The sixth-century Roman technical base was just too narrow. They lacked the tools to make the tools to make the tools, just as they lacked the artisans who could have used them properly even if they existed. That was a reality which could not be overcome in a few years, regardless of Aide’s encyclopedic knowledge.
Since there was no point in having a “machine gun” which ran out of ammunition within minutes on a battlefield, Belisarius had opted for the Montigny design. The small number of brass cartridges which could be produced would be reserved for the special use of the Puckle guns mounted on river boats. The mitrailleuse, because it used a plate where all thirty-seven cartridges were fixed in position, did not require drawn brass for the cartridges. Rome did have plenty of cheap labor, especially in teeming Alexandria. The simple plate-and-papier-mâché units could be mass produced easily enough, providing the mitrailleuse with the large quantities of ammunition which were necessary for major field battles.
It was a somewhat cumbersome weapon, but, as he watched it in operation, Belisarius was satisfied that it would serve the purpose. The two mitrailleuse which were raking the Malwa along the curtain wall—one firing from each opposed retired flank of two adjacent bastions—were wreaking havoc in the closely packed and unprotected troops. Combined with the grenades being lobbed by soldiers on the curtain wall, and the grapeshot being fired by field guns positioned in the sharply raked angle of the bastions themselves, the water in the ditch where hundreds of Malwa soldiers were already lying dead or wounded had become a moat of blood.
Satisfied by that aspect of the battle, Belisarius began studying the sharpshooters at work. There were a dozen such men positioned in each bastion, whose principal responsibility was to target those Malwa soldiers carrying grenades or satchel charges. Or, possibly—although Belisarius had so far seen no indication of such a weapon in use—attempting to use a Malwa version of the flamethrower which John of Rhodes had designed for the Victrix.
He didn’t envy the sharpshooters their task. The crude design of the breech-loading rifles—again, a result of the severe shortage of brass cartridges, which required a rifle which could fire a linen cartridge—produced a certain amount of leakage blowing upward around the breech block. Every sharpshooter soon acquired a blackened face and a few powderburns on his forehead.
The other drawback to being a sharpshooter, naturally, was that the man was singled out by the enemy for special attention. As Belisarius watched, one of the sharpshooters on the bastion wall was suddenly slammed backward, sprawling dead on the bastion’s fighting surface. His face was a pulped mass of flesh and blood, with brains leaking from a shattered skull. The horrible wounds looked to have been inflicted by several musket balls striking at once.
Felix cursed bitterly. “Those damned organ guns! I hadn’t counted on those. Not so many of them, at any rate.”
Ignoring the murmured protests of his bodyguards Isaac and Priscus, Belisarius crawled over to the inner side of the bastion and propped his periscope over the wall. Within seconds, he was able to spot what he was looking for.
The Malwa, sensibly enough given their numerical advantage over the Romans, had opted for organ guns rather than mitrailleuse. The organ guns were even cruder in design—about the most primitive conceivable quick-firing gunpowder weapon—but they had the great advantage of being easy to produce in quantity, using the skills and material available. The Malwa had an even narrower technical base than the Romans.
An organ gun looked like a wheelbarrow more than anything else, with a dozen barrels laid side by side in a row across the equivalent of the bucket. Except that it used two wheels instead of one, like a rickshaw Aide had shown him. They were muzzle-loaders, and so required some time to reload. But they could be easily moved into position manually, with only a two-man crew, and were surprisingly easy to aim. The recoil was small enough that an experienced organ gun handler could aim simply by using the two wooden handles—even adjust the elevation of the weapon by the simple expedient of rolling it up or down on the big wheels which held up the barrels.