The splendiferous regimental band were bedecked in their wonderful tall bearskin hats, their sword-blade creased trousers and with their gleaming brass buttons reflecting the polished cymbals or trumpets that in turn mirrored them in their burnished metal planes. They ceremonially piped and beat the farewell advance of each of their fellow regiments as they set off for battle. The regiments’ marching boots seamlessly fell into step with the band’s rhythms. 
Their instruments were taken from them and sent to the forges to melt down for bullets and shells. Their hands were filled with rifles instead. Their fine regalia was stripped from them and swapped for fatigues. They themselves now marched to the front, without even a lone drum to keep them in step. Not being regular soldiers they were wiped out in double quick time, by the wind of screaming shells and the percussion of high explosive. There was no band to give them a send off at their mass funeral in the military cemetery. 
They were accompanied by no sound save for the wind among the woods. Not even birds raised their song and the women mourners sobbed silently at the gravesides rather than letting out full-throated lamentations. The dead bandsmen grew restless in the soil with no music to pulse their eternal sleep.
One by one they rose from their graves and these bags of bones ordered themselves into their band formation. They brought phalanges up to the maxilla and mandibles but on blowing found there were no reeds to receive their breath, no pipes to shape and vent the air. Their heads sagged crestfallen, when one of them who still had the ceremonial knife he had been buried with, took it and cut off a phalange. He gouged a hole in it’s sealed end and proceeded to notch holes in tits length. He brought it to up his mandible, pursed the bone with difficulty and started blowing. Notes were emitted, a sweet pitch and his comrades all gathered around him to imbibe the balm it provided. 

At the end of his recital, each scurried off to other graves and began disinterring their unfortunate residents. The snapped off all manner of bones, snaffled ragged vestiges of cartilage, scooped out membranous lattices and bored and gouged holes and apertures of precise dimension. Then they reformed their phalanx and brought their newly forged fifes and bagpipes and euphoniums up to their mandibles, or poised bonesticks over membranes stretched across craniums. One drummer had lashed several skulls together in a line which he wore as a belt, twin tibia poised to palpate the osseous matter. The band struck up a tune and gave themselves a fitting send off as they marched down towards the eternal parade in Hell.