The "spirit of the pike" died hard in Britishicon service.

When the SMLE was engineered from the parent "long" Lee Enfield, it initially used a modified version of the Patt 88 bayonet.

Someone, somewhere, must have thought that losing five inches of reach with the bayonet would put young "Tommy" at greater risk. The Arisakaicon Type 30 bayonets that arrived around the same time must have given someone a brainwave and voila, as Lebel shooters would say, an ideal solution.

The Frenchicon, of course had those long, skinny, pointy things that could just about reach across international borders, and that didn't do them much good in the trenches.

It is also interesting that the Patt '07 is called a Sword, bayonet: Brown Bess thinking in the Maxim / Vickers age.