Bola (weapon)

“ Whether these advantages sufficiently outweigh the disadvantages of complication and cleaning difficulties to render the weapon acceptable to military authorities remains to be seen. We can only say that, if the ball bearing proves as valuable in ballistics as it has in machinery, then its adoption for firearms can be only a matter of time. ”

“ As soon as he comes within throwing distance, which materially varies according to the strength of the thrower and the structure of the bolas, he hurls his singular weapon with unerring skill. No sooner does it leave his hand than the centrifugal force causes the balls to diverge, and they fly round and round in the air with a motion exactly resembling that which an English street acrobat imparts to a couple of padded balls at the ends of a string, when he wants to clear the ground. ”

“ With expressive pantomime he explains that, while my 38 bullet would kill a person as well as a larger one, it requires a heavier missile to crash into a man who is making for you with a knife or sword, and stop him. His favorite weapon for close quarters is a murderous-looking piece, half blunderbuss, half pistol, that he carries thrust in his kammerbund, so that the muzzle points behind him. ”

“ Lying across his chest was a curious weapon, a shotgun with the barrel sawed off a foot in front of the triggers. It was clear that this had been fired at close range and that he had received the whole charge in the face, blowing his head almost to pieces. The triggers had been wired together, so as to make the simultaneous discharge more destructive. ”

“ The recruit must be carefully and sedulously taught when meeting the enemy, even at a trot or canter, to use no force whatever, otherwise his sword will bury itself to the hilt, and the swordsman will either be dragged from his horse, or will be compelled to drop his weapon -- if he can. Upon this point I may quote my own 'System of Bayonet Exercise' (p. 27) : --
"The instructor must spare no pains in preventing the soldier from using force, especially with the left or guiding arm, as too much exertion generally causes the thrust to miss. A trifling body-stab with the bayonet ”

“ But I would say to the leaders of the Soviet Union, and to their people, that if either of our countries is to be fully secure, we need a much better weapon than the H-bomb—a weapon better than ballistic missiles or nuclear submarines—and that better weapon is peaceful cooperation. ”

“ Could she not obtain from him the promise to discharge his weapon in the air, if the duel was with pistols, or, if it was with swords, simply to disarm his enemy?
Like nearly all persons unversed in the art, she believed in infallible fencers, in marksmen who never missed their aim, and she had also ideas profoundly, absolutely inexact on the relations of one man with another in the matter of an insult. ”

“ “Let us prevent the second discharge,” said Enjolras.
And, lowering his rifle, he took aim at the captain of the gun, who, at that moment, was bearing down on the breach of his gun and rectifying and definitely fixing its pointing.
The captain of the piece was a handsome sergeant of artillery, very young, blond, with a very gentle face, and the intelligent air peculiar to that predestined and redoubtable weapon which, by dint of perfecting itself in horror, must end in killing war.
Combeferre, who was standing beside Enjolras, scrutinized this young man.
“What a pity!” said Combeferre. ”

“ It is not drawn with the right hand, like the bow of other nations, but by placing the feet upon the weapon itself, and pulling with the whole force of the body; and it despatches arrows called bolts, of hard wood pointed with iron, which the strength of the bow can send through the strongest breastplates, and even through stone walls, where not of uncommon thickness." ”

“ The use in warfare of explosive balls, so sensitive as to ignite and burst on striking a substance as soft and yielding as animal flesh (of men or horses) , I consider barbarous and no more to be tolerated by civilized nations than the universally reprobated practice of using poisoned missiles, or of poisoning food or drink to be left in the way of an enemy. Such a practice is inexcusable among any people above the grade of ignorant savages. Neither do I regard the use in war of such explosive balls as of any public advantage, but rather the reverse ”

“ The airplane bombs were seldom more than sixty pounds in weight, although in the larger British machines a record of ninety-five pounds has been attained. The most common form of bomb used in the heavier-than-air machines was pear-shaped, with a whirling tail to keep the missile upright as it falls. Steel balls within, a little larger than ordinary shrapnel, are held in place by a device which releases them during the fall. On striking the ground they fall on the explosive charge within and the shell bursts, scattering the two or three hundred steel bullets which it carries over a wide radius. ”

