Part I
“There is only one alternative left to us. We must train every soldier in our Army to become a ‘human machine-gun.’ Every man must receive intensive training with his rifle, until he can fire – with reasonable accuracy – fifteen rounds a minute.”
Maj. Norman Reginald McMahon, Chief Instructor 1905-1909, School of Musketry, Hythe
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School of Musketry, Hythe, Kent, United Kingdom – Friday 12th July 1912
One of the perils of being seen as a bit of a crank, Lieutenant-Colonel Norman McMahon pondered to himself as he idly watched the latest class being put through their paces, was that other supposed cranks seemed to be attracted to you as a kindred spirit. On the positive side just because they might be cranks didn’t mean they were wrong when they came to your door with a new-fangled gadget or idea and it was one such an auspicious meeting that had led to him returning to Hythe that day.
Even if he hadn’t previously spent some four years as Chief Instructor here, before promotion led to him reassigned to Aldershot to take command of a battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, the fact he had also basically written the 1909 Musketry Regulations, and was an enthusiast on his subject to the point of being a bore, had earned him the nickname “The Musketry Maniac”. The disparaging moniker, which he was likely to be stuck with forever by this point, had long since ceased to bother him, it was merely one of the burdens a man with vision had to bear he supposed. At least they had let him bring in badly needed reforms once it became apparent his oft-repeated arguments really did have weight behind them and weren’t merely the eccentric ramblings of an obsessive.
Lt. Col. Norman McMahon was certain that if not for his family background and connections they would have found a way to shuffle him into obscurity years ago however. There were at least a few perks from having a father who served in the Crimea, finishing his own military career as a full general, while his grandfather, himself a lieutenant-general had fought in the Peninsular War against the French.
The McMahon’s were soldiers that knew their trade, he himself had seen action in Burma barely a year after leaving Sandhurst as a lieutenant. Later he went into the Second Boer War as a captain and came out of it as a major with a D.S.O. and a few nasty scars from wounds received.
It wasn’t his fault that the top brass and the bean-counters couldn’t see the logic that more machine-guns were needed to be successful on the modern battlefield. McMahon had certainly done his best to get the message across with his lectures arguing the point, but if they were too blind to see then by default it had been his job to drill the British Tommy into a pseudo automaton and foist the so-called “Mad Minute” drill of a minimum fifteen aimed rounds per minute upon him.
To his credit it had certainly worked. Helpfully the extremely smooth bolt-action utilised by the standard British army rifle, the Short Magazine Lee Enfield, allowed most properly-trained infantrymen to fire in excess of twenty rounds in sixty seconds, with some exceptional men having fired more than thirty, but despite exceeding the volume of fire that the soldiers of other nations could boast it was still only a poor substitute for a few more Maxim guns in McMahon’s considered opinion.
More concernedly now however the bloody imbeciles were actually considering abandoning the SMLE for a new rifle, one firing a more-powerful cartridge that necessitated using a modified Mauser action instead. Apparently the faster cycling Lee-Enfield bolt design just wasn’t strong enough to deal with those kinds of breach pressures safely. It would be impossible for the wretched thing to match the Lee-Enfield for rate-of-fire, no Mauser design was as fast in operation, and to make matters worse the new rifle could only hold half as many rounds in the magazine.
They were clearly making the standard military error of preparing for the last war not the next McMahon realised. It wouldn’t be Boer marksmen shooting at you on an open veldt from a thousand yards next time, it would be a European army coming at you en-masse. The relatively small British Army, made up of full-time professionals, would be badly outnumbered by the huge conscript forces to be found on the continent and they required a weapon to compensate for that disparity.
The British Tommy needed to make up in weight-of-fire what he lacked in weight-of-numbers. If he couldn’t manage to put out at least twice the rounds then how would he be able to hold his ground against twice the men?
