Listening to the din of the First World War

Abstract

In Great War texts, ranging from memoirs and journal articles to songs and novels, former soldiers comment not only on the extraordinary noise of the battlefield, but also on the importance of listening to that noise. As Erich Maria Remarque laments, “young recruits … are mown down because they are listening anxiously to the roar of the big coal-boxes falling in the rear, and miss the light, piping whistle of the low-spreading daisy cutters”. By juxtaposing a variety of sources in different media, representing different ideological positions, nationalities, and race and class backgrounds, this article documents a distinctive aural culture that emerged along the Western Front. Through battle experiences, the informal pedagogy of fellow soldiers, and formal listening duties, soldiers developed an aural acuity that not only helped them survive but also challenged prior understandings of the relationship between “listening”, “noise”, and “music”.

Keywords:

• Listening
• noise
• World War I
• aural culture
• soldiers
• music
• James Reese Europe

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank James Humphrey Jr (US Army, 91–98), Georgia Humphrey (SFC Retired, National Guard), and Martin Hartford (US Army 70–72, National Guard 72–73) for fielding many questions about the military and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their constructive comments and suggestions. I would particularly like to thank Katherine Kaiser for many conversations about sound studies and for her insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1. While the best-known example is Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture, which uses both actual cannon fire and the juxtaposition of the Marseillaise and a Russian folk melody to paint a picture of a battle and its combatants, the tradition can be traced to at least 1515, in French composer Clément Janequin’s La guerre, which uses a cappella voices and extensive onomatopoeia to capture a military battle (reportedly the Battle of Marignan).

2. Seamus O’Malley deals more thoughtfully with the question of Tjietjens’s (and Ford’s) relationship to wartime sound, but he does so only briefly in the service of a larger argument about the aural traces of class conflict on the last novel in the tetralogy, The Last Post. See O’Malley (2014, 694–697).

3. The machine gun. The “unsewing machine” in the following sentence is also a machine gun.

4. The Somme was one of the bloodiest battles of the Great War. There were over 50,000 casualties on the first day alone, and over a million in the battle, which lasted several months.

5. Daly’s interest in offering a richer, more contextual understanding of Russolo’s jingoism finds analogues in Paul Fox’s work on Otto Dix. Like Daly, Fox argues for viewing Otto Dix’s paintings not simply as a statement of anti-war ideology, but as texts through which Dix reconciles post-war German discourses about heroism, military service, and “male hysteria”, and his lived experiences of wartime trauma (Fox 2006).

6. The 1917 publication of an American war memoir is not a typo. Inspired by the sinking of the Lusitania and its American casualties, Empey travelled to England and enlisted there; he was invalided out of the British military before the AEF (American Expeditionary Forces) arrived.

7. All citations from the Europe Collection, save references to programmes, are taken from Noble Sissle’s unpublished memoir of his experiences with James Reese Europe. Because the text was not published, the typescript was not professionally edited.

8. I use Europe’s military title in what remains to avoid confusion between the bandleader and the continent.