Under the recurring headline ‘the Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches’, several British newspapers reported in early 1900 that, during the ongoing siege of Mafeking, British army concertina players were capturing enemy soldiers by simply playing strains of the concertina to distract them out of their hiding places. ‘One is sorry to learn that the art of music should be pressed into service to lure persons to destruction’, a commentator in the Musical News noted, but then, it was rationalized, ‘all's fair in war’. This hybrid use of the concertina during the South African War was further employed as a metaphor for the decay of the physical body itself: as has been noted by Elizabeth van Heyningen, food in Boer concentration camps was so meagre that the meat served to prisoners was once described as coming from a ‘carcase [who] looks like a concertina drawn out fully with all the wind knocked out’. Likewise, Krebs (1999) has discussed the presence of the concertina in the trenches as an example of contemporaneous stereotypes about the susceptibility of Boer soldiers to music in relation to perceived notions that they were backwards and easily manipulated. Drawing upon references to music – particularly the ubiquitous, anthropomorphised, instrument of the concertina – in concentration camps during the South African War, this paper will situate the use of British military music at the dawn of the twentieth century within the framework of trauma studies, proposing that the soundscapes of imperial war were implicitly tinged with traces of physical suffering.

在反复出现的标题“六角琴在战壕中的致命作用”下，几家英国报纸在 1900 年初报道说，在对 Mafeking 的持续围攻期间，英国军队的六角琴演奏者通过简单地演奏六角琴的乐曲来俘虏敌军士兵，以分散他们的注意力他们的藏身之处。音乐新闻的一位评论员说：“得知音乐艺术应该被用来引诱人们走向毁灭，我们感到很遗憾”注意到，但随后，它被合理化，“战争中一切都是公平的”。南非战争期间手风琴的这种混合使用被进一步用作身体本身腐烂的隐喻：正如伊丽莎白范海宁根所指出的那样，布尔集中营的食物非常匮乏，以至于囚犯的肉是曾被描述为来自“尸体 [who] 看起来像一个完全拉出的手风琴，所有的风都被淘汰了”。同样，克雷布斯 (Krebs) (1999) 讨论了战壕中手风琴的存在，以此作为同时期刻板印象的一个例子，即布尔士兵对音乐的敏感性与他们落后且容易操纵的感知观念有关。借鉴音乐——尤其是无处不在的、拟人化的、