Brother Lead and Sister Steel

Barbed wire, mud, poison gas and the bayonet are potent symbols of the horror of the fighting in the First World War. Little wonder that they feature so in the poetry of the of the time, as here in Siegfried Sassoon's The Kiss

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967). The Old Huntsman and Other Poems. (1918).
10. The Kiss

TO these I turn, in these I trust—
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
To his blind power I make appeal,
I guard her beauty clean from rust.

He spins and burns and loves the air,
And splits a skull to win my praise;
But up the nobly marching days
She glitters naked, cold and fair.

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this:
That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss.

Sassoon wrote some years later that the poem had been inspired by a lecture on the use of the bayonet in which the lecturer, a major, had spoken with 'homicidal eloquence'. Bullet and bayonet, the major reported, were brother and sister.

The upper bayonet is German, made by R Stock of Berlin, the lower is Bristish, manufactured by Wilkinson.