Different varieties of ammunition had widely different rates of use. The gigantic 15-inch howitzer on some days did not fire a single round. It was a "big day" when it fired fifty rounds. It was just as well that it was not a gun which indulged in thousands of rounds, for a ten-ton broad-gauge railway truck would only take twelve rounds for it. The 18-pounder field guns would shoot 100,000 rounds on a normal day, and on a heavy day would use 200,000 rounds. The cost of ammunition was, in a time of heavy fighting, up to £3,000,000 per day.
A heavy item in munitions was for defence against poison gas and for our own poison gas service. We entered with extreme reluctance into the ghastly business, but once we started we soon made the German sorry that he had brought that element into the war. Our gases were more potent and more plentiful than his. For lack of material he could not give his men perfect gas protectors, while to our men we could and did.
The last loathsome trick of the enemy in this direction was the introduction of mustard gas, a powerful corrosive which was discharged from shells. The use of mustard gas by the enemy raised a number of problems for Supplies as apart from the Medical Staffs. The disinfection with chloride of lime of ground contaminated with the gas, a prompt change of clothing and bath treatment for men affected, proved efficacious in dealing with mustard gas. There was, too, safety in protective overalls of oilskin. Mustard gas affected the Veterinary Service heavily, there being many casualties to horses and mules through passing over ground infected with the gas.
The inventive spirit was naturally strong in the Army, and some of the most useful of the new ideas in the way of munitions or equipment came from men in the Field. These ideas were tested in the Army workshops, and occasionally there was a certain amount of waste owing to the same idea, or nearly the same idea, being experimented with simultaneously in more than one Army. So an Army Order from Home recalled the King's Regulation that War Office approval must be obtained before experimental work was done in regard to any invention. But this, it was urged from G.H.Q., would act prejudicially to the interests of the Force in France, since many very useful inventions regarding stores and material had come from officers and men of the Force and it was not in the best interests of the public to put any obstacles in the way of future inventions. This was recognised, and a subsequent Army Order gave authority to the Commander-in-Chief of any Expeditionary Force to authorise trials of inventions; but precautions were taken in regard to duplication and overlapping.
There were not in the Field so many foolish inventors as at Home. No such merry idea came to G.H.Q. as that anti-submarine device with which the Admiralty was plagued—a liquid air shell which on being exploded anywhere in the vicinity of a submarine formed an extensive iceberg (through the lowering of the surrounding temperature by a release of the liquid air from pressure). On this iceberg the submarine would be brought to the surface. The next step would be easy: open with an oyster knife, sprinkle with pepper and salt and a dash of lemon juice, and serve.
The B.E.F. had never anything quite so naive as that. Its limit was the inventor who claimed to be able to project an X-ray from an electric battery so that it would kill anything within 1,000 yards. This invention would have been a great war-stopper. It would have been only necessary to set up a sufficient number of the projectors along our Front, switch on the current and march on to Berlin. It was offered at a time when inventions were rather the fashion, and it needed courage to scoff at even the most curious notion. So it actually got to the stage of a trial with a High Authority present. The inventor set up his projector; an animal was let loose within its deadly range and, surely enough, dropped dead. Unfortunately for the inventor a medical scoffer subjected the animal to a post mortem examination and found that it had evidently resolved on suicide, for it had taken a large dose of strychnine. This discouraged further trials of the X-ray device.
The inventor with a "wireless" device for exploding enemy magazines also cropped up. You projected a wireless ray and it blew up a dump. This invention could be very convincingly demonstrated within your own lines. All that was necessary was to provide in the dump a certain amount of loose explosive, a fulminate, and a receiver tuned to receive your wireless message. We were not on sufficiently good terms with the Germans to persuade them to arrange their ammunition depôts in this way for our convenience.
There was a close liaison kept up between the B.E.F. and the Ministry of Munitions. When Mr. Winston Churchill was Minister of Munitions he was over in France so frequently that a small château was kept up for him at G.H.Q. He was wont to come into the Officers' Club for his meals. There was always an air about him that he would have liked to be in the jack-boots of his famous ancestor and give the world a spectacle of another Marlborough winning victories in Flanders.