succession, at a high rate of fire. Formerly the mechanism of
machine-guns was hand operated, but all modern weapons are
automatic in action, the gas of the explosion or the force of
recoil being utilized to lock and unlock the breech mechanism,
to load the weapon and to eject the fired cartridge cases. The
smaller types approximate to the “automatic rifle,” which is
expected to replace the magazine rifle as the arm of the infantryman.
The large types, generically called “pompoms,” fire a
light artillery projectile, and are considered by many artillery
experts as “the gun of the future.” The medium type, which
takes the ordinary rifle ammunition but is fired from various
forms of carriage, is the ordinary machine-gun of to-day, and
the present article deals mainly with this.
Historical Sketch
Machine-guns of a primitive kind are found in the early history of gunpowder artillery, in the form of a grouping or binding of several small-calibre guns for purposes of a volley or a rapid succession of shots. The earliest field artillery (q.v.) was indeed chiefly designed to serve the purpose of a modern machine-gun, i.e. for a mechanical concentration of musketry. Infantry fire (till the development of the Spanish arquebus, about 1520) was almost ineffective, and the disintegration of the masses of pikes, preparatory to the decisive cavalry charge, had to be effected by guns of one sort or another (see also Infantry). Hence the “cart with gonnes,” although the prototype of the field gun of to-day was actually a primitive mitrailleuse.
Weapons of this sort were freely employed by the Hussites, who fought in laager formation (Wagenburg), but the fitting of two or more hand-guns or small culverins to a two-wheeled carriage garnished with spikes and scythe blades (like the ancient war-chariots) was somewhat older, for in 1382 the men of Ghent put into the field 200 “chars de canon” and in 1411 the Burgundian army is said to have had 2000 “ribaudequins” (meaning probably the weapons, not the carts, in this case). These were of course hardly more than carts with hand-gun men; in fact most armies in those days moved about in a hollow square or lozenge of wagons, and it was natural to fill the carts with the available gunners or archers. The method of breaking the enemy’s “battles” with these carts was at first, in the ancient manner, to drive into and disorder the hostile ranks with the Ribaudequins. scythes. But they contained at least the germ of the modern machine-gun, for the tubes (cannes, canons) were connected by a train of powder and fired in volleys. As however field artillery improved (latter half of 15th century), and a cannon-ball could be fired from a mobile carriage, the ribaudequin ceased to exist, its name being transferred to heavy hand-guns used as rampart pieces. The idea of the machine-gun reappeared however in the 16th century. The weapons were now called “organs” (orgues), from the number of pipes or tubes that they contained. At first used (defensively) in the same way as the ribaudequins, i.e. as an effective addition to the military equipment of a war-cart, they were developed, in the early part of the 16th century, into a really formidable weapon for breaking the masses of the enemy, not by scythes and spikes but by fire. Fleurange’s memoirs assign the credit of this to the famous gunner and engineer Pedro Navarro, who made two hundred weapons of a design of his own for Louis XII. These “were not more than two feet long, and fired fifty shots at a round,” but nevertheless “organs” were relatively rare in the armies of the 16th century, for the field artillery, though it grew in size and lost in mobility, had discovered the efficacy of case shot (then called “perdreaux”) against uncovered animate targets, and for work that was not sufficiently serious for the guns heavy arquebuses were employed. Infantry fire, too, was growing in power and importance. In 1551 a French army contained 21 guns and 150 arquebuses à croc and one pièce façon d’orgue. By about 1570 it had been found that when an “organ” “Organs.” was needed all that was necessary was to mount some heavy arquebuses on a cart, and the organ, as a separate weapon, disappeared from the field, although under the name of “mantelet” (from the shield which protected the gunners), it was still used for the defence of breaches in siege warfare. Diego Ufano, who wrote in the early years of the 17th century, describes it as a weapon consisting of five or six barrels fired simultaneously by a common lock, and mentions as a celebrated example the “Triquetraque of Rome” which had five barrels. Another writer, Hanzelet, describes amongst other devices a mitrailleuse of four barrels which was fired from the back of an ass or pony. But such weapons as these were more curious than useful. For work in the open field the musket came more and more to the front, its bullet became at least as formidable as that of an “organ,” and when it was necessary to obtain a concentrated fire on a narrow front arquebuses à croc were mounted for the nonce in groups of four to six. The “organ” maintained a precarious existence, and is described by Montecucculi a century later, and one of twelve barrels figures in the list of military Stores at Hesdin in 1689. But its fatal defect was that it was neither powerful enough to engage nor mobile enough to evade the hostile artillery.
Enthusiastic inventors, of course, produced many models of machine-gun in the strict sense of the word—i.e. a gun firing many charges, in volleys or in rapid succession, by a mechanical arrangement of the lock. Wilhelm Calthoff, a German employed by Louis XIII., produced arquebuses and muskets that fired six to eight shots per round, but his invention was a secret, and it seems to have been more of a magazine small arm than a machine-gun (1640). In 1701 a Lorrainer, Beaufort de Mirecourt, proposed a machine-gun which had as its purpose the augmentation of infantry-fire power, so as to place an inferior army on an equality with a superior. At this time inventors were so numerous and so embarrassing that the French grand master of artillery, St Hilaire, in 1703 wrote that he would be glad to have done with “ces sortes de gens à secrets,” some of whom demanded a grant of compensation even when their experiments had failed. The machine-gun of the 17th and 18th centuries in fact possessed no advantage over contemporary field artillery, and the battalion gun in particular, which possessed the long ranging and battering power that its rival lacked, and was moreover more efficacious against living targets with its case-shot or grape. As compared with infantry fire, too, it was less effective and slower than the muskets of a well-drilled company. Rapid fire was easily arranged, but the rapid loading which would have compensated for other defects was unobtainable in the then existing state of gun-making.
Thus a satisfactory machine-gun was not forthcoming until breech-loading had been, so to speak, rediscovered, that is until about 1860. At that time the tactical conditions of armament were peculiar. As regards artillery, the new (muzzle-loading) long-range rifle sufficed, in the hand of determined infantry, to keep guns out of case-shot range. This made the Napoleonic artillery attack an impossibility. At the same time the infantry rifle was a slow loader, and the augmentation of the volume of infantry fire attracted the attention of several inventors. The French, with their artillery traditions, regarded the machine-gun therefore as a method of restoring the lost superiority of the gunner, while the Americans, equally in accordance with traditions and local circumstances, regarded it as a musketry machine. The representative weapons evolved by each were the canon à balles, more commonly called mitrailleuse, and the Gatling gun.
The declared purpose of the canon à balles was to replace the old artillery case-shot attack. Shrapnel, owing to the defects of the time-fuzes then available, had proved disappointing in the Italian War of 1859, and the gun itself, of the existing model, was not considered satisfactory. Napoleon III., a keen student of artillery, maintained a private arsenal and workshop at the château of Meudon[1] and in 1866, in the alarm following upon
- ↑ Meudon Château had long been used for military experiments. The peasantry credited it with mysterious and terrible secrets, asserting even that it contained a tannery of human skins, this tradition perhaps relating to the war balloon constructed there before the battle of Fleurus (1794). Reffye had also many non-military tasks, such as the reproduction of a famous set of bas-reliefs, construction of aeroplanes, and the reconstruction of triremes and balistas.
