center, striking some British soldiers on the far ranks but breaking the Arab attack. An Arab retreat began. Nine British officers and sixty-five soldiers were killed, including everyone who had tended to the Gardner gun, except Lord Beresford, the officer who had put it to use in foolish fashion and was spared the fate of the unlucky men he had led. A count of the Arab dead found eleven hundred corpses.27
The hand-cranked Gardner gun, for all its potential, had failed. The brief sequence told less about the potential of rapid-fire arms as devices for mass killing than it did about the enduring pitfalls of cumbersome machine guns, low-quality ammunition, and early design. Once Lord Beresford had found the proper range and engaged the lead of the approaching charge, he had managed only six turns of the crank before it seized up.28 He had made eight more turns before adjusting the elevation. After the battle, he walked among the Arab dead and confirmed the awful power of the big weapon: “I observed that the rows of bullets from the Gardner gun, which was rifle calibre .45 inch, with five barrels, had cut off heads and tops of heads, as though sliced horizontally with a knife.”29 Lord Beresford liked that. But it lasted only fourteen turns—seventy bullets against thousands of attacking men. A machine gun good only for a moment’s work was not much good at all.
The Desert Column fought another engagement en route but Colonel Stewart was wounded and he ceded command. His unit arrived at Khartoum one day late. The city had fallen. General Gordon had been beheaded. His killers displayed their grisly prize by wedging it in the branches of a tree. Colonel Stewart later succumbed to his wounds. London was crestfallen.
What was bad for Britain was good for Maxim. Episodes when manual machine guns failed could only aid his cause. And then it happened again. Two years later an Italian column roughly half the size of Colonel Stewart’s expedition was caught by an Ethiopian force making an overland movement in what is now Eritrea. In late January 1887, the Italians set out after one of their garrisons, in Sahati, was attacked by Ras Alula, a renegade Ethiopian commander. The reinforcements, 524 men led by a lieutenant colonel, had two Gatling guns. As they walked toward the hills near the town of Dogali, the enemy was alerted of their movement. Ras Alula was a skilled commander and, by contemporary accounts, had ten thousand warriors under his control. He began maneuvering his forces early in the morning to cut Sahati’s reinforcements off. The Italians had little wartime experience with their Gatlings. But they had brought them into exactly the sort of tactical situation that the Gatling Gun Company’s surreptitiously paid lecturer, Captain Ebenezer Rogers, had proposed at the Royal United Services Institution a dozen years before. A small force on colonial duty, facing a much larger force, the captain had said, would find a Gatling most useful for turning back primitive subjects. Unless the Gatling did not work.
As Ras Alula constricted his hold on the Italians’ route, Lieutenant Colonel Tomasso De Cristoforis, the Italian commander, ordered his troops to higher ground. The fighting began. Within a half hour, both Gatling guns were jammed. The Italian soldiers could not revive them. The colonel managed to send out a messenger with a note saying the machine guns were down and help would be welcome. But there was not enough time. This fight would be determined by older rules.
At one o’clock Ras Alula, having completed two concentric circles around them and closed inwards to within a short distance, gave the order to charge. Then the hand-to-hand fighting began; the Italians having opened fire at the longer ranges had by this time exhausted their ammunition, but each man defended his life with bayonet and sword. To the last man they struggled against an enemy twenty times their number, falling one by one on the position they were holding; 23 officers killed and one wounded; 407 men killed and 81 wounded. Such is the death roll of that sad and glorious day.30
When a patrol from the main garrison arrived the next day, it found the Italian wounded hiding under the Italian dead.
Maxim had not made his weapon merely to satisfy his curiosity, or out of patriotism. A sense of concern for soldiers’ fates seemed to interest him not at all. He was in the gun business for fame and money. He sought sales. After his gun was unveiled, it was quickly examined for its fitness for military service, and Maxim incorporated suggestions from British officers to transform it from a technical marvel to an instrument more suitable for combat use. Chief among his tasks was simplification, so the gun could be broken down, cleaned, and reassembled with no tools beyond a soldier’s hands. Belts of 333 cartridges were made, which could be fed into the gun easily, one after the other, to keep the Maxim firing. The feed system was simplified so that component parts could be removed and replaced in as little as six seconds.31 Maxim also reduced the weapon’s weight. His machine gun would not be like the big Gatlings or Gardners when they entered the market. It would be a fraction of the size, a full system under 150 pounds. The other guns were still large enough to be confused with artillery.
