We passed from there through Scotland, through the country described by Sir Walter Scott, and saw in Edinburgh what is known as the "King's Inn," a national prison.
We traveled through the western part of Austria, adjoining Switzerland, where we saw the most unhappy people probably then on earth, poor and helpless, surrounded by soldiers on all sides and influenced by priests, who caused them to build wayside shrines at short distances from each other along the roads where the people would pause and make their obeisance to images. So unhappy and ignorant were these people that they would make grimaces at us while riding by in the automobile, and by gesture and physiognomy showed how much they hated those who were better situated than they were.
Returning, we visited London, stopping at the fashionable Carlton Hotel, where the people seemed less isolated from the world than on my former visit, less exalted in their estimate of themselves, and more appreciative of the progressive features of others, having adopted street cars, tunnels, elevators and electric lights, and become themselves personally more cosmopolitan, but they were still loudly English, proud of their Emperor, his empire and his royal family and accompanying dukes and nobles, so amusing to the rest of the intelligent world.
My Cartridge Belt Equipment
The invention, development and manufacture of the woven web ammunition carrier and its accompanying web equipment (which has taken the place of leather throughout the world), was my greatest material achievement. I only regret that they were not designed for construction rather than for destruction.
In 1866 our army adopted the breech-loading rifle with metallic ammunition, comparatively non-perishable by exposure to the elements. The almost cylindrical stem of the cartridge with the projecting flange on its head, made it possible to make a belt with closely fitting cylindrical loops, in which the cartridge was held in place by friction, prevented from dropping through by the flange.
When captain of the 18th Infantry, I equipped my company with my invention, using belts made of leather, with sewed-on leather loops. These did not prove entirely satisfactory. The acid in the leather acted on the copper in the shell, producing verdigris, causing the shells to stick in the belt or, after firing, in the chamber of the gun.
Belts of this character were submitted to every equipment board organized between 1866 and 1879, but so wedded were the authorities to the use of ancestral methods that no board even made favorable mention of my invention. Meanwhile, the cavalry and infantry on active service against Indians adopted these belts of this character, fabricating them themselves.