Introduction
In the summer of 1915, Ford Madox Ford enlisted in the army and got his commission as a second lieutenant in the Welsh Regiment (Special Reserve). He joined his battalion for training in Cardiff Castle, where he wrote some poems. On July 13, 1916, he left for France and was deployed to the Somme. Within a month, he was “blown up” by a high explosive shell (Ford, Mightier 265), landed on his face, with concussion and mouth injuries, and lost his memory for three weeks (Saunders, Ford Madox Ford 1–23). On August 23, 1916, Ford rejoined his battalion in Ypres Salient, and, as Saunders (Ford Madox Ford 15) recalls, the question of how “to render his impressions of war—and how to transform them into narrative—[became] Ford’s predominant concern throughout the next decade”.1 Texts like the three letters2 that Ford sent to Joseph Conrad3 in September and his essays “Arms and the Mind” (1916) and “War and the Mind” (1917) echo both the change in the way soldiers and the world perceived World War One after Verdun and Somme and the beginning of the soldier’s literary project to aestheticise war, “the psychological side of warlike operations” (Ford, War Prose 37) and its sounds.
Ford’s interest in war writing predated the Great War (Frayn, “Ford Madox Ford” 179; Brasme, Writers at War 16–54). Between 1915 and 1929 Ford wrote several onomatopoeic modernist4 war novels,5 poems such as “Antwerp” (1914) published in On Heaven and Poems Written on Active Service (1918), short stories (Frayn, “First World War”) and non-fictional narratives anthologised in 1999 by Max Saunders as War Prose (2004). His letters, essays and other autobiographical and literary texts aestheticise the many dimensions of a soldier’s life on the Front and chronicle his sensory, physiological and affective perception of soundscapes (Kyne 21–70), traumatic emotions, fears and thoughts. Writing journals, letters or essays based on one’s experience during war became a ritual in owning experience “as much to oneself as to the rest of the world: it is the record of a subjectivity whose trauma and effacement are simultaneously inherent in the act of bearing witness to another’s wound, and ignored by a less than empathetic world” (Das 226).
This article deals with the perception and literary representations of acoustic warscapes, or ‘aurality’, suggested and represented in some of Ford’s essays and letters, mainly in three “hasten” epistolary “notes” that he sent to Conrad in September 1916 after he “just had a curious opportunity with regard to sound” (Ford, Letters 71). The letters can be read as fragmentary literary exercises and as poetics of war soundscapes containing examples of the literary functions of the expressive traumatic sounds which Ford would later use in his fiction and poems (Berrahou), as we will see. The almost daily letters were surely therapeutic6 and they intertextually dialogue with the author’s literary texts while allowing him to filter, dramatise and deal with life during war “in the middle of it” (Hynes 126). Loud noises on the Front, in the rear areas and No Man’s Land, “the territory of Armageddon” (Ford, War Prose 42), announced death and were part of the new “war of attrition” (Eksteins 143) that introduced new synthetic sounds and demanded a new kind of diagnostic listening to the long-range artillery fire (Kyne 21, 24).7 As Henri Barbusse’s 1916 novel Le Feu: Journal d’une Escouade8 and Erich Maria Remarque’s 1928 All Quiet on the Western Front illustrate that most war writers highlight the cruel effect of the sounds of ‘fire’ and silences on the soldiers’ psyche during the unrelieved continuity and “condition of middleness” (Hynes 126) of the long war. Ford represents the repetitive and traumatic dimensions of war through its many sounds in his novels (O’Malley, “Listening” 689–714; Kyne 21–70; Moss 59–77), poetry, shorter war prose published by Saunders (War Prose) and letters (Haslam and Saunders 25–26).
