Ten Pieces - 'Mars' From 'The Planets' UK Quiz

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He had lost many friends in the Boer War at the turn of the 20th century
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World War I was beginning at the time when he began composing The Planets
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H G Wells had fairly recently published The War of the Worlds in which Martians were 'the enemy'
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The Mars Bar was newly on sale, so the name was in people's minds

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It uses stringed instruments, which would plainly be impractical for marching people to play
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It has the wrong number of beats in the bar (5 rather than 4)
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It isn't loud enough from the outset
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There are no 'effects' to suggest gunfire during it

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They flick the bodies of their instruments with their fingernails
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They pluck the strings with their fingertips instead of stroking them with the bow
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They turn the bow over and bounce the wooden side off the string instead of stroking it with the horsehair
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They tune their strings to pitches different from the usual

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Holst's first schoolgirl choir (from St Paul's, where he taught) rehearsed their notes to the accompaniment of an organ before practising with the full orchestra
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The singers were instructed to vocalise without forming actual words, so as to sound as near as possible like the tone of an organ
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The singers could breathe 'secretly' whenever they wanted, so the overall sound of their chords never ran out of puff ~ like the potentially unbroken sound of an organ
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The final 'fade' is achieved by slowly closing a door so that the audience can no longer hear the offstage chorus: this is the same basic acoustic / mechanical principle as the pedal-controlled 'swell box' on all but the smallest pipe organs