THE RIFLE SUPERSEDED.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 310, 7 October 1915, Page 3

THE RIFLE SUPERSEDED.

Mr. Frederick A. Talbot, writing on; "Munitions Old and New" in the current number of The World's Work, refers to the uses of the most modem ride, and asks /'What has actual- warfare revealed? Instead of battling at 2.000 paces (the range of a rifle) thaprotagonists are waging combat ;st forty yards and even less. The riflo as a weapon might just as well biv consigned to the scrap-heap. The magazine rifle is of little avail because it has been superseded by the machinegun. "Markmanship is of little account because the arm is used at ranges where one could scarcely fail to seom a hit if firing blindfolded, while as for the infliction of small, clean wounds (the object of the modern rifle, he explains in a previous paragraph), welj, the tendency is not so much to knock your adversary over as to blow him to pieces or to riddle him like a sieve. . - Curiously enough, the rifle lias come into prominence in an applications, which it was maintained in many quarters /would never occur in a modern: war—as a handle for the bayonet. "Cold steel," he adds, "is playing; a more prominent part in trie actual fighting than the rifle bullet, and is genrally far more* effective because the enemy evinces a marked disinclination to stand his groand to face such a. weapon."