...But we have the Gatling.

[carnivorousplant]

During one of the Wars of Empire uner Victoria, a British Government or Military official remarked:

(something about the enemy) but we have the Gatling.

What was the quote?

[aha]

I don’t know but it reminds me of the quote from a british general, " They Couldn’t hit anything from this dist…"

[carnivorousplant]

That was the American Civil War, Dude.

[glee]

In the film ‘Zulu’ (about the defence of the heavily outnumbered Mission at Rorke’s Drift), a mass of Zulus begin a booming warchant.

A British Officer turns to an NCO and remarks that they make a formidable sound.

'Yes, replies the Welshman, ‘but they don’t have any tenors!’

[aha]

*Originally posted by carnivorousplant *
**That was the American Civil War, Dude. **

well I am fucking drunk right now what do you expect?

[carnivorousplant]

…So, if Jimi Hendrix and Robert Johnson got in a fight, who would win?

[Boris_B]

This might be what you’re thinking of:

Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not

• Hilaire Belloc

That might, on the other hand, be totally irrelevant.
I learned that one in my Russian Roulette and various revolvers thread, in which Cecil Adams himself showed up and chewed me out.

Wendell Wagner explained,

It comes from Hilaire Belloc, as you can see if you look just below the quote. Belloc lived from 1870 to 1953. Although he was born in France and didn’t become a British subject till 1902, he lived in England from the age of 2 onwards. I guess I would call Belloc a later contemporary of Kipling.

[Boris_B]

I know the Maxim and the Gatling are different weapons. I just figured someone might have confused them since they are both early machineguns (albeit a few decades apart).

[carnivorousplant]

Boris-I think that’s it. What were the circumstances?

[Boris_B]

Well, according to my good friend carnivorousplant, it occured “During one of the Wars of Empire uner Victoria”. Seriously though, I don’t know the circumstances. tomndebb said it was from The Modern Traveller, 1898, but I don’t know much more than that.

For a while I figured it referred to the Boer Wars, but it looks like the Boers had Maxims as well, and “Whatever happens, we have got/ The Maxim gun, which they have as well” doesn’t rhyme very well.
http://users.netconnect.com.au/~ianmac5/exhibit8.html#maxim

Maybe it was referring to a battle with Dervishes? Or some uprising by a people native to a British colony, who didn’t have state of the art weapons. Those are just guesses though.

[carnivorousplant]

I thought it was the Zulu or Boer War.
The Boers had Maxims? I thought that they were a bunch of cowboys with hunting weapons.

[Padeye]

*Originally posted by Boris B *
**I know the Maxim and the Gatling are different weapons. I just figured someone might have confused them since they are both early machineguns (albeit a few decades apart). **

curiously the ATF does not consider a hand operated gatling to be a maching gun.

[tomndebb]

This is anecdotal, but this site alludes to Belloc’s comment with the followin:

An earlier example involves the Maxim gun. When asked in 1884 why Western nations had colonized almost the entire known world, the English writer Hilaire Belloc said that it was not because of their advanced civilization, greater universities or cultural advances.

No, he quipped, “Whatever happens, we have the Maxim gun, and they have not.” Of course, the technology for this early machine gun and other technological information was routinely shared and sold in open contracts between “civilized” countries. In World War I this exchange of information resulted in the slaughter of an entire generation; by then all nations had access to the Maxim gun.

(This citation suffers from attributing the quote to Belloc when he was 14 years old. The Modern Traveller was not published until 1898. My guess would be that the point made by the cited essay is correct, regardless of the inaccurate date. The Modern Traveller is usually described as “light verse,” but it has been out of print for a while and I can’t examine it to give a better opinion.)

I found a quote from The Economist on Google, but the page had expired and only the cached page was still there: (I don’t know whether this link will work.)

[quote]
Is the British penchant for irony a cause or cure of national decline?

By contrast, the ironists who made the first breaches in the walls of Victorian earnestness were outsiders or dandies, who had none of the macho, empire-building virtues. Oscar Wilde titillated Victorian London with his subversive wit, and then scandalised it with the homosexual affairs which ultimately ruined him. George Bernard Shaw, another Irishman, used his plays to satirise and undermine Victorian attitudes to everything from grammar and pronunciation to the arms trade. The French-born Hilaire Belloc punctured imperial triumphalism in 1898 with a brilliant parody of jingoistic verse called “The Modern Traveller”. (“Whatever happens we have got/The Maxim Gun, and they have not,” his languid hero observes of the mutinous natives.)

note: I tried to fix the link. -manhattan

[Edited by manhattan on 10-29-2000 at 06:22 PM]

[Doug_Bowe]

*Originally posted by carnivorousplant *
**I thought it was the Zulu or Boer War.
The Boers had Maxims? I thought that they were a bunch of cowboys with hunting weapons. **

Carnivorous may be referring to the Matabele War of 1893-94. “Matabele” refers to members of a Zulu people of Southwest Zimbabwe. That war saw the first proof of the Maxim machine gun. 4 Maxims were used in a battle that inflicted over 5,000 Matabele causalities.
As to W.W.I–Maxims were used mostly by German troops. British troops predominantly used Vickers.

[ElvisL1ves]

Famous last words:

Union General John Sedgewick at the Battle of Spotsylvania:
“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist…”

[Doug_Bowe]

Sedgewick was urging his officers to join him on a raised platform to observe the battle. The officers were afraid that standing on the platform would make them targets.

[Boris_B]

Doug Bowe said,

As to W.W.I–Maxims were used mostly by German troops. British troops predominantly used Vickers.

True, but I think we are using “Maxim” in the broad sense. The Vickers was simply a copy of the Maxim using lighter components and chambered in .303-caliber. Add that to the German “Spandau” Maxim and the Russian Maxim M1910, and consider that the U.S. made some use of the Vickers when we eventually entered the fray, and that’s some heavy usage for a pretty specific weapon family. Competing weapons (Hotchkiss, Schwarzlose, and Fiat) were generally inferior and not nearly so internationally-favored.