The traumatic sonic dimension of World War I in Ford’s essays and letters
The battles of Verdun (21 February-18 December 1916), the longest of the war, and of Somme (1 July-18 November 1916) lasted several months9 and their destruction and death numbers changed the world’s perception of the war. The letters and essays analysed in this article were written in this (re)adaptation period and show the same change by illustrating what soldiers heard and felt during months of continuous artillery, many times standing still, in panic,10 stuck in a suspenseful countdown. When Ford became a direct eye/earwitness of the unprecedented mass killing on the Front “his pre-war assertions gave way to questions” (Brasme, “Imprint” 3), and he used sounds to convey those doubts and fears. As the war became a more sinister and mechanical affair (Heyman 67; Kyne 1–2) Ford’s perception changed as he confessed in his essay “Arms and the Mind” (Ford, War Prose 40) by describing the psychological effects of the enumerated and disorienting war sounds that quickly turn into torture, as we will see. As editor and founder of modernist magazines such as the English Review (1908–1910), Ford was familiar with outstanding essays and letters (Wulfman 226–39; Frayn, “First World War”). In another war essay, “War and the Mind”, Ford, as beholder and earwitness, describes different perspectives of battles witnessed from the top of hills and dramatises simultaneous images of decimated and entrenched land and dynamic shells blowing up, suggested soundscapes, soldiers’ direct speech and movements of enemy soldiers in panic.11 His letters and essays illustrate how it is impossible to describe war in the course of events without its many noises, especially the cacophonies of shelling, and the new aural culture that emerged along the Western Front,12 forcing soldiers to develop acoustical agency.13 In July 1916, in a letter to Lucy Masterman, he started describing the deadly Battle of the Somme in terms of sounds because hiding soldiers cannot see the shells. The author explained how he got used to the sounds of war which he compared to positive ecosounds and technological sonicscapes:
We are right up in the middle of the strafe, but only with the 1st line transport. We get shelled two or three times a day, otherwise it is fairly dull—indeed, being shelled is fairly dull, after the first once or twice. Otherwise it is all very interesting … The noise of the bombardment is continuous—so continuous that one gets used to it, as one gets used to the noise in a train and the ear picks out the singing of the innumerable larks. (Ford, Letters 66–67)
One month later, Ford (68–69) writes again to Lucy from quieter Ypres Salient and explains how he tries to make sense out of war through recently developed “extra senses” while he analyses what he hears, namely bursting shells which he personifies and crepitating onomatopoeic machine guns:
[i]t is all very interesting & one learns a little more everyday. We have been out of the trenches since Monday & go in again almost immediately—but it is quiet here at its most violent compared with the Somme… . even the shells as they set out on their long journeys seem tired. It is rather curious, the extra senses one develops here. I sit writing in the twilight &, even as I write, I hear the shells whine14 & the M. G.’s crepitate & I see (tho’ it is hidden by a hill) the grey, flat land below & the shells bursting …
In his essay “War and the Mind” (War Prose 46), using alliterative onomatopoeic sentences, Ford described how a bullet almost hit him: “And then: ‘Zi … ipp!’ a single rifle bullet as nearly as possible got me. I would swear that it passed between me and my horse’s neck! At any rate it cannot have missed me by more than two feet. I found myself saying: ‘Four seconds! Four seconds!”, a risky episode to which he adds his own direct speech in mobility.
In September, also from Ypres, Ford wrote three letters to his friend Joseph Conrad, describing himself as an “annalist” who was recording history in the making and the sounds of war sounds that Conrad could use in his writings (Letters 75). If the soldier’s letters can be read as war travel writing, he is well aware that his geopolitical texts and the registered moment would become part of Europe’s historical past. As everything was new to him in the war theatre, he immediately decided to reflect on the experience of sonic perception and to illustrate how events are signalled by sound on the Front and far away. In December 1918, a month after the Armistice, he wrote the poem “Peace” which describes a new period symbolized by silence and illustrates how loud noises metaphorize traumatic episodes:
The black & nearly noiseless, moving, sea:
The immobile black houses of the town,
Pressing us out towards the noiseless sea
No sounds … . (Ford and Bowen 48)
His observations and memories are first-hand accounts of the war which allow us to analyse how war sounds were considered literary topoi and devices by him and Conrad. One of the letters that Ford (War Prose 4) sent to his mother in September 1916 describes the war as nerve-wracking due to constant fatal noises. Loud bombardments split the eardrums of soldiers, especially gunners who often went deaf, concluding “things are enormously exciting & the firing all day keeps me a little too much on the jump to write composedly”. As we will see, in his letters to Conrad, the soldier shares sounds as useful future material for novels, sensations which he would also represent in his prose to symbolise and convey, sometimes ironically, traumatic experiences, collective stress, shell shock, the absurdity of abject deaths, civilian and military suffering and technological modernity.15
