Sounds of war

Amid all the remembrance, Radio 3 came up with a simple yet effective way of reflecting on war’s impact. Threaded throughout the day on Sunday were ‘sonic’ memorials, three minutes of silence, or rather opportunities to stop and reflect. Not the music of a requiem mass, or a lonesome bugle, but the sounds of those places where the worst battles in recent history — from Antietam in America (during the Civil War) to Huaihai (between the Kuomintang and communists in China) via the Somme, Stalingrad and Afghanistan — were played out. Allan Little introduced each pause in the day’s schedule, explaining in the barest outline what happened, how many were killed, who was fighting whom, what the place of desolation looks like now, before we were left with just the sound of crickets humming, birds singing, wind blowing through sun-bleached grass.

In Kent, beneath the white cliffs, the Battle of Britain is remembered each year, the first major air battle in any war. The Last Post faded out as the sound of the aircraft looming overhead grew louder and louder. We could picture the men on board, trapped in a metal cylinder, deafened by the noise of the engines, the rattle of gunfire. Off the coast of Denmark, 8,000 seamen lost their lives in the Battle of Jutland, their bodies now at rest at the bottom of the sea along with the 25 ships that were destroyed. We could hear the barren loneliness of that bleak coastline; the salt-laden spray hitting the microphone, the eerie wailing of the wind like a chorus of grief. No words were necessary. This was storytelling through sound alone, evoking all the emotions that remembrance of war arouses. In Helmand province, the silence was punctuated by gunshot, shocking in its physical impact as it burst into my kitchen, assaulting not just the ears but punching the stomach.