A Rifleman Went to War

chauts — using clips of, I think, thirty cartridges. Some of the lighter German guns, of the automatic- rifle family, were of similar construction, but they had, in addition to these, another one, called a “Parabellum.” This one had the barrel covered with a flanged, aluminum casing and an outside jacket of light metal, very much like the Lewis in some respects but longer and slimmer and with holes in this outside jacket. The rate of fire of these guns was above any others that I have ever seen.

As to the Browning, I must confess utter ignorance. So far as I have been able to learn, very few — if any — were used in actual warfare. In general appearance and construction, they closely resemble the various types of Maxims — either the Vickers-Maxim or the light Maxim-Nordenfeldt. Whether they possess any marked points of superiority over those guns, I do not know; and, unless they have stood the test of a long and strenuous campaign under modem war conditions, it is safe to say that nobody else knows. The true test of any materiel is possible only under actual service conditions.

Our Machine Gun training in Canada consisted of, first, a very thorough course of instruction in the construction and mechanical features of the guns themselves, the quickest and most efficient methods of replacing broken or damaged parts, the diagnosis and cure of the numerous malfunctions which are enumerated under the all-embracing name of “stoppages;” second, spirited daily drills, which took the form of competitions, in the rapid mounting, dismounting and moving of the guns, accompanied by sight adjustments and aiming drill and, third, many days of actual firing, with service ammunition, on the Barriefield ranges. This was limited to direct fire but, as it included all degrees of slow and rapid fire, at both bull’s-eyes and man-targets, at all ranges from two hundred to one thousand yards, and since the supply of ammunition was not limited, every man had ample opportunity to become thoroughly familiar with every phase of the actual handling and firing of the guns and the filling of belts, both by machine and by hand.

A gun crew consisted of six men, numbered from one to six and each with certain specified duties. The Number One man was designated a lance corporal and was the commander of the crew and did the actual firing. During the period of our training, however, positions were changed frequently, so that each man performed, in turn, the duties of every number. No permanent assignments to crews were made until we were about to leave England for the front.

In England the course of instruction was extended to include practice on miniature targets of various kinds with traversing: horizontal, diagonal and vertical. Then we resumed the firing, on the Hythe ranges, first at bull’s- eye targets and then at long lines of individual silhouettes set up on the stop-butt and which fell when hit. This was usually in the nature of advancing fire, starting at about six hundred yards and firing a short burst and then moving rapidly forward, setting up the guns and continuing the fire. Two guns would work together, one of them maintaining a fire while the other advanced, just as is done in the “advance by rushes” of the infantry. We seldom had any difficulty in downing all the targets in short order, but I have seen several other, inexperienced outfits, going through the same performance, on the same range, when they would have to get both guns clear down to the two-hundred yard range before finishing the job.

But the matter of indirect fire was still merely a matter of theory. A few of us had given the matter considerable study but had had no opportunity to give our ideas a practical try-out until, on our last visit to the range, just a few days before we sailed for France, we spent several hours experimenting. Our only “tools,” besides map, protractor and compass, were an ordinary carpenter’s square and level. With these and by dint of main strength and endurance, we managed to get on the targets at ranges from 900 to 1100 yards. Next day we received an issue of clinometers — quadrants — such as were used by the light artillery. These, together with prismatic compasses, protractors, maps and elevation charts, comprised the firing equipment with which we took the field. There were, of course, numerous and sometimes amazing gadgets being turned out and offered for the purpose of simplifying the problems of the Emma-Gee officer, many of them of no practical use and none of them living up to the expectations of the inventors.

