Page:EB1922 - Volume 31.djvu/345

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GREGORY, AUGUSTA GRENADES
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from the Royal Geographical Society and the French Geographic Society. In 1886 he was made captain and in 1887 was given an unusual promotion to brigadier-general, being appointed chief signal officer U.S.A. by President Cleveland. From 1898 to 1902 he supervised the construction of telegraph lines in Cuba, Porto Rico and China, and of a very elaborate system in the Philippine Islands. He was likewise in charge of constructing means of communication in Alaska. In 1904 he was made a member of the board to regulate wireless telegraphy in the United States, and the following year appointed to the board to report on coast defences. At the time of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, as commander of the Pacific Division, he was in charge of relieving the sufferers. In 1908 he was retired by operation of law. In 1911 he represented the United States in London at the coronation of King George V. He wrote Three Years of Arctic Service (1886); Handbook of Arctic Discoveries (1897) and Handbook of Alaska (1909).

GREGORY, AUGUSTA, LADY (1852-' ), Irish folklorist, playwright and author, was born March 5 1852, the youngest daughter of Dudley Persse of Roxborough, co. Galway. She married in 1881 Sir William Gregory, a well-known Irish M.P. and ex-governor of Ceylon (d. 1892), whose autobiography she afterwards edited in 1894. A prolific writer upon Irish sub- jects, she produced many plays, essays, volumes of folklore, and popularized versions of ancient sagas and romances con- cerning the early Irish heroes. She always lived in close rapport with the people, and identified herself with their sufferings and aspirations, as in The Jail Gate, the Rising of the Moon, and other plays. It was she who chiefly popularized the Anglo-Irish dialect of English as spoken in the west, which had been first employed in the Love Songs of Connacht. She translated for the Abbey theatre several of Moliere's plays into this dialect under the title of The Kiltartan Moliere (1910). Hence this form of idiom has by some been christened " Kiltartanese " after the name of her district in Galway. She made Cuchulain the greatest hero of pre-christian Ireland known to thousands through her re-telling of the ancient tales, which she wove with great restraint and ability into a consistent whole. She did the same for Finn MacCumhail and other heroes of the old sagas. Her work as playwright, and director, in association with W. B. Yeats, of the Abbey theatre, was enormously fruitful. Over a hundred new plays had been produced there by 1921, and scores of actors had been developed and trained. This theatre was opened in 1904, and she told its story in her volume Our Irish Theatre (1913). Her only son, a distinguished airman and artist, was killed in the World War; and Sir Hugh Lane, whose life she wrote (1920), was her nephew.

Lady Gregory's chief works are: Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) ; Poets and Dreamers (1903) ; Gods and Fighting Men (1904) ; A Book of Saints and Wonders (1907); Seven Short Plays (1909); The Kiltartan History Book (1909) ; The Kiltartan Moliere (1910) ; The Image (1910); Irish Folk History Plays (1912); New Comedies (1913); Our Irish Theatre (1913); The Kiltartan Wonder Book; The Golden Apple (1916); The Kiltartan Poetry Book (1919); The Dragon (1920); Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920); Hugh Lane's Life and Achievement (1921).

GREGORY, ROBERT (1819-1911), English divine, was born at Nottingham Feb. 9 1819. He was first intended for business, but subsequently went to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and was ordained in 1843. In 1851 he became curate of Lambeth parish church, and from 1853-73 was rector of St. Mary's, Lambeth, becoming a canon of St. Paul's in 1868. In 1890 he became dean of St. Paul's. A member of the first London School Board, he was a champion of church schools and of religious education. He died in London Aug. 2 1911.

GRENADES (see 12.578). The revival of the hand grenade in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 resulted in new designs for weapons of this class being worked out in several countries, not only for hand grenades with a time fuze, but also for percussion grenades and for grenades fired from a rifle. In the World War the advent of trench warfare on the largest possible scale produced a sudden demand for grenades in enormous quantities and as pre-war and war-time designs were successively exposed to the test of active service conditions, while at the same time the needs of quantity production constantly imposed checks of another kind, grenade design passed through a rapid evolution from 1914 up to 1917 after which warfare became more open and the rifle and light machine-gun asserted themselves as the prime infantry weapons. It is proposed here to indicate the course of this evolution by describing representative patterns of grenade employed successively in the British and other armies.

