Читать книгу Ordeal by Fire - Ralph Allen - Страница 24

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ALMOST simultaneously another confusing drama was approaching another conclusion of sorts. Again Sam Hughes was the most vociferous if not the most convincing figure on the stage.

The Ross rifle was a mere thing of wood and steel (and possibly of tin, some of its adversaries were known to cry), but during the quarter of a century covering its gestation, birth, rise, decline, and fall it became almost a part of the country’s animate being. This would have been true of any basic infantry weapon in a war of infantry.

But more than ten years before 1914, in a time of peace and peaceful prospects, the Ross rifle had already begun to excite feelings of special depth and complexity. If it had come into being fifty years earlier or fifty years later, it would have stood a good chance of being judged solely on its performance as a machine; arriving when it did, it could not escape becoming a symbol.

Until well after the Boer War, Canada, like the other dominions and colonies, was absolutely dependent on Great Britain for weapons and most other military supplies. The feeble militia forces got only what the mother country chose to let them have, sometimes by sale, very frequently as handouts. During most of the nineteenth century Canada had not only acquiesced in this arrangement but basked in it.

But immediately before and during the Boer War, the Laurier government was rudely reminded of the drawbacks. Britain helped to equip the Canadian contingents sent to South Africa, but when Laurier’s militia department tried to order 15,000 Lee-Enfield rifles in England for direct delivery to Canada, it found it couldn’t buy a single one. The British Army, quite naturally, was exercising its priority on all arms production.

An earlier attempt to persuade the Birmingham Small Arms Company to establish a branch plant in Canada for the manufacture of the Lee-Enfield had been rebuffed. Accordingly, Laurier’s Militia Minister, Sir Frederick Borden, persuaded his leader that Canada would have to make its own rifles.

This, it soon developed, would not be so formidable an undertaking as might at first have been supposed. It happened that an exciting new sporting rifle, incorporating several features of design and performance more advanced than the Lee-Enfield, was just being put on the market in Great Britain and the United States. Its sponsor was Sir Charles Ross, ninth baronet of Balnagown and an inventor of promise, a soldier of excellent record, and a businessman of good reputation. Ross expressed the conviction that, with a very little modifying, his rifle—which had been patterned after a military weapon, the Austrian Mannlicher—would make a first-class infantry rifle. He brought several of them to Ottawa from his American factory in Connecticut. Sir Frederick Borden was so impressed by what he saw and heard that in the early summer of 1901 he drafted, but did not sign, an agreement to buy sixty-two thousand of them for the Canadian militia during the next six years. At the same time he appointed a five-man committee to prepare a report on the Ross invention and suggest changes. One of the members of the committee was Sam Hughes, then a private M.P. on the Opposition benches, a battalion commander in the militia, and a well-known amateur marksman.

Hughes, in common with most of his fellow committee members, liked the look and feel of the Ross. It was an unusually long rifle, but it was light and well balanced. These things could have been perceived by any tyro. What particularly appealed to the experts was its simple, straight-back-and-forth bolt action (two motions to unload and load, compared with four motions for the Lee-Enfield). They liked its strong breech mechanism, with its certain promise of standing up to higher chamber pressures, hence greater muzzle velocities, longer ranges, and greater accuracy. Sam Hughes, as always the man of impulse, fell in love with it on the spot. But before they would consent to begin the tests, he and his colleagues insisted that Ross make half a dozen changes in the sights, magazine, breech, and bolt.

No inventor ever had a more sympathetic audience than had the baronet of Balnagown when he came back to Canada to subject his new Ross Mark I to a trial of accuracy and endurance against the veteran Lee-Enfield Mark I. The government’s desire to make the Canadian foot soldier independent of the whims of the British Ordnance Corps had already been communicated to the nation, and the nation, generally speaking, had applauded. What a poetic thing if Canada, which only a year or so ago had not been able to buy or beg a rifle from Whitehall, should now be on the brink of making rifles of her own of such incomparable merit that Whitehall might in time be coming, brass hat in hand, to Ottawa to buy others like it! Though all Hughes’s colleagues on the jury were, like him, loyal officers of the Crown and unswerving admirers of the Empire, it would have been strange if each of them had not felt some tiny bias against the Imperial Lee-Enfield and in favor of the “Canadian” Ross.

