barrels came from the London office of the Henry Rifled Barrel Company, where the company’s superintendent tried to dissuade the American inventor. “Many engineers and clever men imagine that they can make a gun, but they never succeed,” he said. “They are all failures. So you better drop it, and not spend a single penny on it. You don’t stand a ghost of a chance.”21
He ignored the warning. Maxim knew his problems were not in the marketplace—he would be offering something different from all machine guns then available. His problems were in the industrial climate of his new home. The Industrial Revolution had not blossomed as fully in England as it had in the United States. Maxim found London technologically backward. The workers were unfamiliar with modern tools then in common use in American mills. And as he procured those tools, he discovered that many were unwilling to work with them. Others followed schemes to slow work and deceive their bosses, extending the time taken to complete a task, so as to maximize wages.
Maxim claimed he often worked alone, pursuing a design for which there were no models. “When tools were required for the various machines I forged them out and tempered them myself,” he said.22 One apparatus allowed him to measure the force and other characteristics of recoil, and with this data he built the interrelated components for model guns that he hoped would perform the chores of all firearms—loading, firing, removing the empty case, and reloading. He made several prototypes. Finally, he settled on a concept whereby when a gunner fired the first shot, the force of the recoil would slide the barrel backward about three-fourths of an inch. After the bullet left the muzzle, this backward motion would unlock the chamber where the spent shell casing was seated and begin the empty casing’s extraction. Simultaneously the force of the barrel’s rearward travel would knock a heavy metal rod toward the rear of the weapon, where it would meet a thick and powerful spring that would throw it forward again. As the bolt was rushed forward by the spring, it would catch a new cartridge and lock it in the chamber, where the firing pin would strike the cartridge’s primer and fire the gun again. The blast that propelled the second bullet down the barrel knocked the bolt backward again, beginning the cycle once more, and so on, a cycle at a time, each lasting as little as one-tenth of a second, until the trigger was released or all the ammunition gone.23
By early 1884, after testing several designs, Maxim had a working model based on these principles, which fired at adjustable rates as fast as six hundred rounds per minute. The invention was reported in London newspapers. Maxim was almost immediately visited by England’s upper crust. The Duke of Cambridge, who at the time was the head of the British army, was an early visitor. Maxim became so busy with guests, he said, that he could work productively only at night and on weekends. “It was a veritable nine-day wonder,” he said.
As the new weapon was receiving its inaugural praise in Maxim’s shop, England was consumed by a long- running difficulty in eastern Africa. The Egyptian province of Sudan had been swept by Islamic rebellion in 1881, and in 1883 Britain had decided to evacuate its citizens and the Egyptian military presence from the capital, Khartoum. A popular officer and former administrator of the province, Major General Charles Gordon, was dispatched to organize the city’s defense and coordinate the exit. He arrived to discover the situation desperate. By midspring 1884 the Islamic forces controlled the approaches to the city, trapping the Egyptian contingent and General Gordon in a siege.
Britain, pressured by public demands for a rescue, ordered General Wolseley, who had brought the first Gatling gun to Africa during the Ashanti War, to go to Gordon’s assistance. Khartoum rests at the juncture of the White and Blue Nile rivers, and General Wolseley initially chose to ascend the river with all of his forces. But as his relief expedition bogged down, he ordered Colonel Herbert Stewart and more than eleven hundred men to break off and attempt an overland route. The foot column set out with a camel train toward the beleaguered capital. Colonel Stewart’s detachment became known as the Desert Column. They were the forerunners of the special forces; many had been selected from top English families and for their fitness for the difficulties ahead. Theirs was a colonial misadventure of the first order. On January 16, 1885, while moving between wells on arid terrain, the column encountered near Abu Klea a large Arab force blocking the route to the next watering point. The Arabs, carrying shimmering green banners, outnumbered the British column by as much as ten to one. Night fell before the two sides clashed in force.
At dawn the Arabs began a war dance, and an exchange of distant fire ensued. The Arab shooting was intermittent and not especially accurate, but bullets occasionally slammed into Colonel Stewart’s men. The wounded soldiers were loaded onto camels. The colonel understood that the math did not work; the column could not withstand a prolonged contest of attrition. He ordered a square formed and marched toward the green banners at about 10:00 A.M., hoping to provoke the Arabs into a fight in the open, where the Europeans’ superior weapons and their battle-drill training might give them an advantage. A naval contingent, led by Lord Charles Beresford, pulled a five-barreled Gardner gun along with the stumbling square. Lord Beresford was peculiar and excitable. He opted to ride a white donkey instead of a camel. But he was devoted to his Gardner and wanted to see what it might do.
The two sides skirmished as the square moved over the broken ground. The Arab units swerved and probed, seeking weakness in the lines. At last they selected the rear of the square, which was having trouble maintaining formation, for their full attack. They closed the distance in phalanxes led by flag-carrying sheiks. “After them came the fighting men, armed with javelins and hatchets, knobkerries and knives,” a survivor would later write. “These were not the sharpshooters who had been firing Remingtons, but warriors chosen to exterminate the infidel.”24
The British riflemen fired into the flanks of the phalanxes as the Arabs moved for the weakest point. The shrieking attackers momentarily wavered, but their numbers were great; they rushed on. Lord Beresford’s eagerness to use the Gardner overcame his tactical good sense. The naval contingent broke ranks, rolled the gun and carriage outside the formation, and prepared to meet the charge and cut it down. Lord Beresford, ready at the crank, would test his gun at last.
They were tearing down upon us with a roar like the roar of the sea, an immense surging wave of white- slashed black forms brandishing bright spears and long flashing swords; and all were chanting, as they leaped and ran, the war-song of their faith,
I laid the Gardner gun myself to make sure. As I fired, I saw the enemy mown down in rows, dropping like nine-pins; but as the men killed were killed in rear of the front rank, after firing about forty rounds (eight turns of the lever), I lowered the elevation. I was putting in most effective work on the leading ranks and had fired about thirty rounds when the gun jammed.25
The moment that machine guns’ critics had long warned about had arrived. Outside the exhausted and bloodied square, Lord Beresford and his little naval detachment stood exposed. They were alone, facing a charge, and with a silent gun.
To clear it the feed-plate had to be unscrewed, and Beresford and a chief boatswain’s mate named Rhodes began to do this. Within minutes the enemy were on top of them. Rhodes was speared and killed instantly, and so was the naval armourer beside the gun. Beresford was luckier. He was saved momentarily by the feed-plate dropping on his head and knocking him under the gun, and was then hit by the handle of an axe, the blade of which missed him. He caught a spear blade that was being thrust at him, got to his feet, and was then borne backward by the rush into the front rank of Number 4 Company.26
The fighting went to hand to hand on the line, with British soldiers thrusting bayonets while the Arabs hacked with axes and stabbed with spears. The Gardner was briefly in enemy possession, but the British made a rush and reclaimed it, even though it was jammed. By now there were other problems. The attackers had flowed into a gap that had opened in the square. There were so many British camels within—more than one hundred—that the Arabs could not capitalize at the moment they might have broken down the British formation and commenced its slaughter. Their confusion among the animals allowed time for Colonel Stewart to recover. The opposite line of the square, following a drill no infantryman would ever wish to execute, faced about and fired into the square’s
