The Sound of World War 1
How a soldier reminded us of our humanity
7 min read
Harold Triggs with his “travel” cello
100 years ago, on November 11th, war hostilities ended.
The First World War was a conflict of unprecedented scope, bloodshed, and destruction.
It shook the world from its complacency, disfiguring and remolding the face of Europe. A face that’s been rebuilt and glued from shattered pieces throughout history — like the art of Kintsugi — fragile, yet seemingly intact.
Ottoman Empire, German Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Russian Empire — all gone.
65 million soldiers fought in the war, and the number of deaths is still being debated. Some say it’s about 16 million, and if you include injuries and casualties — the number of people who suffered goes up to 40 million. Beside deaths on the battlefield, there were numerous ones caused by famine, disease, and genocide. The 1918 influenza pandemic caused between 50 and 100 million deaths worldwide.
Many of those genocides are still largely ignored — particularly the ones caused by the Ottoman Empire — the Greek genocide (750.000 deaths), the Assyrian genocide (300.000 deaths), and the Armenian genocide (1.5 million deaths).
Furthermore, unresolved rivalries at the end of the World War I contributed to the start of World War II in 1939.
Arguably, the most brutally excruciating part of the war were the trench warfare tactics.
Infantry advances and tactics failed to keep up with the progress in military technology — which made those tactics obsolete. The technological advances like artillery, machine guns, and barbed wire made crossing open fields extremely difficult. That caused armies to dig up a complex system of trenches (deep ditches), which could stretch for hundreds of miles.
And even though the invention of trench warfare kept more soldiers safe, it caused many stalemates, where no one would win considerable ground for months — or even years — at a time. Therefore, those trenches literally became a home for soldiers. There were rooms for sleeping and eating, but they were mostly cold, wet, and dirty. Often soldiers got diseases like trench foot, which was when the soldiers’ feet rot due to standing in water and mud.
This misery, anxiety, and hopelessness of a slow war is brilliantly portrayed in a film that I saw last year at TIFF, called Journey’s End. It is shown from the perspective of a few British soldiers, stuck in the trenches. It is brutal, yet deeply touching and intimate. You embark on an adventure with men that were thrown into that chaos, where the uncertainty and despair of the slow war was creeping into everyone’s psyche, keeping them tense, yet providing no clear resolution.
Improvised tactics like gasses, grenades and small bombs periodically broke the stalemate. The chlorine gas — although never being a decisive weapon in the war — was one of the most feared and remembered parts of that war.
The suffocating effects of that gas is terrifyingly described in this video:
“Imagine you’re a soldier, in any war, anywhere. You’re prepared for battle, for the enemy, and you know you might get shot or even killed. Imagine being on the front line though, and suddenly something comes creeping around your legs. A cloud of yellow or green, that spreads until you have no choice but to breathe it in, and you begin to gag and to choke as your throat and lungs are eaten from the inside out by the horror of poison gas.”
In the middle of the war, in 1916, engineers started developing tanks and testing them on the battlefield. Their initial effectiveness was not great, but it progressively increased during the war.
It is easy to assume that in all that misery and bloodshed, people have gradually lost their sense of humanity.
However, that was not the case.
There were multiple examples that showed the character of the war — a chain of events that led millions of soldiers into fighting one another without a real purpose.
People stuck in extremely harsh conditions, wanting to get out and taste more of what life has to offer.
One of those moments is the story of a 2nd lieutenant named Harold Triggs, who was also an amateur cellist in the Royal Sussex Regiment. In those muddy trenches, he performed music on his improvised “travel” cello, which he set up from the parts that he brought with him on the front. The parts were carried in an ammunition box.
Harold’s cello
When it was assembled, it was essentially a rectangular box with some holes and strings. But don’t let the apparent ugliness fool you, in the right hands it sounds lovely.
100 years later, Steven Isserlis, a renowned cellist, performed on that exact cello that was played by Harold in the trenches.
Steven Isserlis admiring the “trench cello”
“I immediately fell in love with it,” said Steven, “it’s got this soft, shy sound which I found really touching.
“It’s a lovely thought that this cello having stayed silent for so long has found its voice again.”
The cello is owned now by Charles Beare, who has a cello and violin firm.
“Harold Triggs came to us and asked for £15, along with the assurance that it would have a home,” he says, adding: “It’s been with us ever since.”
Harold Triggs died a year later.
“We don’t know a huge amount about Triggs, but we know that, towards the end of the war, he was captured by the Germans during a counterattack,” explains Beare.
“He didn’t see the cello again until years later, in the late 1950s, when he was walking along the beach at Brighton and passed someone holding it!”
Hidden on the back is an inscription written in 1962 by war poet Edmund Blunden who, like Triggs, was an officer in the Royal Sussex. It recalls their time together at Ypres and expresses his pleasure at being reunited with the cello, almost 50 years after hearing it in the trenches. There’s also an invitation stuck to the instrument, which dates from 1916, when Triggs was summoned by the corps commander to play for the officers.
Vanora Bennett, an author who wrote an article about the history of this instrument, recounts the time when Steven Isserlis took a whole tour on British venues and radios with that trench cello:
During radio performances, Isserlis has experimented with playing the kind of music he thinks Harold Triggs might have enjoyed, from World War One favourites like the song “Keep The Home Fires Burning,” and rousing English hymns such as “Jerusalem” to the Bach’s Sarabande (from the Fifth Suite) which, he says, a talented amateur like Triggs might have been less likely to play but which, to Steven Isserlis, represents “utmost loneliness.”
“He obviously must have loved the cello to take it to the front with him,” Isserlis said. “You’d take the minimum. But music in the trenches probably brought a lot of joy and a lot of nostalgia…and reminded the soldiers of their loved ones.”
To imagine a civilized evening with men in uniform listening spellbound to the rich dark tones of a cello — after a day of deafening shellfire, foot-rot, razor wire, mud, rats and death — is an incredible juxtaposition.
“I think about the history a bit when I play it,” added Isserlis. “Something in the sound makes me think about it. You can’t separate the history from the sound.”
There were other accounts of soldiers bringing their musical instruments to war. It wasn’t that unusual.
In times of war, it is these sentimental, human things, that remind us of what really matters, of what we should fight for. And those soldiers had to fight. They had to because they were called up to defend their country.
It was them or their enemies. But who were those enemies? In the middle of the slow and exhausting battle in the trenches the real enemy was the mud, the cold, the misery.
Everyone: the Germans, the French, the British, the Turks — were in the same boat. Everyone was miserable and everyone wanted that damn war to end.
The complex monster of imperialism, militarism, extreme nationalism, faulty defense alliances — culminating in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand — led to the war. Some say it was a pointless war, some say it was long overdue. Either way, some things are certain — the sacrifice, cruelty, bravery, and suffering of people.
We must never take this lightly, and we must never forget it.
We live in prosperity because someone in the past had to fight for a better world — a world that we should cherish and improve.
A world with which we should be responsible. A world that will be passed on to our children.
The fallen soldiers, civilians, and victims of that war are long dead, their bodies discomposed into the soil, feeding back into the cycle of life.
The sound of their voices , silenced forever.
Would they be proud of us?
Will our children be proud of us?
Will they despise us?
Armistice Day is on 11 November and is also known as Remembrance Day. It marks the day World War One ended, at 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month, in 1918. The anniversary is used to remember all the people who have died in wars — not just World War One.