Had it been otherwise the history of the Ross rifle might have ended then and there, on a rifle range near Quebec City on an August day in 1901. Twelve different tests had been agreed upon. Reporting on one of them, the dust test, the jury was obliged to observe politely: “Both rifles were heavily sanded.... Sir Charles Ross oiled Lee-Enfield bolt under cover, but this was objected to by the committee, and both rifles were fired dry.” The two rifles were rated about even by the committee in this particular test and in nine others.

But in two of the most critical ones, the Ross came off very badly. One was designed to show how the two rifles would react to overheavy charges of powder. The Lee-Enfield passed without incident. On the first round the Ross jammed and had to be kicked open with the heel of a boot. After the second round Sir Charles refused to let his rifle continue the excessive-charge test.

Perhaps the most important of the dozen tests was that intended to show how well each weapon would stand up under steady and prolonged action. They were to fire a thousand rounds each. The Lee-Enfield performed perfectly. The Ross jammed and misfired constantly. After fifty rounds the bolt worked stiffly, if at all. After three hundred rounds the barrel was so hot that it melted away the soldered foresight.

For the Canadian militia the Ross remained, however disappointing its first trial had been, the only rifle Canada could make for itself. Thus, when the inventor put forward a ready explanation for its failings he found in the testing committee a ready audience. All the tests, he pointed out, had been made with British .303 shells made in Canada. All his earlier private trials and hence all his niceties of tooling had been based on experiments with American and Austrian shells. The British-Canadian shells he had been compelled to use in the tests were inferior to these both in precision and quality, he informed the jury, and no one called on him to prove it. Now that he knew more about the ammunition his rifles would have to use, he would make the needed adjustment, which involved “only a small detail of manufacturing.”

Thus reassured, all five members of the testing committee recommended that Canada switch to the Ross. One of them had brief second thoughts and wrote a letter for the committee’s records pointing out an ominous coincidence: everyone had observed that the bolt action of the Ross grew stiff under heat; nine years earlier the United States Army had tested the Austrian Mannlicher, which had the same breech and bolt mechanism and which had shown the same weakness.

There were other belated protests at more exalted levels. A month after the contract was signed the major general commanding the militia, R. H. O’Grady-Haly, received a report on the tests. He raised several objections to the tests themselves and to the rifle which passed them. Still a month after that, the British War and Colonial offices joined in an alarmed plea that Canada abandon the Ross in the interests of uniformity and efficiency. When this warning was ignored, the War Office began issuing statements to the effect that it too had tested the Ross against the Lee-Enfield and established that “the inferiority of the Ross was very marked.”

Nothing further was needed to remove the issue forever from the realm of cool and logical discussion. The Ross rifle was now in politics—in Empire politics and Canadian politics. In the next dozen years the original Ross Mark I underwent more than eighty changes, and created at least as many headlines. Australia was about to buy 100,000 Ross rifles; Australia was about to do nothing of the kind. The peerless and discriminating Royal North West Mounted Police switched to the Ross in 1904; the disgruntled Royal North West Mounted Police switched back to Winchesters, Lee-Enfields, and Lee-Metfords in 1906. The newly formed Department of Naval Service found 350 Mark I Rosses in its stores in 1911 and tried to give them to the militia; the militia would not have them.

A Ross Mark I blew up in a militiaman’s face, mortally wounding him. A Liberal M.P. thereupon charged in the Commons that the Ross killed “as much behind as in the front.” Sam Hughes rose fiercely and declared his willingness to swallow any Lee-Enfield rifle that did not jam when he fired it. By 1907 Hughes wrote that with just a few more changes the Ross would be “the most perfect military rifle in every sense in the world today.” “I condemn the Lee-Enfield from start to finish,” he added with finality.

The facts, rumors, pronouncements, and contradictions about the Ross piled up endlessly. There was not a saloon, hotel lobby, or barbershop across the whole Dominion whose rafters had not rung at the merest whisper of that name.

