By eight o’clock in the morning, the mismatch was obvious. Thousands of Sudanese soldiers had been wounded or killed, and not one had managed to come close enough to the British lines to throw a spear. Churchill watched the charges lose momentum, waver, and stop. The remaining Sudanese men tried to get away. There was little chance for that.
As the shells burst accurately above the Dervish skirmishers and spearmen who were taking refuge in the folds of the plain, they rose by hundreds and by fifties to fly. Instantly the hungry and attentive Maxims and the watchful infantry opened on them, sweeping them all to the ground—some in death, others in terror. Again the shells followed them to their new concealment. Again they rose, fewer than before, and ran. Again the Maxims and the rifles spluttered. Again they fell. And so on until the front of the zeriba was clear of unwounded men for at least half a mile.67
The British cavalry, the Twenty-first Lancers, organized for a sweep of the plain and pounded out from the lines and across the ground to exploit the enemy’s helplessness and confusion. Roughly four hundred horsemen strong, they rode unexpectedly to a large and deep depression, and met a Sudanese force in hiding. The horsemen were too close to stop, so instead they accelerated and collided with the wall of men in the trench. For ten seconds, both sides were stunned. They continued to fight while intermingled, slashing and stabbing and shooting into one another, sometimes with muzzles pressed almost to one another’s flesh. Then the British broke through, but not before having lost more than a quarter of their horses and suffering seventy wounded or dead men. Less than two minutes had passed since the two groups collided. The British survivors regrouped and wheeled back to prepare to repeat their charge, as riderless horses or horses carrying sagging, bloodied men wandered uselessly about. The Lancers had just completed the last effective British cavalry charge in history. It had been an anachronism in real time, and an example of older, outmoded ideas of tactics urging men to do what Maxim guns no longer required.
The cavalrymen galloped to the Sudanese flank, dismounted, and the two sides exchanged rifle fire as the Sudanese fighters retreated, allowing the British to recover their dead. General Kitchener in the meanwhile had directed his units to move forward and capture Omdurman, and his forces were attacked en route by a massive concentration of the Khalifa’s fighters. The British set their Maxim guns and shattered charge after charge. The battle passed with astonishing quickness. Churchill, a veteran of the seesaw skirmishes against Pashtun tribes on the Afghan and Pakistani frontier, was both astonished and horrified. A huge collection of drilled fighting men had been cut down, almost extinguished, by modern arms. The British force had suffered forty-eight dead, including those lost in the cavalry charge. Contemporaneous estimates of the Sudanese dead exceeded ten thousand, and sometimes were twice that. It was not yet noon. “Within the space of five hours,” Churchill wrote, “the strongest and best-armed savage army yet arrayed against a modern European power had been destroyed and dispersed with hardly any difficulty, comparatively small risk, and insignificant loss to the victors.”
Three days later Churchill accompanied a British horseback patrol that toured the plain, which was covered with the grisly remains of the local army’s dead, and a far smaller number of the wounded, some of whom were trying to crawl with their wrecked frames to the Nile, for a drink. His report of the ride is among the most chilling pieces of battlefield correspondence from the nineteenth century, and the most complete assessment in its time of the power of automatic fire.
A strong, hot wind blew from the west across the great plain and hurried foul and tainted to the river. Keeping to windward of the thickest clusters, we picked our way, and the story of the fight unfolded itself. Here was where the artillery had opened on the swarming masses. Men had fallen in little groups of five or six to each shell. Nearer to the zeriba—about 1,000 yards from it—the musketry had begun to tell, and the dead lay evenly scattered about—one every ten yards. Two hundred yards further the full force of the fire—artillery, Maxims and rifles—had burst on them. In places desperate rushes to get on at all costs had been made by devoted fearless men. In such places the bodies lay so thickly as to hide the ground. Occasionally there were double layers of this hideous covering. Once I saw them lying three deep. In a space not exceeding a hundred yards square more than 400 corpses lay festering.
Churchill was shaken. “I have tried to gild war,” he wrote, “and to solace myself for the loss of dear and gallant friends, with the thought that a soldier’s death for a cause that he believes in will count for much, whatever may be beyond this world.” But he was unable to square the sights before him, acre upon acre of the remains of soldiers on their own land, with his understanding of war waged by a “civilized Power.”
There was nothing dulce et decorum about the Dervish dead; nothing of the dignity of unconquerable manhood; all was filthy corruption. Yet these were as brave men as ever walked the earth. The conviction was born in me that their claim beyond the grave in respect of a valiant death was not less good than that which any of our countrymen could make.