Fortunately from what McMahon had heard the new rifle had already run into a few teething troubles, so with any luck he might have the opportunity to convince a few people that if they were going to insist on switching from the SMLE to something new they might want to embrace a different concept entirely.
If you can’t generate change from above due to institutional inertia, generate it from below, he had decided.
“Can’t tear yourself away from the place Sir?” one of the Sergeant Instructors who taught at the Musketry School asked, walking over to him. “I thought you’d stopped dropping in to give lectures last year?” he queried.
“You know me Sergeant Snoxall, Hythe is my Mecca” McMahon replied evenly. That he had continued to help out at the school for some two years after his promotion moved him to bigger and better things had only served to bolster the opinion that the man was downright obsessed with rifle practice. “Managed to set a new record yet Sergeant?” he inquired politely. It was good form to pay attention to the men and know enough about them to make conversation when required by courtesy.
“Not yet Sir, but I’ll do it one day” Snoxhall replied confidently. Like several of the other instructors at Hythe his dream was to beat the thirty-six rounds in a minute Jesse Wallingford had achieved four years earlier when the then Major McMahon had still been running the place.
McMahon smiled. “What would you say if I told you I was going to beat that record myself this very afternoon?” he asked hypothetically.
“It’s not for me to question the word of an officer Sir” Snoxhall replied being carefully non-committal, although inwardly he questioned the man’s sanity. Snoxhall had seen the man shoot on several occasions and he wasn’t nearly fast enough with an SMLE to break the thirty rounds barrier, let alone approach forty.
“Prepare me a spot on the range while I go have a word with the Chief Instructor and I’ll come back and show you Sergeant” McMahon requested. “And bring an audience, it’ll be worth watching believe me” he promised before turning and heading towards his old office where his replacement now resided. The daft balding bugger had a definite spring in his step too, Snoxhall thought to himself, idly wondering what the Fusiliers under McMahon command these days thought of him. Certainly when he had still been at Hythe the running joke had been that the reason why the major was unmarried was that he could never love a woman like he loved the art of musketry. No wife would want to be second in their husband’s affections behind a sodding smelly.
Thirty minutes later Snoxhall, the rest of the instructors, most of the trainees present that day and a few interested bystanders were watching McMahon open an oversized gun-case he had arrived with and pull out the ugliest damn rifle any of them had ever seen.
“It’s a tremendous piece of kit, but I’ll freely admit it won’t be winning any beauty pageants” McMahon joked, everyone laughing although perhaps in some cases only because he considerably outranked them. “A couple of chaps came to see me at Aldershot, said they read some of my articles and thought I might be interested in seeing what they’ve come up with” he explained how he came to have it. “They tried going through normal channels but I think what they had was a tad too revolutionary for the chaps at the War Office” he continued disparagingly, putting the rifle aside and placing three large and strangely shaped magazines to one side where he could reach them easily from a kneeling shooting position.
McMahon picked up one of the magazines and loaded it into the rifle. “Rapid fire, second class figure at three-hundred yards for qualification as per the 1909 Regulations” he informed them professionally, kneeling down and taking aim at where the target would pop up to start the shoot. He pulled the trigger but instead of firing a metal slide on top of the rifle slid forward to load the first round into the chamber and cock the weapon.
As soon as the target appeared, starting the clock for the drill, McMahon pulled the trigger again but this time the rifle answered the action with a sharp report as it fired. Less than a second later he pulled the trigger again and the rifle fired once more, then again and again as he kept pulling the trigger, the rifle clearly loading for itself each time with no need to work a bolt.
After some nineteen rounds, shot faster than anyone there had seen by anything that wasn’t a Maxim, Lt. Col. McMahon pulled off the now empty magazine, reached for another and snapped it into place. It seemed a bit fiddly and time-consuming compared to re-loading a stripper-clip into a SMLE but he was soon blasting away once more and he certainly had to stop to reload far less often.
