In this poem, the speakers are skeletons of the dead who are awakened by the booming sounds of "gunnery practice" on the English Channel in the months before World War I.

The light-hearted tone of the poem, in which Hardy imagines making literal the cliche about sounds loud enough to wake the dead, contrasts with the poem's bleak and somber anti-war theme. In the poem, the skeletons sit "upright" as they hear the guns, thinking it is the sound of Judgement Day. However, God speaks, telling them this is not the case and delivering his opinion of the war mongering:

Mad as hatters

They do no more for Christés sake

Than you who are helpless in such matters.