SUCCESS OF THE BAYONET

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2345, 30 December 1914, Page 6

SUCCESS OF THE BAYONET

The • success •of the bayonet in ths present war is a tribute to the insight of the British and Russian military authorities.; The controversy is an old one. , In tho purely technical argument''tlio bayonet has had the worst of it, but there is a psychological sido to every military question. Ike British view is that, as one eminent military writer puts it, tho bayonet is a comfort" to tho menl Presumably the meaning is that when -• it conies to . close quarters there, is an mstmotive craving for a hand weapon as distinct from a firearm. The Russian saying (attributed, we believo, to Suvaroll, Russia's greatest military, genius ot the eighteenth century, and the Napoleonic wars) is that the rifle 13 a fool, but I the bayonet bites. In the present war our men say that Ihe Germans do not know how to use the bayonet themselves, and run at the sight of it, or ask for quarter. Of late) however, there have been signs that tho Germans aro losiiig tbeir foar of it, and are heRumiiiß to us 6 it to drive iiomo an £.t~tack themselves. ' ■ , , , There is some slight doubt about tJio origin of (the word bavonet, or, as it w;is usually pronounced by the soldiers in Crimean days, bagonet. It has. been suggested that it is from an old i-rencn word "bayou," .meaning an arrow or crossbow shaft, or, again, that it is from tho Italian "bajonetta," which means "little joker." But it is most likely that it is really from tho namo : of tiio town of Bayonno, in the,south-west of France, and that it was first made or used there. The word in English originally meant a dagger, and a short dagger called a bayonnette is said to have been first made at Bayonne towards the end of the fifteenth century. A certain French military writer, a tia- [■, tivo of Bayonne, says that when bo was commanding troops at Ypres, in 1647; v ? his musketeers used a steel dagger fix-' . ed in a wooden jhaft, which fitted into • ? the muzzle of the musket to form .a • ' piko. If that is true, it was tho first., "plug" bayonet, and the bayonet was thus first used at Ypres, tho centre of the hottest fighting just now. ,