The Gun

Kessinger Publishing, 2004), p. 150.

68. Hutchinson, Machine Guns, p. 69.

69. Rudyard Kipling, “Pharaoh and the Sergeant,” 1897. First published in the New York Tribune.

70. Maxim, My Life, p. 182

71. Hiram S. Maxim, Li Hung Chang’s Scrap-Book (London: Watts & Co., 1913). The first two quotations are excerpted from p. 19; the last quotation from p. 368.

72. Not long before his death, Maxim wrote of the inferiority of the freed slaves, describing his frustration at trying to keep the Kimball House lit and heated through a night with the help of only a black man. The company engineer had the same problem, he said, and finally told him he had concluded that “no amount of beating would keep a nigger awake at night.”

73. New Zealand Free Lance, September 15, 1900.

4. Slaughter Made Industrial: The Great War

1. Sergeant A. J. Rixon papers, letter of March 17, 1915. On file at Imperial War Museum, London. Rixon added: “Not the St. Patrick’s Day I’m used to.”

2. Chinn, The Machine Gun, describes Browning’s discovery and the series of experiments on pp. 160–63.

3. Ibid., pp. 150–70; also Major B. R. Lewis, Machine Guns of the U.S., 1895–1944, a series in Army Ordnance.

4. Chinn, The Machine Gun, pp. 209–10.

5. Julia Keller, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel (New York: Viking, 2008), p. 203. The text of Dr. Gatling’s letter thanking his son for the five hundred dollars appears on p. 203.

6. Historians have excoriated Western officer corps for what would later seem monumental ignorance; it has become a bromide. Ellis’s Social History of the Machine Gun portrayed the British generals thoughtlessly sending a generation to its doom.

7. Richard Meinertzhagen, Army Diary: 1899–1926 (Edingburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1960), p. 8.

8. Ellis, Social History of the Machine Gun, pp. 54–55.

9. “The United Service,” New York Times, July 15, 1903.

10. Kimball, “Machine Guns,” p. 417.

11. Armstrong, Bullets and Bureaucrats, p. 133.

12. Ibid., pp. 126–29.

13. Ibid., pp. 136–37.

14. Ellis, Social History of the Machine Gun, p. 55.

15. Hutchison, Machine Guns, pp. 82–83.

16. Charles A Court Repington, The War in the Far East: 1904–1905 (New York: Dutton, 1908), p. 315.

17. Tadayoshi Sakurai, Human Bullets: A Soldier’s Story of Port Arthur (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907), pp. 152–53.

18. Hutichison, Machine Guns, p. 89.

19. B. W. Norregaard, The Great Siege: The Investment and Fall of Port Arthur (London: Methuen & Co., 1906), p. 71.

20. Louis A. La Garde, Gunshot Injuries: How They are Inflicted, Their Complications and Treatment, 2nd Revised Ed. (New York: William Wood and Company, 1916). The precise losses remain a matter of dispute. La Garde, who apparently was working off medical data, put the number of Japanese killed in action at more than forty-seven thousand. With disease factored in, the number likely rises significantly.

21. Sakurai, Human Bullets.

22. Ibid., pp. 232–38.

23. Hutchison, Machine Guns, p. 84

24. Armstrong, Bullet and Bureaucrats, p. 139.

25. La Garde, Gunshot Injuries, p. 411.

26. Repington, War in the Far East, p. 490.

27. Armstrong, Bullets and Bureaucrats, p. 140.

28. From the handwritten letters of Alfred Dougan “Mickey” Chater, a captain in a Territorial unit who served on the Western Front from fall 1914 through March 1915, when he was struck in the face by a piece of shell. Captain Chater survived, but the injury and disfigurement were horrible. Letters on file at the Imperial War Museum, London.

29. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, 1915–16 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1933), pp. 61–74.

30. Goldsmith, The Devil’s Paintbrush, pp. 131–60. The question of how many machine guns the Germans had at the war’s outset has been clouded by unattributed guesses and estimates. Goldsmith provides the text of a report by “The German Government Agent at the Anglo-German Mixed Arbitral Tribunal,” dated October 5, 1928. The report provided depot-by-depot totals from the former chief of the German Machine Gun Department.

31. Meinertzhagen, Army Diary. pp. 90–94. Meinertzhagen, a British intelligence officer, globe-roaming ornithologist, and self-aggrandizing figure, kept exhaustive diaries. His journals are both interesting and suspect, and his writings have been found to contain frauds. In this case, his account of the battle of Tanga is consistent with other sources, and one of his conclusions, that troops felt disgraced by being defeated by black soldiers, was consistent with many of the misapprehensions of the ways that machine guns were changing warfare.

32. Chater, letter of December 13, 1914. On file at Imperial War Museum.

33. Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme (New York: Norton, 1972). Soldiers were surrounded by signs that, though the age of industrial warfare had arrived, many officers leading the army did not understand what this meant.

34. Ibid., p. 11.

35. Arthur Anderson, from a ninety-five-page hand-written manuscript. On file at Imperial War Museum.

36. Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 49.

37. La Garde, Gunshot Injuries, p. 422.

38. Tim Ripley, Bayonet Battle (London: Pan Books, 2000), pp. 34–35.

39. A. J. Rixon, diary entry of April 1. On file at Imperial War Museum.

40. Rixon, diary entry of May 26, 1915.

41. Rixon, diary entry of September 25, 1915.

42. C. E. Crutchley, Machine Gunner 1914–1918: Personal Experiences of the Machine Gun Corps (South Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military Classics, 2005), p. 15.

43. Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, p. 21.

44. Andre Laffargue, The Attack in Trench Warfare: Impressions and Reflections of a Company Commander (Washington, D.C.: United States Infantry Association, 1916), p. 27.

45. Ibid., p. 12.

46. Anderson, from his diary.

47. Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, p. 81.

48. Ibid., p. 106. The quoted section at the end of the excerpt is from Middlebrook’s interview with Private W. J. Senescall of The Cambridge Battalion.