The Gun (13 page)

Over the years Maxim offered a range of stories about when he first undertook such work. He told one interviewer that he made his first designs in 1873, but did not have time to test them for a decade.
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In a third version, he said his interest reached to 1854 when his father conceived of a hand-cranked, single-barrel machine gun. He hoped it would fire one hundred rounds a minute. Maxim would have been fourteen years old then; he claimed he made drawings and models of his father’s ideas over the next two years at the family wood shop in Maine. His uncle, who owned a metal works in Massachusetts, examined the plans and announced they would cost one hundred dollars to manufacture but not be
worth one hundred cents.
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The three accounts are not mutually exclusive, though the third description, if true, would have placed Maxim’s involvement in hand-powered machine guns neatly ahead of Richard Gatling’s. Maxim liked to be first.

Whether Maxim was a reliable correspondent on matters related to the development of the Maxim gun is another question. Ian V. Hogg, one of the most objective researchers of firearms and their origins, suggested that Maxim did not act nearly as independently as he made it seem. Citing records of the 1880s from the British military’s director of artillery, Hogg wrote that the first time the British military heard of the Maxim gun, word of the weapon came from Albert Vickers of Vickers, Sons & Company, a metallurgical concern. In September 1884, it seemed, Mr. Vickers told the British military that he had “several machine guns ready for inspection” and identified himself as “one of the part owners of the patents.” Within a week, the British military had decided to provide cartridges for demonstration trials, and by early October the superintendent of the Royal Small Arms Factory had visited Maxim’s workshop. A demonstration shooting was held in late January 1885 for several British military officials, who were impressed. From the records, Hogg deduced that Maxim had entered an early partnership with Vickers, and perhaps had his financial backing.
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The available records also show that by early November 1884, the Maxim Gun Company had incorporated, and that Albert Vickers and Robert R. Symon each had 417 shares with an initial value of twenty pounds each. Maxim was a minority shareholder, with 416 shares.
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Whatever the precise nature of his earliest backing, two things are clear. First, Maxim had more support—financial, technical, and social, the third being important to penetrate the business world in a foreign country—than he publicly acknowledged. Second, as Maxim turned his attention to firearms full-time in London, he was well placed to open a new business. He was in his early forties and had experience in manufacturing, engineering, design, sales, and patents. He had made ample money in the early utility industries, and he possessed a rich mix of theoretical and practical skills. He opened an experimental workshop in Hatton Garden, hired assistants, and worked out his drawings. He focused on the guts of an automatic weapon, wasting no time on elements already well-known. The 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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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,
“La ilaha ill’ Allah Mohammedu rasul Allah!”;
and the terrible rain of bullets poured into them by the Mounted Infantry and the Guards stayed them not. They wore the loose white robe of the Mahdi’s uniform, looped over the left shoulder, and the straw skull-cap. These things we heard and saw in a flash, as the formidable wave swept steadily nearer.

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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.