DEADLY MACHINE GUN

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2276, 9 October 1914, Page 9

DEADLY MACHINE GUN

THE AMERICAN ARM. The most deadly weapon now in use is the Benet-Mercier machine gun of the United States Army. _ A maohine gun is a device that fires rifle bullets continuously and automatically. All the soldier has to do is to pull a string or press a lever, and then the bullets fly out. The man in control can play the stream of bullets over a field just as you scatter the jets of a watering-can over the garden. It is impossible for any man to remain alive in an open space over which a machine gun is playing its death rain. The only imperfection iu the absolute readliness of the machine gun was its liability to jam occasionally. That has been almost entirely overcome in the Benet-Mercier jjun. This gun weighs only' 291b., and needs no tripod like the older machine guns. In an emergency it might be rested on the' shoulder of one man and fired by another. But under ordinary circumstances the soldier who fires it lies on his stomach on the ground, holding the breech, while the muzzle is upheld at the requisite elevation by a pair of steel prongs. Only two men are needed to operate this marvellous weapon. One' aims it and pulls the trigger, while the other replaces the spent slips of cartridges with fresh ones as fast as they are used up. Two additional-men nro required,' however, for bringing supplies of the cartridge-slips, each one of which contains rifle cartridges with conical bullets. Theoraticilly, tho gun is capable of firing 600 bullets a minute—that is to say, at the rate of ten a second. In actual practice, however, it con discharge' only 400 per minute, becauso some time is lost in replacing the spent clips with fresh ones. But 400 per minute weans 24.000 man-killing projectiles per hour.