A newly formed concern, the Maxim Gun Company, was ready to market his product, and it quickly became evident that there were advantages to not being first: The sales groundwork laid by Gatling and Gardner had made his path easier. So had the uneven performance of the Gatling gun at Ulundi, and the failures of the Gardner at Abu Klea, and then the massacre at Dogali. In 1885, Maxim’s gun was fired for the public at an inventors’ exhibition in South Kensington, and next were a series of trials in England and France, and in Italy, where the gun was submerged in the sea for three days and put to tests without cleaning. Upon watching a test in Vienna, Archduke William called it “the most dreadful instrument I have ever seen or imagined.” And placed orders with its inventor.
No matter the Maxim’s superior performance, it faced clever interference. At one shooting trial between Maxim’s guns and those of his competitors, a sales agent for the Nordenfelt gun lingered among the reporters waiting outside the test-range gates. The Maxim beat the hand-cranked Nordenfelt handily, but could not defeat the agent’s guile. The competitor’s agent addressed the reporters in a hasty news conference. “The Nordenfelt—it has beaten all others,” he told them, and so the stories read the next day.32 Maxim also could not attract attention across the Atlantic; his competitors and potential partners in America barely replied to his mail. “I wrote to all the prominent gun and pistol makers in the States telling them that the automatic system would soon be applied to firearms of all sizes from pocket-pistols up, and advising them to work my system, which had been broadly patented in the States,” he said. “I did not receive a single favourable reply.”33
The American army was similarly unimpressed, in part because it was in a period where it was under orders to buy American-made arms, but also because early tests raised concerns about reliability and durability.34 Nonetheless, a few officers were scolding the others for not paying developments in machine gunnery adequate mind. “There can be no question that these guns will prove an all-important factor in deciding war, and the nation which best employs them, and fully understands their working and organization, will come off the victor,” one artillery colonel wrote in an article in a leading tactical journal. The colonel, Edward B. Williston, pilloried the ignorance permeating the American officer corps. “Generally speaking, not one officer in a hundred has any special knowledge of the subject of machine guns, and very little is known of their construction, capabilities or proper uses,” he wrote. “The guns issued to the Army are either used to ornament posts … or they are carefully housed and greased to prevent rusting.” A terrible tool had appeared, to snickers. “It has been the fashion,” he said, “to decry the guns.”35
In 1887 Maxim submitted guns to the British for naval trials, and the navy bought three. Royal enthusiasm for the gun ran so high that Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, recommended it to his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II, the emperor of Germany, who requested a demonstration competition between a Gatling, a Nordenfelt, and a Maxim. The Germans already had tested machine guns, but were not satisfied with them; they had yet to design ammunition casings sturdy enough to bear the strain of rapid fire. The Maxim worked flawlessly, firing 333 rounds in less than thirty seconds. The kaiser approached the gun and placed his finger on it.
“That is the gun,” he said, “there is no other.”
At that moment, Hiram Maxim had effectively achieved what he would be most remembered for. The companies he was affiliated with would sell more guns to many buyers, and he would continue his inventing, and would try to design an airplane. With uncanny martial prescience, he would predict aerial bombing before airplanes had even been made. But the demonstration for the kaiser was his moment. Once the kaiser had seen the efficiency and ease of use of the automatic machine gun, Maxim had offered his weapons for sale to the powers that would become the central military actors in World War I.
While Europeans placed their initial orders, the most important test results were trickling back—from battle. A Maxim gun was first used in 1887 in the jungles along Africa’s western coast, about sixty miles inland from Freetown, against a small, recalcitrant tribe. As colonial episodes went, the uprising was minor. But it proved to
