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544 ILLUSTRATED WORLD
It is difficult even with the hand-operated
rifle to hold troops down to a reasonable
fire rate. The tendency is to
speed up, to fire ten or even twenty shots
a minute when this is not at all necessary.
And if the soldier does this, presently
he finds himself without supplies
for the "hard winter" that may follow
when the enemy gets closer or when he
gets closer to the enemy, because he cannot
carry more than three hundred
rounds, and at ten shots a minute his
three hundred last only half an hour.
So the correct self-loading rifle for
infantry is hand-operated in a manner
akin to the present hand-operated bolt
rifle until the critical moment arrives,
then the pleased infantryman has but to
aim and pull the trigger for each shot
until his magazine runs empty. Also the
hand-operation is essential in case the
rifle fails to operate through the recoil
mechanism or the gas from the barrel
port used to function some types.
The privilege of merely aiming and
pulling the trigger creates less disturbance
in the aim, lets the soldier watch the
enemy all the time, and of course makes
a speed of fire so great that the ten shots
combined with the self-loading rifle. A
ten-shot magazine is almost inadequate,
a fifteen-shot would be better still. The
fire of a regiment so armed would be
about three times as efficient in the last
hundred yards of a charge as the fire
of a regiment armed with the present
accepted type of military rifle.
Because the cartridge is lighter and
smaller and more of them can be carried
by a soldier and accommodated in a
magazine of given size, our new rifle
ought to fire the .25 caliber cartridge
instead of the present .30. True, our
present ammunition reserve is all of .30
caliber, and our tools and fixtures in the
arsenals are for the .30, and our machine-guns
are for the .30—saving a
small matter of 300 we bought chambered
for the British cartridge at the
time of the border mobilization. But
when we took up the Krag in 1893, we
didn't try to make it shoot the old .45
because we had a lot of the .45 on hand;
and when we got the present rifle we
didn't try to make it shoot the out-ofdate
Krag cartridge because we had
some of them left over. Progress in
military firearms cannot be sat upon by
The Slowest of All
This single shot Remington model still is being turned out
to fill French emergency orders, not because of quality.
hut because even a single shot rifle is better than dirksand
rapiers nowadays.
Old Lady Economy, because the old
may be fired with accuracy in as many
dame wouldn't permit any war preparation
at all if she had her way. War
preparation always is costly and wasteful.
seconds.
The Austrians, facing Italian .25 cali­
••'The fact of this high speed—and the ber bullets, expressed themselves as
urgent necessity for it at times—makes entirely satisfied that no man ought to
the old five-shot magazine silly when get in the way of one of them. The