During the course of the war, both hand and rifle grenades (especially the latter) were used as containers for gas and smoke compositions, as well as for illuminating and light-signalling purposes. These special grenades, as grenades, presented fewer problems of design than the explosive grenade, and the safety and ignition devices employed with them were simple adapta- tions of those used with the explosive grenade. They do not, therefore, require special treatment in the present connexion, and the following account will deal with the explosive grenade only.

Hand Grenades. Perhaps the dominating characteristic of trench warfare as practised in 1914 and 1915 was the inability of the deeply entrenched infantry on each side to inflict damage upon the other otherwise than by high angle fire. Within the infantry arm itself, this high angle fire could at first be provided only by hand grenades. But as no one had foreseen the use of this weapon by infantry on a large scale, the available patterns in Great Britain and elsewhere (designed for use by skilled sappers in siege warfare) were of a somewhat complicated design. Thus, at the outbreak of the World War, the only grenade available in the British service was the "No. I," evolved after the Russo-Japanese War, and the only immediate means of supplementing it was a stock of " Hale's " grenades which had been manufactured for the Mexican Govern- ment. These two, in very small quantities, formed the only armoury of the bomber in the early days of 1915, and soon the troops in the field began to improvise grenades out of jam tins and other recep- tacles, using any explosive and any form of igniter which was at hand. At the same time other types were worked out by the engineer branch of the War Office, and both then and afterwards countless inventors set to work to produce weapons of this class and sub- mitted them to the military authorities, who sifted them, tested the more promising both on the experimental ground and in the trenches, and finally, where the advantages of a proposed new design outweighed the very serious drawbacks attendant upon manufacturing a new type and training the army to its use ^con- siderations which ruled out many designs that were intrinsically very good it was adopted as a service store. So far as concerns British grenades, only service stores will be dealt with in this article.

Thus, towards the end of 1915 or the spring of 1916 the types in use and in prospect were very numerous, and most of them were open to objections, either in point of safety to the user, or of trust- worthiness in trench conditions, or of manufacture.

Considering them collectively, these grenades may be classified in two ways: according to their effect and according to their method of explosion. As regards the former, a distinction arose between those designed for concussion effect and those designed for frag- mentation. From the same dual need of localized effect and of distributed effect which produced the two main classes of artillery shell, came " concussion " grenades which contained a maximum of explosive, contained in the thinnest possible case, and " frag- mentation " grenades with heavy iron cases, provided only with the explosive necessary to impart wounding energy to the frag- ments, and having the iron prepared for the desired fragmentation by criss-cross weakening grooves. Each of these had the defects of its qualities; thus, the concussion grenade was only effective within a narrow radius from the point of burst, and the fragmentation grenade was liable when used in the open to kill the thrower himself with splinters coming back. Examples of each class will be found below, and it should be added that special grenades such as those used for smoke, for light and for gas, were in the intermediate posi- tion, having thin walls, so as to contain a maximum of composition and a small explosive charge sufficient merely to open the casing.

The second basis of classification, which from the designer's point of view was the more important, was the method of bursting the charge. In all grenades filled with H.E. 1 as in all shell so filled, a. small charge of sensitive explosive is required to detonate the rela- tively inert main charge. This element is contained in a copper tube called a detonator and it is in the means of igniting this detonator and the safeties provided against its premature action that the whole art of grenade design resides. Many of the risks, indeed, only became evident as the result of active service expe- riencefor instance, the risk that a man would be shot after putting the safety device out of action but before he could throw the grenade.

At the outset, the standard patterns of hand grenade had percussion ignition that is, they were arranged to explode on contact

1 Certain German grenades were filled wholly or in part with black powder and needed no detonator.