The Battle of the Marne, 1914.

War is terrible, but all resources are called on and all media are used in its furtherance. The relatively newly-developed art of Sound Recording was no exception and was pressed into service early. The most obvious use was as a vehicle for the patriotic songs that inevitably appear when a war breaks out. Freshly recorded National Anthems of the Allies were made, and so on. But ‘Descriptive Records’ also appeared from earliest times. These would enact or re-enact battles, speeches, events etc., for the public at home to listen to, and marvel at the bravery of ‘our troops’ (though they knew that already). Better still, able-bodied men who had not yet enlisted may have been persuaded to do so by these records.

The earliest war Descriptive record I ever had was a Columbia 2-minute cylinder. Alas, I have it no longer; it succumbed to attack by mould. It was titled ‘The Capture of the Forts At Port Arthur’, an event in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. It was of the simplest nature. First a military band played ‘Lord God Protect The Czar’, the Imperial Russian National Anthem (the opening bars of which actually are - or were - quite similar to the British National Anthem). There was then a flurry of shouting, cries of ‘Banzai’, and rifle shots imitated on a snare drum. (I had the record 30 years ago and can’t remember the exact details…) This lasted for a few seconds, then the band played another piece, which was undoubtedly the Japanese National Anthem; or if not actually so, then some music intended to unmistakably portray it. End of cylinder.

Therefore, compressed into the slender compass of 2 minutes was a stylised, or symbolic, representation of a battle. Had the Russians won, the Anthems would merely have been reversed, the one appearing last signifying victory, of course!

There are doubtless many earlier examples of War Descriptive Records, (e.g. the Spanish-American War of 1898 must have produced some), but the above example is probably typical.

The Great War naturally called into being large quantities of these records. I’m not a specialist in these, but have heard a few. These are usually much more elaborate than the 1905 cylinder. Disc records lasted longer, recording was (generally speaking) better… and besides, much more was at stake in Europe than commenting on a ‘minor war’ right round the other side of the globe.

All the different record companies produced such issues, naturally. Columbia, for instance, produced a four-sided set called ‘The Big Push’. But the one you can hear now has struck me as being somehow more convincing than any of the others I’ve heard.

It’s a Diamond record, called ‘The Battle Of the Marne’. This Diamond label was a substitute for Pathé records during WWI in Britain. Like the parent label, they were of course vertically-cut. I don’t have this record any more either, but believe it was credited to Russell Hunting. There were 2 Battles of the Marne in the Great War, September 1914 and again in mid-1918. This record seems to refer to the first one, and probably originally appeared on Pathé, being reissued on Diamond later, though this is conjectural. (The Pathé factory that supplied Britain with discs was in Belgium, and presumably eventually fell into German hands. The Pathé concern in Britain carried on as best it could. It is pleasant to record that after the Great War, British Pathé flourished greatly for a few years.)

I don’t mean this record sounds other than a pathetically inadequate set of poorly made and recorded sound effects. A snare drum hit for a single rifle shot… repeated hits for a machine gun; a bass drum (which would record badly, if at all, on most acoustic systems) to represent heavy artillery; a siren whistle for the whine of the shells…

And the dialogue: to us today, it is stilted, predictable, jingoistic, patronising; the men marching up, whistling a song; the colonel speaking of the glory of the British Empire…

Most of the WWI Descriptive records have these sounds and contents.

But, as I said, this one seems to me to be different, and more immediate somehow. There are more people taking part, so the ‘crowd scenes’ are more convincing… the bugle calls set an atmosphere (they’re accurate; a military historian friend of mine has checked them for me). There are commendable touches like the (cocoanut shell) horse riding up, then snorting fairly authentically. At the end of the Colonel’s address, a soldier shouts out ‘Kill ’em!’ (normally on these records, there is a greater sense of chivalry; I think the people at home were more comfortable with that). Also, the record does not end in a triumphant victory march… it just fades out, without any proper conclusion. I spent quite a bit of time transferring this record and tinkering with the sound, so I got ‘drawn into’ it. Eventually I found the shell-burst with the ensuing screams of the wounded becoming more and more startling: indeed horrible, as my imagination got to work…

In the end, I concluded that if sound recordings made during the start of a battle in The Great War actually existed (which they don’t, of course): then this really is what they would have been like! In other words, primitive and amateurish as this disc sounds to us today, it nevertheless carries in its long-obsolete, vertically-modulated groove, some elusive element of reality…

Just click this link to hear the mp3 file:

The Battle Of The Marne

Page written 25th September 2002.

Revised 26th September 2006.