Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/590

586 other story concerning the general treatment of "the ingenuity and inventive talent of the country," before we pass to the mode in which these principles have been applied in the matter of the actual construction of the guns themselves. We have taken our illustrations hitherto from the "ammunition" or "laboratory" department, and, in Colonel Moncrieff s case, from that of carriages. We will take our next from the vexed question of multiple guns – Gatlings, Nordenfelts, and the like. Whatever our opinion on that subject may be – whether we agree with the very able lecture in which Lord Charles Beresford recently advocated the use of these weapons, or with Colonel Brackenbury's view, that any advocacy of them is mere folly – we are not here called upon to say. Colonel Brackenbury will agree with Lord Charles Beresford so far as this, that if multiple guns are in any case to be used, we ought, at least, to have the best form of them that we can obtain. Now the curious fate of the Ordnance Department has been such that it decreed that our troops should use in the field an inferior form of Gatling. We have heard the story repeatedly told with much indignation by officers who were engaged in the Zulu campaign. We believe, though in this instance we only speak from broad and general facts of public notoriety, that we shall not be unfair if we state the matter thus. Shortly after the Franco-German war – say about the year 1873-74 – the only form of multiple gun in existence was the old Gatling, which was made of a series of barrels, arranged in a circular form, and worked with a handle, so that two circular surfaces had to play against one another when the gun was loaded and fired. At that time the question of the use of Gatlings was referred, by the department, to a very able body of officers. They reported that the Gatling, in its then form, might prove very useful in certain special positions, such as the ditches of fortresses, &c., but that it was wholly unadapted to service in the field. The objections to its use were, chiefly, its tendency to jam when loading, and the fact that a special ammunition would be required for it, which would greatly complicate the stores taken into the field. General Sir Edward Hamley, who had been asked separately by Mr Cardwell to report on the mitrailleuse, expressed a somewhat more favourable opinion on these points.

As it is by no means our purpose, in this article, to advocate the claims of any particular inventor, we shall not attempt to decide whether, of the more modern forms of multiple gun, the Gardner, the Hochkiss, or the Nordenfelt is the best. But at all events, a few years later than the report we have spoken of, it was proved, by a series of exhaustive trials at Shoeburyness, that inventions had been introduced which entirely obviated the chief objections which had been raised to the earlier form of Gatling. In one, at any rate, of the forms, a series of the Martini-Henry barrels