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Show How Canada Trains Army Great Camp and its Intensive Specializing Special-izing Described; Bombing a Science Before snow files more than 500,000 American men, today civilians, will go to school to learn the art of fighting. How will they be trained? for on the training will depend largely their efficiency and their lives. Canada has learned how to train soldiers. The tales from the battlefields of Europe prove this. At Camp Borden, near Toronto, Canada operates a camp where often as many as 40,000 men have been taught to fight as fighting Is done on the other side of the Atlantic. By JACK LAIT. CAMP BORDEN, Ont.. Canada, June 12. "Where are they?" I asked of Colonel Biekford, who was driving; me In his motor mo-tor to see the trench fighting-ln fighting-ln the world '3 greatest and mos modern soldier-training camp. "I don't know," said lie, "there may be dozens of men thousands all about, under us, perhaps; we couldn't see them, you know." Picture five miles of intercommunicating intercommuni-cating trenches, and these only one section of scattered war-works, hidden hid-den and lost so that one high on the seat of an automobile, on elevated ground, couldn't find tlem 1")0 yards off. We did find them narrow black lines they seemed to be, zigzagging over hillocks of grass and sand. BOMBING IS TAUGHT. Had those trendies been filled with enemies instead of with training friends we should have been shattered shat-tered by grenades, bombs, or snipers' bullets long before we could have known where they had come from. As it was, Captain Pat Kelly came forth to greet us. Captain Kelly was once a bank clerk. So was Belgium once a country. coun-try. All that was before the war, in the prehistoric days of 1914. Now Captain Kelly is an expert bomber, back from fifteen months in France to show recruits what bombs are like and what they are for, to reveal to them the strange technique of this ghastly but fascinating business of pitching curves and "putting 'em over" in the hottest sporting contest ever, the game to decide the world championship. A smiling", dimpled young man is Captain Kelly. He fondles his bombs with the naive effect ion of a small girl coddling her dolls. . He loves them he has seen them "go." His mild eye snaps when' one of the egg-shaped egg-shaped pestilences scores a "hit," as the British jocundly call it. FBOM TKENCH TO TiENCH. Bomb-throwing does riot resemble tossing a baseball to any great degree. de-gree. It Is a finer science and exacts ex-acts more precise skill. The hand-bomb hand-bomb weighs twenty-four ounces and fits snugly into the palm, which firasps It as one would, a ball. But the throw has a unique parabola based not upon neatness or beauty, but upon necessity of throwing out of a trench seven feet deep, over "no man's" flat area, varying in dimesions, into the other fellow's trench, also seven feet deep and often not more than two feet wide at Its' top. The bomh explodes on time- A safety pin is withdrawn as the hurler seizes the released spring, which escapes when he lets the thing" fly. That jams two firing pins against percussion, which sets off the two ounces of high explosive encased in the shrapnel egg.y So he must not only throw In any direction and to any distance, and from low ground over high ground into narrow, low ground, but he must time the journey so that his souvenir will not explode until it has company. com-pany. Oh, it is nothing like pitching, pitch-ing, especially if it slips out of the bomber's hand and kills him and a few trenehmates, or if he holds it a wink too' long and it bursts in hia hand and does likewise. MANY DIFFERENT BOMBS. When the hurler lias learned what to do with shrapnel bombs lie must learn all over again, for he ha to send other things, such as black powder and primer bombs and grenades. gre-nades. The black powder and primer 'fombs are incased in tin cans, like predi-gested predi-gested soup, but they sport white, thick fuses, like Roman candles. The bomber grips his can and swings back his hand for the throw; as he does, the carrier holds a matchhead to the tip of the fuse and scratches over It once neatly, scrapingly and with a single motion the igniting edge of an ordinary safety-match box, the sort one buys for a cent. That lights the fuse as it passes. It explodes exactly five seconds after the flame touches It. In just five seconds it vis meant to be in that other trench, with every allowance made for speed, wind, distance, direction, di-rection, human uncertainty and all those other historic alibis whit causes bases on balls, besides. They tell me of men who lose their heads and cannot get the bombs out of their clutches; In those events, of course, they have arms and comrades blown to pieces. That