“ I was not surprised when Holmes suggested that I should take my revolver with me. He had himself picked up the loaded hunting-crop, which was his favourite weapon. ”

“ Even amid the booming of the anti-aircraft batteries and the sharper staccato reports of the machine guns from various parts of the field, all blending into an unearthly din, the droning of the motors high in the air could be distinctly heard. Like a pyrotechnic display, luminous bullets, searching for the invaders, shot up into the sky, often piercing the low-hanging clouds; and mingling in with them were vicious little spurts of fire which told of the explosion of shrapnel shells. ”

“ However, there exist dum-dum bullets, as I mentioned before. They are manufactured by the soldiers themselves. If the point is filed or cut off a German infantry bullet, so that the nickel case is cut through and the lead core is laid bare, the bullet explodes when striking or penetrating an object. Should a man be hit in the upper arm by such a projectile the latter, by its explosive force, can mangle the arm to such an extent that it only hangs by a piece of skin. ”

“ The principle consists in using large charges of powder and a light bullet, which gives a very high initial velocity and a trajectory practically a right line for 150 or 200 yards, hence the term “Express.” To increase the killing power of the bullet it is made of pure lead and has a hollow point. Upon striking game the bullet spreads outwardly, giving a fearful death-wound. Moreover, for specially ugly game [155] a small explosive cartridge can be dropped into the cavity in the point, making it an explosive bullet. ”

“ Think of a cannon-ball rushing through the air at a speed of a thousand feet per second; it is capable of wreaking disaster on anything which it meets, simply because its rapid motion is the vehicle by which the energy of the gunpowder is transferred from the gun to where the blow is to be struck. Had the cannon been directed vertically upwards, then the projectile, leaving the muzzle with the same initial velocity as before, would soar up and up, with gradually abating speed, until at last it reached a turning-point, the elevation of which would depend upon the initial velocity. ”

“ It is not strange that the airman does not worry much over the regular steel ammunition of the machine gun, for like other similar dangers, while they are the most fatal, they cannot be seen, so, he is oblivious to their presence; but when the guns are using tracer and incendiary bullets, the stream of fire is not unlike a miniature fire rocket and behind each of the pretty fire rockets comes two silent, fatal 171ball cartridges, for, indeed, the very object of “tracer” ammunition is to show the path the bullets are taking. ”

“ Bomb-dropping under the above conditions, however, is vastly dissimilar from such work under the grim realities of war. The airman has to act quickly, take his enemy by surprise, avail himself of any protective covering which may exist, and incur great risks. The opposing forces are overwhelmingly against him. The modern rifle, if fired vertically into the air, will hurl the bullet to a height of about 5,000 feet, while the weapons which have been designed to combat aircraft have a range of 10,000 feet or more.
At the latter altitude aggressive tactics are useless. ”

“ The bombs reported as noisily as the seventy-seven-millimetre guns, but they made only a shallow hole in the ground. More devastating were the machine-gun bullets which zinged off the steel helmets of the men or bored their way through to the skull. Under the combination of direct artillery fire, enfilade machine-gun, rifle sniping, bombs dropped from airplanes, the ranks of the advancing men had become so sparse that the attack was brought to a temporary halt. ”

“ Bang! and a massive cannon ball tore whizzing over our heads. The shore batteries had us in their range, and the firing from the far-reaching Whitworth guns grows more rapid. Puff after puff rolls up from the long line of battery-covered hillocks, under the bastard flag, and the rolling thunder peals on our ears with the whizzing of death-threatening balls. Oh! the excitement of watching and wondering where the next ball will strike, and whether it will crush a hole right through us, wasting rich human life, and scattering our decks with torn-off limbs and running pools of blood. ”

