Somme by Lyn MacDonald

“As they neared the wood, between the roar of the explosions, behind the sickening gas-soaked mist, in the forefront of the noise that raged at them from every horizon, the small party of the West Yorkshires became aware of another sound. It was like nothing they had ever heard before. Later — and for the rest of his life — Lieutenant Hornshaw was to remember it as a sound that chilled the blood; a nerve-scraping noise like ‘enormous wet fingers screeching across an enormous pane of glass.’ It was coming from the wounded, lying out in No Man’s Land. Some screaming, some muttering, some weeping with fear, some calling for help, shouting in delirium, groaning with pain, the sounds of their distress had synthesised into one unearthly wail.
”As midnight passed and the night of the first day of July turned towards the dawn of the second, as the gunfire died down, it seemed to fill the air. All along the front, from the orchards of Gommecourt to the heights of Beaumont Hamel, from the shoulders of Thiepval to the valley beyond la Boisselle, it rose from the battlefield into the night like the keening of a thousand banshees.
”Holding grimly to the remnants of their battered trenches, the battered remnants of the Army shivered as they listened.”

-Lyn MacDonald, 1983