obably from this that
we get the word _gun_. The most interesting of all the guns used in
the Great War has only a number for its name. It is the famous French
'75, and takes this name merely from a measurement.

The special weapon of the foot soldier, or infantryman, is the
bayonet. This is a short blade which the foot soldier fixes on the
muzzle of his rifle before he advances to an attack. In the trenches
his weapon is the rifle; before the order is given to go "over the
parapet"--that is, to climb out of the trenches, to run forward and
attack the enemy at close quarters--he "fixes his bayonet." The word
_bayonet_ probably comes from _Bayonne_, the name of a town in France.

The word _infantry_ itself, now used to describe regiments of foot
soldiers armed with the ordinary weapons, comes to us, like most of
our words connected with war, from the French. We have already seen
that the words of this sort which we borrowed in the Middle Ages were
Norman-French words descended from Latin. But after the use of
gunpowder in war became general there were many new terms; and as at
this time the Italians were the people who fought most, and wrote most
about fighting, many words relating to the methods of war after the
close of the Middle Ages were Italian words. It is true that we
learned them from the French, for the great writers on military
matters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were Frenchmen. But
they borrowed many words from the Italian writers of the fifteenth
century. One of these words is _infantry_, which means a number of
junior soldiers or "infants"--the regiments of foot soldiers being
made up of young men, while the older and more experienced soldiers
made up the cavalry.

This, again, is a word which we borrowed from the French, and which
the French had borrowed from the Italians. _Cavalry_ is, of course,
the name for horse soldiers, and the Italian word _cavalleria_, from
which it comes, was itself derived from the Latin word _caballus_, "a
horse." The general weapon for a cavalryman is the "sabre," a sword
with a curved blade. This, again, comes to us from the French, but was
probably originally an Eastern word. It is quite common for officers,
in reckoning the number of men in an army, to speak of so many
"bayonets" and so many "sabres," instead of "infantry" and "cavalry."

Many of the words which people began to use familiarly during the
great European war first came into English in the sev