The second reload after the subsequent nineteen rounds was even more problematic than the first, costing him valuable seconds, but McMahon still managed to get it fitted and to fire off another eight rounds before his minute was up and he stopped shooting.
“Forty-Six rounds the minute!” Snoxhall exclaimed. It was accurate too, despite the extreme rate-of-fire the grouping on target was more than acceptable.
“Drat. I was hoping for the full fifty-seven, three full magazines” McMahon stated regretfully. “Definitely need more practice on re-loading the bally thing” he observed, putting the safety catch on and putting the rifle down to one side as he got up. “Farquhar-Hill semi-automatic rifle fitted with a nineteen round drum magazine” he informed the frankly awe-struck crowd. “Perhaps I should amend the 1909 Regulations to insist on a minimum forty-five rounds per minute for qualification instead of fifteen with these things around” he suggested humorously.
Lieutenant Colonel Norman McMahon looked around. Yes that was exactly the expression he was hoping for written on the faces of the men who had been watching. When they returned to their units the junior officers who had been at Hythe for training would all be talking about the amazing new rifle the “Musketry Maniac” had demonstrated to them and word would hopefully spread far and wide.
“What’s the recoil like Sir” Snoxhall asked professionally.
“Lighter than you’re used to, the spring mechanism inside that loads the next round cushions it apparently, helps keeps your eye on the target” McMahon replied. “Between that and not having to work the bolt yourself it’s surprisingly steady even when you rapid-fire” he noted.
“Could have used one of those at Omdurman in ‘98 when ten-thousand Fuzzy Wuzzies charged our lines” one of the other instructors commented. “If it hadn’t been for the Maxims we’d have been overrun just like the poor sods were at Tamai and Abu Klea the first time the lads marched into the Sudan the decade before” he recalled a couple of the less successful battles fought by the army in defence of Empire. That was of course before the even more embarrassing early clashes with the Boers had set a new standard for British military incompetence.
“It takes standard .303 so if anyone wants to have a bash themselves we can re-load the magazines and see if anyone can beat my forty-six” McMahon suggested now he had them suitably hooked. “Takes a lot longer to re-load them than empty them I’m afraid to say” he continued apologetically. “I suggested to the gunsmith he might want to come up with an interchangeable ten round box magazine for the weapon too, something to use for when you don’t need to riddle absolutely everything in front of you with multiple holes.”
“Could he make it less ugly at the same time?” one young wag wearing the insignia of a second lieutenant suggested to laughter.
“It’ll look a lot prettier if you ever find yourself with a few thousand spear-chucking natives heading your way Sir” the instructor who had been at Omdurman wryly observed.
“Oh I’m sure if that ever happened Colour-Sergeant, I’d be happy to take her out for a walk along the strand and treat her to fine dining at the Café Royal afterwards” the junior officer who clearly fancied himself as a music hall comedian replied to more laughter.
McMahon sighed. Getting shot at would make the boy grow up fast, he thought to himself, pointedly ignoring the excessive joviality. “Very well. Raise your hand if you want to fire off a few rounds with this contraption” he invited anyone that might be interested.
Virtually everyone there immediately raised their hand with alacrity.
“Oh good grief, perhaps I shouldn’t have offered” McMahon said with mock dismay. In reality that was exactly what he had been hoping for as a reaction. “Sergeant Snoxhall, can you have a couple of boxes of .303 withdrawn from stores, I’ll sign off on it on my chit.”
Within the hour at least a dozen of the trainees had asked where they could obtain one of the rifles for themselves, officers typically provided their own personal weapons so they weren’t tied to using standard issue, and McMahon was starting to regret being too principled to ask Messrs. Farquhar and Hill to put him on sales commission. Several of the other officers of his own regiment had already ordered one of the new rifles after witnessing him blasting away with it on the range the Royal Fusiliers used the week before and word was already starting to spread to other units based Aldershot as a result.
