Название: The Book of The Machine Gun
Автор(ы): Longstaff F.V., Atteridge Hilliard A.
Издательство: London: Hugh Rees Ltd
Год: 1917
Страниц: 467
Язык: English
Формат: PDF
Размер: 31,44 MB
The soldier is by nature conservative. Mature age and high command usually go together, and it is the exceptional man who, as years increase, maintains the openness and elasticity of mind that welcome new ideas. Among the younger men, until very recent times, an officer hardly improved his prospects by being a seeker after novelties. One can trace the influence of this cautious conservatism far back in the development of armaments and tactics. Long after the invention of gunpowder the knightly soldiers of the time regarded gunnery as a mechanical art to be left in the hands of mere tradesmen. They did not trouble themselves to learn anything about it, and were content to hire the professional artillerists to assist them in battering down castle and city walls, or to fire a few shots at the beginning of an engagement. The result was that it required more than three centuries of slow evolution to convert the clumsy bombard of the middle ages into the field gun of the first part of the eighteenth century. It was nearly another hundred years before the guns were worked in permanently organized batteries.
