Kaiser Bill is feeling ill
The Crown Prince he's gone barmy
We don't give a fuck for old von Kluck
And all his bleedin' army
British Expeditionary Force marching song, August 1914 (sung to the tune of The Girl I left Behind Me)
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Nimy Village, Belgium – Saturday August 22nd 1914
Lieutenant-Colonel McMahon carefully inspected the map laid out on the table in front of him in the building he had commandeered as his battalion headquarters. From what he had managed to make out from dispatches from Brigade HQ the Germans were pushing against the French Army hard near Charleroi and they needed the British to hold the Condé–Mons canal to make sure the Germans couldn’t flank them.
At least the canal was defensible, too wide to be easily crossed if you didn’t control the bridges, and bridges made for excellent choke-points.
The Nimy railway and road bridges in particular were the primary responsibility of his Fusiliers and McMahon had deployed a full company of infantry to guard them. The road bridge was a swing type with the mechanism on the south side of the canal so the lads had simply swung it closed and positioned both the battalion’s two machine-guns, water-cooled Vickers, to guard the railway bridge.
In a perfect world the battalion would have three times as many machine-guns but you never got everything you wished for. At least the new rifles meant that no other soldier in the world could hope to match the individual firepower that the British Tommy could boast of, McMahon thought with satisfaction, spying one of his men through the open window carefully loading a Farquhar-Hill drum magazine from a box of .303 cartridges.
Annoyingly the woodland on the other side of the canal would provide cover for a determined enemy advance McMahon pondered, frowning. A clearer field-of-fire would have been something else to wish for too now he came to think about it.
“Bugger” the private who had been loading the magazine swore as he inadvertently released the catch which held the bullets in place once they were loaded into the drum magazine. It had promptly dumped the whole lot on the ground, the spring inside rapidly ejecting them.
“You dozy bastard!” a sergeant bellowed at him. “Pay proper bloody attention to what you’re doing man!” he chided.
“Sorry Sarge” the private apologised. “My mind wandered” he explained sheepishly.
“My boot will wander up your arse if I see you do that again” the sergeant vowed as the private bent down to start picking up the scattered ammunition. “And make sure to clean the dirt off those bullets before you stick them back in the drum or else they won’t come out when you
do want them to” he advised with a distinctive growl to his voice.
Yes, that was one ongoing problem with the Farquhar-Hill, McMahon considered regretfully, the large drum magazines had to be handled with due care and diligence or else they had a tendency to mess you about.
On the other hand in a way the complicated magazine had helped out somewhat during his campaign to get the army to adopt the weapon. Colonel John Seely, Secretary of War until the Curragh Mutiny led to his resignation earlier in the year, had strongly opposed the idea of the British Army transitioning to a conscript force in order to better match the numbers of the continental armies. It hadn’t taken much to plant the seed that if they carried a weapon that could instead match the
firepower of several bolt-actions then the army wouldn’t need more men to do so.
It was perhaps fortuitous that McMahon and his battalion came to be transferred from Aldershot to the Isle of Wight in January 1913 since Seely, at one point the MP for the area, had his family estate there. Both men having won the DSO in South Africa had provided McMahon with the introduction he needed and over dinner McMahon had suggested that the more complicated Farquhar-Hill was clearly a weapon intended for properly trained, disciplined and well-drilled soldiers, not conscript rabble.
Seely had embraced the argument enthusiastically, although to be fair nobody that knew him had ever credited the man with possessing a great intellect.
Needless to say when discussing the merits of the rifle with anyone that thought a less fiddly design was best, or that soldiers would carelessly expend too much ammunition for no reason with nineteen rounds on tap, McMahon would note that the improved Farquhar-Hill model 1913 would be able to take stripper-clips like the Lee-Enfield, as well as the high-capacity drum.
Another piece of good fortune for McMahon’s rapid-fire crusade was the news that the French Army was putting their own new semi-automatic rifle, the Meunier A6, into production. The notion that the
French of all people might steal a technological march on the British Army was something that rankled with senior officers throughout the service and led to a great deal of resistance to the ‘clearly superior’ British equivalent fading away.
By this point McMahon wasn’t just the ‘Musketry Maniac’ he was the ‘Wild-eyed Mahdi of the Mad Minute’, but unlike his namesake in the Sudan Lt. Col. Norman McMahon achieved his goal.
After successful trials the first of an initial batch of ten-thousand of the new rifles began in early summer 1913, shifting to full-scale production later that year at both at both Royal Small Arms Factory Enfield and Birmingham Small Arms.
The majority of the infantry battalions of the BEF had therefore re-equipped with what the army formally referred to as the ‘.303 calibre, Self-Loading-Rifle, Magazine, Farquhar-Hill, Pattern 1913’ in time for the war breaking out, although the Territorials back home soldiered on with the SMLE for now. With the exception of the usual reactionaries, gainsaying luddites and knee-jerk opponents of change they were generally happy with the new rifle too. A combination of novelty value and the sheer fun to be had from merely shooting the thing on the range had eventually won over most of the men and they seemed eager to get to use the weapon in anger for the first time.