The patrol continued on. Its members traced the outlines of the battle by following the lines and piles of corpses. Churchill had participated in the charge of the Twenty-first Lancers; he knew of its exhilaration and frantic terror, and had been within the rushing wall of four hundred horsemen crashing at high speed against a denser wall of dismounted men. As he roamed away from the location of the Lancers’ victory, out onto the plain near the Nile, he came to the spot where another cavalry charge—this one by the Baggara, who were aligned with the Khalifa—had been stopped by Maxims. The result had been utterly different. The area of the Baggara attack was marked by a sun-bloated collection of dead horses and men. Churchill saw immediately the distinction between the charges. It was as if two events from different eras had occurred side by side on the same field. The British cavalry had faced rifles, swords, and spears, and made it up to and through the Sudanese lines, just as their tacticians had imagined, and much like cavalrymen from another time. The collision eroded the will of the defenders, and as the British turned around, reorganized, and attacked again, the Sudanese men fled. The Baggara faced a line thick with machine guns. A few European men, peering down metal sights and pressing metal buttons with their thumbs, had filled them and their horses with bullets, bringing them to a not quite instantaneous stop.
Every man had galloped at full speed, and when he fell he shot many lengths in front of his horse, rolling over and over—destroyed, not conquered, by machinery. At such sights the triumph of victory faded on the mind, and a mournful feeling of disgust grew stronger.
Battle had changed. Modern weapons were no longer curiosities. The questions about their reliability had been put to rest. Sudan would fall back under British control. War had entered a new phase.
Now only the heaps of corruption on the plain, and the fugitives dispersed and scattered in the wilderness, remained. The terrible machinery of scientific war had done its work.
For this victory, General Kitchener would be named Kitchener of Khartoum and propelled to celebrity and ahead of other British officers in his career. And other movements were afoot. Adolf von Tiedemann, a German military attaché, had toured the right flank during the battle and taken notes of the work of the Maxim guns. He estimated that more than half of the Sudanese deaths were caused by them, and saw the ruinous effect of reliable and massed automatic fire used against soldiers who moved into it in traditional military style.68 While London celebrated, the attaché was sending back his reports. Germany would soon increase its production of Maxim guns.
Reaction to the sudden dominance of machine gunnery on the battle-field was mixed. By 1893, after British expeditions had gunned down the Yonnies and the Ndebele, the British Parliament was debating the merits and morality of machine gunnery. Several politicians found the startlingly lopsided killing unfair and suggested it was counterproductive. “Treaties with savage Chiefs were not of much value,” the
parliamentarian A. C. Morton told his fellow members in 1893. “They were very often brought about by the aid of Maxim guns, aided not infrequently by the whisky bottle.” Hilaire Belloc, the deeply Catholic French writer who had taken residence in England, was also made uneasy by the ready application of machine gunnery in colonial governance and the callous attitudes that accompanied it. In 1898 he published The Modern Traveler, a narrative poem about a trio of Englishmen who traveled to Africa for profit and tried to exert their will. One of the characters, a feckless stockbroker named William Blood, relied on machine guns even to settle a wage dispute.
Blood thought he knew the native mind;
He said you must be firm, but kind.
A mutiny resulted.
I shall never forget the way
That Blood stood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath:
“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”
He marked them in their rude advance,
He hushed their rebel cheers;
With one extremely vulgar glance
He broke the Mutineers.
(I have a picture in my book
Of how he broke them with a look.)
We shot and hanged a few, and then
The rest became devoted men.
As General Kitchener was marching across the desert in 1897, Rudyard Kipling had already commandeered the word Maxim. He made it a verb, describing a British sergeant, a man “with a charm for making riflemen from mud,” training his colonial charges in the arts of military rule.
Said England unto Pharaoh, “I must make a man of you,
That will stand upon his feet and play the game;
That will Maxim his oppressor as a Christian ought to do.”69
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 Labouchère, 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 veloci
ties, 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 focus to the necessary minds. Machine gunnery remained misunderstood by senior officers in armies around the world.
The marketplace, though, was enthused. Even before machine guns shaped the outcome of closely watched battles, Maxim guns had been finding customers near and far. Demand meant opportunity. Other designers wanted market share, too. New weapons emerged. In 1889, John Moses Browning, a second-generation American gunsmith whose father had operated a small gun works in Utah, began trying to harness another form of energy from a bullet’s discharge: the muzzle blast. Like almost anyone who had fired a rifle, Browning had noticed that the report of a rifle was accompanied by the rush of gas that followed the bullet out of the muzzle. He had seen how the blast knocked aside bulrushes in marshes in Utah. This represented unused energy. Browning wanted to put that energy to work. But how to capture gas rushing through a barrel, especially with a bullet in the way, moving at more than two thousand feet per second? Browning held a series of firing experiments,2 and ultimately made a prototype weapon with a vent inside the barrel, near the muzzle, to provide an alternative route for a portion of the expanding gases; essentially, a tap. In this system, in the tiny fraction of a second after the bullet passed the vent but before it left the barrel, gas whooshed at high pressure through the vent and forced a rod backward, down the length of the gun, toward the trigger. The excess gas was animating a lever. Now it was only a matter of mechanics for that pulse of energy to be converted to the work once done by hand: extracting the spent casing, loading and locking a new cartridge into the chamber, and, as long as the trigger remained depressed and ammunition available, firing the next round to start the cycle anew. By late November 1890, the Browning Brothers Armory, in Salt Lake City, had offered this new design to Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Company in Hartford. Five years later, a gas-operated automatic[4] sold under the name Colt Model 1895 entered the market.3
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