The epistolary Self (analysing the effects of war noises and violence) mimics the anthropologist doing both ethnography of the senses16 and anthropology “under fire” or “frontline” ethnography (Boyden 238) while crystallising his subjective personal testimony. While defining the concept of ‘belliphonic’—as the “spectrum of sounds produced by armed combat”—, Daughtry (3) concludes that to witness war “is, in large part, to hear it. And to survive it is, among other things, to have listened to it. Or better: to have listened through it”, and Ford characterises himself as a (ear)witness in constant mobility who perceives war noises as invasive sources of trauma. The three letters sent to Conrad summarise Ford’s impressions of the war through some “notes upon sound” (Ford, Letters 73) and describe the soldier’s diagnostic listening as well as the constant surprises and shock caused by the traumatic acoustic dimension of the conflict as a “curious opportunity”. They also suggest that the short sound “notes” are potential fictional material. The first epistle describes the simultaneous sounds of artillery and of a huge storm, which make the writer hide under a table and humorously fuse and compare the violent sounds of nature and war to emphasise his auricular training:
I have just had a curious opportunity with regard to sound wh[ich]. I hasten to communicate to you … This aft[ernoo]n then, we have a very big artillery strafe on—not, of course as big as others I have experienced—but still very big. I happened to be in the very middle—the centre of a circle … The [illegible] last for about an hour—incessant and to all intents and purposes at a level pitch of sound. I was under cover … [y]ou see men going about daily avocations, carrying buckets, being shaved or reading the D’ly Mail &, quite suddenly, they all appear to be pulled sideways off their biscuit boxes or wagon shafts. I mean of course shrapnel or minen.
Well I was under the table and frightened out of my life—so indeed was the other man with me. There was shelling just overhead— apparently thousands of shells bursting for miles around and overhead. (Ford, Letters 71)
After describing simultaneous male occupation on the Front and how shells make soldiers and objects shake, the author in peril represents himself listening to the surrounding (sonic) environment, looking for relief in the sound of the rain. The sonic effect of shells and the rain hitting the physical natural landscape recall the letter’s reader that the sound of human conflict can only be made sense of in relation to the surrounding reference sounds of the natural world and that paying attention to nature’s sounds and their reception allows us to better understand how soldiers endured the fighting on the Western Front (Guida 1). The sounds of shells give place to the sound of universal raindrops that make the trenches muddy:
It was of course thunder. It completely extinguished the sound of the heavy art[iller]y, and even the how[itzer] about 50 yds. away was inaudible during the actual peals and sounded like stage thunder in the intervals. Of course we were in the very vortex of the storm, the lightning being followed by thunder before one cd. count two—but there we were right among the guns too… . At any rate they [guns] are quiet now, but the rain isn’t. (Ford, Letters 71–72)
By dramatising sonic episodes as subplots, Ford suggests that when the soldier arrives at the Front auditory perception (of the types, origin and location of sound sources) ceases to be a passive activity and is oriented toward very specific purposes, especially survival. The emotional sounds he describes function as a frontier between the world of the living and the dead. The audiosphere of his texts is militarised and marked by intense emotions in a war of moods. Incessant sound inscribes itself in the individual and collective memory and bodies of soldiers and civilians,17 while the excerpt’s description of auditory violence and reconnaissance illustrates how war sounds produce bad vibrations and modulate moods (Goodman xiv-xv). Ford is echoing Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto for music, The Art of Noises, which explores the expressiveness of noise one year before the war broke out and the significance of military noises changed forever.18 During WWI, hearing became almost as important as vision as an index of what was real and threatening (Leed 124), and the act of hearing was recast as a tactical activity, one that could determine survival. If, at the outset of the War, the concept of acoustic defence was mostly unknown, by the end of it, both parts had developed new technologies and techniques for sound location and employed these methods on countless occasions, generating new modes of acoustic defence (Ouzounian). Ford and other poets such as Siegfried Sassoon19 portray themselves hearing what they couldn’t see (spatial hearing) when visibility was hampered by fog, rain, smoke or darkness, and this was vital.
