Sometimes I bump into some seriously exaggerated articles in the old papers. The Lebel rifle was revolutionary in the sense it was the first rifle adopted my a military sporting the new smokeless powders which did improve the ballistics of the bullets, but there is ballistics and then there is a bit of too much.
How bad ass? It killed the factory where it was being made! Just kidding.
But do enjoy the long article I found.
I do believe the 1911 people stole some of the overblown qualities from the article.
Anyway, it shows that over a century later, journalism still can’t come up with a decent article about a gun.
Propaganda and hype to scare the crap out of the Germans. It worked so well that ten years later, the Germans developed the ’98 Mauser. In hindsight, one of the things they got right was probably not intended to be as horrifically prophetic as it turned out to be. “The more the attacking party marches in serried ranks, and the quicker it advances on the enemy, the more fearful will be the losses inflicted on it by the invisible foe.” That could be a summary of the Western Front for the first two years of The Great War. although the grim reapers would have names like Maxim, Vickers, and Hotchkiss rather than Lebel
There is a lot of truth on your last sentence.
Technically the development for the Mauser rifles started before the Lebel was out of production in 1893 š
In 1893 the Spaniards had already received their second generation of modern Mauser rifles in 7×57 and in 1889 the 7,65x53R was already in service with the Belgians but in the older Mauser rifles.
The genie was out of the bottle by 1888 – the French only succeeded in producing a mediocre and impractical round because of their rushed development process.
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