A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
HE Gatling's jammed and the Colonel's dead I " wrote Kipling; and though he, with his schoolboy relish for technical terminology, might have been just as happy Writing " The F.N.'s jammed," I doubt if the line would have Stuck so firmly in posterity's mind. I really do think it is time that we started giving our weapons decent names. The FN, and not the EM2, is to replace the SMLE Mark IV; and soon the Sten is to be superseded by the L2A1, which at an earlier stage of its evolution was known, not unonomato- poeically, as the Patchett gun. Why, in the names of Martini- enry and of Hotchkiss, shouldn't it go on being known as the Patchett gun ? Or, better still, why doesn't Mr. Head set up a committee to see that a soldier's personal weapons are given good names, as tanks and aircraft are ? The Bren (by Brno out of Enfield) represents a modest flight of the military unngination (or was it excogitated by some madcap in the Ministry of Supply ?); but it is almost the only recent devia- tion from a tendency to use either unnecessarily long designa- tions, like Armoured Personnel Carrier, or meaningless numerals; what our fathers called a Mills bomb has become a No. 36 grenade. Here and there the specialists have been Permitted to okristen their inventions sensibly; there is a flame thrower called a Wasp, a rather unreliable rocket for making gaps in barbed wire called a Viper. In my view there ought to be more of this sort of nomenclature. If a man is already slightly uncertain in his own mind whether he is fighting for NATO or for EDC, to send him into battle in a DUKW, bra. ndishing his faithful L2A1, is needlessly to weaken his grip on essentials.
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