One hundred years ago, the world’s guns fell silent after four years of hell. It is impossible, they say, to adequately understand what the guns of the Western Front sounded, and felt, like.

The combatants hurled millions of shells at each other a week; during the fearsome artillery barrages that preceded an offensive, sympathetic vibrations were felt in England. It nearly wiped out a generation in Western Europe; when the British author Arthur Mee (familiar to some of us, perhaps, as the editor of the old ‘Children’s Encyclopaedia’) wrote about what he called ...