Soldiers of our army who read this story will probably observe one thing in particular, and that is the importance of bombing operations in the present style of warfare. You might say that a feature of this war has been the renaissance of the grenadier. Only British reverence for tradition kept the name of the Grenadiers alive, through a considerable number of wars. Now, in every offensive, big or small, the man who has been trained to throw a bomb thirty yards is busier and more important than the fellow with the modern rifle which will shoot a mile and a half and make a hole through a house. In a good many surprising ways this war has carried us back to first principles. I remember a Crusader’s mace which I once saw in the British museum that would make a bang-up knob-kerrie, much better than the kind with which they arm our Number 4 men in a raiding party section. It had a round, iron head with spikes all over it. I wonder that they haven’t started a factory to turn them out.
As I learned during my special training in England, the use of hand grenades was first introduced in warfare by the French, in 1667. The British did not use them until ten years later. After the battle of Waterloo the hand grenade was counted an obsolete weapon until the Japanese revived its use in the war with Russia. The rude grenades first used by the British in the present war weighed about eight pounds. To-day, in the British army, the men who have been trained to throw grenades—now of lighter construction and much more efficient and certain action—are officially known as “bombers” for this reason: When grenade fighting came back to its own in this war, each battalion trained a certain number of men in the use of grenades, and, naturally, called them “grenadiers.” The British Grenadier Guards, the senior foot regiment in the British Army, made formal complaint against the use of their time-honored name in this connection, and British reverence for tradition did the rest. The Grenadiers were no longer grenadiers, but they were undoubtedly the Grenadiers. The war office issued a formal order that battalion grenade throwers should be known as “bombers” and not as “grenadiers.”
Up to the time when I left France we had some twenty-seven varieties of grenades, but most of them were obsolete or ineffective, and we only made use of seven or eight sorts. The grenades were divided into two principal classes, rifle grenades and hand grenades. The rifle grenades are discharged from a rifle barrel by means of a blank cartridge. Each grenade is attached to a slender rod which is inserted into the bore of the rifle, and the longer the rod the greater the range of the grenade. The three principal rifle grenades are the Mills, the Hales, and the Newton, the former having a maximum range of 120 yards, and the latter of 400 yards. A rifle discharging a Mills grenade may be fired from the shoulder, as there is no very extraordinary recoil, but in using the others it is necessary to fasten the rifle in a stand or plant the butt on the ground. Practice teaches the soldier how much elevation to give the rifle for different ranges. The hand grenades are divided also into two classes, those which are discharged by percussion, and those which have time fuses, with detonators of fulminate of mercury. The high explosives used are ammonal, abliste and sabulite, but ammonal is the much more commonly employed. There are also smoke bombs, the Mexican or tonite bomb, the Hales hand grenade, the No. 19 grenade and the fumite bomb, which contains white phosphorous, wax and petrol, and discharges a stream of liquid fire which will quickly burn out a dug-out and everything it contains. Hand grenades are always thrown with a stiff arm, as a bowler delivers a cricket ball toward the wicket. They cannot be thrown in the same manner as a baseball for two reasons. One is that the snap of the wrist with which a baseball is sent on its way would be likely to cause the premature discharge of a percussion grenade, and the second is that the grenades weigh so much—from a pound and a half to ten pounds—that the best arm in the world couldn’t stand the strain of whipping them off as a baseball is thrown. I’m talking by the book about this, because I’ve been a bomber and a baseball player.
A bomber, besides knowing all about the grenades in use in his own army, must have practical working knowledge concerning the grenades in use by the enemy. After we took the Regina trench, on the Somme, we ran out of grenades at a moment when a supply was vitally necessary. We found a lot of the German “egg” bombs, and through our knowledge of their workings and our consequent ability to use them against their original owners we were able to hold the position.
An officer or non-commissioned officer in charge of a bombing detail must know intimately every man in his command, and have such discipline that every order will be carried out with scrupulous exactitude when the time comes. The leader will have no time, in action, to prompt his men or even to see if they are doing what they have been told to do. When a platoon of infantry is in action one rifleman more or less makes little difference, but in bombing operations each man has certain particular work to do and he must do it, just as it has been planned, in order to protect himself and his comrades from disaster. If you can out-throw the enemy, or if you can make most of the bombs land with accuracy, you have a wonderful advantage in an attack. But throwing wild or throwing short you simply give confidence to the enemy in his own offensive. One very good thrower may win an objective for his squad, while one man who is faint-hearted or unskilled or “rattled” may cause the entire squad to be annihilated.
In the revival of bombing, some tricks have developed which would be humorous if the denouements were not festooned with crepe and accompanied by obituary notations on muster rolls. There may be something which might be termed funny on one end of a bombing-ruse—but not on both ends of it. Whenever you fool a man with a bomb, you’re playing a practical joke on him that he’ll never forget. Even, probably, he’ll never get a chance to remember it.
When the Canadians first introduced bombing, the bombs were improvised out of jam tins, the fuses were cut according to the taste and judgment of the individual bomber, and, just when the bomb would explode, was more or less problematical. Frequently, the Germans have tossed our bombs back into our trenches before they went off. That was injurious and irritating. They can’t do that with a Mills grenade nor with any of the improved factory-made bombs, because the men know just how they are timed and are trained to know just how to throw them. The Germans used to work another little bomb trick of their own. They learned that our scouts and raiders were all anxious to get a German helmet as a souvenir. They’d put helmets on the ground in “No Man’s Land,” or in an advanced trench with bombs under them. In several cases, men looking for souvenirs suddenly became mere memories, themselves. In several raids, when bombing was new, the Canadians worked a trick on the Germans with extensively fatal effect. They tossed bombs into the German trenches with six-inch fuses attached. To the Germans they looked just like the other bombs we had been using, and, in fact they were—all but the fuses. Instead of having failed to continue burning, as the Germans thought, those fuses had never been lighted. They were instantaneous fuses. The ignition spark will travel through instantaneous fuse at the rate of about thirty yards a second. A German would pick up one of these bombs, select the spot where he intended to blow up a few of us with our own ammonal, and then light the fuse. After that there had to be a new man in his place. The bomb would explode instantly the long fuse was ignited.
The next day when I got up after this disastrous raid, I said to my bunkie:
“Got a fag?” (Fag is the Tommy’s name for a cigarette.)
It’s never, “will you have a fag?” but always, “have you got a fag?”