The Gun (11 page)

As the mounted men scrambled out of the donga, the inGobama-khosi regiment rose from the midst of the grass and, as if on signal, other regiments appeared at wide intervals on either side. The silent black masses parted the waving grass, displayed their shields and began to move forward, joining the regiments coming down from the heights as they reached them, until the center of the basin was ringed with dark groupings.
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The British formed a square and watched, tightening ranks and readying weapons. The Zulu defenders, estimated to be twenty thousand men, merged and stamped their feet, harassed lightly by the Seventeenth Lancers, a unit of British cavalrymen, who opened fire and peppered the walls of Zulu warriors as their horses cantered in the shrinking open space. The Lancers were outnumbered by thousands. The enclosing circle grew smaller. The British cavalry taunted the Zulus, but they knew, like Colonel Custer’s men, that they would have small chance in a head-to-head fight. They withdrew within the square as the larger clash became imminent. The Zulus advanced slowly until the British artillery opened fire. Then the Zulus broke forward at a run.

For all of his professions of humanitarianism and assurances that machine guns could serve as such a powerful deterrent that they would make wars safe, Richard Gatling had never addressed this.

The battalion opened fire with rifle fire and the rattling bursts from the Gatling guns stitched the crashing volleys together. Regiment after regiment surged forward, and the lines began to melt away in the hail of bullets scything the slopes. Succeeding waves charged over the contorted bodies that littered the grass, and shining faces of the warriors, with gleaming eyes and set teeth, bobbed up and down over the rims of their shields. Raw courage had brought them that far, but bravery alone could not force a way through the crescendo of fire, and the warriors sank to their knees to crash full length in the dust or tumble head over heels in mid-stride. Not a Zulu reached within thirty yards of the British lines.
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The Gatling guns had jammed several times, but were still effective. A charge by the Zulu reserve was broken, and then Lord Chelmsford ordered the cavalry back out, to pursue. The Seventeenth Lancers cheered as they bore down on their retreating victims, and cut them with lances and swords. The Zulu charges had been broken in thirty minutes. Most of the mopping up was completed within the hour. Several of the British soldiers had brought champagne on the march, and now, with clusters of African bodies glistening on the field, and the British killing the wounded in vengeance for past defeats, some men shared warm toasts. Lord Chelmsford ordered Ulundi to be set afire. His command had left its camp before 7:00
A.M.
It faced the Zulu charge at 9:00
A.M.
“Ulundi was burning at noon,” he telegraphed home.
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The British, with their superior firepower, had completed the destruction of the Zulu nation in a morning, though they were on enemy terrain and outnumbered roughly four to one. One British officer and ten enlisted men were killed.
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The rout had reached proportions almost absurd, but was also demonstrative of what rapid-fire weapons could do when applied to people who did not have them, or who were ordered in the open by commanders who did not appreciate how machine gunnery worked. Colonel Custer had left his guns behind. The killing at Ulundi had shown their utility in what one officer called “wars with people who wear not trousers.”
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They would not be left behind anymore.

Still the dispute over the utility of rapid fire raged back at home. At the Royal United Services Institution in London not long after Lord Chelmsford returned to England, another American arms designer, William Gardner, spoke on the merits of machine guns in conventional battle. Gardner had served as a captain in the Union Army during the Civil War, and knew his way around a battlefield. In 1874, he had developed hand-cranked weapons, available in time with two to five barrels arranged in a row, like organ pipes. His guns competed with Gatling’s better-known models. Unlike Gatling, Gardner had drawn from his military experience and understanding of tactics to canvass the literature and develop practical theories for machine-gun use. In his lecture in London, he laid out proposals for machine gunnery that would in time become standard practice for infantrymen in the field, including using the guns from a distance
against an enemy to fix him in place while other soldiers advanced. And he was realistic, avoiding Captain Rogers’s breathless hyperbole and conceding that the problem of unwanted stoppages was critical. Jamming had been attributed in the main to poorly manufactured European cartridges, which were not sturdy enough to withstand the forces of extraction from a gun firing at a high rate of speed, and often were bent or broken in place, stopping firing altogether. But Gardner’s observation was also a veiled attack on his product’s main rival, the Gatling gun, and lingering British concerns about its reliability. “I prefer a pair of walking boots to a balking horse,” he said, “and a club to a machine gun very liable to jam.”
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After his lecture, Gardner faced the doubters. Lieutenant General Charles Pyndar Beauchamp Walker, who had traveled with the crown prince of Prussia during the Franco-Prussian War and assimilated the Prussian assessment of rapid-fire arms, did not contain his contempt. “The introduction of this engine into the French armament was, as I have already expressed myself, a gigantic swindle,” he said. “The results have been in no way commensurate with the expectation formed, and although the weapon is probably capable of improvement and certainly very formidable under certain conditions, I do not think it will ever take the place which its upholders expect.”

The general listed objections, including that the French guns often fell out of use because they malfunctioned. He cannily echoed Gardner’s own statement about a club, to suggest, indirectly but pointedly, that perhaps the infantry would be better armed with blackthorn mallets. “I am reminded of the old Irish saying which I heard a great many years ago, when first in that country, that the ‘shillalah never missed fire,’” he said. “The Irishman prefers a stick to any other weapon; there is no jamming there.”
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Lord Chelmsford, who had led the forces in the Zulu War, and knew something about a machine gun’s value, intervened politely. But as an officer with colonial experience and not a presumed expert in continental warfare like General Walker, he treaded carefully. “I think myself that machine-guns have been rather harshly judged,” he offered. “I cannot help but thinking there is a future for these machine-guns, and I think there is a future for them not as employed with artillery, but as employed with infantry. I can safely say, at all events in such wars as we have to carry
on in South Africa, that machine-guns attached to infantry, if they are of simple and reliable nature, carrying the same ammunition as the infantry arm, would be of inestimable value.”
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Gardner, like Gatling, was able to handle rejection. He showed no sign of offense. By this time he had designed multiple models of his machine guns and was breaking into markets. His guns had performed admirably at recent British tests, and one version from his line had been accepted for service in the British navy. An exhibition of them was available in the building. Soon his guns were to go ashore in landing parties in Africa, and meet indigenous charges, too. He opened his reply with polite confidence. “I have only some crude ideas to express, and I express them in a crude way,” he said. “But I believe in what I say.”