In times of war other senses such as touch also become literary themes when the soldier tries to make sense out of the conflict’s violence and pains (“The mud and rain here are pretty bad—after about a fortnight of wet—but they are not really much worse than Stocks Hall … I … do not seem to have taken any harm except for a touch of toothache” [Ford, Letters 72]). As Brasme (“Imprint” 11) concludes, Ford’s first-hand experience of the war caused “a rift in his creative process. His war writings show a constant tension between the feeling of a duty to bear testimony to the war, and that of a helpless speechlessness in the face of indescribable horror”. This transformative creative process is visible, or should we say audible, in his description of successive traumatic war sonicscapes that reinforce the nonsensical dimension of war, for instance, in the essay “Arms and the Mind”:
And so with the guns that in peace time I had found interesting or picturesque: they rattled past me there in an endless procession: they crushed slowly into the sandy road behind immense tractor monsters like incredible kitchen stoves. Further down in the wood they were actually at it: a dozen converted naval howitzers like enormous black toads that wheezed, panted out flame, shook the earth, and ran back into shelters of green boughs. The shells went away with long, slow whines … [I]t all seemed to signify nothing. One did not think of where the immense shells struck the ground; blowing whole battalions to nothing. One did not think that the RFA guns, hurrying forward, meant that the Push was progressing. Even the enemy shells that whined overhead were not very significant – and the visible signs that, shortly before, these shells had pitched into the new British graveyard, seemed to mean nothing very personal … I have been lifted off my feet and dropped two yards away by the explosion of a shell and felt complete assurance of immunity. (Ford, War Prose 40–1; my emphasis)
The chronotopic images of flying Shrapnel shells populate the 1916 essay that fuses images and sounds that constitute emotional episodes and memories from the Front (“Yes, I have just one War Picture in my mind: it is a hurrying black cloud, like the dark cloud of the Hun shrapnel. It sweeps down at any moment: over Mametz Wood” [War Prose 41]), while war is marked by alternating silences and monstruous sounds that become fantasized memories in his 1917 essay “War and the Mind”:
Curiously enough that sniper – if it was a sniper – is the most present in my mind of all the thousands of blue grey beasts that, in one capacity or another, one saw out there …. And yet I, naturally, never saw him. I do see him. He has a black moustache a jovial but intent expression: he lies beside a bit of ruined wall, one dark eye cocked against his telescopic sight, the other closed. And through the circle of the sight he sees me riding slowly over the down. (Ford, War Prose 46, my emphasis)
As Saunders (“Arms” 32) concludes, these two essays are concerned “with the problem of visions: questions of perspectives, hallucinations, and the difficulties of visualisation” and the enumerated noises become part of the soldiers’ sensory and sound-centred memories of war and suffering. Ford’s 1916 essay on his weekend leave in Paris, “Trois Jours de Permission”, also illustrates the relation between violence and the waiting for the sound of shells:
[W]aiting for the bombs to come up; waiting for one’s unit to move; waiting for one’s orders; waiting for the shelling to stop; and, above all, waiting for the shell – the solitary whining shell, the last of three that is due from the methodical German battery miles away on the plain – waiting for that to manifest itself in a black cloud, up there; in an echoing crash, and in a patter, as of raindrops …. Yes, one learns to wait. (Ford, War Prose 49)
The incoherent art of war is also the art of waiting for and of interpreting sounds, as well as of coping with abject and grotesque portraits such as the one he inserts in his prose20 and poem “One Day’s List” which enumerates and suggests sounds, smells and tactile sensations as well as the different dimensions of the incomprehensibility of war:
The mine thunders
Upwards and branches of trees, mud, and stone,
Skulls, limbs, rats, thistles, the clips
Of cartridges, …
Belch
……………………………
Of the craters where doubtless you died … (Ford, On Heaven 48)
The second letter sent to Conrad (06-09-1916) continues the “notes upon sounds” for the addressee’s “information and necessary action” (Ford, Letters 73) should he decide to fictionalise war. The soldier italicises war acoustic plots and explains their effects, namely the “echoes” of bombs in different kinds of land and water morphologies, as if nature reacted to these sounds:
In woody country heavy artillery makes most noise, because of the echoes—and most prolonged in a diluted way. On marshland—like the Romney Marsh—the sound seems alarmingly close: I have seldom heard the Hun artillery in the middle of a strafe except on marshy land. The sound, not the diluted sound, is also at its longest in the air. [An arrow is drawn from the “e” in the following paragraph to the “e” in this paragraph.] On dry down land the sound is much sharper; it hits you & shakes you. On clay land it shakes the ground & shakes you thro’ the ground. A big naval (let us say) gun, fired, unsuspected by us out of what resembled (let us say) a dead mule produced the “e” that I have marked with an arrow. In hot, dry weather, sounds give me a headache—over the brows & across the skull, inside, like migraine. In wet weather one minds them less, tho’ dampness of the air makes them seem nearer. (Ford, Letters 73)
The technological battle noise and violence were overwhelming (Habeck 103–112), and soldiers learned how to listen beyond it. The identification of war sounds was essential to avoid danger. Ford noticed that the texture of the landscape altered the sound of artillery fire, and this was not only literary sensitivity at work because sound-ranging techniques were being developed by engineers to locate the position of the enemy (Guida 1, 4).
