Hidden Gunmen: The Breech‑Loading Rifle

^{Two breech‑loading rifles: top, Martini‑Henry single shot carbine, used by both sides in the Boer War; bottom, German Mauser 1898 k, from World War II.}

It was December 20, 1881, and the Boers were making trouble again. To keep the “dumb Dutchmen” in line, the British authorities in Capetown sent a column of Connaught Rangers under a colonel named Ansthruther into what the British called the Transvaal and the Afrikaners called the South African Republic. Ansthruther and his men had no particular worries. British troops had soundly defeated the Afrikaners in 1842 and again in 1848. The British considered the Afrikaners, whom they called “Boers” (Dutch for farmers), a feeble foe – not to be compared with such native warriors as the Zulus.

Colonel Sir Owen Lanyon, the British proconsul in the “Transvaal,” said that the “Boers” were incapable of united action and, moreover, they were “mortal cowards.”

Actually, united action did not come easy to these descendants of the Dutch settlers who came to South Africa about the same time their countrymen were landing in New York. The government of the South African Republic could be described as anarchy tempered by bankruptcy. That was the reason the British gave for taking over the country in 1877. The fiercely independent Afrikaners had no regular army. When danger threatened, all the men in a district would form a military unit called a commando and elect officers. Each man brought his own weapon and his own horses. The system had been reasonably effective against native warriors who had no guns, no wagons, and no horses, but it had not been able to cope with highly trained troops like the British regulars.

As Ansthruther’s column approached a stream called Bronkhorst Spruit, a mounted Afrikaner galloped up and told the colonel that any further advance would be considered an act of war by the South African Republic. He gave Ansthruther two minutes to decide what to do.

Ansthruther didn’t need two minutes. He told the messenger he had orders to march to Pretoria and he intended to follow his orders. The messenger galloped away. Ansthruther halted the column and waited for a reply. He took no security measures. His soldiers saw a few men in civilian clothes flitting through the scrub. They began to unsling their rifles.

A long, ripping volley exploded from the bushes. In a few minutes, Anstruther was dead and 120 of the Irish troops were dead or wounded. Afrikaner losses totaled two killed and five wounded.

That British defeat was followed by a series of disasters. General Sir George Pomeroy Colley, high commissioner for South Africa, gathered 1,200 troops, six cannons, and a rocket battery to attack Afrikaner trenches in the Drakensburg Mountains. The British were repulsed with heavy losses. Of the 480 men who made the charge, 150 never returned. The losses were heavier than the statistics indicate. A newspaper account reported that “Sublieutenant Jopp now commands the Fifty‑eighth Regiment.” Sharpshooting Afrikaners had taken out all the regiment’s senior officers. Colley led a 300‑man reconnaissance patrol that ran into an equal number of Afrikaner mounted infantry. The South Africans dismounted and crept through the bushes, sheltering behind rocks and in low places in the ground, firing all the time. They surrounded Colley’s force and would have annihilated it if a cloudburst hadn’t given the British an opportunity to sneak out of the trap.

Finally, the Afrikaners attacked Colley and his men, who were holding a mountain called Majuba Hill. Hidden riflemen at the base of the mountain fired at every redcoat who tried to look over the crest of the hill, keeping the British force blind. At the same time, the attacking commando made its way up the slopes, taking advantage of all available cover. They reached the crest, stood up, and fired at the front‑line troops, killing most of them. Then, mostly hidden by brush and earth, they fired into the mass of the British. They killed Colley and killed or wounded most of his men. The rest fled precipitously, some falling to their deaths from cliffs on the mountainside. The Afrikaners suffered one killed and five wounded.

The Afrikaner militia were rank amateurs in war; the British were long‑service troops, some of whom had recently been in combat in Afghanistan.

How could this have happened?

Afrikaner success was entirely dependent on a single item: the breech‑loading rifle. The breech‑loader let the South African farmers take advantage of their natural strengths, but it did nothing for regular troops like the British who clung to the techniques of fighting with the muzzle‑loader.

It was not impossible to load a muzzle‑loader without standing up, but it was extremely difficult. The muzzle had to be higher than the breech of the rifle, and that meant that the rifleman could not load his piece from the prone position. Consequently, all armies for most of the 19th century trained their troops to stand up when loading. And, after loading, it was easier and quicker to fire from the standing position. In the British and other regular armies this was done by firing volleys on command. And, in spite of the slaughter that resulted from their use in the American Civil War, most armies continued to use the charges Frederick the Great had perfected for troops armed with smoothbore muskets.

In 1881, the Afrikaners were blessed by having no regular military tradition.

They knew nothing of close‑order drill, volley firing on command, saluting, or any other regular military practices. Every man was a hunter, though. They depended on hunting for most of their meat. Hunters learned early to stalk game, to stay hidden from the animals’ suspicious eyes while they closed in on their targets. The breech‑loading rifle was a great boon to hunters. They could lie prone and hidden from the game while they loaded and fired their rifles.

Hunters knew, too, that if they missed, the game would probably be long gone.

Most of the Afrikaners had single‑shot breech‑loaders such as the Westley Richards, the Martin‑Henry, or the Remington Rolling Block. Only a few had repeaters like the Winchester or the Swiss Vetterli. They learned to make the first shot count. Target shooting was a major sport for Afrikaner farmers. They usually shot at hens’ eggs perched on posts 100 yards away.

The British, on the other hand, were not marksmen in 1881. They got little rifle practice, and what shooting they did was volley firing in a way that would have warmed the heart of General Edward Braddock in 1755.

The “Boer” farmers in 1881 were at least a generation ahead of their time.

Although only a few of them had repeating rifles, the tactics they used proved to be just right for hand‑operated repeaters like the bolt actions almost universally used in the early 20th century, and even for semiautomatics such as the U.S. M 1 (Garand) rifle used in World War II and Korea. Most regular armies, however, did not seem to appreciate that modern rifles allowed a soldier to produce lethal fire while remaining hidden from his foe until the time of the Spanish‑American War of 1898 or the Second Boer War of 1899.

The development of automatic weapons opened a new chapter of infantry tactics, as we’ll see in the sections on machine guns, submachine guns, and assault rifles, but, in the development of infantry tactics, the introduction of the breech‑loading rifle was the most revolutionary advance since the introduction of the rifle itself.