Tommy (53 page)

This is a vivid example of what could happen when armed men met at close range on the battlefield: one surrendered or ran away, and determination to take those last few steps was often the deciding factor. But if bayonet training gave men confidence to press on at moments like this, it often went further, and made them reluctant to show mercy.

Frank Crozier argued that the bayonet put killing spirit into a man.

A soldier in this frame of mind was unlikely to accept surrender, especially if he had something to avenge. In the summer of 1915 Captain Billy Congreve was at Hooge, in the centre of the Ypres salient, and wrote in his diary that:

One soldier on the Somme was so enraged that his best friend had been buried alive by a shellburst that he bayoneted three Germans in a matter of minutes. The Germans, for their part, went round No Man's Land in the sector attacked by the Accrington Pals: ‘They kicked one or two of the bodies; any showing signs of life were shot or bayoneted.'
⁴⁰

The ever thoughtful Lieutenant C. P. Blacker suggested that however strong the logic for the spirit of the bayonet, it was no easy matter to convert its theory into practice on the battlefield. ‘It was, of course, splendid that our forceful corps commander should tell us that the real business of war was done with the bayonet and the rest was mere by-play,' he wrote. ‘But bayonets would not stop the autumn rains or dry up the waterlogged crater-fields.'
⁴¹
Nor would they stop hostile machine-gun fire or shelling: the pre-war emphasis on the spirit of the offensive had undoubtedly made too much of what the bayonet could achieve in physical terms. Both British and French bayonets began the war with their quillons (the guard between grip and blade) hooked so as to catch the enemy's blade in bayonet fighting, enabling it to be snapped with a smart twist of the rifle. Hooked quillons disappeared during the war as it became evident that elaborate fencing like this would never happen. Yet, start to finish, the bayonet played its part in steeling men to face the battle of the last five yards.
⁴²

German infantry carried hand grenades at the very start of the war, partly because they expected to have to deal with French and Belgian fortifications. The grenade proved so useful in trench warfare that the British quickly developed their own, though once again they faced the problem of introducing new weapons at precisely the same time that they were expanding the production of old ones to equip a burgeoning army. For the first eighteen months of the war private ingenuity vied with official manufacture as the army struggled to produce grenades that were both lethal to the enemy and safe to their users. Some early versions were so delicate or unstable that their users – ‘bombers', first grouped as a platoon within the battalion, and eventually spread more widely so as to constitute ‘a nucleus of one officer and eight men' per company – shared with the crews of early trench mortars the discouraging nickname ‘Suicide Squad'. The first grenades were empty jam tins – Mr Tickler making a further contribution to the war effort – filled with guncotton or the more effective and more stable ammonal. A detonator was inserted into the guncotton and ignited by a length of safety fuse which the thrower ignited with a match or lighter before hurling it at the enemy. The Official History advised its readers how to make one.

By early 1915 there was even an up-market version of the jam-tin bomb with a friction primer.

Gerald Burgoyne first met the jam-tin bomb on Hill 60, outside Ypres, in May 1915:

Private Harold Dolden was then a bomber in the London Scottish.

The obvious disadvantages of the jam-tin bomb and other early grenades encouraged a plethora of inventions, and the War Office departments and committees responsible for such things – including the Trench Warfare Department, the Trench Supply Department, the Munitions Inventions Department and assorted committees – received thousands of suggestions for new weapons of one sort or another. The Munitions Inventions Department alone received over 100,000 from servicemen and members of the public between May 1915 and August 1918, commenting on all of them and commissioning full reports on 3,549.
⁴⁶

There were too many grenades adopted for service to be included here, but they fell into three main types: percussion, ignition and mechanical grenades. Percussion grenades, such as Hand Grenades Nos 1 and 2, had percussion detonators secured by removable safety pins, and cloth streamers which ensured that the bomb fell nose downwards. The pin was removed and the grenade was thrown. ‘Care should be taken that the streamers do not get entangled,' warned a pamphlet. ‘The bomb should be thrown WELL up into the air.'
⁴⁷
Percussion grenades were the cause of frequent accidents, usually because the thrower hit the rear of the trench with the grenade as he drew his arm back to throw it. James Dunn, medical officer of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, saw that ‘so many of our wounded are the victims of our own bomb accidents',
⁴⁸
and Cyril Helm of 2/King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry agreed that ‘they caused heavy casualties among our own men'. Ignition grenades included Hand Grenades Nos 7–9, and the Battye, Ball, Picher and Oval grenades. These were lit by a variety of patent lighters, often a friction lighter like a large version of the striker on a box of matches, and the pamphlet was generous enough to observe that some were ‘somewhat complicated, and special instruction should be given …': 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers reported that their strikers were ‘so wet as to be useless' at the battle of Loos.

