CHAPTER II EARLY MILITARY RIFLES-ROBINS'S PROPHECY-THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE PICKET BULLETS--MINIÉ BULLET AND RIFLE TRIALS IN 1852- THE history of the rifle as a military weapon in continuous use does not begin much more than a hundred years ago, although many attempts to introduce it for troops were made at different times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Perhaps the earliest was the arming of some of the Danish troops at the beginning of the seventeenth century with the rifle. A number of these arms are still in the Arsenal at Copenhagen, and one is in the collection at Woolwich. The barrel is dated 1611, and is marked with the cypher of Christian IV. At the end of the Thirty Years' War the Elector Maximilian is said to have introduced rifled firearms into the Bavarian army, and Marshal Puysegur recommended the adoption of rifled muskets as the arm of a small proportion of the men in each company in the French infantry of his time. Louis XIII. established a carbineer cavalry regiment, which was armed throughout with rifled carbines, and a certain number of rifles were issued for distribution among the infantry. In a small book called A Treatise of Arms,' written by Louis de Gaya, and published at Paris in 1678, and two years later translated into English, illustrations are given both of the straight-stocked musket, with match or flint lock which is placed against the breast when fired, and of the firelock with a crooked stock, with which a proper aim could be taken along the barrel; and also of the mousqueton, which is the short form of the firelock, and does not by a third part carry so far unless the barrel be screwed and rifled '; and of the carbine, the chief distinction of which was that it had a wheel lock. De Gaya speaks further of extraordinary EARLY MILITARY RIFLES 23 carbines (arquebuses guttières),' which have a more rapidly acting lock and a thicker barrel than any carbine, and can carry blank about 1,000 paces with the same proportion of powder as is necessary for the fusil, because it is screwed and rifled, that is to say, wrought and crevassed in the inside from the muzzle to the breech in the form of a screw, and from thence proceeds the justness of harquebuses.' He clearly shows that it was the usual arm of the French troopers of his day. We may observe in passing the delightful ascription to this short rifle of a point-blank' range of 1,000 paces, a claim which is hardly more wonderful than the similar one so often made nowadays for rifles of modern make. In those days even more than in these such a statement could rest only upon a very flimsy substratum of fact. It is a curious fact that Mr. Grose, in his book on Military Antiquities,' in which he gives a history of the English army and of military weapons in this country from the Conquest, until the date at which he wrote, 1786, does not even mention the rifle as a weapon. At that time, indeed, it had never been seriously made use of in the British army, although as long before as 1742 Benjamin Robins, in his New Principles of Gunnery,' had ventured so far into the region of prophecy as to pronounce that whatever State shall thoroughly comprehend the nature and advantages of rifled barrel pieces, and having facilitated and completed their construction, shall introduce into their armies their general use, with a dexterity in the management of them, will by this means acquire a superiority which will almost equal anything that has been done at any time by the particular excellence of any one kind of arms, and will perhaps fall but little short of the wonderful effects which histories relate to have been formerly produced by the first inventors of firearms.' Prophecy is proverbially dangerous. Yet when we consider first. the general adoption, and then the improvement of the rifle and of cannon, by which fire effect and fighting tactics have been entirely revolutionised, we must place Robins among the true seers. So questionable was it considered by military opinion whether the rifle gave on the whole any advantage at all over the musket, that Napoleon is said to have withdrawn the rifle from a part of the French light infantry, to whom it had been issued in 1793, during the wars of the Republic, and we hardly hear of it again as being used by the French until 1830. The great objection to the rifle arose, as we have already seen, from the difficulty of loading it, and its consequent slowness of fire. Colonel Beaufoy, in his book 'Scloppetaria,' in 1808, says frankly that a musket will fire three shots to one from a rifle, as generally used.' Nearly all fighting was still at such close quarters as to make it more important that the firearm should be useful in preparing for bayonet work on the offensive, or in breaking the force of a charge before it reached the bayonets on the defensive, than that its fire at long range should be accurate. Then as now, speed of fire was a governing factor. It is only as speed has become. combined with accuracy at a distance, that the old piketactics, which have in a large measure been continued by the bayonet, have given way. The firearm is now no mere auxiliary, as it used to be, to the bayonet. Yet there never was a time when the rifle in skilful hands could not produce striking effects in war. The present writer, in a little book published some years ago, drew attention to a passage in the History of the War in America between Great Britain and her Colonies,' published in Dublin (1785), which shows the value given in America to skilled shooting with a rifle at that time. Lieut.Col. Ferguson was an active and capable officer who met his fate in 1780, when sent by Lord Cornwallis on an expedition into North Carolina with a corps of light infantry, and a body of militia of his own training. The fall of this officer,' says the work above referred to, who possessed very distinguished talents as a partisan, and in the conduct of irregular warfare, was, independently even of his detachment, no small loss to the service. He was, perhaps, the best marksman living, and probably brought the art of rifle shooting to its highest point of perfection. He even invented a gun of that kind upon a new construction, which was said to have far exceeded in facility and execution anything of the sort before known; and he is said to have greatly outdone |