Mitrailleuse is a French word translating as ‘grapeshooter’ and still used in France to mean ‘machine gun’. The original mitrailleuse was developed by a Belgian, Joseph Montigny, into a 37-barrelled mechanical machine gun and it was adopted by the French army in the late 1860s. Loaded with separate iron breech-plates containing thirty-seven 11 mm cartridges, it was fired by turning a crank with a rate of fire of 444 rounds per minute. Used as though it were an artillery piece during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1, it was a success only when occasionally used in the close support role. The French were not impressed, but the Germans were.
Bibliography
- Hobart, F. W. A., Pictorial History of the Machine Gun (London, 1971)
— Stephen Wood