Gatling knew about Gardner. In what resembled turf encroachment, Gardner was having his weapons manufactured at a Pratt & Whitney factory in Hartford, not far from the Colt factory where Gatlings were made. And Gardner’s line of guns was enjoying warm press coverage and satisfying reviews in competitive military trials. Gatling had market share to preserve. He wanted to put Gardner and the others in their place. The field was getting ever more crowded. Dr. James H. McLean, a fraud who had passed himself off as an inventor in Saint Louis, was even echoing Gatling’s own theories of world peace through awesome firepower and offering an entire range of quick-firing weapons, with catchy names designed to attract sales: the General Sherman, the Vixen, the Annihilator, and, with a wink, the Lady McLean.
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The Gatling gun risked losing ground. The aging inventor took out newspaper advertisements, calling his would-be rival out.

Many articles have recently appeared in the press, claiming the superior advantages of the Gardner and other machine guns over the Gatling gun.

In order to decide which is the best gun, the undersigned offers to fire his gun (the Gatling) against any other gun, on the following wagers, viz:

First, $500 that the Gatling can fire more shots in a given time, say one minute.

Second, $500 that the Gatling can give more hits on a target, firing, say, one minute—at a range of 800 or 1000 yards.

The winner will contribute the money won to some charitable object.

The time and place to be mutually agreed upon.

R. J. Gatling
Of Hartford, Conn.
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The advertisement appeared in 1881. In a similar advertisement published a few weeks later in England, Gatling added a line suggesting the depth of his annoyance. “The trials of the above character,” it read, “will do more to determine the efficiency of the guns than newspaper articles so cleverly written.”
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Twenty years after designing the first Gatling gun, Gatling was white-haired and wealthy, an elder statesman in the machine-gun trade whose name was known round the land. He wanted his life’s most successful work to be above all challengers. It was a sentiment that was unnecessary in the short term, and pointless in the long.

In the short term, the British were still taking his weapon on colonial campaigns, mounting them on the seagoing vessels, boats, outposts, and armored trains. The problems with ammunition used by European forces had been largely solved, and there would be little more talk of jams. The naysayers in officers’ circles could block their armies from purchasing Gatling guns for continental service. But there were other markets—for navies, for police forces, for yachts, for mines, and for penitentiaries—all of which his company would try to tap. And yet his dream of assigning the Gatling to the world’s ground forces was soon to end. Gatling had spent two decades designing and marketing rapid-fire arms. Through official indifference and hostility, and the perplexity of friends, he had set the stage for machine guns. And Hiram Maxim was about to take it.

i
The underlined words retain the underlines in Gatling’s handwriting. The [and] replaces an addition sign.

That Patent Music Box for Perforating Men
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H
IRAM MAXIM WORKED A CARTRIDGE INTO THE ACTION OF HIS
prototype gun. It was an unusual-looking device: a narrow and dull metal box with a single protruding rifled barrel. For a trigger it had a small metal bar at the back end of the gun, and on its right side was a lever, resembling a switch, that could be used to adjust the rate of fire. Maxim had obtained the necessary Royal Laboratory machine-gun cartridges, the sort fired by a Gardner gun, and he intended to use them in his creation’s first firing test.

Powerfully built and dark-eyed at forty-four, Maxim had started his career in industry in rural New England. He was a picture of supreme confidence. As a young man he had earned his living as a maker of bedposts, wheelbarrows, wagons, and rakes, and as a decorative carriage painter. But his mind outpaced both the lifestyle and products the local mills offered, and he had become a prolific inventor and successful businessman in the electric and gas industries in New York. A few years earlier he claimed to have beaten Thomas Edison in the race to invent the light bulb, only to have Edison submit the necessary patent papers first. Had Maxim won that race, everything might have been different. He might have remained in the United States and enjoyed a life of fame and wealth, as Edison did. Instead he had moved to Europe, and in a professional lull in London had begun to work on machine guns that would not need a man to do more than depress a trigger to produce continuous fire. His weapon had no hand crank to turn. It did not need one.

He had the six cartridges in place,
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and he gave it a try. In roughly half a second, all of the cartridges were gone. The bullets had been fired in
a little more than a blink. This was a new kind of gunfire,
automatic fire,
the manifestation of the vision Gatling had had almost a quarter-century before. Everything was about to change.

Hiram Maxim was a designer with a story, and an ego, like almost no other. He was born in 1840 on a small farm in central Maine, an isolated and impoverished region. By his own long and often unverifiable account of his life, his excellence had begun with birth. “For many years there has been a tradition that there was always one very strong member in the Maxim family,” he said. “And I think I am entitled to be recognized as the strong member of the generation in which I was born.” His attraction to labor started early, as did his sense of mischief. At the age of eight, he said, he felled a gigantic fir tree with a butcher’s knife, chipping at a groove around its base all day for a week. The tree toppled and fell. The little Maxim watched with awe. A farmer soon complained to him that he had robbed his cows of their pasture’s only shade. Maxim was unmoved. “This was the proudest moment of my long and eventful life,” he wrote shortly before he died. “Nothing since has equaled it.” After he became famous in Europe he was remembered back in Maine as “the worst boy for miles around.”
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