A Rifleman Went to War

by Herbert W. McBride

  During the war we used all kinds of ammunition. That loaded in England and (most of it) in Canada, was loaded with cordite, but most of the product of the factories in the United States used one or the other of the nitro-cellulose or pyro-cellulose powders manufactured by the duPont Company. Of course they were all designed to give the required initial velocity of 2440 f.s. and I suppose they actually did approximate that standard, but we found a vast difference when it came to machine-gun work where we were required to fire over the heads of our own troops.

  Naturally we blamed the ammunition for all our troubles but, since I have had time to think about it, I am inclined to believe that part, at least, of the trouble, was due to worn-out barrels.

  We went in with two barrels for each gun and so long as we were able to change barrels after each two belts (500 rounds) and thoroughly clean the used barrel, we had no difficulty in holding elevations within the limits required for safety, but there were times when this changing was impossible and many thousands of rounds would be fired through the one barrel without cleaning. Now, it seems to be pretty generally believed by civilians – and some soldiers, too – that a machine gun just shoots and shoots and shoots, that all the gunner does is to squeeze on the trigger and run out belt after belt, without any intermission. Of course this is all wrong. The really efficient machine gunner will fire short bursts with corresponding pauses between. On rare occasions, when the action becomes hot and the enemy is advancing in overwhelming numbers, he may have to simply “pour it into them,” but when he does he knows full well that he is sacrificing his gun.

  From time to time we received new barrels and the old ones were sent back to “Ordnance” where I suppose they were tested or, perhaps, just calibrated, to see how badly they really were worn. We tried always to have at least one good one for use in our strafing work where accuracy at long range was essential.

  There is one phase of machine-gun work which I have never seen mentioned in print and that is wire-cutting. When a raid was contemplated or even a minor attack on a limited bit of front, it was customary to have certain men delegated to go out ahead and cut lanes through the enemy wire. The British even had several varieties of gadgets which fitted on the muzzle of the rifle for wire-cutting purposes. One was something like the extended pruning shears which gardeners use, but this was not strong enough for some of the heavier wires. Another had two “horns” which brought the wire directly across the muzzle of the rifle where a shot would sever it. But where a general advance was in preparation and it was desirable to keep some semblance of a line, it was necessary to cut up, roll up or blow up as much as possible of the entanglement.

  For a long time this work was done by the artillery – mostly light, field batteries. Given time they could certainly make a mess of things and would usually flatten out the barricades so that men could work their way through. Then some bright “Emma Gee” discovered that bullets would cut wire, and, from that time on, it was one of the functions of the machine gunners to do this work. By mobilizing a group of guns – anywhere from four to a dozen, they could rip lanes through any barbed-wire defense in a few hours.

  We Canadians of the Second Division were originally equipped with Colt guns. We afterwards – at various times – learned to use others, all of the Maxim persuasion. The machine gunner’s business, so far as I learned it, was either to keep the infantry out of trouble, or get ’em out of it after they had over-estimated their own ability.

  At the time of the beginning of the war, in the British as well as in the United States Army, the machine gun had been considered – and so described in their textbooks – as a “weapon of opportunity:” something to fall back on or to use when conditions appeared to be favourable. Evidently they did not look for the opportunity to occur very often, because each regiment had but two machine guns issued them. In visiting various army posts and from conversations with officers of the regular establishment during the years prior to 1914, I got the idea, and I think it was well founded, that the machine-gun section was a place to send undesirable individuals from the various companies or troops – just a convenient dumping ground for all the no-account soldiers and bums who did not seem to fit into the spick and span ranks of the regular units.

  I had occasion to observe the same feeling during my training period with the Canadians.

  I suppose my own gang, in the Emma Gee Section of the Twenty-first, harbored more of the happy-go-lucky and devil-may-care individuals than all the rest of the battalion. Some of them were transferred to us because their company commanders had become tired of having to gloss over their insubordinate and utterly undisciplined actions; but many others had voluntarily – even eagerly – sought this service because it offered the best chance for more excitement than the monotonous routine of the infantry companies. However that may be, it is just such a mixture of adventurous spirits, disdaining personal danger and ever on the lookout for a chance to stir up a scrap, that makes a good and efficient machine-gun organization. Hard swearing, hard fighting and, yes, on occasion, hard drinking men; it is no place whatever for the sissy or the mollycoddle.

  Lest some of my readers may infer, from the above, that the machine-gun men were just naturally a depraved and unregenerate lot, I hasten to deny any such allegation. Among them were to be found many of the highest type of “gentlemen and scholars” – men of education and refinement, who harbored, under the surface, an intense and burning desire for high adventure. Others, perhaps, denied even the most elementary schooling, were possessed with the same un-definable urge for the excitement of primitive combat. A few months of association under the stress of actual warfare and it was difficult for an observer to detect any material difference. All had been fused into a perfect, synchronized unit to which might well be applied the slogan: “one for all and all for one.” Tough? Yes, indeed; I’ll say they were tough, but, by the same token, they were not mean or “ornery.” Their toughness was of the case-hardened nature which is absolutely necessary if men are long to endure the frightful horrors and desperate, relentless ordeal of furious life and sudden death which is their daily portion. Hard indeed, on the surface, but underneath this artificial veneer was hidden a generous store of the milk of human kindness. The Oxford graduate and the homeless hobo met on common ground, where the only thing that counted was innate courage and honest friendship.

