I find it very easy to fall down rabbit holes when translating older books, especially non-fiction; there’s often something that doesn’t quite make sense to my modern anglophone ear, or just sparks my curiosity.
I’m in the midst of Rudolf Koch’s memoir of the First World War, and it is full of these oddities. In one entry he says he “rolled up” his great coat before an attack. What does that mean, exactly? Did German grenadiers storm the trenches with grey, woollen pool noodles flopping around on their backs? A quick search turned up this YouTube video, showing how the men would fold their outerwear into a canvas square which was then wrapped around a canteen and secured with leather straps to create a Sturmgepäck, or assault backpack. Very tidy:
In another, stranger passage Koch describes how some of his comrades converted munitions into cooking fuel:
I met a few other soldiers on the way back [from the first aid station] but they were afraid that the shelling would start again and they had no interest in accompanying me back to the front line. These fellows had a knack for more peaceful pursuits. One of them was using a hand grenade to heat his coffee. If you unscrewed the handle of this murderous device, you could safely light the contents and get a nice, even-burning flame. Another man was busy frying a couple of lovely eggs using the same technique.
I had never heard of grenades being used this way. Given the details and the date in Koch’s diary, my first guess was that these men had disassembled an early M15 version of the Stielhandgranate since the detonator was kept separate and the explosive charge was ammonal.
Initially I wondered if the TNT used in later models of German “potato masher” hand grenades might have been too powerful for this sort of application. Surely the whole thing would blow up in their faces… But then I found a YouTube video demonstrating (at the 16 minute 43 second mark) that several grams of TNT powder can indeed be set alight to produce a big, smokey (and toxic) flame. So perhaps the later M16 version could have been used to heat rations too.
My interest in militaria and explosives is academic, but I fear my innocent googling may have put me on a watch list. It occurred to me afterwards that my keywords were a little spicy.
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