THE BAYONET IN WAR SIR, —The letter from Mr. A. C.
Taylor raises the question of the value of bayonets, and also refers back to "A Spectator's Notebook " of the previous week. Perhaps I can answer both criticisms together. Of course I was wrong about General Wavell, and Heaven knows, I am glad to have been wrong. What I said in my review of his life of Allenby was that as General Wavell held one of the key commands in the present war, it was important for outsiders to try and gauge his intellect from the only evidence then available to them, i.e., the book itself. I submit that it was a dull book, about a man who may have been an able soldier but was a dull personality. Where I was wrong was in supposing that General Wavell's literary shortcomings reflected in any way on his skill as a commander. I apologise to him, in case this should ever meet his eyes, but I doubt whether he will have been very seriously affected by anything I have said about him.
As to bayonets, Mr. Taylor states that Italian troops " both in Libya and Albania, were surrendering in their hundreds and thousands the moment they saw this weapon in the hands of the charging enemy." I suspect that the tanks, aeroplanes, &c., may also have had something to do with the Italian surrenders. One must use common sense. A weapon which will kill a man at hundreds of yards is superior to one which will only kill him at a distance of a few feet. Otherwise why have firearms at all? It is quite true that a bayonet is terrifying, but so is a tommy gun, with the added advantage that you can kill somebody with it. Certainly a soldier with a bayonet on the end of his rifle feels aggressive, but so he does with a haversack full of hand-grenades. In the last war exactly the same propaganda stories about the " power of the bayonet " were current, in the German newspapers as much as in the British. There were tales of thousands of German prisoners who had received bayonet wounds, always in the hind quarters, and countless German cartoons showed British soldiers in flight with Germans prodding them, also in the hindquarters. The psycho-analysts can no doubt ell us why this fantasy of prodding your enemy in the backside appeals so deeply to sedentary civilians. But statistics published after the war was over showed that bayonet wounds accounted for atout I per cent.. of total casualties. They will account for far less in this war, in which automatic weapons have grown more important.
But why, in the book Mr. Taylor refers to, did I complain about the continuation of bayonet training? Because it wastes time which ought to be spent in training for things the infantryman will actually have to do, and because a mystical belief in primitive weapons is cry dangerous to a nation at war. The experience of the last undred years shows that whereas military opinion in England often Ines realistic after a defeat, in interim periods the belief always guns ground that you can somehow disregard the power of breach- ding weapons if your morale is good enough. The majority of British commanders before 1914 " did not believe in " the achine-gun. The results can be studied in the enormous cemeteries northern France. I am not saying that morale is not important. f course it is. But ter Heaven's sake let us not deceive ourselves to thinking that we Anil defeat the German mechanised divisions th riles and bayonets. The campaign in Flanders ought to have hown whether that is possible.—Yours faithfully,
GEORGE ORWELL.
18 Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street, Ivor Place, N.W. t.
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