happens, and has happened, even here in practice. In mora than one Instance it has killed the bomber here, and in no end of instances in France. They recite one instance of a martyr mar-tyr who threw himself on oVe smoking smok-ing bomb that a frantic comrade had fumbled, smothering it with a cost of only his own life, saving his squad. This Isn't by any means all there (Continued on Page Two.) HOW CANADA IS TRAIIfG ARIES (Continued from Page One.) is to bombing, even in its high school stages. When all that has been here related lias been perfected it must all be relearned so that it can be done on the ru-n, for the man with the hand-conducted bouquet is the blona-haired blona-haired boy when it comes to running the Hun out of his hole and c-basing him along "trench clearing" is tno trade term for the job. Here smoke-bombs smoke-bombs resembling the primer bombs in weight and appearance are added to the bag of props. And when he can do that he hasn't his diploma. He must master grenade gre-nade shooting, which is bomb work, not artillery operation. The egg -like shrapnel things are ' hurtled up. over and into trenches from long-ranye rit!es. For this use they are set on ten-inch metal rods, whk'n slip down into the barrel of the rifle. resti:: in hi tie citeuUr cages set over tiie tc'.:z:::'s much as the wire defenses over inrnndescent brhs in i'ho:i:s gir;' d:vsi:. moms. Tiie rides aie" handled h;e those snootirg b-ad.. thona the v..n.--different and t!u projectiles are ser.t up into the aii and aimed to fall pre-cisolv pre-cisolv into distant lissures alive wilh "bodies." LONG-RANGE THROWERS. Furthermore, there are two longer-distance longer-distance grenades, pro ice ted from guns especially designed for the work: the Mills Co. short-barreled, which will do I'M yards easily and wilh accuracy ac-curacy with bombs on metal rods that look sicken ing ly like taffy-on-a-slick. and the amusing Stokes gun, which works backward and kicks frontward for 2uu or more yards with big grenades that are eased slantingly slanting-ly down its yawning tunnel, where their cartridge-heads hit a firing pin, contrary to tiie accustomed rifle method of having the firing pin come up to meet its copper. Captain Kelly smiled through all the exposition of this, as he put his veteran men t.severa.1 of them good, loyal Yanks) and bis rr-eruities through the vaiiuus "numbers" of his highly entertaining and inexpressibly inexpressi-bly convincing show. He said it was all much prettier in action because one saw so much dirt fly up. and there was much more yelling ami all that. And I was silently willing to bet that over his head in that Toronto To-ronto bank had hung a sign saying "Silence." Bombing Is a small part of the big work at Borden. 22,000-ACRE CAMP. We have here twenty -four square miles of wilderness reclaimed into 22, (iu0 acres of war plant, Its thousands thou-sands of stumps pulled up, its cross-ways cross-ways paved with asphalt, electric lighted like an amusement park, Us engines pumping about l,u00,000 gallons gal-lons of the purest spring water daily, holding a mobilization and training metropolis the like of which this continent con-tinent had never known. There are not many men here now. Canada doesn't keep many men here when it can send them there. About 800 flyers have one end of the grounds. I hope to spend a day with them, at least, to learn more about soldier aviating than I did about bombing. Then there are the countless other phases of trench warfare, every minute element of which is exemplified exempli-fied here, and which will demand a story all its own. The magnitude of an institution ' such as this may be epitomized in the authorized statement that more than 16,000 men who would have otherwise been rejected as unfit have been turned :nto soldiers and turned out as soldiers through the work of the dental corps alone. The dental corps, " by the way, is a Canadian invention. inven-tion. I am told. Army dentists are old, but corps of them grew from a new thought. CAN HANDLE 40,000 MEN. Two railroads run to the oor of Camp Borden. These days, when few come and go, they run seldom; but last summer they landed enlisted men ''out of Toronto and Winnipeg at a rate often as high as 6000 a day, and . often sent them forth in large units. More than 40,000 soldiers have been encamped here simultaneously. If conscription comes in Canada there will be as many again; otherwise there cannot be many, as the volunteering volun-teering system has exhausted itself in Canada, especially in Ontaria, which gave prodigally from the start and gave and gave until there aren't many more to be given of the giveable sort. But here it stands, a paradise for the man who Is going across, where he can learn all that can be learned without dying in the learning about