“ After this battle we captured some damaged machine-guns; this was the firearm most dreaded by us. A large iron plate serves the purpose of a shield, through which aim is taken, and the trigger can be pulled while the gun is moving upward, downward, to the left, or to the right. More than six hundred bullets are pushed out automatically in one minute, as if a long, continuous rod of balls was being thrown out of the gun. It can also be made to sprinkle its shot as roads are watered with a hose. It can cover a larger or smaller space, or fire to a greater or less distance as the gunner wills. ”

“ One steel bullet, or one shell, fired from a modern high-power gun into a chest of shells or bombs, loaded as they are with highly explosive material,—one such bullet or shell thus fired, might set off a chest of shells and carry death to all around, these shells, exploding other chests of shells, and these still others, creating a sort of hell in all directions. The possibilities thus created by modern highly explosive ammunition materials are terrible, horrible to contemplate. ”

“ It is well known, that cannon balls and shot out of common barrels are impelled in a line formed by the centre of the ball, and a compound of the projectile force of the explosion acted upon by the air and by gravitation in its course; the ball has a tendency to rise upward to a certain extent after leaving the muzzle of the gun; its particular motion is as if the ball had a transverse axis, and rolled forward in that axis, in the manner that the wheels of a carriage roll ”

“ To put a captive balloon out of action one must either riddle the envelope, causing it to leak like a sieve, blow the vessel to pieces, or ignite the highly inflammable gas with which it is inflated. Individual rifle fire will inflict no tangible damage. A bullet, if it finds its billet, will merely pass through the envelope and leave two small punctures. True, these vents will allow the gas to escape, but this action will proceed so slowly as to permit the vessel to remain aloft long enough to enable the observer to complete his work. ”

“ The dum-dum bullet is a soft-nosed missile which, when it strikes a bone, flattens out and splatters, creating a jagged wound which it is almost impossible to treat or heal. The Germans, in ordinary, use a steel jacketed bullet which possesses high penetrative powers, while the French at the beginning of the war were using the ordinary lead bullet. ”

“ Again, I have seen a shrapnel burst alongside within range; and five minutes later the balloon was down and out of sight. No balloon observer hopes to see the enemy's guns. He is watching for shell- bursts, in order to inform the guns of his side whether they are on the target or not.
Riding along the roads at the front one may know that there is a battery a stone's throw away only when a blast from a hidden gun- muzzle warns him of its presence. It is wonderful to me that the artillery general who took me gun-seeing knew where his own guns were, let alone the enemy's. ”

“ But the question is, whether in a well-constructed rifle, the bullet does strip? and if not, then a gaining-twist is unnecessary and objectionable, as it offers to the ball’s progress a continually increasing opposition, while the ball itself is subjected to a continually increasing urging force from the inflamed gunpowder in the barrel, so that, as the velocity of the ball increases, so also does the resistance to its escape. ”

“ A small part of the gas generated by the explosion of the individual cartridge operates the mechanism, discharging the bullet, throwing out the empty shell and making ready for the next shot.
A machine gun is designed to enable one man to fire the equivalent of a volley, or series of volleys, discharged by an entire platoon (one-third of a company) of infantrymen. As at present developed, it represents a step toward the evolution of a shoulder-rifle that will throw a continuous stream of bullets. ”

“ In the excitement of battle men are too nervous to take careful aim and they are apt to fire either112 too high or too low, so that the mortality is not nearly so great as some would expect. But with the machine-gun there is not this waste of ammunition, because it fires a stream of bullets, the effect of which can readily be determined by the man who operates the volley. ”

“ The all-steel, built-up gun has a possible rival in wire-wound ordnance, a system which replaces the tubes, to a greater or less extent, by layers of wire, wound while in tension around the barrel.
Powder is the soul of the gun; it transforms the huge inert mass into a flaming engine of death. The great development of explosives began but a generation since. The researches of Robins and Rumford in the last century, and of Hutton in the dawn of this, formed the world’s knowledge of the gun’s internal ballistics until the year 1870. ”