[Teflonic]

Here's the most amusing comment I came across on it:

I'm coming to the conclusion that it's a brilliantly successful British "dirty tricks" distraction photo to be fed to a German spy for transmission back to the Reich, supposedly of a top secret British weapon.

It was intended to waste the time of the enemy's Intelligence department and the country's best inventive minds who would spend their days fruitlessly trying to work out how the darn thing worked and what it was for, instead of concentrating on inventing something useful to the war effort, such as the tank.

I expect that in early 1919 there was STILL a room full of professors in Berlin earnestly saying things like "yes, but what's that hook thingy on the front for?"(in German, of course).

Who knows how many lives were saved and by how much the war was shortened as a result?

Like much WW1 weaponry this photo is still potentially lethal 100+ years later and should be approached with extreme caution.

I'm only partly joking.

[pt17]

Or as a corollary to your idea - perhaps a more modern photoshop job meant to generate forum chatter and clicks.

[KitJ]

A lot of odd things appear when the winds of war are blowing.

I like the theory of a British deception!

[xrmusn]

That comment/analysis is not as far fetched as it sounds - at least the reasoning behind it.

During WWII we had a secret base in the SW desert where we were training bats to carry incendiaries to drop over Tokyo with the goal being set the thatched roofs on fire?

Had heard that one of the fires in Southern California was actually because of these bats NOT a Jap submarine??

‘Bat Bomb’ Jack Couffer ...1992

[OldCorps]

Not a bad reply, except the uniform is WWII, not WWI!