At the very least if people started talking about it then proper value might be given to the notion that rate-of-fire mattered to the infantryman more than the ability to occasionally hit a speck on the horizon. Hopefully it would nip the changeover to the new Mauser copy in the bud because better to stay with the SMLE than embrace that folly.
All he needed to do now was mention in passing to the right people that other armies were looking into switching to semi-auto rifles, including bloody Mexico of all places who had developed the new ten-round Mondragón rifle, and then see if momentum started to build towards finally bringing his concept of a British Army based around the principle of overwhelming volume of firepower to fruition. Ideally with that penny-pinching civilian Haldane finally gone, replaced as Secretary of War by Colonel Jack Seely who had served as a cavalryman against the Boers and knew soldiering first-hand, it might be possible to get the purse-strings loosened for more equipment.
Two years later at the Mons-Condé Canal in Belgium the machinations of the Musketry Maniac paid off tremendously, albeit greatly to the cost of the German First Army under General Alexander von Kluck.
-------
Notes (long version):
Norman Reginald McMahon of the Royal Fusiliers, the so-called "Musketry Maniac", was an influential character in developing the tactics and techniques used by the British Army rifleman in the run up to the First World War. A strong and outspoken advocate of increasing the firepower of the army with automatic weapons, he was thwarted in his quest by a combination of cuts in defence spending under Richard Haldane (Secretary of War from late 1905 to mid 1912) and resistance within the army from more traditionalist senior officers.
Since the army wasn't going to get more machine-guns McMahon decided that the next best thing would be to drill the British infantryman until he could fire his rifle so rapidly that the amount of lead heading towards the enemy could still achieve the same result. This evolved into the so-called "Mad Minute" drill that required an absolute minimum standard of putting fifteen rounds into a target at three hundred yards distance within no more than sixty seconds.
Some soldiers could do much better than the required fifteen rounds. Jesse Wallingford (British soldier and Olympic marksman) managed a thirty-six round "Mad Minute" in 1908 and an unconfirmed thirty-eight was made by Sergeant Instructor Alfred Snoxhall at the School of Musketry in Hythe in 1914.
At the Battle of Mons in 1914 McMahon was proved right. The outnumbered British Expeditionary Force (BEF) shot German formations to pieces before a collapsing strategic situation and sheer enemy numbers forced the Great Retreat to the Marne. By a twist of history elements of his own command, the Fourth Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, were the first to introduce the Kaiser's Army to the Mad Minute during their defence of the Nimy Bridge over the Mons–Condé canal.
However despite the success of the Mad Minute drill in creating a "human machine-gun" the British Army almost went the other way. Following their experiences of being out-ranged by Boer riflemen equipped with 1895 Mauser rifles the army had looked to replace their standard Short Magazine Lee Enfield (SMLE or "Smelly") with a new weapon firing a more powerful cartridge effective at a longer range, this becoming the Pattern 1913 Enfield.
Problems with the Pattern 1913 (many the result of its problematic new ammunition) meant that the SMLE was still the weapon of the BEF throughout the Great War, although another new rifle was adopted in 1917 and would itself have entered service as the Pattern 1918 if the war had continued. This new rifle was the semi-automatic Farquhar-Hill which actually pre-dated the Enfield Pattern 1913 (having been patented in 1908 and revised to an improved gas-piston design in 1911).
The Farquhar-Hill was itself originally chambered in another experimental cartridge (.303 Rimless) but later came to use standard .303 Rimmed like the SMLE. The PoD here is that Arthur Hill and Moubray Farquhar never bothered with the new cartridge and spent the time sorting out other problems with the design instead. Then with a working model, one that could use the tried-and-tested ammunition the army already had millions of stockpiled, they went to see a soldier whose reputation made them think he would be rather receptive to a rifle that could fire a fifty-seven round "Mad Minute".
Notes (Short Version):
In this timeline the lead elements of the unfortunate German First Army at the Battle of Mons in 1914 get themselves royally farq'd by the Royal Fusiliers.