Naturally the long-form name was little used in ordinary parlance, being abbreviated to Self-Loading-Rifle and then simply SLR (often vocalised as ‘Slarr’ in the same way that SMLE was ‘Smelly’).
On occasion it was also the ‘Ugly-arsed Farq’ing Rifle’ and variations thereof, with ‘Hun Farq’er’ being a popular recent addition to the list.
“Sorry to interrupt Sir” a distinctively Australian-accented voice from the doorway broke McMahon’s train of thought and he looked up from the map to see Lieutenant Steele standing there.
“What is it Lieutenant?” McMahon asked.
Steele held out his right hand with a piece of paper clutched inside it which McMahon took from him. ‘Captain Ashburner requests as to whether we should be rigging the bridges for demolition?’ he explained the note.
“Division thinks that with any luck the French will win at Charleroi and if they do we might be marching over them tomorrow to support General Lanrezac’s counter-attack” McMahon replied. “In the worst case scenario I think we should be able to hold the thing long enough to blow the thing up if that ever does becomes necessary” he added for himself.
Steele nodded his agreement with the latter supposition. “If the Germans turn up we’ll bloody the bastards and hold them as long as required no matter how many of them there are” he said confidently.
The lieutenant-colonel smiled gently at the young officer’s enthusiasm. Ordinarily he frowned upon his officers talking like they were rankers but Steele was an Australian who had served in their army as an artilleryman before moving to the UK and joining the Fusiliers. It was perhaps too much to expect a colonial, an antipodean in particular, not to swear up a storm, especially when there was the exciting prospect of a battle imminent.
McMahon recalled with amusement an incident back in South Africa shortly after the Battle of Onverwacht when a Sub-Assistant Commissary from the Army Service Corps had complained to an Australian lieutenant that one of his men had called him a bastard. The lieutenant had frowned, turned to his men and asked ‘Which one of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?’ whereupon the Sub-Assistant Commissary had promptly dropped the issue.
“Are your lads in good spirits Fred?” McMahon asked the lieutenant less formally.
“Yes Sir” Steele confirmed, nodding energetically. “I told them that if the Hun turns up all I want from them is a nice big pile of spent cartridge casings on this side on the canal and a nice big pile of dead German’s on the other” he continued, grinning. “They say they’ll be damned happy to comply with that order” he told his battalion’s CO.
“Good. Then let’s hope both the SLRs and the Germans both do their part then” McMahon responded. “Back to your boys then Lieutenant.”
“Right away Sir” Steele obeyed, heading off at the double.
McMahon returned to looking at the map. Along the canal he had the Royal Scots Fusiliers to his left and the 4th battalion of the Middlesex Regiment to his right, defending their respectively assigned sections of the canal and its multiple bridges, so his flanks were secure.
He lacked artillery support however, most of the batteries were positioned some distance away, so if the Germans did come in force, and with plenty of big guns of their own, he couldn’t be certain of the counter-battery fire required to suppress them.
Standing order to the men was that if you saw a Hun on the other side of the canal with binoculars, don’t wait for permission to fire, just blow his head off. The blighter might well be spotting for artillery, and if he wasn’t, well, he deserved it anyway for not only being in Belgium without an invitation from the locals but for being a nosy parker.
Having seen artillery do its nasty business first-hand at Tugela Heights, where the British used some fifty pieces to blast the Boers into submission, McMahon was under no delusion as to how destructive it could be to men, materiel and morale. Hence he had his men digging in along the bank while there was still a few hours of daylight left, with others filling and piling up as many sandbags as they could.
Unfortunately it had been a hard days marching in hot weather to get here and the men were too tired and too short of time to excavate the really deep trenches needed to wither a concentrated barrage. In any case there was always the logic that if they weren’t going to be here very long anyway full-scale entrenchment would be an utter waste of energy.
Lt. Col. McMahon folded up the map and put it to one side. The last time the British Army had been in Belgium it had been up against Napoleon at Waterloo and as he put on his hat and headed out to the village’s small railway station to check on his men stationed there he couldn’t help but be mildly amused by the notion that on that prior occasion the timely arrival of a Prussian general and his men on the field had been rather more welcome.
The people of Nimy had certainly been welcoming enough, turning out when the Fusiliers had arrived earlier that day to provide gifts of food and cigarettes. More than a few soldiers could still be seen snacking on bars of chocolate as they went about their assigned tasks while sergeants made sure none of them accepted proffered bottles of beer or wine. The men had been told they were here because Britain had promised to defend Belgium from foreign invasion and it certainly helped if they thought the Belgians were worth getting shot at for. To the rankers they seemed like good people here, even if they did speak a foreign language, and with the Belgian’s own army fighting elsewhere if the only thing that stood between the locals and the oncoming Germans were the Royal Fusiliers then the Hun had better be prepared for one hell of a good scrap.