Thirteen years later, in his 1929 “‘A Note by Way of Preface’ to All Else is Folly (1929) by Peregrine Acland”, Ford described the effects that other writers’ fictional sensorial descriptions and soundscapes of war had on him:
When I read of the marching and fighting towards the end of the book, I feel on my skin the keen air of the early mornings standing-to, I have in my mouth the dusky tastes, in my eyes the dusky landscapes, in my ears the sounds that were silences interrupted by clickings of metal on metal, that at any moment might rise to the infernal clamour of all Armageddon …. Yes, indeed, one lives it all again, with the fear, and the nausea … and the surprised relief to find oneself still alive. (Ford, War Prose 195)
The second epistle sent to Conrad emphasizes the degree to which the human body and the geographic environment become sonic conductors through a taxonomy of sounds (Kyne 42, 47) and comments on the sound of bombs hitting a church and Ford’s lack of feelings accompanied by a suggested common war soundtrack: female and male screams fusing with the sound of bombs exploding. The noises produced by the dying soldiers become memories that vanish quickly as the living ones need to forget and survive, normalising the sound of bombs hitting houses. Near the Front, when bombed, people don’t even hide any longer as fear arrives with some delay:
Shells falling on a church: these make a huge “corump” sound, followed by a noise like crockery falling off a tray—as the roof tiles fall off. If the roof is not tiled you can hear the stained glass, sifting mechanically until the next shell. (Heard in a church square, on each occasion, about 90 yds away). (Ford, Letters 73)
The repetitive dimension of alliteration and onomatopoeic words conveys the continual sound of shells and the fact that alert soldiers learn to recognise the sound of different types of shells. Ford’s bellic soundscape gives place to the simultaneous sounds of female bodies in agony and to images of surviving, desensitised, non-empathetic male listeners, as emotions seem to vanish:
Screams of women penetrate all these sounds—but I do not find that they agitate me as they have done at home. (Women in cellars round the square. Oneself running thro’ fast.) Emotions again: I saw two men and three mules (the first time I saw a casualty) killed by one shell…. These things gave me no emotion at all—they seemed obvious; rather as it wd. be. A great many patients on stretchers—a thousand or so in a long stream is very depressing—but, I fancy, mostly because one thinks one will be going back into it. When I was in hospital a man three beds from me died very hard, blood passing thro’ bandages and he himself crying perpetually, “Faith! Faith! Faith!” (Ford, Letters 73–74)
These sounds of dying men are also fictionalised in Some Do Not …21 and illustrate how the soldier’s autobiographical anecdotes become fictional episodes in war novels that establish intertextual dialogues with his letters and essays. The epistles ironically describe psychological strategies used to deal with traumatic sounds conveyed through onomatopoeic words that humorously convey the war soundscape.22 In an almost nonsensical episode presented to the reader who, of course, is far away from the Front, the soldier pretends that bomb sounds are made by flies. The shells are heard in the trenches and by the local communities in houses and public spaces near the Front. The second letter describes a close call while the soldier is buying flypaper in a French shop. A polyglot paragraph titled “Fear” is marked by repetition, human sounds, agitated alertness and simultaneous reactions and illustrates the new relationship between the static and active listening subjects and sound objects:
Fear;
