Mons

Another pick-me-up from the Raynes Park Platform Library, rather thinly stocked on this occasion.

That is to say, a guide to the work of the Royal Engineers produced for students at the Mons Officer Training School, based in the Mons Barracks - presumably so named for the place in Belgium at which the British Expeditionary Force fought its first battle of the First World War. Once the capital of the county of Hainult, which I remember as a sort of prize, periodically awarded to some peripatetic aristo, along with an heiress. But I maybe have got that all wrong.

A training school which was closed down fifty years ago and its business moved to nearby Sandhurst. It had specialised in half year training courses - unlike the regular two years of Sandhurst - and trained many officers for the armies of the emerging Commonwealth nations.

A guide which tells me all about the organisation of engineering units in the field, about their makeup in terms of officers, men and equipment. Helpful annexes explaining the workings of various British and US mines - for example the Claymore mine - and suggestions for their use in the field. Which I now know to be a paint-pot sized version of a shotgun cartridge. Otherwise, an updated version of the grapeshot used by artillery on the battlefields of the Napoleonic era.

A guide which includes some references to the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons.

The guide closes with an appendix - Appendix 2 to Annex G - explaining how to make a barbed wire entanglement. I learn that to make an entanglement 100 by 10 yards you need, inter alia, 15 130 yard reels of barbed wire. The suggestion seems to be that one man can carry such a reel. They sell reels of barbed wire in one of the fencing operations south of Epsom, probably the one I bought the materials for my deer fence from, so if I remember, I must go and see how big such a reel might be. See, for example, reference 4.

The guide is reproduced from typescript, tied together with substantial staples, now rather rusted. A good quality typescript, from before the days of word processors, supplemented with some reasonably crude diagrams, presumably pasted into gaps in the original typescript before reproduction.

The size of paper is the foolscap common at the time, which, as it happens and as can be seen above, fits better into a modern computer screen than the A4 which has replaced it. Albeit, on its side. I learn from Wikipedia that the proper name for this sort of paper is foolscap folio, often sold as folded pairs. I think my father used to buy the stuff for his fairly serious literary endeavours and that I used to pinch the odd sheet for my endeavours.

I have learned that it was called foolscap for the watermark once used for this sort of paper, first seen in the fifteenth century. The fool's cap and bells. Maybe the Brexit people will catch onto to this one when they bring back the good old English pint and get rid of all that foreign lager. Perhaps overlooking the fact that this sort of paper kicked off in foreign, that is to in what is now Germany.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mons_Officer_Cadet_School.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mons. The battle.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mons. The place.

Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2007/01/deering-it-is.html.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foolscap_folio. The paper.