Читать книгу Disenchantment - C. E. Montague - Страница 20

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"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 come out to France with their lines of weakness cut not half as deep as they should be. The burst only ripped the case open without breaking it up. It had been lovely in life, and in death it was not divided. It just gave a jump, the length of a frog's, and presented the foe with a cheap good souvenir, reassuring besides.

There must have been a good many thousands of these. They may have done good—perhaps won a good-conduct mark to some War Office hero for rushing them out in good time to the front; perhaps assisted some politician to feel that he was riding a whirlwind and directing a storm, solving munition crises and winning the war. All human happiness counts. In France, if the physical effects of their detonation were poor, the moral reverberations which followed were lively. A bombing sergeant, sent down the line for a rest and instructing new drafts in a hollow among the sand dunes at Etaples well out of authority's hearing, would start his lecture by holding one of them up and saying: "This 'ere, men, is a damn bad grenade. But it's all that the bloody tailors give you to work with. So just pay attention to me." And then he would go on to pour out his cornucopia of tips, fruits of empiric research, for doing what somebody's slackness or folly had made it so much less easy to do.