“Looks like we might be in for a thunderstorm later Sir” Captain Carey observed, looking up at the sky. His command, B Company, was assigned to guard Nimy itself while C and D companies dug in at the canal and A company was being kept further back between Nimy and Mons to act as a reserve.
“I wouldn’t be surprised after that stifling heat today” McMahon agreed with Carey, noting the clouds forming. “Pity we can’t get all the men under cover.”
“Wouldn’t exactly be the first time they’ve slept in a muddy ditch” Carey noted. “Some of those times might have even been on manoeuvres rather than stumbling home drunk from the pub” he joked.
“Some of them yes” McMahon replied deadpan. “Did I overhear you mention to Major Mallock that some of your men were having trouble with the SLR’s?”
“Yes Sir, I think some of the reservists lack sufficient familiarity with the weapon, the ones who finished their term of service before we switched from the SMLE I mean” Carey confirmed. The so-called ‘Class A’ reserves who had been called up to bolster the ranks of the BEF were men who had left the regular army in the last two years, not long enough for them to forget much of their training but quite a proportion of them had only handled a Farquhar-Hill during the minimum of twelve training days they had to undertake each year in order to qualify for reservist’s pay.
“I assume it’s the drum magazines because a trigger is just a trigger, a gunsight just a gunsight and a stripper-clip just that” McMahon stated.
“Well they certainly seem to struggle with the drums but curing them of reaching for the bolt that isn’t there when they want to fire another round, rather than merely pulling the trigger again, might take some getting used to” Carey told him.
McMahon sighed. “Perhaps I drilled them too well with the SMLE” he observed sadly. “I made the men operate more automatically than the SLR does.”
“A victim of your own success perhaps Sir” Carey concurred. “I’m sure after a few hundred rounds they’ll get the knack.”
“From your lips to God’s ears” McMahon replied evenly. If only that damned Serbian troublemaker had left it another year or two before gunning down the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne the reserves would all be properly trained on the Farquhar-Hill as well.
McMahon watched as a sergeant patiently showed one of the reservists how easy it was to remove one of the nineteen round drums and replace it on the rifle with the military oxymoron that was the “Detachable Fixed Box-Magazine”. Certainly a man that liked to do things a bit differently the gunsmith Arthur Hill had come up with an ingenious way of allowing the new Self Loading Rifle to accept the standard stripper clips of the SMLE. Basically he just added the catches that held the drum into place to what amounted to a slightly modified ten-round Lee-Enfield magazine so you could fit one to the SLR. Then with the dust cover and bolt pulled back on the rifle to give access you could simply reload it from above like you would the rifle it replaced.
The revised 1913 Musketry Regulations detailed three different minimum “Mad Minute” requirements. Fifteen rounds for a Short Magazine Lee Enfield, thirty rounds for a Self-Loading-Rifle using stripper clips and fifty rounds for the SLR using the drum magazine. The regulations also stated that the drum magazines were to be kept in reserve and not used unless the situation warranted an
extreme rate-of-fire for a short period.
Not using the drums unless you really had to prevented wastage of ammunition, reduced the chances of the weapon overheating and most important to the private soldier meant you didn’t have to reload the wretched things.
The next morning the men of the 4th Battalion Royal Fusiliers were glad to have their three issued drum magazines loaded and ready when the situation
did indeed very much warrant their employment.
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Notes:
At the start of the Great War in 1914, and as part of the series of battles collectively known as the Battle of the Frontiers, the BEF was deployed to the Mons–Condé Canal with the objective of preventing the German First Army under Gen. Alexander von Kluck flanking Gen. Charles Lanrezac whose French Fifth Army was already tied down fighting the Battle of Charleroi.
As part of the BEF's deployment the 4th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers under the command of the Musketry Maniac Lt. Col. Norman McMahon were given the job of defending the bridges across the canal at Nimy.
John Seely, the Secretary of War from 1912 to 1914 was extremely opposed to the idea of conscription to the point that he basically lied to the House of Commons about it, stating that all the Imperial General Staff were as opposed as he (that simply wasn't the case and he knew it). To his credit Seely was extremely brave, and returned to the colours to fight in France during WWI, but by all accounts he wasn't blessed with an abundance of brains.
Several countries were working on self-loading rifles before the Great War. Besides Britain's Farquhar-Hill there was the Mexican Mondragon (which came to be used in small numbers by the Germans in WWI) the French Meunier A6 (adopted by the French Army in 1913), the Italian Cei-Rigotti and a number of others.
McMahon was present at the Battle of the Tugela Heights when the British with some fifty pieces of artillery used them to blast the defending Boers out of their trenches. He knew full-well from first-hand experience what heavy guns could do to infantry, even when they were dug-in.
A large proportion of the men under McMahon's command at Nimy were reservists who had been called up to fill out the ranks on the outbreak of war. You could only stay on the Class A reserve list (which you were paid for so it was a nice addition to your pay from your civilian job) for two years after you left the army in order to ensure the Class A reservists weren't too rusty.