After the 1911 election, which made Hughes the new Minister of Militia and National Defence, it seemed likely that the argument was settled for good. As though to emphasize his own expectations, Sam included Sir Charles Ross among his first wave of honorary colonels and gave him the title “Consulting Officer, Small Arms, Ammunition and Ballistics.” By the time war broke out, the baronet had manufactured 112,000 rifles of various marks at his factory near Quebec.

Without correcting all its defects, the endless revisions had lengthened the rifle’s barrel by more than two inches and increased its weight by more than two pounds. No one disputed that it was still an excellent target rifle—it had, indeed, won the King’s Prize at Bisley in 1911 and again in 1913—but it was now more than a pound heavier and seven inches longer than the Lee-Enfield. When the first contingent went into the trenches at Ypres, thousands of men who had experienced or heard of epidemic jamming and faulty cartridge ejection on the ranges of Salisbury and Valcartier had begun to regard the traditional “soldier’s best friend” with suspicion and alarm.

In the First Division’s memorable stand at Ypres against gas, artillery, small arms, and an empty flank, the Ross’s already shaky reputation among the men who had to use it was all but obliterated. The battle ended with about five thousand Canadian infantry survivors, and an official arms census showed that 1452 of them had thrown away their Rosses and armed themselves with Lee-Enfields, picked up on the battlefield beside dead Englishmen or acquired in trades with adjoining units moving out of the line into relief. If men could judge dispassionately when their own lives hang upon the judgment, it might have been said that this soldier’s verdict against the Ross was more harsh and sweeping than it deserved. Just as there were infinitesimal differences in the chamber measurements of the Canadian-manufactured Ross and the British-manufactured Lee-Enfield, so were there infinitesimal differences in the Canadian-made and British-made .303 shells used by both. Since they were part of a British army and were in a British chain of supply, a high proportion of the Canadian rifles were supplied by British shells; their rate of failure was greater than that of the rifles which had been supplied by Canadian shells.

But none of this had the slightest meaning to the Canadian infantryman who, fighting for breath itself as he peered across his parapet into the gray-green fogs of Ypres and the gray-green Germans marching through them, suddenly found himself with a seized-up rifle. There was, of course, no way of telling what loss of life was directly entailed while the desperate forward battalions tried to kick back their frozen bolts with muddy boots or hammer them loose with trenching spades. But Alderson, the divisional commander, determined to get as much precise information as he could. As soon as the battle ended he asked his brigade and battalion commanders to report on their experiences with the Ross and the feeling toward it in their units. A few officers reported favorably and a few noncommittally. The majority reaction ranged from one officer’s terse “The men have lost confidence in the Ross as a service arm” to another’s angry “It is nothing short of murder to send our men against the enemy with such a weapon.”

Alderson forwarded the reports to the British commander in chief, Sir John French, along with a warning: “This matter is as delicate as it is important.... Canada will no doubt be extremely annoyed if fault is found with the rifle; this, however, cannot be allowed to stand in the way when the question may be of life and death, and of victory and defeat.” French appointed another committee to test the Ross against the Lee-Enfield. The report he sent to the War Office in London was a model of tact. The Ross worked smoothly and well with Canadian ammunition. But it was still impossible to guarantee a continuous supply of Canadian ammunition to the front-line. Therefore French had ordered the entire First Division to be rearmed with the Lee-Enfield.

No amount of polite dissembling could alter the shocking truth: the Ross, endorsed by two successive Canadian governments and a personal favorite of a strong-willed and notoriously difficult Canadian Minister of Militia, stood repudiated. The British Army Council nervously admonished French that he had condemned the Ross on insufficient evidence. “In view of the very favorable character attached to the Ross rifle by the Canadian government the Army Council would be glad to have some independent opinion of a few selected Canadian officers on the general serviceability of this rifle as compared with the Lee-Enfield.”

