WAR NOTES.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 83, 7 December 1914, Page 3

WAR NOTES.

SNIPING BRITISH OFFICERS. A cavalry trooper tells how German sharpshooters are told off to shoot down our officers. This regiment was fighting its way, dismounted, through i village which the Germans had hold in force. After a hard fight the enemy were driven out and our men entered the main street. All was quiet. Suddenly a shot rang out and Captain Springfield fell, shot through the head. Several men rushed into the'house from which the shot was fired, and in the first door bedroom they found a German. The men*were about to kill him, but an officer intervened, and told them to make the man a prisoner.

He told his captors ttyat in each regiment the best shots were told to pay special attention to officers. When the Germans had to retire from a village they left two or three men behind with orders to shoot any officer they could, and then give themselves up, relying on the British to treat the men as simple prisoners of war.

A COMPARISON OF RIFLES. Not only are the forces of the various countries engaged in the present conflict armed with different patterns of rifles, but the British troops themselves are not, it is said, all armed alike, though all the rifles in use by cur men are adapted to the same cartridge. An article in the Westminster Gazette sets forth the characteristics of the various weapons which are being employed in the present war. Dealing first with the British rifles it says:—

The short Lee-Enfield rifle, which is

: the standard arm of the Regular Arrify, | was the outcome of experiments ini duced by the experiences of the Boer j War. It represents an effort to reduce a rifle while |noti too long in the barrel to be conveniently carried on horseback, is efficient for infantry purposes, which include on oc. casicn the use of the bayonet. The barrel of the rifle is 25in long, and has seven grooves in the rifling. The cartridges are usually fired from a -magazine which holds ten cartridges in clips, but the gun can be loaded with single/ cartridges if required. The second rifle is the Lee-Enfield, familiar in the hands of Territorials, with a barrel sin longer, and with the wood casing extending (not so , far towards ithe muzzle 'and not around the whole barrel. Both o fthese weapons fire a bullet .303 in in diameter from a cartridge loaded with cordite. The muzzle velocity with round-nozed ammunition is 2000 ft per second. With the most recently issued ammunition, the bullet of which comes to a sharp point, the muzzle velocity has been increased to 2440. The advantage of the high, ■er velocity is not in greater striking power or in the longer range of the bullet —a velocity of 2000 ft per second carries .the bullet a much greater distance than that at which any ordinary man ca nsee to aim accurately—but in the lower trajectory of the bullet, which minimises the effect of errors in the estimation of ihe range. With the lower velocity of the older ammunition a bullet fired at the Axed sight range of 500 yards at no point in it s flight rises too high to be dangerous to a standing man. The higher velocity reduces the trajectory so that a bullet aimed at a target 700 yards away is dangerous in the whole of its flight to \the islanding man or horseman. Over a distance of 1000 yards the trajectory of the new bullet rises to a height of only ISft, as against the 24ft of the cider pattern.