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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 8, 2017)
Wednesday, February 8, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon 9 Commenbary... The Gun Thab Shook The World By Jim Cornelius News Editor “Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim Gun — and they have not…” — Hilaire Belloc • • • • • On October 25, 1893, a huge impi of the Matabele Nation attacked a small British South Africa Company paramilitary force in what would become Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Under the auspices of British tycoon and imperi- alist Cecil Rhodes, settlers had moved across south- ern Africa’s Limpopo River into Mashonaland in 1890. Relations with the Matabele, a powerful warrior nation related to the Zulu, had grown tense. The Matabele traditionally raided the Mashona people for slaves and bloodsport, a practice the new, mostly British, set- tlers of Mashonaland would not tolerate. A brutal mas- sacre of Mashona by King L o b e n g u l a ’s M a t a b e l e sparked war — and the inva- sion of Matableleland by Rhodes’ paramilitaries, who brought a long five brand- new Maxim machine guns, mounted on horse-drawn wagons. The invaders forted up in a laager — very much like the classic “circle the wagons” scenario seen in old Western movies. The Matabele, armed primarily with assegai stabbing spears, though also with single-shot Martini-Henry rifles, charged the wagons at night, hoping to overwhelm the laagered force by sheer numbers and ferocity. The laager defenders worked the Maxims, ham- mering out streams of lead. The result was devastat- ing carnage. Some 1,500 Matabele — the flower of the nation — went down in wind- rows. The laager defenders suffered four killed and a handful of wounded. Another similar attack against a pio- neer fort met the same fate, and the Matabele were bro- ken, their lands thrown open for Rhodes’ company to set- tle and develop for mining and agriculture. The First Matabele War of 1893 marked the first deploy- ment of a true machine gun in combat. The Maxim gun gave the European imperialists of the late Victorian Age an unassailable advantage over adversaries that in most cases could field only Iron Age technology supple- mented by a few trade rifles. The Maxim gun, field artil- lery and the railroad allowed Euro-American civilization to plant the flag in the deep- est back-of-beyond, where the nations and empires of the West could exploit even the most remote hinterlands for minerals, furs, timber and other resources and commodities. Then, in 1914, the nations and empires of the West used the same gun to attempt suicide. • • • • • Battle becomes a very different thing when your adversary is armed not with spears and trade rifles, but with the same lethal technol- ogy that you possess. Evenly matched in firepower as they went to war in August 1914, the European pow- ers were soon locked in a grotesque war of attrition, where machine-gun fire and fast-firing artillery swept the battlefield with such a lethal storm of steel that it was nearly impossible to advance over open ground. Men died in their thou- sands, tens of thousands, PHOTO PUBLIC DOMAIN Hiram Maxim’s machine gun rocked the world in the 20th century. hundreds of thousands — falling in windrows before the roaring guns of their ene- mies. On August 22, 1914, 27,000 French soldiers died charging into German fire in the Battle of the Frontiers. On July 1, 1916, 20,000 British soldiers fell on a single day at The Somme, in a slaughter that forever after traumatized the British Empire. Germans, Austro- Hungarians, Russians, Turks all experienced the horror of advancing directly into the arc of the Grim Reaper’s scythe. The industrial-scale kill- ing of the Great War per- manently scarred Western Civilization. It swung open the gates of hell and the twin scourges of Bolshevism and Fascism vomited forth into the world. The war and its violent aftermath eroded and collapsed whatever moral authority the West could claim in its dominion over the peoples of the world. Indeed, it sowed the seeds of nationalism that would undermine Western domi- nance for all time. • • • • • One hundred years later, we still live in the long shadow of the Great War. Eastern Europe faces a resur- gent Russia that seeks to regain the power and pres- tige that it lost, won, and lost again in a century of fallout from the war. The Middle East continues to convulse in the aftershocks from the earthquake of 1918 that top- pled the Ottoman Empire, which had dominated the See GUN on page 22