This of course is the devil—& worst because it is so very capricious. Yesterday I was buying—or rather not buying—flypapers in a shop under a heap of rubbish. The woman was laughing & saying that all the flies came from England. A shell landed in the chateau into whose wall the shop was built. One Tommie said, “Crump!” Another: “Bugger the flies” & slapped himself. The woman—about thirty, quick, & rather Jewish—went on laughing. I said, “Mais je vous assure, Madame, qu’il n’y a plus comme ça de mouches chez nous.” No interruption, emotion, vexed at getting no flypapers. Subconscious emotion, “thank God the damn thing’s burst.” (Ford, Letters 74)
Ford’s memories of this psychological experience made him tremble in terror the following day, aware of his nervous responses and mental health issues (Chantler and Hawkes) caused by the war: “Yet today, passing the place, I wanted to gallop past it & positively trembled on my horse” (Ford, Letters 74). The third letter that Ford sent to Conrad conveys the soldier’s permanent fear of imminent death, and, like in the first letter, the urge to record the many dimensions of war:
I wrote these rather hurried notes yesterday because we were being shelled to hell and I did not expect to get thro’ the night. I wonder if it is just vanity that in these cataclysmic moments makes one desire to record. I hope it is, rather, the annalist’s wish to help the historian—or, in a humble sort of way, my desire to help you, cher maître!—if you ever wanted to do anything in “this line.” (Ford, Letters 75)
Sounds are represented as warnings and source of vital information that traumatise the military Self who constantly fears death in “cataclysmic moments” which he desires to record for posterity, as we already mentioned. One week after writing these letters and spending three days of leave in Paris, Ford was advised to go to the hospital “suffering from specific shell-shock” (Ford, Letters 76). He refused to do so and was sent back to the battalion base in Wales before the end of September. In his 1933 narrative “It Was the Nightingale”, war sounds invade home as London becomes the epicentre of the warscape, and its monuments and houses are personified as “listening” during one silent evening of a great air-raid, “awaiting doom” (Ford, War Prose 247). German planes return after having “already smashed many houses and killed a great many people in their cellars” (247) while people and the narrator pray, adding a religious soundscape to the psychological situation.
Conclusion
In “‘That Same Poor Man’; a revised typescript of an unpublished novel”, Ford (War Prose 265) concludes that “the sights, sounds, psychologies and conditions of trench warfare had at first appalled, then disgusted and finally wearied [soldiers] beyond the bounds of patience”. He conveys this same idea to Conrad through his sonic “notes” that explore the functions and literary expressiveness of real war sounds which he witnessed and recorded in letters and essays that function as a fragmentary poetics of the war sonic imaginary. The danger of imminent death stimulated the soldier’s drive to write and even to ignore danger itself as noises and silences, like letter writing and reading, mark the passage of time and show how the body is permeable to the continual loud traumatic sounds that formed an “unmistakable sensory signature of World War I” (Hoffmann 114). As we saw, the analyst’s literary descriptions of sounds function as sonic fragments that chronicle the change in the hierarchy of senses that took place during the conflict. Encke (Augenblicke der Gefahr 51; “War Noises” 7–21) terms this process of intensive engagement with sounds “new listening” and recalls that interest in sound perception continued well after the end of the underground23 war in the trenches. Ford’s letters and essays are exercises on the possibility both to weaponise sound and to ‘transcribe’ the violent acoustics of war. Listening is (re)presented as an essential cognitive activity on the Front and the hearing military Self is a vulnerable target, just like his ear, because “you can’t close it, you can’t choose what it hears, and the sounds that reach it can profoundly alter your psychological or physical state” (Volcler 1). These same sonic images and themes would soon become symbols of the War in English literature.
