I’m currently working on a Victorian-era Adventure Story- very much in the vein (excuse the pun) of King Solomon’s Mines, as it happens- and I’ve got a minor plot point that I’m trying to iron out.
The story is set in 1897, and the main character is an former officer in the Queen’s African Rifles, currently on an adventure/expedition to find a Lost City (yes, I know, it’s not exactly original- the plot twists later on). He has stopped for the night at a British military encampment, and the next morning the encampment is attacked by a large number of native tribesmen, most of whom are armed with spears, clubs and swords. A couple of them, however, have firearms, and the main character has just shot one of them with his revolver and then taken the tribesman’s gun, which turns out to be a Mauser C96 “Broomhandle” semi-automatic pistol.
Now, the battle is still raging on around the main character, who has taken cover behind some mealie bags, and overturned cart, and a number of wooden barrels, is trying to reload the Mauser with spare cartridges from a box found on the dead tribesman. The problem is, he’s never fired or used a semi-automatic pistol before- the Mauser C96 was the first widespread semi-auto handgun, and the story is set at a point in history where they are unlikely to be common outside Europe- production started in 1896 and travel was slow in those days, especially to remote parts of Africa. (How the gun ended up in the hands of a Masai tribesman is part of a mystery which forms a major sub-plot and is tied into other events further down the road, incidentally).
Anyway, what I’m trying to work out is: What sort of difficulties would someone with basic firearms training- but only familiar with British service revolvers and rifles- have trying to reload a completely unfamiliar firearm (in this case, a semi-automatic pistol) in combat? The reason the character is trying to reload this gun, incidentally, is that his revolver (yes, it’s a .455 Webley :D) is out of ammunition and his spare cartridges are in his knapsack, which is inconveniently located on the other side of the melee currently taking place in the encampment.
As most of the shooters here on the SDMB know, if you can operate one semi-automatic handgun, you can work most of them (If you own a Colt M1911A1 and wanted to borrow someone’s Sig P226, you’d have no trouble at all loading it, working the action, and firing it). Revolvers are a bit more problematic- if you’ve only ever owned and used Colt Peacemakers, and then borrow a friend’s Smith & Wesson Model 10, you might have a lot of trouble working out where the cylinder release catch is and what you needed to do to actually get the spent cartridges out of the gun once you’d managed to open the cylinder.
So, would someone in the main character’s position be able to apply some sort of prior knowledge (“To reload a Maxim gun, I need to pull the breechblock back, insert a new belt, and then release the charging lever; this gun seems to work in much the same way so I will try pulling this slide back and feeding bullets in”), or would they be struggling to get more than one round at a time in? (The C96 loads from stripper clips, but the character doesn’t have any- just a box of 7.63x25 Mauser cartridges and an empty gun).
The character is an intelligent guy, but he’s in the middle of a skirmish trying to work an unfamiliar gun (the markings on which are in German, a language he cannot read). How do you think someone in his position might go about reloading the pistol?