But French was on unassailable ground and he knew it. “This is a difficult and complicated question, which can only be satisfactorily settled by the best expert opinion,” he replied carefully. “The views of a few selected Canadian officers, who may or may not be prejudiced in the matter, will not be of any material assistance.” And it was a matter not of opinion but of cold fact that the number of Canadian infantrymen who had thrown away or traded their Ross rifles for Lee-Enfields had by now risen from 1452 to about 3000. French conceded that there was as yet no need to switch the Second Division, then in England, from the Ross to the Lee-Enfield. If it could be guaranteed a steady supply of Canadian ammunition, it might fight with the Ross indefinitely; ultimately, indeed, if the cartridge chambers were slightly enlarged, the First Division’s old rifles might be reclaimed for useful duty. But the First was already poised for another hard battle, and French, in effect, dared his superiors to issue “an authoritative statement which will carry conviction to the men that their apprehensions are unfounded.” The Army Council hastily backed down and accepted the switch-over to Lee-Enfields.

During the next few months all the Ross rifles of the Second Division were rechambered, as were those returned to stores by the First Division in exchange for Lee-Enfields. But almost at once and in every main particular, history began to repeat itself. Despite Sir Sam Hughes’s personal order that its members should be told “the Lee-Enfield jams even worse with bad ammunition than does ours,” the Second Division, equipped with the Ross, was full of foreboding when it arrived in France. No amount of reasoning could dissuade the soldier who carried it from the notion that the Ross was heavy and ill balanced; that the long barrel took a long time to bring on a target and was forever knocking against the parapets and other abutments in the trenches; above all, that it had been disowned and cast away by the men who had passed that way before.

In the confused, costly, and futile fighting around the craters and Mound of St.-Eloi in early 1916, Canadian soldiers again found themselves defending themselves with rifles that had ceased to work. Those who had a chance followed the example of the First Division and acquired British weapons in whatever way they could. The exact number was never established, but there were enough to make the Second Division think it necessary to issue a special order threatening to court-martial any company commander who allowed his men to use the Lee-Enfield or to keep the Lee-Enfields they had already obtained.

As for the Third Division, which also fought its first main engagement at St.-Eloi, so many of its infantrymen threw away their Ross rifles that Hughes sent a personal emissary to demand an explanation from the divisional commander in the field. Major General M. S. Mercer—who as a brigadier a year earlier had declared the Ross “a satisfactory weapon”—made a devastatingly unapologetic reply. His men had little or no confidence in the Ross. His officers had reported overwhelmingly against it. It jammed whether the ammunition was Canadian or British, good or bad. He stated his conclusion in the same clear terms as he had in presenting the evidence: “To longer withhold the issue of the L. E. rifle and compel the men of this Division to use the Ross rifle would be criminal in the extreme.”

General Alderson, now promoted to commander of the Canadian Corps and apparently less impressed by the political delicacy of the issue than he had been during the previous round, had in the meantime launched his own attack against the Ross. In another of the interminable tests between the two rifles he had invited two of Hughes’s closest friends and confidants to attend as observers. One of these was Major General J. W. Carson, Hughes’s special representative in London. The other was Sir Max Aitken, the Canadian-born newspaper publisher whom the Militia Minister had appointed to his roster of honorary colonels and given the title of Special Representative at the Front.

The report Carson and Aitken signed was similar in tone to a dozen others that had gone into the record during the previous fifteen years. Three different marks of ammunition were used in this latest test. The Lee-Enfield fired from 100 to 125 rounds “as rapidly as possible.” The Ross jammed from the twenty-fifth to the fiftieth round.

Alderson summarized this information and some other unflattering observations about the Ross in a letter to the Chief of the General Staff at Ottawa, Major General W. G. Gwatkin. Actually, he added, the official report had flattered the Ross. “It does not state, as it should, that the Lee-Enfield, although handled by men not trained to it, fired (owing to it being, as I have before said, much easier to charge the magazine) its 100 rounds in about one-third less time than the Ross. Nor does the report state, as was the case, that the hands of the men using the Ross were cut and bleeding owing to the difficulty they had in knocking back the bolt.”

