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