Maj. Norman Reginald McMahon, Chief Instructor 1905-1909, School of Musketry, Hythe
-----
School of Musketry, Hythe, Kent, United Kingdom – Friday 12th July 1912
One of the perils of being seen as a bit of a crank, Lieutenant-Colonel Norman McMahon pondered to himself as he idly watched the latest class being put through their paces, was that other supposed cranks seemed to be attracted to you as a kindred spirit. On the positive side just because they might be cranks didn’t mean they were wrong when they came to your door with a new-fangled gadget or idea and it was one such an auspicious meeting that had led to him returning to Hythe that day.
Even if he hadn’t previously spent some four years as Chief Instructor here, before promotion led to him reassigned to Aldershot to take command of a battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, the fact he had also basically written the 1909 Musketry Regulations, and was an enthusiast on his subject to the point of being a bore, had earned him the nickname “The Musketry Maniac”. The disparaging moniker, which he was likely to be stuck with forever by this point, had long since ceased to bother him, it was merely one of the burdens a man with vision had to bear he supposed. At least they had let him bring in badly needed reforms once it became apparent his oft-repeated arguments really did have weight behind them and weren’t merely the eccentric ramblings of an obsessive.
Lt. Col. Norman McMahon was certain that if not for his family background and connections they would have found a way to shuffle him into obscurity years ago however. There were at least a few perks from having a father who served in the Crimea, finishing his own military career as a full general, while his grandfather, himself a lieutenant-general had fought in the Peninsular War against the French.
The McMahon’s were soldiers that knew their trade, he himself had seen action in Burma barely a year after leaving Sandhurst as a lieutenant. Later he went into the Second Boer War as a captain and came out of it as a major with a D.S.O. and a few nasty scars from wounds received.
It wasn’t his fault that the top brass and the bean-counters couldn’t see the logic that more machine-guns were needed to be successful on the modern battlefield. McMahon had certainly done his best to get the message across with his lectures arguing the point, but if they were too blind to see then by default it had been his job to drill the British Tommy into a pseudo automaton and foist the so-called “Mad Minute” drill of a minimum fifteen aimed rounds per minute upon him.
To his credit it had certainly worked. Helpfully the extremely smooth bolt-action utilised by the standard British army rifle, the Short Magazine Lee Enfield, allowed most properly-trained infantrymen to fire in excess of twenty rounds in sixty seconds, with some exceptional men having fired more than thirty, but despite exceeding the volume of fire that the soldiers of other nations could boast it was still only a poor substitute for a few more Maxim guns in McMahon’s considered opinion.
More concernedly now however the bloody imbeciles were actually considering abandoning the SMLE for a new rifle, one firing a more-powerful cartridge that necessitated using a modified Mauser action instead. Apparently the faster cycling Lee-Enfield bolt design just wasn’t strong enough to deal with those kinds of breach pressures safely. It would be impossible for the wretched thing to match the Lee-Enfield for rate-of-fire, no Mauser design was as fast in operation, and to make matters worse the new rifle could only hold half as many rounds in the magazine.
They were clearly making the standard military error of preparing for the last war not the next McMahon realised. It wouldn’t be Boer marksmen shooting at you on an open veldt from a thousand yards next time, it would be a European army coming at you en-masse. The relatively small British Army, made up of full-time professionals, would be badly outnumbered by the huge conscript forces to be found on the continent and they required a weapon to compensate for that disparity.
The British Tommy needed to make up in weight-of-fire what he lacked in weight-of-numbers. If he couldn’t manage to put out at least twice the rounds then how would he be able to hold his ground against twice the men?
Fortunately from what McMahon had heard the new rifle had already run into a few teething troubles, so with any luck he might have the opportunity to convince a few people that if they were going to insist on switching from the SMLE to something new they might want to embrace a different concept entirely.