Ford’s experience of war sounds in the summer of 1916 became one of his signature leitmotive and awakened him to the literary possibilities of an auditory impressionism (Kyne 21, 51) as Conrad himself suggested when he replied to Ford’s letters in December: “Methinks to make anything of [the war] in our sense one must fling the very last dregs of realism overboard” (Conrad 683), that is to write impressionistically (Kyne 33), in terms of acoustic impressions.24 These noises function as modernist fragments of the surrounding war reality one wishes to escape from and show that the shock of war can only be approached through such (sometimes incoherent) fragments, and peripherally (Haslam; Brasme, “Imprint” 18). If war (as a historical-psychological situation) is too vast to be understood and imagined because “to imagine it would be to discover its significance” (Hynes 106), soldiers like Ford quickly learnt how to shelter from shells and this “‘mobilization of the ear’ as a military cognitive organ” encouraged a “trend toward auditory perception” (Volmar 228) textualized in the letters and essays we are dealing with. As micro-literary fragmentary exercises on the effects of sound, Ford’s 1916–1917 letters and essays and their literary intertexts represent his aural experience of the Somme and the formation of his sonic consciousness before he took the First World War as his primary literary subject in the following decade.25 The letters and essays invite Conrad and other readers to imagine the continuous traumatic sounds of conflict and to think about their literary suggestiveness and potential when trying to make (impossible and aesthetic) sense out of the never-ending war as an acoustic stage.
Notes
[1] Ten years later, in November 1926, Ford (Letters 170) wrote to the editor of The New York World and presented himself as “the only British novelist of … [his] age who actually took part in hostilities as an infantry officer”, and indeed most of his famous works have the First World War at their centre.
[2] Haslam and Saunders (25–26) remind us that Ford’s letters, many of which remain unpublished, are the single element of his oeuvre most in need of editorial attention and have been mentioned and cited far more in biographies than in critical essays of his work. The authors conclude that, in the absence of diaries, Ford’s letters provide the most comprehensive picture of his everyday life and experiences, as our paper demonstrates. On Ford’s 1914 short prose about the war, see Frayn, “First World War”.
[3] As is known, Conrad and Ford co-wrote several texts since 1898 (The Inheritors; 1901; Romance, 1903; The Nature of a Crime, 1909) and wrote for one another (Morey).
[4] English modernism was “invented during the First World War (not after it) by writers who had little direct involvement in the war” (Lewis 148, 155). Ford, like other war writers, had a great influence on the modernists, as war “facilitated a transformation of English literary tradition exemplified in the changing status of the corpse in wartime and post-war poetry” (Lewis 148, 155; see also O’Malley, Making History New). On the relationship between modernism and the First World War, see, for instance, Booth (8); Sherry; Saunders, “Life Writing” 106–111), Saint-Amour; and Chantler and Hawkes.
[5] Namely, the Parade’s End tetralogy, The Marsden Case (1923) and No Enemy (1929). A Man Could Stand Up (Ford 557, 566) describes how “[i]n the trench you could see nothing and noise rushed like black angels gone mad; solid noise that swept you off your feet. … Swept your brain off its feet… . You became second-in-command of your own soul… . Snap! Snap! Snap! … Clear sounds from a quarter of a mile away. … Bullets whined. Overhead. Long sounds. Going away. Not snipers… . A chance! Snap! Snap! Snap! Bullets whined overhead”. The narrator of No More Parades (Ford 297) describes “an enormous crashing sound said things of an intolerable intimacy to each of those men and all of them as a body. After its mortal vomiting, all the other sounds appeared as a rushing silence, painful to ears in which the blood audibly coursed”.
[6] In October of 1923, in a letter to H. G. Wells, Ford (Letters 154) would state: “I am as happy as it is decent to be: very fit … after many years of great anxiety and strain things have rather suddenly gone all right together. I’ve got over the nerve tangle of the war and feel able at last really to write again—which I never thought I should do”.
[7] The 1990s ‘sonic turn’ gave way to the interdisciplinary field of sound or sonic studies, and in 2003 Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction analysed listening as a historically situated and technologically mediated activity.
[8] The narrator of Barbusse’s novel comments on the perception of war noises: “The dark, flaming storm never ceases. Never. We are buried in the depths of an eternal battlefield; but, like the ticking of the clocks in our houses, in the olden days, in that almost mythical past, this is something that you only hear when you listen for it” (Barbusse 8).
[9] The Battle of Verdun claimed almost half a million men, and the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916 (the bloodiest single day in the history of the British armed forces), saw some 60,000 casualties, 20,000 deaths.
