Whatever, again, was august in Canadian life and affairs was bent in 1914 upon arming Canadian troops with what was indeed, by a long chalk, the pick of all match-shooting rifles. It was the last word of man in his struggle against the caprices of barometric and thermometric pressures on ranges. And it was to show a purblind Europe, among other things, that Sam Hughes was the man and that wisdom would die with him. Yet hardly had its use, in wrath, begun when there broke upon the untutored Canadian foot-soldier a revelation withheld from the Hugheses of this world. He perceived that the enemy, in his perversity, did not intend to stand up on a skyline a thousand yards off to be shot with all the refinements of science; point-blank was going to be the only range, except for a few specialists; rapidity of fire would matter more than precision; and all the super-subtle appliances tending to triumphs at Bisley would here be no better than aids to the picking of mud from trench walls as the slung rifle joggled against them.
The great did not turn these truths of mean origin right away from the door. They would quite often take a discovery in. Only there was no running to greet it.
There was no hurry in their hands,
No hurry in their feet.
Like smells that originate in the kitchen and work their way up by degrees to the best bedroom the new revelations of war ascended slowly from floor to floor of the hierarchy. They did arrive in the end. The Canadians got, in the end, a rifle not too great and good for business. By the third year of the war the infantry schools at the base were teaching drafts from home to use the bayonet as troops in the line had taught themselves to use it in the second. The frowning down of the tanks can hardly have lasted a year. The Stokes gun was not blackballed for good. It was not for all time, but only for what seemed to them like an age, that our troops had to keep off the well-found enemy bomber with bombs that they made of old jam tins, wire, a little guncotton, a little time fuse, and some bits of sharp stone, old iron, or anything hard that was lying about, with earth to fill in; the higher powers did the thing well in the end; they came down handsomely at last; in the next life the Mills bomb alone should be good for at least a night out once a year on an iceberg to some War Office brave who would not see it killed in the cradle.
And yet authority wore, in the eyes of its troops in the field, an inexpert air—sublime, benevolent, but somehow inexpert. They had begun to notice it even before leaving England. Imagine the headquarters Staff of a district command watching a test for battalion bombing officers and sergeants at the close of a divisional bombing course in 1915: the instructor in charge a quick-witted Regular N.C.O. who has shone at Loos and is now decorated, commissioned, slightly shell-shocked, and sent home to teach, full of the new craft and subtlety of trench war; the pupils all picked for the job and devouringly keen, half of them old cricketers, all able-bodied, and all now able, after hard practice during the course, to drop a bomb on to any desired square yard within thirty-five yards of their stance; and then the Staff, tropically dazzling in their red and gold, august beyond words, but genial, benign, encouraging, only too ready to praise things that they would see to be easy if only they knew more about them and were not like middle-aged mothers watching their offspring at football—so a profane bombing sergeant describes them that night to his mess.
V
“Your Old Army’s all bloody born amatoors,” an Australian of ripe war experience remarked with some frankness in France. His immediate occasion for generalizing so rashly was somebody’s slip in passing certain grenades as good for field use. Most of our hand and rifle grenades undoubtedly were. If anything they were too fine for it, too fit to beautify drawing-rooms as well. One objet d’art, a delight to the eye, was said to cost its country one pound five as against the two francs for which France was composing an angel of death less pretty but equally virtuous. Still, ours would kill, if you had the heart to break up an object so fair. But the batch that made the Australian blaspheme, though good in design, were mismade. They were made as if the people who made them had not guessed what they were for.
As you know, the outside of most kinds of grenade is a thick metal case serrated with deeply-cut lines that cross each other like those more shallow sunk lines on crocodile-leather, only at right angles. These lines of weakness, cut into the metal, mark out almost the whole of the case into little squares standing up in relief, sixteen or thirty-two or forty-eight or seventy-two according to type. The burst, if all goes well, attacks the lines of weakness, cuts them right through, and so disperses all the little squares of brass, cast-iron, or steel radially as flying bits of shrapnel. What led the Australian to sin was that this batch had