If you can’t generate change from above due to institutional inertia, generate it from below, he had decided.
“Can’t tear yourself away from the place Sir?” one of the Sergeant Instructors who taught at the Musketry School asked, walking over to him. “I thought you’d stopped dropping in to give lectures last year?” he queried.
“You know me Sergeant Snoxall, Hythe is my Mecca” McMahon replied evenly. That he had continued to help out at the school for some two years after his promotion moved him to bigger and better things had only served to bolster the opinion that the man was downright obsessed with rifle practice. “Managed to set a new record yet Sergeant?” he inquired politely. It was good form to pay attention to the men and know enough about them to make conversation when required by courtesy.
“Not yet Sir, but I’ll do it one day” Snoxhall replied confidently. Like several of the other instructors at Hythe his dream was to beat the thirty-six rounds in a minute Jesse Wallingford had achieved four years earlier when the then Major McMahon had still been running the place.
McMahon smiled. “What would you say if I told you I was going to beat that record myself this very afternoon?” he asked hypothetically.
“It’s not for me to question the word of an officer Sir” Snoxhall replied being carefully non-committal, although inwardly he questioned the man’s sanity. Snoxhall had seen the man shoot on several occasions and he wasn’t nearly fast enough with an SMLE to break the thirty rounds barrier, let alone approach forty.
“Prepare me a spot on the range while I go have a word with the Chief Instructor and I’ll come back and show you Sergeant” McMahon requested. “And bring an audience, it’ll be worth watching believe me” he promised before turning and heading towards his old office where his replacement now resided. The daft balding bugger had a definite spring in his step too, Snoxhall thought to himself, idly wondering what the Fusiliers under McMahon command these days thought of him. Certainly when he had still been at Hythe the running joke had been that the reason why the major was unmarried was that he could never love a woman like he loved the art of musketry. No wife would want to be second in their husband’s affections behind a sodding smelly.
Thirty minutes later Snoxhall, the rest of the instructors, most of the trainees present that day and a few interested bystanders were watching McMahon open an oversized gun-case he had arrived with and pull out the ugliest damn rifle any of them had ever seen.
“It’s a tremendous piece of kit, but I’ll freely admit it won’t be winning any beauty pageants” McMahon joked, everyone laughing although perhaps in some cases only because he considerably outranked them. “A couple of chaps came to see me at Aldershot, said they read some of my articles and thought I might be interested in seeing what they’ve come up with” he explained how he came to have it. “They tried going through normal channels but I think what they had was a tad too revolutionary for the chaps at the War Office” he continued disparagingly, putting the rifle aside and placing three large and strangely shaped magazines to one side where he could reach them easily from a kneeling shooting position.
McMahon picked up one of the magazines and loaded it into the rifle. “Rapid fire, second class figure at three-hundred yards for qualification as per the 1909 Regulations” he informed them professionally, kneeling down and taking aim at where the target would pop up to start the shoot. He pulled the trigger but instead of firing a metal slide on top of the rifle slid forward to load the first round into the chamber and cock the weapon.
As soon as the target appeared, starting the clock for the drill, McMahon pulled the trigger again but this time the rifle answered the action with a sharp report as it fired. Less than a second later he pulled the trigger again and the rifle fired once more, then again and again as he kept pulling the trigger, the rifle clearly loading for itself each time with no need to work a bolt.
After some nineteen rounds, shot faster than anyone there had seen by anything that wasn’t a Maxim, Lt. Col. McMahon pulled off the now empty magazine, reached for another and snapped it into place. It seemed a bit fiddly and time-consuming compared to re-loading a stripper-clip into a SMLE but he was soon blasting away once more and he certainly had to stop to reload far less often.
The second reload after the subsequent nineteen rounds was even more problematic than the first, costing him valuable seconds, but McMahon still managed to get it fitted and to fire off another eight rounds before his minute was up and he stopped shooting.