[10] Leed (126) recalls that on the Front the “conditions of neurosis were created not by the sight of exploding chemicals but by the deafening sound and vibration of the barrage, which defenders were required to suffer for hours, even days.” A letter that Ford (Letters 74–75) wrote to Lucy Masterman (06-09-1916) describes these same vibrations: “We are in a h-ell of a noise, just now—my hand is shaking badly—our guns are too inconsiderate—they pop up out of baby’s rattles & tea cosy & shake the rats thro’ the earth”.
[11] Ford (War Prose 42): “from high points like the OP on the Albert-Bécourt road, … one saw … big and coloured bits of wall and the white lines of trenches in the chalk, below the feet. Wytschaete with the tranquil red roofs … And little white balls would exist, one by one, at intervals of a second or so, appearing to be an inch to the right … One thought comfortingly: ‘Our own shells.’ And one said aloud: ‘Somebody will be ducking, out there!’”
[12] Hartford (98) analyses how, 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’.
[13] On the concept of acoustical agency, see Rice 1–15.
[14] Ford (War Prose 40) uses this same verb in his essay “Arms and the Mind”: “even the enemy shells that whined overhead were not very significant”.
[15] Fauser (9) recalls that since both world wars recorded sound has become so commonplace that it has lost its historical specificity. Memoirs of soldiers and novels describe how it felt to be shelled, for instance, German officer Ernst Jünger’s 1920 memoir Storm of Steel: “It’s an easier matter to describe these sounds than to endure them, because one cannot but associate every single sound of flying steel with the idea of death, and so I huddled in my hole in the ground with my hand in front of my face, imagining all the possible variants of being hit. I think I have found a comparison that captures the situation … you must imagine you are securely tied to a post, being menaced by a man swinging a heavy hammer … cleaving the air towards you, … struck the post, and the splinters are flying — that’s what it’s like to experience heavy shelling in an exposed position” (Jünger 80–81).
[16] On ethnography of the senses, see Howes; Classen; Stoller (559–570).
[17] Robert Graves (74) recalls that war noises “never stopped for one moment – ever”.
[18] Russolo (49–50): “from noise, the different calibres of grenades and shrapnels can be known even before they explode. Noise enables us to discern a marching patrol in deepest darkness, even to judging the number of men that compose it. From the intensity of rifle fire, the number of defenders of a given position can be determined. There is no movement or activity that is not revealed by noise”.
[19] In his poem “A Working Party”, Sassoon (19) describes the confusion in the trenches where the soldier is both auditor and producer of a symphony of sounds: “Three hours ago he blundered up the trench,/Sliding and poising, groping with his boots; /…/ He couldn’t see the man who walked in front;/Only he heard the drum and rattle of feet /…/ Voices would grunt ‘Keep to your right— …/… rifle-shots/Would split and crack and sing along the night,/And shells came calmly through the drizzling air/… /And [he] always laughed at other people’s jokes”.
[20] Ford’s essay “Arms and the Mind” describes how “in the battle zone – the whole world, humanity included, seems to assume the aspect of matter dominated eventually by gravity. Large bits of pot fly about, smash large pieces of flesh: then one and the other fall, to lie in the dust among the immense thistles… . Hopes, passions, fears do not seem much to exist outside oneself” (Ford, War Prose 39).
[21] Tietjens tells Sylva: “He let out a number of ear-piercing shrieks and lots of orderlies came and pulled him … Then he began to shout ‘Faith!’ He shouted: ‘Faith! … Faith! … Faith! …’ at intervals of two seconds … until four in the morning, when he died.” (Ford, Some Do Not … 175).
[22] In August 1916, Ford (Letters 68) tells Lucy Masterman that while bathing, “some shrapnel burst overhead—& [he] was amused to discover that [he] grabbed for a shirt before a tin hat”.
[23] Fussell (39) called the trenches a “troglodyte world” where the “sonic mindedness” (Jean 53) or “hearing became much more important than vision” (Leed 124).
[24] Bonikowski (61) analyses the crisis of impressionism in Ford’s narratives due to the impossibility of representing recent trauma, asking: “how does one write about war when one is essentially ‘blind’ to one’s experience?”
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.