3-074-507 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Nordenfeldt Guns at Aldershott, 1883. The Nordenfeldt machine-gun battery of the 22nd Middlesex Volunteers (Central London Rangers). 'Prepared for cavalry; action front...Experiments were made with the view of determining the extreme effective range...and all the practical information it was possible to collect regarding the use of machine-guns in the field...This was the first occasion on which machine-guns have been worked in this country in conjunction with troops, and the experiment has been watched with great interest...by the military authorities...[First illustration shows the guns] in the fighting line, with skirmishers between the guns in front of the action... the men serving the gun are behind it, mostly engaged in filling the receivers with cartridges...[The other shows] the men attached to the guns in a defensive attitude, prepared to receive cavalry...Each gun, worked by nine men, is estimated to do the service in action of three hundred men acting in line as infantry. The gun has five barrels, discharging showers of the ordinary cartridges of Martini-Henry rifles, and is worked with extraordinary rapidity. Its front is protected by a plate of the finest steel, a quarter of an inch thick'. From "Illustrated London News", 1883.