"Bombing" is one form of trench warfare particularly annoying to the
enemy. The revival of bombing began when a British soldier, to while
away an idle moment, put some high explosive and a lighted fuse in
a discarded bully-beef tin, and pitched it into the German trench
opposite him.
In his way the British soldier is as handy as the bluejacket, and the
long days of the winter monotony produced all kinds of inventions in
the way of mortars and bombs, which led to the scientific development
of this mode of warfare. A Territorial officer was discovered making
all manner of ingenious bombs and trench appliances in his spare time.
He was taken out of the trenches and installed in an empty school, and
when last I heard of him had a regular factory turning out bombs for
the firing line.
Bombing is very tricky work. Your bomb must be safe as long as it is in
your possession. Nor must it be liable to explosion if dropped after
the safety-catch has been removed. That is why bombs are provided with
time fuses. Some nicety of judgment is required to hurl them so that
they will explode on impact or immediately afterward.
If the time fuse has still a second or so to burn when the bomb falls
in the enemy trench, a resolute man will pick it up and fling it back,
with disastrous consequences to the bomber. Therefore bombers must be
trained. The training is extremely simple, but it is essential, and I
look forward to the time when every soldier who comes out to France
from home will have gone through a course of bombing just as he has
gone through a course of musketry.
Just as the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 introduced the needle-gun, and
the Franco-Prussian War the chassepot rifle, and the South African War
was the war of the magazine rifle, so the present war will be known
as the war of the automatic gun. When the German General Staff sits
down to write its official history of the great war it will be able
to attribute the greater part of the success that German arms may
have achieved to its foresight in accumulating an immense stock of
machine-guns, and in studying the whole theory and tactics of this
comparatively new weapon before any other army in the world became
alive to its paramount importance.
The only factor that furnishes anything like a certain basis for
calculation as to the date of the conclusion of the war is the number
of fighting men available for each of the different belligerents. Of
all the supplies required for making war, the supply of men is limited.
The Germans recognized this sooner than any of their opponents. In the
machine-gun they had a machine that does the work of many men.
The machine-gun is the multiplication of the rifle. The Vickers gun
fires up to 500 shots a minute. This is also the average performance of
the German gun. To silence this multiplication of fire you must outbid
it, you must beat it down with an even greater multiplication. This is
where the difficulty comes in for an attacking force.
The machine-gun, with its mounting and ammunition and spare parts, is
neither light in weight nor inconspicuous to carry. When the infantry
has rushed a trench after the preliminary bombardment the machine-guns
have to be carried bodily forward over a shell and bullet swept area,
where the machine-gun detachment is a familiar and unexpected target
for the German marksmen. This is where the automatic rifle is destined
to play a part--a part so decisive, in my opinion, as may win the war
for us.
The automatic rifle is a light machine-gun. In appearance it
resembles an ordinary service rifle, with rather a complicated and
swollen-looking magazine. It is not water-cooled like the machine-gun,
but air-cooled, and is therefore not absolutely reliable for long
usage, as it inevitably becomes heated after much firing. It will fire,
however, up to 300-odd shots a minute, and can be regarded as the
ideal weapon for beating down German machine-gun fire and checking the
advance of bombers while the heavier but more reliable machine-guns are
coming up.