  Chapter 19. The Soldier in Battle

  THERE is a universal curiosity about war. Of the great primary human impulses constantly manifested in the will to live, it is rather curious that this one, the impulse to kill, is the only one that is highly organized. In the matter of eating and mating we pursue our individual ways; but war is the most stupendous business on earth; it is the most highly organized and the most lavishly financed; it takes precedence over every other social activity, and women who have never done anything in their lives except to attend teas and entertain week-end guests turn out en masse to raise funds and stimulate patriotic fervor. It is a well known quirk of human nature that we like to do what is forbidden, and when it comes to defying the commandment which says that “Thou shalt not kill,” our efforts are set to martial music and the national tempo undergoes remarkable changes.

  But it was not speculations of this sort that induced me to undertake this book. I don’t know just why I began it; but once I was setting about it, I was aware of a desire to answer a lot of questions, mostly those asked by soldier-friends who got to see little or nothing of the conflict. These questions were evidence of a practical sort of curiosity. I can best be regarded as a practical sort of soldier, not concerned with the moral or ethical aspects of war, but with the fact that it is. What about the Ross rifle? Did it fail you? What about these automatics that are to put it out of business? Did excitement or fright threaten to make worthless your ability to hold, to score with each shot? Where do pistols come in, anyway? It was questions of this sort – numbers of them, and not only about rifles – that I set out to answer. I am not a professio
nal story-teller. I know that the foregoing chapters do not make a smooth-running story; but I hope that, somewhere in them, may be found the answers to some of these questions – and the provocation to ask, and honestly try to answer, a great many more; for national defense is still an important matter. For the rest, the story might well close anywhere. It is at best but a diffuse and disjointed record of the observations and experiences of a rifleman who went to war. There have been many books about the war; yet it remains as something of an anomaly in human experience, its interest never satisfactorily summarized or epitomized, even for themselves by those who took an actual and active part in it.

  I have, of course, not attempted this. I shall be satisfied if I have answered a few questions to the partial satisfaction of a lot of men honestly interested in them. Yet what I have written is so fragmentary and incomplete that some summing up is necessary; for in answering these questions I have frequently emphasized one point; the value of rifle-training. With another word about the rifleman here, I shall go on to the larger implications of this sort of training. I think it will appear that the emphasis was justified.

  Riflemen are not bom, they are made. In the early stages of American history, they were made by the sheer necessity of providing food for themselves and their families and of protecting themselves from the savage and war-like owners of the land they, the intruding white men, were determined to possess.

  All the time the youth of that day were learning to shoot straight they were also learning the arts of concealment and of woodcraft that enabled them to steal upon their prey, whether it be human or four-footed, without being detected.

  The riflemen of Morgan, of Marion and “Nolichucky Jack,” the men who followed John Rogers Clark to Kaskaskia and thence through the indescribable hazardous journey which won Vincennes – and, with it, the whole Northwest; the men who won the battle of King’s Mountain from the best rifleman officer who ever wore the King’s uniform, Captain Patrick Ferguson, all had their initial training in performing the ordinary routine work of their daily lives. Deer, turkeys and, in the very early days, buffalo and elk, furnished a large part of their larder. To successfully stalk and kill this game they must, inevitably, learn the stealth of the Indian or of the game itself. From those men and their achievements, came the slogan, “The Americans are a Nation of Riflemen.”

  Yes, that’s right. They were. But, how about now?

  Those men, with their woefully inadequate weapons, as measured by modem standards, successfully vanquished their human adversaries, largely because everybody was a rifleman; and their ability was not only in their marksmanship, but in their knowledge of woodcraft, their alertness, initiative and self-reliance under all circumstances. How many Americans, today, can even approach the state of perfection reached by those – our forefathers – in the rifle shooting game. (We call it a game. With them it was a business – a vocation.)

  We are training men in the art – or, should I say, science – of rifle shooting. We train them on a range where everything runs on a hard and fast schedule. At eight o’clock, we know we can go to the six-hundred yard range and, upon reporting to target No. 69, will find a scorer and a range officer who will issue ten rounds of ammunition and tell us that we have just ten minutes to get rid of them. The target is fixed – in the same place it was yesterday; it won’t move – it will stay right there until we finish the ten shots and, moreover, someone down there will tell us just exactly where each bullet strikes.

  Well, that’s fine. It is a great game, and we can learn a lot from it. We can learn just what we may expect from these rifles – at known ranges – and we can learn how to sight and hold and squeeze the trigger and all that.

