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Military History – South Africa – Europe – England 19th Century
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damaging to the victim. Third, less elevation is needed in aiming the rifle, and thus there is less
room for error and increased accuracy. Finally, the extent of ‘point-blank’ range, the range of the rifle
when the lowest or fixed sight is used, is increased. That of the Lee-Enfield was 500 yards (457
metres) within which the bullet never rose above the height of a man, making the whole range
‘dangerous zone’. The Boer Mauser’s performance was much the same, while the Martini-Henry had
a point-blank range of four-fifths of that. Moreover, the smokeless powder newly in use kept the
position of the marksman concealed from his target.
The new rifles thus had the power to inflict damage much more efficiently than any the British
had previously faced. What was more, the Boers had traditionally shot game for food and their
marksmanship was therefore of high quality. Finally, both the Mauser and the Lee-Enfield had a
magazine from which new rounds were drawn by working the bolt of the rifle, and thus a swift rate of
fire could be attained. New tactics, such as open troop formations, movement by bounds and coordinated artillery barrages, were required to combat these weapons and the British army was slow
to learn.
The Martini-Henry
By the time the Second Anglo-Boer war began, the Martini rifle, the standard weapon of the British
infantry in the previous Boer War of 1881, was obsolete, but there were many examples in Boer
hands. It was a single-shot rifle firing a heavy round of 0.45 inch calibre, propelled by 85 grains of
coarse grain black powder in a 0.577-inch cartridge at a muzzle velocity of 1,350 feet per second.
The requirement to own a rifle was made less onerous for the Boer by the government’s arrangements
to sell imported weapons at cost or even less. British service pattern Martinis were purchased from
Birmingham, England, and Liège, Belgium, in the early 1890s and sold for £4 sterling to citizens of
the South African Republic. Even as late as 1896, probably because of the preference Commandantgeneral Piet Joubert had for the gun, an order for 10,000 “improved” Francotte-Martinis was
accepted by Westley Richards of Birmingham, an order that was increased to 10,450 rifles and 2,000
carbines three months later. They were sold to individuals at the price of £7 16s 6d.
The Mauser
At the same time as the order for the obsolete Martinis was being placed, 5,000 Mausers were being
imported through Portuguese East Africa. In that same year the interested companies in Germany,
Ludwig Loewe & Cie, Berlin, Deutsche Metallpatronfabrik and the powder manufacturing companies
Reinische-Westphaelishe and Rottweil, combined to form Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken,
DWM, the mark to be found on all the guns made after 1896. By the outbreak of the war the Germans
had adopted the 1898 pattern rifle, but the Boers stayed with what is known as the Spanish pattern,
the model of 1896. This fired a 7mm (0.276-inch) bullet propelled by nitro-cellulose with a muzzle
velocity of 2,296 feet per second. The weapon was sighted for
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