The situation appears to be that if we get through—­and no one seems to doubt that we shall:  the difficulty lies in staying there when you have got through—­we shall be committed at once to an endless campaign of village-fighting.  This country is as flat as Cambridgeshire.  Every yard of it is under cultivation.  The landscape is dotted with farm-steadings.  There is a group of cottages or an estaminet at every cross-roads.  When our great invading line sweeps forward, each one of these buildings will be held by the enemy, and must be captured, house by house, room by room, and used as a base for another rush.

And how is this to be done?

Well, it will be no military secret by the time these lines appear.  It is no secret now.  The answer to the conundrum is—­Bombs!

To-day, out here, bombs are absolutely dernier cri.  We talk of nothing else.  We speak about rifles and bayonets as if they were so many bows and arrows.  It is true that the modern Lee-Enfield and Mauser claim to be the most precise and deadly weapons of destruction ever devised.  But they were intended for proper, gentlemanly warfare, with the opposing sides set out in straight lines, a convenient distance apart.  In the hand-to-hand butchery which calls itself war to-day, the rifle is rapidly becoming demode.  For long ranges you require machine-guns; for short, bombs and hand-grenades.  Can you empty a cottage by firing a single rifle-shot in at the door?  Can you exterminate twenty Germans in a fortified back-parlour by a single thrust with a bayonet?  Never!  But you can do both these things with a jam-tin stuffed with dynamite and scrap-iron.

So the bomb has come to its own, and has brought with it certain changes—­tactical, organic, and domestic.  To take the last first, the bomb-officer, hitherto a despised underling, popularly (but maliciously) reputed to have been appointed to his present post through inability to handle a platoon, has suddenly attained a position of dazzling eminence.  From being a mere super, he has become a star.  In fact, he threatens to dispute the pre-eminence of that other regimental parvenu, the Machine-Gun Officer.  He is now the confidant of Colonels, and consorts upon terms of easy familiarity with Brigade Majors.  He holds himself coldly aloof from the rest of us, brooding over the greatness of his responsibilities; and when he speaks, it is to refer darkly to “detonators,” and “primers,” and “time-fuses.”  And we, who once addressed him derisively as “Anarchist,” crowd round him and hang upon his lips.

The reason is that in future it is to be a case of—­“For every man, a bomb or two”; and it is incumbent upon us, if we desire to prevent these infernal machines from exploding while yet in our custody, to attain the necessary details as to their construction and tender spots by the humiliating process of conciliating the Bomb Officer.

So far as we have mastered the mysteries of the craft, there appear to be four types of bomb in store for us—­or rather, for Brother Bosche.  They are:—­