And the Band Played On

With the anniversary of World War One upon us there are a number of books relating to various aspects of the war that have recently been published. One that I have just read is And the Band Played On: How Music Lifted the Anzac Spirit in the Battlefields of the First Word War by Robert Holden. Interestingly I have recently discovered that there are very few books about music in World War One compared to the Second World War, so I was pretty excited to find one that was not only about WWI, but also about the ANZACs (for those readers outside of the Antipodes, or the British Commonwealth ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps).

A small caveat: although this purports to be about the ANZACs it is mostly focused on the Australian contributions and reception rather than both Australian and New Zealand. New Zealand soldiers and musicians/entertainers do get mentioned, but not in equal amounts. As a New Zealander I could wish that there were more instances of New Zealand-ness in this book, but I suspect only other Kiwis will notice the lack, and it certainly does not ruin the book.

And the Band Played On was a highly entertaining and incredibly informative book about the role of music and musicians in the ANZAC forces during World War One. When doing a brief Google search before writing this review I noticed one page that stated that Holden had spent five years reading Digger (soldiers) diaries- I’m actually surprised that it was not longer, given the thought and precision that has gone into this book. This book is organised by different aspects of music (and more broadly entertainment) and how they related to the war, and appears to cover almost every possible type of instance:

from gramophones/records for the entertainment and recovery of wounded, to the concert parties performing for the troops, to instances of music, or even the rescue of musical instruments, during fighting and many more. There were many surprising instances that do not get (and probably never have or never will be) mentioned in cultural or military histories.