The Gun

In early 1899, Kipling followed with another poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” encouraging the United States to invade the Philippines. By now machine gunnery was a symbol with many meanings. Opponents of colonialism mocked Kipling’s poem for its racist undertone. Henry Labouchere, a parliamentarian who had used his office to condemn the activities of the British military and trading companies abroad, wrote a jeering retort, “The Brown Man’s Burden.” It was an anticolonial and anti–machine gun screed, summarized in verse.

Pile on the brown man’s burden:
And, if ye rouse his hate,
Meet his old-fashioned reasons
With Maxims up to date.
With shells and dumdum bullets
A hundred times made plain
The brown man’s loss must ever
Imply the white man’s gain.

Pile on the brown man’s burden,
compel him to be free;
Let all your manifestoes
Reek with philanthropy.
And if with heathen folly
He dares your will dispute,
Then, in the name of freedom,
Don’t hesitate to shoot.

What did Maxim think? He seemed never to express misgiving at the uneven killing taking place under his name. There were signs he approved of and encouraged it. As his fame rose, Maxim became friends with Lord Wolseley, who by then had led two campaigns during which hand-cranked weapons had jammed at crucial times. The general took an early and sustained interest in Maxim’s invention and saw it as a superior arm. Maxim in turn enjoyed Lord Wolseley’s company, even seeing him as an equal, which, given Maxim’s personality and sense of self, was a rare thing. “I sympathized with him deeply because he seemed to be afflicted with a very active imagination,” he wrote, adding that it was “a trouble that I had suffered from for many years.” When the two men discussed machine-gun use, Lord Wolseley asked Maxim to consider making a machine gun that would fire a larger cartridge, something that might pierce the side of ammunition carts from great distances. Maxim saw the request as a distraction from his gun’s main purpose: killing men, especially of the uncivilized sort. “I told him that such a gun would not be so effective as the smaller gun in stopping the mad rush of savages, because it would not fire so many rounds in a minute, and that there was no necessity to have anything larger than the service cartridge to kill a man.”⁷⁰

The bloodletting that accompanied British colonialism, represented by the Maxim gun, disturbed liberal members of Parliament. After the initial reports of flattening native formations and shredding native defenses were circulated in London, some of the members decried machine gunnery, worrying even that Maxim guns undermined the cause of Christianity by having Christians associated with such a fearsome thing. Maxim showed little interest; his mind was insulated by a sturdy disgust for all talk of the Christian faith, which he saw as a retreat for the mentally weak and a corrosive on modern life. “The Biblical story of the world and man is, even on broad lines, as far as possible removed from the truth,” he wrote. The central narrative of the testaments, he said, “is indefensible.” He relished insulting it. “Our civilization,” he concluded, “has been retarded more than a thousand years by the introduction of Christianity.”⁷¹

His views on race were equally severe. “A black man,” he declared, “has no rights that a white man is bound to respect.” Late in life, he described belittling blacks in the United States in the service of his early business interests. Before taking a trip to Atlanta in the early 1870s to oversee the installation of one of his automatic gas machines at the grand Kimball House hotel, he bought a photograph of “a New Guinea nigger; it was the niggerest- looking nigger I had ever seen.” Maxim thought the picture might charm his Southern hosts. At the time, Pinckney Pinchback, the son of a slave and the slave’s master, was serving as governor of Louisiana, to many a white Southerner’s dismay. Maxim wrote the words “Governor Pinchback” on the photograph and carried it in his pocket. At moments he deemed convenient, he produced his photograph for his white clients. It was a Maxim calling card. “Whenever we were discussing niggers and politics I used to take out this photograph and hand it to them,” he said. What are we coming to, some of the men would exclaim. Next we will have a gorilla. Maxim maintained his sense of racial superiority, and his disdain for blacks, throughout his life.⁷²

There were signs that some of Maxim’s contemporaries understood the role Maxim and his guns had assumed, and were not positively impressed at the ease with which he accepted it. In 1900, Lord Salisbury, Britain’s prime minister, attended a banquet of the British Empire League, where Maxim was being feted. The inventor was sixty now, white-haired and with a thick, jutting goatee. He had amassed wealth as his guns had been taken into service by armies across Europe. When Lord Salisbury’s turn came to compliment him, the prime minister was ready with his toast.

“Well, gentlemen, do you know, I consider Mr. Maxim to be one of the greatest benefactors the world has ever known?” he said.

Maxim was curious. “And how?” he asked.

“Well,” said Salisbury. “I should say that you have prevented more men from dying of old age than any other man that ever lived.”⁷³

If Maxim had a response, it was not reported by the newspaper correspondent in attendance. The premier’s subtly caustic remark did not reflect the official stance. Maxim guns had brought victory to England. Maxim’s place was secure. In victory was glory, and official gratitude. He was knighted the following year.

CHAPTER 4 Slaughter Made Industrial: The Great War

Must buck up as I am not dead yet.¹

RICHARD GATLING’S VISION HAD BEEN WRONG. GIVING ONE SOLDIER the tool to do the killing of one hundred did not supersede large armies, and exposure to battle had not been diminished so that men might be saved for their countries. By the early twentieth century, industrialization had brought forward all manner of martial developments. Some were natural evolutions in well-established arms: more reliable ammunition that propelled bullets at extraordinary velocities, more powerful explosives, better steels that allowed for artillery to fire more lethal shells with greater precision and over longer range. Others were breakthroughs that made long-awaited technologies ready for war: submarines, war planes, hand grenades, poison gas. All of these would become characteristic menaces of World War I. None of them worked the way Gatling had proposed. Weapons designed to cause more casualties tended to cause more casualties, not fewer. Machine guns fit into this intricate mix of killing tools, and more people were dying before them, many more people than Gatling’s vision had allowed. The remaining questions were behavioral. When would the professional military class realize that machine guns had become a permanent presence in battle? What would they do about it? Machine guns, and the possibilities they created for using massed fire for killing massed soldiers on a large scale, presented new puzzles for officers to ponder and solve. The killing fields of Omdurman and Lieutenant Parker’s innovations in offensive tactics outside Santiago had been widely publicized, providing an impetus to explore the questions at hand. But battlefield results did not bring