Alderson ended his letter to headquarters in Ottawa with a pointed hint that Gwatkin show it to Hughes. This he did, whereupon Sir Sam replied directly to his corps commander with a torrent of insults. “I am well aware that very few officers, British or Canadian, know much about any rifle, especially a new one like the Ross,” he said by way of preamble. “You seem to be strangely familiar, judging from your letter, with the list of ten suggestions intended to prejudice the Ross rifle in the minds of the Canadians.... It is not worth while, with men who know little or nothing about rifles, to take up these ten points in detail, but some of them are so absolutely absurd and ridiculous that no one excepting a novice, or for an excuse, would be found seriously advancing them.... Each and every one, to anyone informed on the expert aspect of rifles, carries its own condemnation on the face.”

Sir Sam could not forgo a few words of reproach for the misguided friends who had given comfort and support to Alderson: “So far as concerns your amateur test with experts like yourself, Sir Max Aitken, Sir George Perley and General Carson ...” Nor could he resist the old temptation to a bit of straight romancing: “I shall not ... produce hundreds of documents in the form of letters, etc., to show that, from the very outset, the expert British soldier, whenever he found an opportunity, invariably slipped off with the Ross rifle leaving the L. E. instead.”

The crux of the matter was not rifles, Hughes persisted, but ammunition. “With good ammunition the Ross has never been known to jam.... The aspect which borders on criminality is the permitting of bad ammunition being placed in the hands of soldiers who are risking their lives in defence of the liberties we all hold so dear. There might have been an excuse at the beginning that some routine officer had passed the ammunition without detecting its faults, but over and over again, in spite of the loss of thousands of the boys, this defective ammunition was placed in their hands.”

Sir Sam ended his letter to his corps commander with the menacing injunction: “Your emphatic energy concerning what your intentions are, if you will pardon me, might better be directed to having your officers of every grade responsible in the premises to make sure that none of the defective ammunition again finds its way into the Canadian ranks.” He took the extraordinary step of sending a copy of this communication to every Canadian unit commander, brigadier general, and major general stationed anywhere overseas.

Alderson’s reply was to order still another pre-Gallup poll of the officers of the Second and Third divisions. Before the returns were in he was relieved of his command and returned to England as Inspector General of the Canadian forces. Like General Hutton, Hughes’s adversary of the now distant Boer War days, Alderson suddenly found himself face to face with a bewildering and painful discovery. To win an argument with Sam Hughes, all you needed was a resolute will, a clear mind, a thick skin, and a detachable head.

But he and the other critics of the Ross did, at last, prevail. Hughes was still good for another six weeks of rearguard action and he fought it out so doggedly that a final decision was reached only after the intervention of Sir Douglas Haig, the new British commander in chief in the field; the Governor General; Prime Minister Borden; Sir Max Aitken; the Privy Council; and the Colonial Secretary, Bonar Law.

On the same day that Alderson was fired, Haig informed the War Office that “the Ross is less trustworthy than the Lee-Enfield,” and recommended that the Canadian Second and Third divisions be rearmed with the British weapon. Hughes immediately demanded yet another round of tests. Almost simultaneously, Borden, who had played a largely passive role throughout the earlier years of argument and invective, demanded yet another poll. When the returns were tabulated the senior officers of the Second Division were exactly divided in their recorded opinions of the Ross: 25 for, 25 against, 13 undecided. But the Third Division was unanimously against. Haig repeated his recommendation that the Ross be abandoned “without delay,” and his recommendation was accepted in July 1916 and put into force in August.

Altogether the Canadian government bought 342,000 Ross rifles. The prices, at various stages of the contract, ran up to twenty-eight dollars each. In general they were between a quarter and a third higher than the cost of Lee-Enfields to the British Army.

The government expropriated Ross’s factory in 1917 and paid him a settlement of $2,000,000 in 1920. Ross had financed the venture privately on an initial capitalization of $1,000,000 and declared himself to be the sole proprietor. His statement of 1906 that no one in Canada had any interest in the company was never in dispute. Nor was corruption or profiteering ever seriously charged against the inventor or his supporters. The only real issue was whether the Ross was a good service rifle.