“Forty-Six rounds the minute!” Snoxhall exclaimed. It was accurate too, despite the extreme rate-of-fire the grouping on target was more than acceptable.
“Drat. I was hoping for the full fifty-seven, three full magazines” McMahon stated regretfully. “Definitely need more practice on re-loading the bally thing” he observed, putting the safety catch on and putting the rifle down to one side as he got up. “Farquhar-Hill semi-automatic rifle fitted with a nineteen round drum magazine” he informed the frankly awe-struck crowd. “Perhaps I should amend the 1909 Regulations to insist on a minimum forty-five rounds per minute for qualification instead of fifteen with these things around” he suggested humorously.
Lieutenant Colonel Norman McMahon looked around. Yes that was exactly the expression he was hoping for written on the faces of the men who had been watching. When they returned to their units the junior officers who had been at Hythe for training would all be talking about the amazing new rifle the “Musketry Maniac” had demonstrated to them and word would hopefully spread far and wide.
“What’s the recoil like Sir” Snoxhall asked professionally.
“Lighter than you’re used to, the spring mechanism inside that loads the next round cushions it apparently, helps keeps your eye on the target” McMahon replied. “Between that and not having to work the bolt yourself it’s surprisingly steady even when you rapid-fire” he noted.
“Could have used one of those at Omdurman in ‘98 when ten-thousand Fuzzy Wuzzies charged our lines” one of the other instructors commented. “If it hadn’t been for the Maxims we’d have been overrun just like the poor sods were at Tamai and Abu Klea the first time the lads marched into the Sudan the decade before” he recalled a couple of the less successful battles fought by the army in defence of Empire. That was of course before the even more embarrassing early clashes with the Boers had set a new standard for British military incompetence.
“It takes standard .303 so if anyone wants to have a bash themselves we can re-load the magazines and see if anyone can beat my forty-six” McMahon suggested now he had them suitably hooked. “Takes a lot longer to re-load them than empty them I’m afraid to say” he continued apologetically. “I suggested to the gunsmith he might want to come up with an interchangeable ten round box magazine for the weapon too, something to use for when you don’t need to riddle absolutely everything in front of you with multiple holes.”
“Could he make it less ugly at the same time?” one young wag wearing the insignia of a second lieutenant suggested to laughter.
“It’ll look a lot prettier if you ever find yourself with a few thousand spear-chucking natives heading your way Sir” the instructor who had been at Omdurman wryly observed.
“Oh I’m sure if that ever happened Colour-Sergeant, I’d be happy to take her out for a walk along the strand and treat her to fine dining at the Café Royal afterwards” the junior officer who clearly fancied himself as a music hall comedian replied to more laughter.
McMahon sighed. Getting shot at would make the boy grow up fast, he thought to himself, pointedly ignoring the excessive joviality. “Very well. Raise your hand if you want to fire off a few rounds with this contraption” he invited anyone that might be interested.
Virtually everyone there immediately raised their hand with alacrity.
“Oh good grief, perhaps I shouldn’t have offered” McMahon said with mock dismay. In reality that was exactly what he had been hoping for as a reaction. “Sergeant Snoxhall, can you have a couple of boxes of .303 withdrawn from stores, I’ll sign off on it on my chit.”
Within the hour at least a dozen of the trainees had asked where they could obtain one of the rifles for themselves, officers typically provided their own personal weapons so they weren’t tied to using standard issue, and McMahon was starting to regret being too principled to ask Messrs. Farquhar and Hill to put him on sales commission. Several of the other officers of his own regiment had already ordered one of the new rifles after witnessing him blasting away with it on the range the Royal Fusiliers used the week before and word was already starting to spread to other units based Aldershot as a result.
At the very least if people started talking about it then proper value might be given to the notion that rate-of-fire mattered to the infantryman more than the ability to occasionally hit a speck on the horizon. Hopefully it would nip the changeover to the new Mauser copy in the bud because better to stay with the SMLE than embrace that folly.
