Graves’s sergeant advises his men ‘Listen by the noise they make where they’re going to burst.’432 Edmonds indicates how essential this was: ‘another shell came, giving the least of warnings. It burst before us after so short a roar of coming that the brain had no time to appreciate it’.433
Discussion of the transcription of projectile sounds involves looking at descriptive, onomatopoeic and metaphorical terms. Some descriptions of sounds verbalise the chaos of shelling – Henry Williamson’s use of ‘Flash-flash-WOMP-WOMP’ and later ‘Whizz, Wang, Zip. Crack. Jagged splinters’ and ‘Zzzzzzuzz-CRASH’434 create a soundscape of the combat zone highlighted by clearly intelligible details. The soundscape is made up of the ‘pop-pop of rifle fire’ and the ‘swish and moan of the shells’,435 the crump of explosions and ‘continual “plonks” ’.436 The gap between the simplistic nature of the noise-words and the actua
lity of topographic, materiel and human destruction can be challenging, but apparently simple names can be informative. The simple-sounding ‘whizz-bang’ for example tells us a basic fact about the nature of the shell’s speed: ‘Whizz-bangs were a torment to us. They travelled faster than sound. If you happened to be near the receiving end, you first heard the thing burst, then the whizz of its approach and lastly the boom of the gun that fired it’.437 But this scientific observation was not universal: ‘Its name derives from the fact that the noise it makes is a whiz, followed at once by the report of the burst’,438 or ‘Whizz-bangs are small shells, that don’t give you time to say Jack Robinson. All you hear is a whizz and a bang’ wrote Pte J. Bowles.439 The name was not universal, one report using the term ‘fiz-bang’.440 The description of ‘The Johnsons’ in the Wipers Times for 12 February 1916 – ‘A Shout. A Scream. A Roar’ – tells us equally that the sound of the shell in flight would be heard after it landed.
Soldiers regularly give evidence of their awareness of the distinct noises made by different projectiles: relating the story of an attack, a soldier writes ‘amidst it all the rifles and the machine guns made their peculiar noise’.441 The sound of bullets always fascinated, the marker of ‘one to one’ combat: bullets ‘whine’,442 they ‘piped and moaned’,443 ‘some whine plaintively, some shriek overhead, and some have an almost vicious hiss’,444 but the soldier is warned that ‘only the bullet that goes by makes any noise’: ‘the pellet with your name and number inscribed on it is not giving any warning of its approach’;445 as bullets travelled faster than the speed of sound over the short distances of no man’s land a soldier heard only the displacement of air caused by the passing of the bullet, not the one coming towards him, hence the interest in transcribing the sound that effectively meant a temporary reprieve from injury or death – ‘occasionally machine-gun bullets whizzed over us’.446 LCpl E. Edwards, sceptical of the ‘bullet with your name on it’ legend this produced, contributed to the Yorkshire Evening Post an article in which he details three different kinds of bullets and the noises they make: ‘the ordinary commonplace bullet … is quite a decent noise, more like a swift-flying bee’, the ‘reversed bullet … makes a rich hum like a whistling rocket’, and the ‘explosive bullet makes an ear-tingling crack as it whizzes by, which makes one deaf for the time’.447 Bullets otherwise are described as ‘pinging and hissing’,448 ‘phitting’449 or making the sound ‘zip’.450 They ricochet with the sound transcribed as ‘ping’,451 or land as ‘patter’452 or, for the bullet which hit him, ‘pf-ung’;453 sometimes the sound is described as ‘plonk’,454 or ‘the plink-plonk of a bullet’.455 A report in the Marlborough Express described the noise as the ‘Zip-zip, hissing and cracking of bullets’ followed by ‘plonk – only a Hun bullet which has buried itself’.456 Pte Leslie Sanders described bullets as going ‘ “crack-plud!” as they bury themselves in a parapet’.457
