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Rh that chemists should be invited to consider the best form of smoke-producing bomb or shell. My friend passed the suggestion on, and it was no doubt carefully pigeon-holed by some military authority. At any rate, there is not the least reason to suppose that it had anything whatever to do with Sir John French's dispatch of October 15 last: 'We attacked the enemy's trenches under cover of a cloud of smoke and gas.' In the same letter it was suggested that the Germans would be likely to use similar methods, and that it was to be anticipated that they would soon pass from smoke as a cover to smoke as an irritant, making it difficult or impossible to breathe in the trenches, and this led to the further suggestion that, although we should never dream of initiating such a thing, we had better experiment so as to be ready if the necessity arose.

Why have not the Germans adopted this obvious device of smoke as a cover? Probably because it would not lead to the kind of fighting in which they excel. My friend Sir Ray Lankester told me the other day of a wounded soldier he had been visiting in a London hospital. The man gave his experience of a German attack: 'Well, sir, they're brave enough, there's no denying it, but their 'eart ain't in it. You see, sir, they ain't a military nation, like us!' Prussian papers please copy!

One sees exactly what the man meant and, in the sense in which he meant it, how true it is.

The appliances that have come in since 1870—smokeless powder, immense precision and range—are on the whole against the peculiar genius of the British soldier. He can learn to use these advantages, indeed to use them splendidly; but they are not natural to him like the weapons of old, when men were directed to reserve