I collected quite a lot of those innovations and still have several. One which is now before me is: “The Machine Gun Officer’s Protractor,” by Capt. H. K. Charteris, Hythe Staff. It reminded me, very much, of the mil-rule which had been introduced to our (U.S.) army a few years previously. In one respect it is an improvement on the type of mil-rule I had seen in that it has a small metal disc at the end of the sighting string, with a little aperture through which one sights. The graduations are called “graticules” instead of mils but the purpose is the same in that they are supposed to be of use in determining any given range. Theoretically these instruments, including the mil-rule, are all to the good and their use in schools of instruction may be justified because of the mental exercise and training which resulted from picking out and identifying certain visible objects in the landscape; but when it comes to the matter of their practical use in warfare; well, so far as I can see, they are simply excess baggage. Even if it were possible for a man to stand out in the open, during an engagement, long enough to take any careful sights with one of the blamed things, it seems to me that the only thing they do is to substitute a lot of uncertainties for one good guess — in other words, a man has a darn sight better chance to make one good guess at the range, without messing around with one of those things, than he has of getting a reliable answer to all the ifs and maybesos which their use entails. For instance: how tall is a man? (He may be a six foot Guardsman or a member of the Bantam Brigade.) How high is a tree, or a house, or a church? How long is a wagon or a truck or a boxcar? How far is it between telephone poles? If you can supply the right answer to any of these questions, then you have to contend with the fact that hardly any two men can sight through the same aperture and see exactly the same thing. The variations in keenness of sight itself, the degree of steadiness with which the instrument is held and the character of the light, shadows, etc., all combine to preclude the probability of uniformity in the results obtained by different persons. This was conclusively proved to me during the Small Arms Firing School, at Camp Perry, in 1918, when, out of a class of thirty-odd officers, it was seldom that one-fourth of them could arrive at the same result, even when sighting on a water-tower, the height of which was known to a foot.

When I went to Canada, I took with me one of the Hitt-Brown Fire Control Rules, thinking it might be useful. However, I was disappointed, as the printing on it is so fine that, even then, when my eyesight was excellent, I could not read the letters or figures without the use of a magnifying glass. Anyway, all the dope on it was for the U.S. 1906 ammunition, so not adaptable to the British .303. That Charteris gadget did have some useful information inscribed on it — angles of elevation and descent, cones of dispersion, etc. — all of it useful at times, but I soon discarded it, as I had all those tables on a celluloid protractor which I found more suitable for my work of compiling firing data. In all our work, designating targets, making corrections in range, etc., we used degrees and minutes of angle — as did the artillery. I have been acquainted with this “mil” business ever since it was introduced in the U.S. Army, but, up to this present year of our Lord, 1932, I must confess that I have never been able to form the slightest idea as to the why of it, and if there is any real and practical advantage in its use, the same has never been explained to me or in my presence. Every rifleman in the United States and in the British possessions is familiar with the minute, as a measure used for changes in elevation or horizontal deflection. Probably some of them do not know that it is just the sixtieth part of a degree or that an angle of one minute, extended to the distance of one mile, equals eighteen inches, but they all do know that a change of one minute is equal to one inch for every hundred yards of range. (The mile being 1760 yards and the minute equaling eighteen inches at that distance, it is plenty close enough for all practical purposes.) And whenever we have to make up a real army, for war, we will take in men from every walk of life; but, no matter what their normal vocation, they will have a general idea of the structure of the circle and its divisions, used by astronomers, navigators, engineers and surveyors, the world over — and really understood by the nucleus of shooting men with whom we would have to start out. What is the advantage in trying to make them learn something altogether different and which cannot, in my humble opinion, increase their efficiency in the slightest degree? The time for training and preparation will be all too short, at the best, so why complicate matters any more than necessary?

The ingenuity, the time and the money wasted by educated theorists would, if properly applied, win most any war. I could not attempt to enumerate all the marvelous and amazing devices that came to my notice, both in the British and American services, during the war. Why, they even issued to us a lot of carefully made cloth masks and neck coverings of a similar khaki-colored material — to be used when on night raids. Nobody ever used them, of course, a smear of mud being much better and easier to apply. Then there were the steel shields, mounted on two little truck wheels, which men were expected to push before them when advancing to the attack. I saw them at various places behind the lines but never up at the front, as it was obviously impossible for men to trundle them across the tom ground of no-man’s-land. The most expensive of range finders — useful in