Rifle fire was characterised as the established ‘rattle of musketry’,458 the ‘rattle of rifles’,459 ‘the incessant rattle and crack of rapid, heavy fire’.460 Rifle fire and machine-gun fire may be described together as a ‘rattle’ or ‘crackle’461 – ‘rattle’ was also the sound of the Lewis gun,462 as well as ‘poppity-pop-pop-pop’.463 Individual rifle firing is often the innocuous-sounding ‘ “poop” of a rifle’464 or ‘popping of rifles’,465 which extends into the ‘pop-pop-pop-pop’ noted by Spicer.466 A wider range of terms were used for machine-guns, ‘tap-tap-tap-tap-tap’,467 ‘Tap! Tap-tap!’,468 ‘phut-phut-phut’,469 ‘the chattering of our machine-guns nearby’,470 ‘pitter-patter’ from a distance (‘the sound was unmistakable’),471 ‘far-away racketing’.472 Identification by sound was possible: ‘A machine-gun was firing. Sergeant Jackson said, “It’s all right it’s one of ours”, but I had my doubts. A Maxim sounds ta-ta-ta-ta, but a Nordonfeldt sounds tut-tut-tut-tut’.473 Given the imitative nature of these sounds it is no surprise that French and German transcriptions of machine-guns are similar: Apollinaire transcribes machine-guns as ‘ca ta clac’ 6 October 1915,474 Masefield gives the sound of the mitrailleuse as ‘tick, tick, tick’,475 and Grimm gives ‘taktaktaktak’.476 In a mix of visual and aural description the traversing action of the machine-gun is recorded in ‘the occasional “Swish! Swish! Shish!” of the bullets as it swung round in our direction’477 and ‘that sissing noise’.478
Shells in flight needed to be identified quickly, the different shapes and velocities giving different sounds. Oil-drums, packed with explosives and scrap-metal ‘hummed’,479 bursting shells ‘throbbed’,480 or ‘whizzed’.481 The terms used often give a strong picture of the level of threat: Charles Edmonds was near one that fell with ‘a low sibilant roar’,482 while there was less danger from ‘a few shells whistling over our heads’ wrote Henry in a postcard home from Gallipoli.483 Distance and danger may explain the wide range between shells ‘sighing’,484 or ‘like the wind through telegraph wires’485 and ‘screaming’486 or ‘screeching’.487 ‘Pussy cats’ was the name given to empty shell cases falling,488 less aggressive but still capable of doing great harm. Sometimes shells were described as landing with a ‘plonk’: ‘All of a sudden I heard a sissing noise over my head … it was a shell about to drop. Plonk! It lands just beyond’.489 The sound of the close explosion of a shell was usually transcribed as ‘bang’: ‘The scream and bang of an occasional shrapnel’ is described in a report from Gallipoli,490 while LCpl Edwards reports ‘bang’ as the noise of a shell in a trench. Midshipman N. K. Calder describes in his diary the explosion that sank HMS Vanguard as ‘a hell of a bang’ (9 July 1917).491 ‘A wounded soldier’ reported his experience of battle as ‘a terrific bang – and then a nurse asked me to “sit up and drink this” ’.492
Charles Edmonds’ description of the noise of gas shells, even a dozen years on, is indicative of the heightened awareness necessary for survival: ‘Flutter, Flutter, Crump! Came the shells. Whirra, Whirra, Phut!’ compared to a high-velocity shell ‘Whoo-Whoo-Whoo-WHOO-CRASH!’493 The distinction was important in terms of the instantaneous protection needed. The liquid in gas shells made them easy to recognise by sound, ‘hooting’ or ‘twittering’,494 but their landing was often barely audible. Larger shells usually gave some warning of their approach and their descriptions show a passage of time. The ‘coal-box’ ‘whines through the air like a drowsy fly’ followed by ‘an ear-splitting roar’,495 or comes ‘screaming and tearing up the field’;496 a similar description, ‘shells ploughed up the field with a great roar’, comes from Pte Thomas Lyon in 1915.497 One of the most frequently used descriptions was ‘crump’, a clear description of the explosion slightly muffled by soil. A glossary published in the Derry Journal defines the ‘crump’ as ‘a German five-point-zero shell’,498 but the term was used to describe both shell, sound and explosion: ‘a heavy crump burst on a knoll close by’,499 ‘a resonant “crump” louder and more obvious, transmitted by the air’,500 and probably other shells: ‘a big crump has burst within 6ft of me, blinded me with the flash of its explosion, and scorched my flesh with the hot gases emitted’,501 and a ‘heavier crash, as some large “crump” was imported’.502 The description of splinters and fragments of hot metal convey a sense of violence as well as sound: they ‘hiss’503 or ‘shriek’.504 Aubrey Smith at the Second Battle of Ypres described a ‘crashing shrapnel barrage over our heads’,505 while Charles Foxcroft in the poem ‘Travail’ gives ‘swish’ as the sound of shrapnel.506
Smaller shells were given rather dismissive names – though ‘pipsqueak’ described the report and flight of the shell;507 Wainwright Merrill gives the sound of a pipsqueak as ‘plunk-whiz-boom’ – the sound of firing, flight and landing,508 while the Australians, dismissive of most things, described a Stokes shell as a ‘mouth-organ’ because of the noise made by air passing through the holes in the base of the shell.509 Very lights ‘whished’510 and lighter shells ‘whispered’.511 Trench mortars seem to have made variable noises: LCpl Edwards describes an ‘almost silent hum’, they
‘give no warning but just go zip-bang!’,512 they ‘whinney’513 or give a ‘raucous screech’,514 or, for at least one German, a soft sound – ‘das leise Schsch’.515 ‘Duds’, and more rarely ‘blinds’ (given as ‘the technical adjective for a “dud” shell’)516 had been around for a long time, but it was still proposed by A.H.B. in correspondence in The Athenaeum (1 August 1919) that ‘no one who has once heard a “dud” fall can have any doubt of the onomatopoeic origin of the word’. Though evidence shows an earlier origin, it may be that onomatopoeia in the period 1914 to 1918 strengthened the word’s popularity. It is not hard to see how onomatopoeia would carry the sounds of war across into metaphor and literary expression. Often description of combat drifts into expected metaphors – ‘a battery of guns on the right sang out’,517 or ‘death whining and screaming’518 but there are surprises such as George Barker’s ‘I try to run but my limbs are like lead. Plonk za! A near shave that time’ from Agony’s Anguish self-published in 1931, which, like Henry Williamson’s descriptions, seems more futurist or Dada than war memoir. Continuous artillery fire was described as Trommelfeuer in German, translated and used in English as ‘drumfire’, and carrying an impression of the hearer being inside the drum. While the ‘heavies’ roared, other weapons were likened to animals, especially dogs: a VAD notes ‘the barking of the “Ack Ack” ’,519 Aubrey Smith notes the ‘bark of our 18-pounder’,520 and a caption to The Battle of the Somme (1916) has ‘The vicious bark of the Canadian 60 pounders’. A more dismissive approach is shown by Neil Tytler: ‘the disgusting noise of the Archies yapping like a pack of toy Sipperkes’.521 In this animal simile scenario Edmonds describes the flight of a gas shell as like a hit partridge522 and the machine-gun inevitably becomes a woodpecker.523 German writers favoured animal similes: Hans Grimm’s eponymous Schlump (1929) sees a shell explode – the fragments ‘hissed through the air like a thousand cats, some wailing and howling like cursed souls’.524 The poet August Stramm likened the ‘howling of the heavy shells’ to the sounds of wild beasts. Somehow in this industrialised war that destroyed land and trees, nature not only appeared to assert itself but even to mock the proceedings. ‘T.H.H.’ wrote to The Times quoting a letter from his son ‘somewhere in France’; the sound of shells falling close by was heard, but with no explosion, which was disconcerting. It turned out that the noise was coming from chickens who had begun to imitate the sounds of the Front.525
Words and The First World War Page 15