However, the future was destined to lie with the mechanical grenade, which embodied a spring-loaded mechanism igniting a fuse which exploded a detonator and thus the bomb itself. The Hand Grenade No. 12 ‘Hairbrush pattern' looked like a large hairbrush, with the explosive where the bristles would normally be, and a wooden handle to assist throwing. The Mills Hand Grenade No. 5 was the now-familiar ‘pineapple' grenade, with a serrated cast-iron case containing a spring-loaded striker, explosive cap, fuse and detonator, weighing 1½ lbs. The thrower ensured that he had a firm grip of the grenade and its long, flat lever, removed the safety pin, and threw the grenade. As it left his hand the lever flew upwards and away, allowing the striker to shoot down and hit the cap. This ignited the fuse, which usually had a burning time of four seconds before it set off the detonator and exploded the bomb.
⁴⁹

The Mills bomb was easily the best of the wartime grenades, but it had numerous teething troubles, and as late as mid-1916 there was still one accident for every 3,000 grenades. Sometimes grenades exploded prematurely because of a manufacturing fault, but sometimes soldiers overdid the process of pinching the safety-pins so that they would pull out easily, and pins simply slid out. This may be what caused the most celebrated grenade accident of the war. Rifleman Billy McFadzean of the Royal Irish Rifles was carrying a box of grenades forward early on the morning of 1 July 1916 on the Somme when he heard the pop of an igniter cap within the box. He knew that there would be an explosion, lethal in a packed communication trench, in just four seconds, so he flung himself on the box to absorb its force: he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

Soldiers (then as now) were often nervous of throwing their first grenades, and Sergeant George Ashurst of 16/Lancashire Fusiliers had a narrow escape when one of his recruits dropped a grenade with the pin out during training in France in 1917. ‘Quickly in the few seconds left to me before it exploded,' he wrote, ‘I picked the bomb up and threw it out of the trench, but even as it was in the air above the trench it exploded, scattering the metal all about.'
⁵⁰
Mills bombs could be carried in pouches, specially-made canvas bombers' waistcoats, or even canvas buckets, and were generally regarded as being easier to carry than the German potato-masher grenade, with its long handle, which could be clipped onto, or tucked inside, the waist-belt, but was generally bulkier. However, the handle gave the potato-masher ‘a much longer range than the Mills bomb, which was rather big and heavy for many to grasp'.
⁵¹

It was a short step from the hand grenade to the rifle grenade. The Rifle Grenade No. 3 – usually known as the Hale's Rifle Grenade – was a small grooved tube filled with explosive and fitted with a detonator. It was attached to a long tube which was slipped down the barrel of the rifle. The firer loaded a special cartridge containing extra cordite but no bullet, and the gases produced on firing sent the grenade on its way. The Mills grenade was modified, by the addition of a steel rod fitted to its base-plug, to be fired in the same way. A cup-discharger, fitted to the muzzle of the rifle, was issued to the British army at the rate of four per company in September 1916, and there were sixty-four per battalion at the war's end.

As the development of grenades improved the infantryman's lethality in one direction, so the introduction of the light machine gun did so in another. The British Expeditionary Force went to war with two belt-fed machine guns per infantry battalion or cavalry regiment, making eight machine guns per brigade. The Germans, in contrast, had a machine-gun company in each three-battalion regiment, six guns in 1914, rising to fifteen in mid-1916 – and extra machine-gun companies in addition. But it was not the sheer numbers of their machine guns that gave the Germans an advantage: it was in their organisation. A German regimental commander, disposing of roughly the same resources as a British brigadier, could centralise his firepower if he wished to do so, with ‘the German concentration of fire giving the impression of superior numbers'.
⁵²
If a British brigade was holding the line with two of its battalions up and two back, then the machine guns of the two reserve battalions would probably be out of the line. This suited the machine-gunners, as Guy Chapman discovered when he became his battalion's machine-gun officer. ‘I was liking my new job,' he wrote. ‘The machine-gunners considered themselves the elite of the battalion. They lived apart from the companies and except in emergency were excused fatigues. In trenches they were responsible only for their immediate surroundings.'
⁵³

However, the unsatisfactory nature of this arrangement was very clear to George ‘Boss' Lindsay, a Boer War veteran and pre-war instructor at the Small Arms School at Hythe, who argued strongly that ‘centralised control of the whole machine-gun belt' was essential if the best use was to be gained from these weapons.
⁵⁴
Machine guns were occasionally massed in 1915; the practice had become widespread a year later, and by then organisational form had changed to conform with tactical function.