is sent on its way would be likely to cause the premature discharge of a percussion grenade, and the second is that the grenades weigh so much--from a pound and a half to ten pounds--that the best arm in the world couldn’t stand the strain of whipping them off as a baseball is thrown. I’m talking by the book about this, because I’ve been a bomber and a baseball player. A bomber, besides knowing all about the grenades in use in his own army, must have practical working knowledge concerning the grenades in use by the enemy. After we took the Regina trench, on the Somme, we ran out of grenades at a moment when a supply was vitally necessary. We found a lot of the German “egg” bombs, and through our knowledge of their workings and our consequent ability to use them against their original owners we were able to hold the position. An officer or non-commissioned officer in charge of a bombing detail must know intimately every man in his command, and have such discipline that every order will be carried out with scrupulous exactitude when the time comes. The leader will have no time, in action, to prompt his men or even to see if they are doing what they have been told to do. When a platoon of infantry is in action one rifleman more or less makes little difference, but in bombing operations each man has certain particular work to do and he must do it, just as it has been planned, in order to protect himself and his comrades from disaster. If you can out-throw the enemy, or if you can make most of the bombs land with accuracy, you have a wonderful advantage in an attack. But throwing wild or throwing short you simply give confidence to the enemy in his own offensive. One very good thrower may win an objective for his squad, while one man who is faint-hearted or unskilled or “rattled” may cause the entire squad to be annihilated. In the revival of bombing, some tricks have developed which would be humorous if the denouements were not festooned with crepe and accompanied by obituary notations on muster rolls. There may be something which might be termed funny on one end of a bombing-ruse--but not on both ends of it. Whenever you fool a man with a bomb, you’re playing a practical joke on him that he’ll never forget. Even, probably, he’ll never get a chance to remember it.