the primitive modern fighting, which is the atavistic reversion to obsolete methods and principles plus the wicked science and the ungodly in- 1 ventiveness of all the modern ages, including the last half hour. BAYONET FIGHTING. "What Is trenching except an application ap-plication of the original impulse of or in his dugout of the aborigine? One of the most serious games here is bayonet fighting, the oldest known mechanical means whereby one man slaughtered another, brought to a taper of finesse, where it has become an athletic pastime with written records rec-ords for accuracy and direction, practiced prac-ticed by grim students with fatal bayonets against dummies horribly ingenious in-genious in their resemblance to German Ger-man soldiers (helmets, mustaches and all!) and with dull or ferruled bayonets against eacli other. Special hurdles have been built, special holes have been torn in the soil here to teach nothing except how, when, where to stab a steel blade into the body of an enemy; and specialists teach it; one of them was a professor at a Canadian university in 1915, and was a specialist then, too in botany, I believe. What is bomb-throwing except a sublimated and latter-day-cunning-loaded perversion of the primitive rock-throwing, just as heavy artillery artil-lery is all the refinement of catapulting catapult-ing and the sling-hurling which made David famous? EVERY ANGLE IS TAUGHT. Yet there is no "old stuff" about what Camp Borden inoculates and produces. Flying and wireless messaging mes-saging and undersea murder aren't any more mysterious than all those other things of whic.h we have read so much and of which we know so little, which are taught here. One cannot understand what a trench is until one walks into a trench and stumbles its labyrinthian windings wind-ings through mazes of Intersecting and branching canyons, between miles of wired supports foe terra untirma, then inward and up caves gaping unexpectedly un-expectedly and suddenly in side walls, which funnel to almost invisible apertures through which noses of machine ma-chine guns protrude, their nozzles surrpunded by shrubbery and grass so that their whereabouts cannot be seen by eye or spyglass or photographed even by the nearly ail-seeing telescope camera of the observing airplane. One cannot imagine what a bursting burst-ing bomb means until a kindly sergeant ser-geant major seizes one by the shoulder shoul-der and screams, "Heads down; turn your hack!" because a practice bomb is about to expioue sixty or moie yards away, and this denatured, emasculated toy can wound or kill even a distant spectator. One cannot understand what danger dan-ger Is until one sees a hidden bomber who cannot see what he is doing toss six out of seven holocausts within an imaginary square a yard wide fifty yards off. Nor can one project Ins unaide I fancv so that it may contemplate millions of men drilling an-t training with rifles so that they might cross seas and realms to fight with rifles useful only as occasional bayonet handles. By the time 1 had seen bombers, sappers, scouts, bomb-carriers, signalers, sig-nalers, officers and artillerymen work in the trenches, and had seen not one of them fire a shot from a rifle. I asked what tiie infantr men do in the trendies. The soldiers who heard me were too courteous to smile; all Fngiish officers are charmingly courteous. cour-teous. They told me that rifle work is ne;c-liuible ne;c-liuible except for the general drilling value it has and for its development or revealment of a few snipers, who are worth while even if t hey lie behind be-hind a. hillock all day long and get but one shot at a head incautiously exposed, for a flash or an indi. That is just wMt ('amp F'orden is for to teach the men wltii tiie useless rifles how to save their lives and take, others' with other useful tools. EVERYTHING SPECIALIZED. Kadi man is specialized. This is intensive individual training. Kadi A plain rookie becomes an expeit bomb-' thrower, or handler, or grenade- pitcher, or shooter, or lookout, or gas-detector, or something of the sort. This is all added to bis accented ac-cented and predestined function as a plain soldier. There isn't any such thing nowadays as a soldier. A man In tlie army Is at least one thing besides be-sides that, " whichever 'thing Jie chose or was assigned to become. So my idea that certain men were sent into trenches to kill and most of the others were sent there so that someone would be on hand to be killed when a bomb lit was wrong. No idle men stand overhead deep in the gullies waiting to charge. They have their guns with them, but they are engaged mostly in not usitig them, except as temporary racks upon which to bang bags of really utilitarian utili-tarian destroyers, such as I have described de-scribed here. |