All he needed to do now was mention in passing to the right people that other armies were looking into switching to semi-auto rifles, including bloody Mexico of all places who had developed the new ten-round Mondragón rifle, and then see if momentum started to build towards finally bringing his concept of a British Army based around the principle of overwhelming volume of firepower to fruition. Ideally with that penny-pinching civilian Haldane finally gone, replaced as Secretary of War by Colonel Jack Seely who had served as a cavalryman against the Boers and knew soldiering first-hand, it might be possible to get the purse-strings loosened for more equipment.
Two years later at the Mons-Condé Canal in Belgium the machinations of the Musketry Maniac paid off tremendously, albeit greatly to the cost of the German First Army under General Alexander von Kluck.
-------
Notes (long version):
Norman Reginald McMahon of the Royal Fusiliers, the so-called "Musketry Maniac", was an influential character in developing the tactics and techniques used by the British Army rifleman in the run up to the First World War. A strong and outspoken advocate of increasing the firepower of the army with automatic weapons, he was thwarted in his quest by a combination of cuts in defence spending under Richard Haldane (Secretary of War from late 1905 to mid 1912) and resistance within the army from more traditionalist senior officers.
Since the army wasn't going to get more machine-guns McMahon decided that the next best thing would be to drill the British infantryman until he could fire his rifle so rapidly that the amount of lead heading towards the enemy could still achieve the same result. This evolved into the so-called "Mad Minute" drill that required an absolute minimum standard of putting fifteen rounds into a target at three hundred yards distance within no more than sixty seconds.
Some soldiers could do much better than the required fifteen rounds. Jesse Wallingford (British soldier and Olympic marksman) managed a thirty-six round "Mad Minute" in 1908 and an unconfirmed thirty-eight was made by Sergeant Instructor Alfred Snoxhall at the School of Musketry in Hythe in 1914.
At the Battle of Mons in 1914 McMahon was proved right. The outnumbered British Expeditionary Force (BEF) shot German formations to pieces before a collapsing strategic situation and sheer enemy numbers forced the Great Retreat to the Marne. By a twist of history elements of his own command, the Fourth Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, were the first to introduce the Kaiser's Army to the Mad Minute during their defence of the Nimy Bridge over the Mons–Condé canal.
However despite the success of the Mad Minute drill in creating a "human machine-gun" the British Army almost went the other way. Following their experiences of being out-ranged by Boer riflemen equipped with 1895 Mauser rifles the army had looked to replace their standard Short Magazine Lee Enfield (SMLE or "Smelly") with a new weapon firing a more powerful cartridge effective at a longer range, this becoming the Pattern 1913 Enfield.
Problems with the Pattern 1913 (many the result of its problematic new ammunition) meant that the SMLE was still the weapon of the BEF throughout the Great War, although another new rifle was adopted in 1917 and would itself have entered service as the Pattern 1918 if the war had continued. This new rifle was the semi-automatic Farquhar-Hill which actually pre-dated the Enfield Pattern 1913 (having been patented in 1908 and revised to an improved gas-piston design in 1911).
The Farquhar-Hill was itself originally chambered in another experimental cartridge (.303 Rimless) but later came to use standard .303 Rimmed like the SMLE. The PoD here is that Arthur Hill and Moubray Farquhar never bothered with the new cartridge and spent the time sorting out other problems with the design instead. Then with a working model, one that could use the tried-and-tested ammunition the army already had millions of stockpiled, they went to see a soldier whose reputation made them think he would be rather receptive to a rifle that could fire a fifty-seven round "Mad Minute".
Notes (Short Version):
In this timeline the lead elements of the unfortunate German First Army at the Battle of Mons in 1914 get themselves royally farq'd by the Royal Fusiliers.
Excellent stuff and I hope to see more and that perhaps the Colonel survives.