  But – and of all the BUTS in the world, this is the most serious – but when we go to war? What do we do then? There is no scorer or range officer or fixed target. Just a hell of a lot of other fellows shooting at us. Don’t know just where they are – somewhere over yonder – in that woods I guess.

  Unless the rifleman has learned, in addition to his ability to hit a clearly visible target at an approximately known range, how to take advantage of all the available protective cover, he is surely out of luck (SOL, in short). It is up to him, personally and individually, for the protection of his own hide, to be able to locate the enemy and to place himself in a position where he can deliver effective fire upon said enemy. Failing in this, he can say his prayers, secure in the knowledge that his grateful country will put a nice little white cross over his grave.

  What with tanks, machine guns, trench mortars, grenades – both hand and rifle – automatic rifles et cetera, it does seem that the rifleman has been driven back into his last ditch, the one he came from in the days when America was a “Nation of Riflemen.” If he is to survive at all, it must be because of his ability to go into battle as an individual, even though surrounded and flanked by thousands of other fighting soldiers. To be of any practical service whatever, he must be able to take advantage of cover, able to search out individual men of the enemy and, in the midst of all the turmoil of battle, to shoot and hit these individual targets.

  It is not easy. Having tried it, I know.

  But, by all the Gods of war, it can be done – and it is up to the riflemen of America, the real riflemen, who are really and truly endeavoring to fit themselves for war service, not only to qualify themselves, but to encourage a system that shall make available to as many men as possible, training that fosters the growth and development of the basic qualities that go into the making of a real rifleman.

  Then, no matter how thorough this training and how well designed to approximate the conditions of warfare, the soldier will still be woefully unprepared for battle. I had had many years of it, and I was not prepared and just here, before going on to justify this insistence upon training in the effective use of the rifle under all conditions, I may as well say something about this inevitable unpreparedness. This involves not only the reaction of men to fatigue and discomfort and imminent death under all sorts of fantastic and gruesome conditions (all the “horrors of war” stuff) – not only this; but also the purely practical matter of our inability to know in advance the manner and methods that will suddenly develop in another war.

  The first of these considerations is of course largely psychological; but the two are closely related, and the emphasis in another war may well be upon methods of instilling “psychological horror.” But it is all but useless, and certainly not my intention here, to attempt to say what the next war will be like. No one has yet told us what the last one was like. The strategists and tacticians will study it; and the rank and file may well do so.

  What was it like? A number of my friends who have read extracts from these pages have criticized me for being so “cold-blooded,” as they phrased it, and have insisted that I should elaborate on the mental and physical sufferings of the actors. They – both men and women – have harped on this subject until I have come to dread having any of them visit me. But, just a few minutes ago, one of my good friends put it into new words. “Hell, Mac,” he said, “that’s fine, but you ought to put more misery into it.” As he was a soldier and went through several major battles, he probably has a vague notion of what he is talking about; but that phrase doesn’t define it at all. Misery wasn’t the dominant note for either of us. There was no dominant note. It was an incredible symphony, beginning in a tedious, endless and uncertain overture, mounting through countless variations, and ending, for many of us, not in a final, crashing crescendo, but in nothing. We were picked up and thrown out and we can’t even recall what it was like. I should like to hear a barrage again, a real decent barrage.

  I might well have been considered an old soldier (on the range and parade-ground) when I began. I was equipped to act and shoot, and I was eager for the fray. After the long preliminaries, I soon got into it, and I found no trouble in being of service. But I didn’t have time – or capacity – to see what was happening. (The High Command didn’t either.) We w
ere all enthusiastic and purposeful. We went in with our rifles and machine guns and fought, and had a great time. Then suddenly, we didn’t know just what we were doing. The war was a good deal bigger than any one of us. Well, I know when this reaction struck me. It was during one of the periods of inaction in London. Prior to that time, I had never given a serious thought to the matter of surviving – or of dying. I didn’t then. But I was not keen as I had been. The war was not staged for my entertainment. But I had had, largely, entertainment out of it. There was something else – a great deal more. I didn’t analyze it, but just sort of collapsed under it.

  Now, I find the same sort of lethargy assailing me when it comes time to relate the incidents leading up to my final months of war.

  Coming back from England and walking right into that Somme fight, I tried to, and think that I did, do some of the best and most useful work that was permitted me during the whole period of my service. The fight at Combles, alone, was just about the best. Just a scratch crew; made up of volunteers of the Ox and Bucks – and some few of the Warwicks – with me, a rank outsider – a Colonial – well: the French appreciated it, anyway, and several of our crowd received individual medals for it, whether or not our own people ever made it a matter of record. The Frenchmen, with their 37 mm guns, shooting right into the port-holes of the German M.G. emplacements, while, at the same time, we were working around the left flank and pouring bullets into the back door. That’s what took Combles and don’t you ever let anyone try to tell you differently.