THE DEADLY MACHINE-GUN.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 290, 6 September 1915, Page 4

THE DEADLY MACHINE-GUN.

1915 MUST NOT BE “AS IN 18(56.” The Germans, says the London Daily Mail, have hitherto been fighting this w r ar with high-explosive shell and machine- guns; the British with shrapnel and ordinary rifles. The public would regard with amazement the man who proposed to race a 60-horse-power motor-car on foot or to match himself against a locomotive in ; a tug Of war. Grim experience is ; proving that an army which attempts to fight machine-guns with rifles is committing much the; Same mistake. ‘ The maeMne-gutf is a rifle |so constructed that the soldier in charge of it pulls the trigger and the mechanism does : the rest. When an ordinary rifle is fifed,- there, fig a; smart shock ' from the recoil. Itt-the machine-gun' this shock is utilised to load and fire the gun. Cartridges are not placed in the machine-gun one by one or packet by packet laboriously by hand. They are fed into- the gun on lengths of tape, to which other lengths of tape can be attached, so that the supply may be continuous and the fire —if all goes well — unremitting. The cartridges, again, are placed' in the tapes, 250 in each, by a special filling machine. Everything is done by machinery.

The use of the recoil to load and fire the machine-gun and the method of feeding it with ammunition give it tremendous rapidity of fire. Four, six, oven eight hundred rounds a minute can be fired from it. The only trouble is that the gun gets extremely hot with rapid firing; To overcome this mos-machine-guns' are fitted with metal jackets containing water. The water boils with continued firing and gives off steam. To- prevent the steam from disclosing the position of the gun, ii the German machine-guns it is led away to some distance through a hose The machine-gun in competent hand? is accurate with a deadly accuracy. Tests agaipst picked shots have show-, that one- machine-gun will make n •

hits than fifty marksmen. As there arc rarely fifty marksmen in any battalion of 1,000 men, we may say that, as a target-hitter, a machine-gun is almost equal to 1,000 menv Nothing can live in its stream, of lead. , And it can he handled by two men.

The Prussians won the w r ar of .1866 against the Austrians with their needle gun, which was to the muzzle-loading

Austrian rifle- of that day much what the machine-gun is to the modern British rifle;. They won the war of 1870 against the- French by their breachloading cannon, which was to the French muzzle-heading cannon of thar time much what the machine-gun is to the present British rifle. They hoped to win the' present war by their new ideas—by their machine-guns in their multitude, their high-explosive 1 shells, their monster howitzers, their concrete trenches* their barbed-wire entanglements, their gas apparatus. We must take extreme care that they do not.

They began the war with 50,000 machine-guns, whereas, as the Germans know, we had a negligible quantity of these weapons. Where our troops met the Germans at the outset not only were there two- Germans to each British soldier, there were also twelve German machine-gtrns to each British machine-gun. The odds against us were appalling. We attempted to fight machinery by man power. And' we are attempting it still. We have increased the number of our machine-guns. The Germans have further. They are virtually substituting men armed with machine-guns for the old-fashioned infantry armed with rifles. They are holding their imst line with a very small number of men armed with machine-guns, protected with concrete works and wire entanglements. Their infantry are only brought up in emergencies and are not constantly exposed to bombardment's. Their machine-guns are sheltered by steel plates and can only be put out of action by a direct hit with high-explo-sive shells.

Where we expose a hundred- men they expose ten. And yot> on a> front where we -can only fire 3,000 shots a minute they, by reason of their nnnt-erotfS'machine-guns; can fire 2.000, 3,000, or 4,000. There is another point. Individual machine-guns, Ittke every other kind of machinery, are apt to fail on occasions. An army which ns-t.3 ' machine-guns sparingly may find that at the critical point and the critical moment there is only one gun-„ which breaks down. If the weapons are in pairs or threes or fours, as the Gormans use them, one of them at least

will be in good working order, and its stream of lead will “crush the attack before it develops, ” in the words of the German Headquarters' reports. The need for an unlimited supply of high-explosive shell is now admitted, and the main question, so far as they are concerned, is how to turn the sholfs out with sufficient rapidity. It is known that the Germans arc using east-iron and cast-steelj, as also are our Allies the French. The advantages of such cast shells is that they can be turned out much more quickly than the ordinary pattern of shell, which is

==s— ~*~ !r slowly manufactured from-a steel Ingot. Yet when this matter was brought, to the notice of the House of Cora* mons recently Mr. Tennant could only reply with an out-of-date official sniff. He “was not aware.” We have had too many of these languid answers, and we hope to hear no more of them. This war will nt be won by officials who- are “not aware'/ ’ Only second in importance to the supply of high-explosive shells is a'? almost unlimited supply of machineguns, and the training of the magnificent men of the new armies irr their use, if our casualties are to be diminished. The guns can be made. They can be made quickly here, in Canada, and in the United States. They can be made cheaply. The one overwhelming sity is that fheir importance should be understood, that the order for them should be given, that there should be action here and now. Eet us sforr the present condition' under which we have* only Gorman machine-guns to shoot r.f, while the Germans have for their target thousands ef bravey living Englishmen,