This was written in 1748, at which time the rifle was used only by the hunters of the Alps and the hunters of the American backwoods; the latter having doubtless derived it from the former through German immigration. Bull's conservatism, however, was in the way. The lessons of Fort Duquesne, of Saratoga and of New Orleans were successively wasted on him. He did arm one regiment, the Ninety-fifth, with this weapon toward the close of the last century, but for a long time it stood alone in the royal service. Austria had previously maintained some corps of Tyrolese Jägers. The French fought through all the wars of their Revolution without having recourse to the rifle, save in the campaign of 1793. It is singular that the keen eye of Napoleon failed to detect its value, especially when we note the use he made of light troops. The fate of Nelson justifies the idea that a large body of good riflemen might have changed the issue of Trafalgar.
Curiously enough, the French, who were the last to realize the merits of the rifle, were the first to institute those improvements which caused, within the present generation, its universal substitution for the musket. The Gallic pioneer was Delvigne, but his first improvements proved, as Pat might say, no improvement at all. The inconvenience of slow loading was the most obvious. Delvigne's remedy was to give the ball increased windage; in other words, to diminish its diameter comparatively with that of the bore. The ball thus went easily down to the shoulders of the chamber containing the charge. Arrived there, a smart rap with the ramrod moulded it to the grooves. But it also flattened the top, and forced the bottom partly into the chamber. Thus misshapen at birth, the bullet was cast upon the world to an erratic and fruitless career.
In 1828 a second Frenchman took the tube in hand. Colonel Thouvenin abandoned the chamber, and filled up much of the place it had occupied with a cylindrical steel pillar, or tige, which projected from the breech-plug longitudinally into the barrel. This formed a little anvil whereon the bullet was to be beaten into the grooves. But the bottom was flattened, and the powder acted only on the periphery of the ball instead of the centre, tending thus to give it an oblique direction.
Here Delvigne picked up the weapon for another trial. He accomplished far the most important advance yet seen—an advance relatively as great as Watt's separate condenser in the steam-engine. He retained the tige, but he changed the spherical ball into a cylinder with a conical point, as we now have it. In this he, in effect, reached the ultimatum of progress as regards the general form of the projectile. He assimilated it to Newton's solid of least resistance. That primeval missile, the arrow, had for unnumbered centuries presented to the eyes of men an illustration of a simple truth which scientific formula succeeded, scarce a couple of centuries since, in evolving. "The bridge was built," as the old sapper told his commander, "before them picters" (the engineer's designs) "came." The arrow-head describes, as it whirls through the air, a solid varying from a cone only so far as its edges vary from straight lines. This variation serves to blend the cone with the cylinder formed by the revolution of the arrow-head and the feather. The difference in length between the ball and the arrow is due to the necessities of the case. The least practicable length is best for both. The office of the spirally-wound feather in communicating a rotary motion, and thereby balancing, by an opposite force, the tendency of the missile to swerve in any given direction, is fulfilled by the spiral groove of the rifle. Of course, the ordinary smooth musket is unfitted to the conico-cylindrical ball. Discharged from such a barrel, there being nothing to keep the point in the direction of its flight, it soon tumbles over, like an arrow without a feather, and strikes wide of the mark.
Delvigne's new gun came into use in 1840. The long matchlocks of the Arabs had been very worrying to the French in Algiers. It was a common pastime of the Ishmaelites to pick off the Gauls at a distance which left Brown Bess helpless. Protruded over an almost inaccessible crag, the former primitive instrument would plump its ball into the ranks of the Giaour in the dell below with a precision and an effect hardly requited by victories in the open field or by the cave-smokings of His Grace of Malakoff. Delvigne's arm was accordingly supplied to the Chasseurs d'Orléans, and in their hands served the desired purpose. The matchlock met its match.
Under M. Delvigne's system, however, the ball was not always well forced into the grooves. The tige, too, made cleaning difficult: it often got crooked, and it sometimes broke off. A M. Tamisier did something toward removing the former difficulty by cutting very shallow grooves on the ball itself. The other called forth the ingenuity of the now famous Minié, who made his first appearance in 1847-1848, and whose name has attained the same kind of lethal immortality with the names of Shrapnell, Congreve and Rodman. M. Minié abandoned the tige entirely. He scooped out the base of the ball and inserted into it an iron cup. This cup was driven into the ball by the explosion, and forced the soft lead into the grooves. The leading objection to the Minié ball in this form was that the device did its work too thoroughly. The iron was often driven so deep into the lead as to tear off the solid point and scatter the whole projectile into two or three pieces. This mitrailleuse-like distribution of disrupted spheres or leaden asteroids was obviated by the abandonment of the iron cup, the powder being left to act on the lead itself. Two or three channels cut around the neck of the bullet helped to keep the point in line, and aided at the same time the fastening of the cartridge. Thus came its final metamorphosis to the buzzing little torment that has been at intervals for the last twenty years flying over all the continents and perplexing the nations.
It was not till 1852 that the Enfield rifle was settled on as the standard weapon of the British army. Machinery and machinists were imported for its fabrication from the United States, the appliances of our government armories being copied, and Colonel Bruton, of the Harper's Ferry Works, employed to set them going. Prior to that time all firearms of public or private manufacture, in England, had been made by hand, the interchangeability of all the parts of any given number of guns being an end accomplished in this country alone. The advantage of having every corresponding detail of each piece a fac simile of the same part in all the firelocks of an army must have been perceived from the time when such weapons were first invented; and nothing but the most inveterate conservatism, or the steadiest opposition of that stamp which mobbed threshing-machines and the spinning-jenny, could have so long staved off its practical adoption.
Once awakened, however, England became, as she usually does, active, innovating and experimental enough. Rifled cannon, breech-loaders and armored ships—all the legitimate offspring of the Venetian barrel and its American employment—have kept her ever since in a ferment of boards, commissions and target-firing. But these would carry us beyond our prescribed limit into a boundless field of inquiry and description. It would be like passing from a notice of the tubular boiler of Stephenson's Rocket to a discussion of the vast railway system it begot.
The Crimean war afforded the first test, on a large scale, in civilized warfare, of the issue between smooth and twist. How the conoidal bullet and rifled barrel, opposed at Inkermann to the antiquated Russian musket, tore through the dense columns which had forced their way to the brow of the plateau, driving the stolid Muscovites, "incapable of panic," back into the ravine pell-mell—how, at many periods of the siege of Sebastopol, the rifle-pits did more to cripple the defence than did the mortars and battering-guns—we need not recount. These pits, and the rope mantlets wherewith they obliged the Russians to cover their embrasures, were pronounced by Captain (since General) George B. McClellan, in his report of the United States Military Commission, about the only marked novelties of the siege. Of both, mutatis mutandis, he and his opponents made effective use in our civil war.
Nor shall we pick our perilous way among the Sniders, Chassepots, Zündnadelgewehre, and Zündnadelbüchsen whose various charms absorb the military mind at this day. The debate among them is but as to the best utilization of the old arrow-theory. The oblong projectile, that goes singing on its winding way, is common to them all. Slipped in at the back door or rammed home at the front, delicately stirred up by the insinuating needle and its titbit of fulminate or bluntly ordered off by the snappish percussion-cap, it is the same obedient and faithful messenger, and goes on its appointed errand in much the same style.